I
Only recently have students of the stage seized the full significance of
the fact that dramatic literature is always conditioned by the
circumstances of the special theater for which it was designed. They are
at last beginning to perceive that they need to know how a play was
originally represented by actors before an audience and in a theater to
enable them to appreciate adequately the technical skill of the
playwright who composed it. The dramatist is subdued to what he works
in; and he can accomplish only that which is possible in the particular
playhouse for which his pieces were destined. For the immense open air
auditorium of ancient Athens, with its orchestra leveled at the foot of
the curving hillside whereon thousands of spectators took their places,
the dramatic poet had to select a simple story and to build massively.
For the unadorned platform of the Tudor theater, with its arras pendent
from the gallery above the stage, and with its restless groundlings
standing in the yard, the playwright was compelled to heap up swift
episodes violent with action. For the eighteenth-century playhouse, with
its apron projecting far beyond the line of the curtain, the dramatist
was tempted to revel in ornate eloquence and in elaborate wit. And
nowadays the dramatic author utilizes skilfully all the manifold
resources of the twentieth-century picture-frame stage, not only to give
external reality to the several places where his story is supposed to be
laid, but also to lend to these stage-sets the characteristic atmosphere
demanded by his theme.
Merely literary critics, secluded in their studies, intent upon the
poetry of a play and desirous of deducing its philosophy, rarely seek to
visualize a performance on the stage, and they are, therefore, inclined
to be disdainful of the purely theatrical conditions to which its author
has had, perforce, to adjust his work. As a result they sometimes
misunderstand the dramatic poet's endeavors, and they often misinterpret
his intentions. On the other hand, purely theatrical critics may be
inclined to pay too much attention to stage-arrangements,
stage-business, and stage-settings, and even on occasion to disregard
the dramatist's message and his power of creating character to consider
his technic alone. And yet it can scarcely be denied that the theatrical
critics are nearer to the proper method of approach than the literary
critics who neglect the light which a careful consideration of
stage-conditions and of stage-traditions may cast upon the masterpieces
of the drama.
Since all these masterpieces of the drama were devised to be heard and
to be seen rather than to be read, the great dramatic poets have always
been solicitous about the visual appeal of their plays. They have ever
been anxious to garnish their pieces with the utmost scenic
embellishment and the utmost spectacular accompaniment of the special
kind that a play of that particular type could profit by. In view of the
importance of this scenic embellishment and of its influence upon the
methods of the successive playwrights, there is cause for wonder that we
have no satisfactory attempt to tell the history of the art of the
scene-painter as this has been developed thru the long ages. The
materials for this narrative are abundant, even if they still lie in
confusion. Certain parts of the field have been surveyed here and there;
but no substantial treatise has yet been devoted to this alluring
investigation. The scholar who shall hereafter undertake the task will
need a double qualification; he must master the annals of painting in
Renascence Italy, and later in France and in England, and he must
familiarize himself with the circumstances of the theater at the several
periods when the art of the scene-painter made its successive steps in
advance.
It is partly because we have no manual covering the whole field that we
find so many unwarranted assertions in the studies of the scholars who
confine their criticism to a single period of the development of the
drama. Partly also is this due to the fact that we are each of us so
accustomed to the theaters of our own century and of our own country
that we find it difficult not to assume similar conditions in the
theaters of other centuries and other countries. Thus the Shaksperian
commentators of the early eighteenth century seem not to have doubted
that the English playhouse in the days of Elizabeth was not unlike the
English playhouse in the days of Anne; and as a result they cut up the
plays of Shakspere into acts and into scenes, each supposed to take
place in a different spot, in accord with the eighteenth-century stage
practise, and absolutely without any justification from the customs of
the Tudor theater. This was the result of looking back and of believing
that the late sixteenth-century stage must have resembled the early
eighteenth-century stage. We are now beginning to see that, in any
effort to recapture the methods of the Elizabethan theater, we must
first understand the customs of the medieval stage, and then look
forward from that point. Of all places in the world the playhouse is,
perhaps, the most conservative, and the most reluctant to relinquish
anything which has proved its utility in the past and which is accepted
by the public in the present; and many of the peculiarities of the Tudor
theater are survivals from the medieval performances.
There are still to be found classical scholars who accept the existence
of a raised stage in the theater of Dionysus at Athens, and even of
painted scenery such as we moderns know; and they find support in the
assertion of Aristotle that among the improvements due to Sophocles was
the introduction of "scenery." But what did the Greek word in the text
of Aristotle which is rendered into English as "scenery" really mean? At
least, what did it connote to an Athenian? Something very different, we
may be sure, from what the term "scenery" connotes to us. Certainly,
the physical conditions of the stageless Attic theater precluded the
possibilities of painted scenes such as we are now familiar with. That
there were no methods of representing realistically, or even summarily,
the locality where the action is taking place is proved by the detailed
descriptions of these localities which the dramatic poet was careful to
put into the mouths of his characters whenever he wished the audience to
visualize the appropriate background of the action. We may be assured
that the dramatists would never have wasted time in describing what the
spectators had before their eyes. Ibsen and Rostand and d'Annunzio are
poets, each in his own fashion, but their plays are devoid of all
descriptions of the special locality where the action passes--that task
has been spared them by the labors of the modern scene-painter working
upon their specific directions.
As there was no scenery in the Greek theater so there was little or none
in the Roman. M. Camille Saint-Saens once suggested that certain airy
scaffoldings in the Pompeian wall-paintings were perhaps derived from
scenic accessories. But this seems unlikely enough; and the surviving
Latin playhouses have a wide and shallow stage closed in by a sumptuous
architectural background, suggesting the front of a palace with three
portals, often conveniently utilized as the entrances to the separate
dwellings of the several characters. Again, we may infer the absence of
scenery from the elaboration with which Plautus, for one, localizes the
habitations of his leading characters. In Rome, as in Athens, some kind
of a summary indication of locality, some easily understood symbol, may
have been employed; but of scene-painting, as we moderns know the art,
there is not a trace.