Those who are in the habit of gaging the drama by this literary quality
only are prone to deplore the bad taste of the public which flocks to
purely spectacular pieces. But this again is no new thing, and it does
not disclose any decline in the ability to appreciate the best. A
century ago in London, when Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble were in
the full plenitude of their powers, and when they were performing the
noblest plays of Shakspere, they were thrust aside for a season or two
while the theater was given up to empty melodramatic spectacles like
'Castle Specter' and the 'Cataract of the Ganges.' It was horrifying to
the lovers of the drama that these great actors in those great plays
should have to give way to the attraction exerted on the public by a
trained elephant, or by an imitation waterfall; but it is equally
horrifying to be informed that the theater in London for which Shakspere
wrote his masterpieces, and in which he himself appeared as an actor,
was also used for fencing-matches, and for bull-baitings and
bear-baitings, and that the theater in Athens for which Sophocles wrote
his masterpieces, and in which he may have appeared as an actor, was
also used for the annual cock-fight.
So strong is the popular appreciation of spectacle that the drama, the
true theater as distinguished from the mere show business, has always to
fight for its right to exist, and to hold its place in competition with
less intellectual and more sensational entertainments. The playhouses of
any American city are likely to have a lean week whenever the circus
comes to town, and perhaps the chief reason why the most of them now
close in summer is to be sought not so much in the frequent hot spells,
as in the irresistible attraction exerted by the base-ball games. The
drama in Spain, which flourished superbly in the days of Lope de Vega
and Calderon, sank into a sad decline when it had to compete with the
fiercer delights of the bullfight; and the drama in Rome was actually
killed out by the overpowering rivalry of the sports of the arena, the
combats of gladiators, and the matching of men with wild beasts. What is
known to the economists as Gresham's Law, according to which an inferior
currency always tends to drive out a superior, seems to have an analog
in the show business.
(1912.)