Chapter III) will be found in Professor Baker's _Development of

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HOW

TO SEE A PLAY

BY

RICHARD BURTON

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1914

Now here are twenty criticks ... and yet every one is a critick after

his own way; that is, such a play is best because I like it. A very

familiar argument, methinks, to prove the excellence of a play, and to

which an author would be very unwilling to appeal for his success.

--_From Farquhar's A Discourse Upon Comedy._

COPYRIGHT, 1914

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and Electrotyped. Published November, 1914

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK--BOSTON--CHICAGO

DALLAS--ATLANTA--SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON--BOMBAY--CALCUTTA

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

* * *

PREFACE

Chapter: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI

NOTES

* * *

PREFACE

This book is aimed squarely at the theater-goer. It hopes to offer a

concise general treatment upon the use of the theater, so that the

person in the seat may get the most for his money; may choose his

entertainment wisely, avoid that which is not worth while, and

appreciate the values artistic and intellectual of what he is seeing and

hearing.

This purpose should be borne in mind, in reading the book, for while I

trust the critic and the playwright may find the discussion not without

interest and sane in principle, the desire is primarily to put into the

hands of the many who attend the playhouse a manual that will prove

helpful and, so far as it goes, be an influence toward creating in this

country that body of alert theater auditors without which good drama

will not flourish. The obligation of the theater-goer to insist on sound

plays is one too long overlooked; and just in so far as he does insist

in ever-growing numbers upon drama that has technical skill, literary

quality and interpretive insight into life, will that better theater

come which must be the hope of all who realize the great social and

educative powers of the playhouse. The words of that veteran

actor-manager and playwright of the past, Colley Cibber, are apposite

here: "It is not to the actor therefore, but to the vitiated and low

taste of the spectator, that the corruptions of the stage (of what kind

soever) have been owing. If the publick, by whom they must live, had

spirit enough to discountenance and declare against all the trash and

fopperies they have been so frequently fond of, both the actors and the

authors, to the best of their power, must naturally have served their

daily table with sound and wholesome diet." And again he remarks: "For

as their hearers are, so will actors be; worse or better, as the false

or true taste applauds or discommends them. Hence only can our theaters

improve, or must degenerate." Not for a moment is it implied that this

book, or any book of the kind, can make playwrights. Playwrights as well

as actors are born, not made--at least, in the sense that seeing life

dramatically and having a feeling for situation and climax is a gift and

nothing else. The wise Cibber may be heard also upon this. "To excel in

either art," he declares, "is a self-born happiness, which something

more than good sense must be mother of." But this may be granted, while

it is maintained stoutly that there remains to the dramatist a technic

to be acquired, and that practice therein and reflection upon it makes

perfect. The would-be playwright can learn his trade, even as another,

and must, to succeed. And the spectator (our main point of attack, as

was said), the necessary coadjutor with player and playwright in theater

success, can also become an adept in his part of this cooeperative

result. This book is written to assist him in such cooeperation.

HOW TO SEE A PLAY

CHAPTER I

THE PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING

The play is a form of story telling, among several such forms: the short

story, or tale; the novel; and in verse, the epic and that abbreviated

version of it called the ballad. All of them, each in its own fashion,

is trying to do pretty much the same thing, to tell a story. And by

story, as the word is used in this book, it will be well to say that I

mean such a manipulation of human happenings as to give a sense of unity

and growth to a definite end. A story implies a connection of characters

and events so as to suggest a rounding out and completion, which, looked

back upon, shall satisfy man's desire to discover some meaning and

significance in what is called Life. A child begging at the mother's

knee for "the end of the story," before bedtime, really represents the

race; the instinct behind the request is a sound one. A story, then, has

a beginning, middle and end, and in the right hands is seen to have

proportion, organic cohesion and development. Its parts dovetail, and

what at first appeared to lack direction and connective significance

finally is seen to possess that wholeness which makes it a work of art.

A story, therefore, is not a chance medley of incidents and characters;

but an artistic texture so woven as to quicken our feeling that a

universe which often seems disordered and chance-wise is in reality

ordered and pre-arranged. Art in its story-making does this service for

life, even if life does not do it for us. And herein lies one of the

differences between art and life; art, as it were, going life one better

in this rearrangement of material.

Of the various ways referred to of telling a story, the play has its

distinctive method and characteristics, to separate it from the others.

The story is told on a stage, through the impersonation of character by

human beings; in word and action, assisted by scenery, the story is

unfolded. The drama (a term used doubly to mean plays in general or some

particular play) is distinguished from the other forms mentioned in

substituting dialogue and direct visualized action for the indirect

narration of fiction.

A play when printed differs also in certain ways; the persons of the

play are named apart from the text; the speakers are indicated by

writing their names before the speeches; the action is indicated in

parentheses, the name business being given to this supplementary

information, the same term that is used on the stage for all that lies

outside dialogue and scenery. And the whole play, as a rule, is

sub-divided into acts and often, especially in earlier drama, into

scenes, lesser divisions within the acts; these divisions being used for

purposes of better handling of the plot and exigencies of scene

shifting, as well as for agreeable breathing spaces for the audience.

The word scene, it may be added here, is used in English-speaking lands

to indicate a change of scene, whereas in foreign drama it merely refers

to the exit or entrance of a character, so that a different number of

persons is on the stage.

But there are, of course, deeper, more organic qualities than these

external attributes of a play. The stern limits of time in the

representation of the stage story--little more than two hours, "the two

hours traffic of the stage" mentioned by Shakespeare--necessitates

telling the story with emphasis upon its salient points; only the high

lights of character and event can be advantageously shown within such

limits. Hence the dramatic story, as the adjective has come to show,

indicates a story presenting in a terse and telling fashion only the

most important and exciting things. To be dramatic is thus to be

striking, to produce effects by omission, compression, stress and

crescendo. To be sure, recent modern plays can be named in plenty which

seem to violate this principle; but they do so at their peril, and in

the history of drama nothing is plainer than that the essence of good

play-making lies in the power to seize the significant moments of the

stage story and so present them as to grip the interest and hold it with

increasing tension up to a culminating moment called the climax.

Certain advantages and certain limitations follow from these

characteristics of a play. For one thing, the drama is able to focus on

the really interesting, exciting, enthralling moments of human doings,

where a novel, for example, which has so much more leisure to accomplish

its purpose to give a picture of life, can afford to take its time and

becomes slower, and often, as a result, comparatively prolix and

indirect. This may not be advisable in a piece of fiction, but it is

often found, and masterpieces both of the past and present illustrate

the possibility; the work of a Richardson, a Henry James, a Bennett. But

for a play this would be simply suicide; for the drama must be more

direct, condensed and rapid. And just in proportion as a novel adopts

the method of the play do we call it dramatic and does it win a general

audience; the story of a Stevenson or a Kipling.

Again, having in mind the advantages of the play, the stage story is

both heard and seen, and important results issue from this fact. The

play-story is actually seen instead of seen by the eye of the

imagination through the appeal of the printed page; or indirectly again,

if one hears a narrative recited. And this actual seeing on the stage

brings conviction, since "seeing is believing," by the old saw. Scenery,

too, necessitates a certain truthfulness in the reproducing of life by

word and act and scene, because the spectator, who is able to judge it

all by the test of life, will more readily compare the mimic

representation with the actuality than if he were reading the words of a

character in a book, or being told, narrative fashion, of the

character's action. In this way the stage story seems nearer life.

Moreover, the seeing is fortified by hearing; the spectator is also the

auditor. And here is another test of reality. If the intonation or

accent or tone of voice of the actor is not life-like and in consonance

with the character portrayed, the audience will instantly be quicker to

detect it and to criticize than if the same character were shown in

fiction; seeing, the spectator insists that dress and carriage, and

scenery, which furnishes a congruous background, shall be plausible; and

hearing, the auditor insists upon the speech being true to type.

The play has an immense superiority also over all printed literature in

that, making its appeal directly through eye and ear, it is not literary

at all; I mean, the story in this form can be understood and enjoyed by

countless who read but little or even cannot read. Literature, in the

conventional sense, may be a closed book to innumerable theater-goers

who nevertheless can witness a drama and react to its exhibition of

life. The word, which in printed letters is so all-important, on the

stage becomes secondary to action and scene, for the story can be, and

sometimes is, enacted in pantomime, without a single word being spoken.

In essence, therefore, a play may be called unliterary, and thus it

makes a wider, more democratic appeal than anything in print can. Yet,

by an interesting paradox, when the words of the play are written by

masters like Calderon, Shakespeare, Moliere or Ibsen, the drama becomes

the chief literary glory of Spain, England, France and Norway. For in

the final reckoning only the language that is fit and fine preserves the

drama of the world in books and classifies it with creative literature.

Thus the play can be all things to all men; at once unliterary in its

appeal, and yet, in the finest examples, an important contribution to

letters.

A peculiar advantage of the play over the other story-telling forms is

found in the fact that while one reads the printed story, short or long,

the epic or ballad, by oneself in the quiet enjoyment of the library,

one witnesses the drama in company with many other human beings--unless

the play be a dire failure and the house empty. And this association,

though it may remove some of the more refined and aristocratic

experiences of the reader, has a definite effect upon individual

pleasure in the way of enrichment, and even reacts upon the play itself

to shape its nature. A curious sort of sympathy is set up throughout an

audience as it receives the skillful story of the playwright; common or

crowd emotions are aroused, personal variations are submerged in a

general associative feeling and the individual does not so much laugh,

cry and wonder by himself as do these things sympathetically in

conjunction with others. He becomes a simpler, less complex person whose

emotions dominate the analytic processes of the individual brain. He is

a more plastic receptive creature than he would be alone. Any one can

test this for himself by asking if he would have laughed so uproariously

at a certain humorous speech had it been offered him detached from the

time and place. The chances are that, by and in itself, it might not

seem funny at all. And the readiness with which he fell into cordial

conversation with the stranger in the next seat is also a hint as to his

magnetized mood when thus subjected to the potent influence of mob

psychology. For this reason, then, among others, a drama heard and seen

under the usual conditions secures unique effects of response in

contrast with the other sister forms of telling stories.

A heightening of effect upon auditor and spectator is gained--to mention

one other advantage--by the fact that the story which in a work of

fiction may extend to a length precluding the possibility of its

reception at one sitting, may in the theater be brought within the

compass of an evening, in the time between dinner and bed. This secures

a unity of impression whereby the play is a gainer over the novel. A

great piece of fiction like _David Copperfield_, or _Tom Jones_, or _A

Modern Instance_, or _Alice for Short_ cannot be read in a day, except

as a feat of endurance and under unusual privileges of time to spare.

But a great play--Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ or Ibsen's _A Doll's

House_--can be absorbed in its entirety in less than three hours, and

while the hearer has perhaps not left his seat. Other things being

equal, and whatever the losses, this establishes a superiority for the

play. A coherent section of life, which is what the story should be,

conveyed in the whole by this brevity of execution, so that the

recipient may get a full sense of its organic unity, cannot but be more

impressive than any medium of story telling where this is out of the

question. The merit of the novel, therefore, supreme in its way, is

another merit; "one star differeth from another in glory." It will be

recalled that Poe, with this matter of brevity of time and unity of

impression in mind, declared that there was no such thing as a long

poem; meaning that only the short poem which could be read through at

one sitting could attain to the highest effects.

But along with these advantages go certain limitations, too, in this

form of story telling; limitations which warn the play not to encroach

upon the domain of fiction, and which have much to do with making the

form what it is.

From its very nature the novel can be more thorough-going in the

delineation of character. The drama, as we have seen, must, under its

stern restrictions of time, seize upon outstanding traits and assume

that much of the development has taken place before the rise of the

first curtain. The novel shows character in process of development; the

play shows what character, developed to the point of test, will do when

the test comes. Its method, especially in the hands of modern

playwrights like Ibsen and Shaw, is to exhibit a human being acted upon

suddenly by a situation which exposes the hidden springs of action and

is a culmination of a long evolution prior to the plot that falls within

the play proper. In the drama characters must for the most part be

displayed in external acts, since action is of the very essence of a

play; in a novel, slowly and through long stretches of time, not the

acts alone but the thoughts, motives and desires of the character may be

revealed. Obviously, in the drama this cannot be done, in any like

measure, in spite of the fact that some of the late psychologists of the

drama, like Galsworthy, Bennett and others, have tried to introduce a

more careful psychology into their play-making. At the best, only an

approximation to the subtlety and penetration of fiction can be thus

attained. It were wiser to recognize the limitation and be satisfied

with the compensating gain of the more vivid, compelling effect secured

through the method of presenting human beings, natural to the playhouse.

There are also arbitrary and artificial conventions of the stage

conditioning the story which may perhaps be regarded as drawbacks where

the story in fiction is freer in these respects. Both forms of story

telling strive--never so eagerly as to-day--for a truthful

representation of life. The stage, traditionally, in its depiction of

character through word and action, has not been so close to life as

fiction; the dialogue has been further removed from the actual idiom of

human speech. It is only of late that stage talk in naturalness has

begun to rival the verisimilitude of dialogue in the best fiction. This

may well be for the reason (already touched upon) that the presence of

the speakers on the stage has in itself a reality which corrects the

artificiality of the words spoken. "I did not know," the theater auditor

might be imagined as saying, "that people talked like that; but there

they are, talking; it must be so."

The drama in all lands is trying as never before to represent life in

speech as well as act; and the strain hitherto put upon the actor, who

in the past had as part of his function to make the artificial and

unreal plausible and artistic, has been so far removed as to enable him

to give his main strength to genuine interpretation.

The time values on the stage are a limitation which makes for

artificiality; actual time must of necessity be shortened, for if true

chronology were preserved the play would be utterly balked in its

purpose of presenting a complete story that, however brief, must cover

more time than is involved in what is shown upon the boards of a

theater. As a result all time values undergo a proportionate shrinkage.

This can be estimated by the way meals are eaten on the stage. In actual

life twenty minutes are allotted for the scamped eating time of the

railway station, and we all feel it as a grievance. Half an hour is

scant decency for the unpretentious private meal; and as it becomes

more formal an hour is better, and several hours more likely. Yet no

play could afford to allow twenty minutes for this function, even were

it a meal of state; it would consume half an act, or thereabouts.

Consequently, on the stage, the effect of longer time is produced by

letting the audience see the general details of the feast; food eaten,

wine drunk, servants waiting, and conversation interpolated. It is one

of the demands made upon the actor's skill to make all these condensed

and selected minutiae of a meal stand for the real thing; once more art

is rearranging life, under severe pressure. If those interested will

test with watch in hand the actual time allowed for the banquet in _A

Parisian Romance_, so admirably envisaged by the late Richard Mansfield,

or the famous Thanksgiving dinner scene in _Shore Acres_, fragrantly

associated with the memory of the late James A. Herne, they will

possibly be surprised at the brevity of such representations.

Because of this necessary compression, a scale of time has to be adopted

which shall secure an effect of actualness by a cunning obeyance of

proportion; the reduction of scale is skillful, and so the result is

congruous. And it is plain that fiction may take more time if it so

desires in such scenes; although even in the novel the actual time

consumed by a formal dinner would be reproduced by the novelist at great

risk of boring his reader.

Again, with disadvantages in mind, it might be asserted that the stage

story suffers in that some of the happenings involved in the plot must

perforce transpire off stage; and when this is so there is an inevitable

loss of effect, inasmuch as it is of the nature of drama, as has been

noted, to show events, and the indirect narrative method is to be

avoided as undramatic. Tyros in play-writing fail to make this

distinction; and as a generalization it may be stated that whenever

possible a play should show a thing, rather that state it. "Seeing is

believing," to repeat the axiom. Yet a qualifier may here be made, for

in certain kinds of drama or when a certain effect is striven for the

indirect method may be powerfully effective. The murder in _Macbeth_

gains rather than loses because it takes place outside the scene;

Maeterlinck in his earlier Plays for Marionettes, so called, secured

remarkable effects of suspense and tension by systematically using the

principle of indirection; as where in _The Seven Princesses_ the

princesses who are the particular exciting cause of the play are not

seen at all by the audience; the impression they make, a great one,

comes through their effect upon certain characters on the stage and this

heightens immensely the dramatic value of the unseen figures. We may

point to the Greeks, too, in illustration, who in their great folk

dramas of legend regularly made use of the principle of indirect

narration when the aim was to put before the vast audiences the terrible

occurrences of the fable, not _coram populo_, as Horace has it, not in

the presence of the audience, but rather off stage. Nevertheless, these

exceptions can be explained without violating the general principle that

in a stage story it is always dangerous not to exhibit any action that

is vital to the play. And this compulsion, it will be evident, is a

restriction which may at times cripple the scope of the dramatist, while

yet it stimulates his skill to overcome the difficulty.

Summarizing the differences which go to make drama distinctive as a

story-telling form and distinguish it from other story molds: a play in

contrast with fiction tells its tale by word, act and scene in a rising

scale of importance, and within briefer time limits, necessitating a far

more careful selection of material, and a greater emphasis upon salient

moments in the handling of plot; and because of the device of act

divisions, with certain moments of heightened interest culminating in a

central scene and thus gaining in tension and intensity by this enforced

method of compression and stress; while losing the opportunity to

amplify and more carefully to delineate character. It gains as well

because the story comes by the double receipt of the eye and ear to a

theater audience some of whom at least, through illiteracy, might be

unable to appreciate the story printed in a book. The play thus is the

most democratic and popular form of story telling, and at the same time

is capable of embodying, indeed has embodied, the greatest creative

literature of various nations. And for a generation now, increasingly,

in the European countries and in English-speaking lands, the play has

begun to come into its own as an art form with unique advantages in the

way of wide appeal and cultural possibilities.

CHAPTER II

THE PLAY, A CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY

Certain remarks at the close of the preceding chapter hint at what is in

mind in giving a title to the present one. The play, this democratic

mode of story telling, attracting vast numbers of hearers and

universally popular because man is ever avid of amusement and turns

hungrily to such a medium as the theater to satisfy a deeply implanted

instinct for pleasure, can be made an experience to the auditor properly

to be included in what he would call his cultural opportunity. That is

to say, it can take its place among those civilizing agencies furnished

by the arts and letters, travel and the higher aspects of social life. A

drama, as this book seeks to show, is in its finest estate a work of art

comparable with such other works of art as pictures, statuary, musical

compositions and the achievements of the book world. I shall endeavor

later to show a little more in detail wherein lie the artistic

requirements and successes of the play; and a suggestion of this has

been already made in chapter one.

But this thought of the play as a work of art has hardly been in the

minds of folk of our race and speech until the recent awakening of an

enlightened interest in things dramatic; a movement so brief as to be

embraced by the present generation. The theater has been regarded

carelessly, thoughtlessly, merely as a place of idle amusement, or

worse; ignorant prejudice against it has been rife, with a natural

reaction for the worse upon the institution itself. The play has neither

been associated with a serious treatment of life nor with the refined

pleasure derivable from contact with art. Nor, although the personality

of actors has always been acclaimed, and an infinite amount of silly

chatter about their private lives been constant, have theater-goers as a

class realized the distinguished skill of the dramatist in the handling

of a very difficult and delicate art, nor done justice to the art which

the actor represents, nor to his own artistry in it. But now a change

has come, happily. The English-speaking lands have begun at least to get

into line with other enlightened countries, to comprehend the

educational value of the playhouse, and the consequent importance of the

play. The rapid growth to-day in what may be called social consciousness

has quickened our sense of the social significance of an institution

that, whatever its esthetic and intellectual status, is an enormous

influence in the daily life of the multitude. Gradually those who think

have come to see that the theater, this people's pleasure, should offer

drama that is rational, wholesome amusement; that society in general has

a vital stake in the nature of an entertainment so widely diffused, so

imperatively demanded and so surely effective in shaping the ideals of

the people at large. The final chapter will enlarge upon this

suggestion.

And this idea has grown along with the now very evident re-birth of a

drama which, while practical stage material, has taken on the literary

graces and makes so strong an appeal as literature that much of our best

in letters is now in dramatic form: the play being the most notable

contribution, after the novel, of our time. Leading writers everywhere

are practical dramatists; men of letters, yet also men of the theater,

who write plays not only to be read but to be acted, and who have

conquered the difficult technic of the drama so as to kill two birds

with the one stone.

The student of historical drama will perceive that this welcome change

is but a return to earlier and better conditions when the mighty

play-makers of the past--Calderon, Moliere, Shakespeare and their

compeers--were also makers of literature which we still read with

delight. And, without referring to the past, a glance at foreign lands

will reveal the fact that other countries, if not our own, have always

recognized this cultural value of the stage and hence given the theater

importance in the civic or national life, often spending public moneys

for its maintenance and using it (often in close association with

music) as a central factor in national culture. The traveler to-day in

Germany, France, Russia and the Scandinavian lands cannot but be

impressed with this fact, and will bring home to America some suggestive

lessons for patriotic native appreciation. In the modern educational

scheme, then, room should be made for some training in intelligent

play-going. So far from there being anything Quixotic in the notion, all

the signs are in its favor. The feeling is spreading fast that school

and college must include theater culture in the curriculum and people at

large are seeking to know something of the significance of the theater

in its long evolution from its birth to the present, of the history of

the drama itself, of the nature of a play regarded as a work of art; of

the specific values, too, of the related art of the actor who alone

makes the drama vital; and of the relative excellencies, in the actual

playhouses of our time, of plays, players and playwrights; together with

some idea of the rapidly changing present-day conditions. Such changes

include the coming of the one-act play, the startling development of

the moving picture, the growth of the Little Theater, the rise of the

masque and pageant, and so on with other manifestations yet. Surely,

some knowledge in a field so broad and humanly appealing, both for

legitimate enjoyment of the individual and in view of his obligations to

fellow man, is of equal moment to a knowledge of the chemical effect of

hydrochloric acid upon marble, or of the working of a table of

logarithms. These last are less involved in the living of a normal human

being.

Here are signs of the time, which mark a revolution in thought. In the

light of such facts, it is curious to reflect upon the neglect of the

theater hitherto for centuries as an institution and the refusal to

think of the play as worthy until it was offered upon the printed page.

The very fact that it was exhibited on the stage seemed to stamp it as

below serious consideration. And that, too, when the very word _play_

implies that it is something to be played. The taking over of the

theaters by uneducated persons to whom such a place was, like a

department store, simply an emporium of desired commodities, together

with the Puritanic feeling that the playhouse, as such, was an evil

thing frowned upon by God and injurious to man, combined to set this

form of entertainment in ill repute. Bernard Shaw, in that brilliant

little play, _The Dark Lady of the Sonnets_, sets certain shrewd words

in the mouths of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth pertinent to this

thought:

SHAKESPEARE: "Of late, as you know, the Church taught the people by

means of plays; but the people flocked only to such as were full of

superstitious miracles and bloody martyrdoms; and so the Church, which

also was just then brought into straits by the policy of your royal

father, did abandon and discountenance playing; and thus it fell into

the hands of poor players and greedy merchants that had their pockets to

look to and not the greatness of your kingdom."

ELIZABETH: "Master Shakespeare, you speak sooth; I cannot in anywise

amend it. I dare not offend my unruly Puritans by making so lewd a

place as the playhouse a public charge; and there be a thousand things

to be done in this London of mine before your poetry can have its penny

from the general purse. I tell thee, Master Will, it will be three

hundred years before my subjects learn that man cannot live by bread

alone, but by every word that cometh from the mouth of those whom God

inspires."

The height of the incongruous absurdity was illustrated in the former

teaching of Shakespeare. Here was a writer incessantly hailed as the

master poet of the race; he bulked large in school and college,

perforce. Yet the teacher was confronted by the embarrassing fact that

Shakespeare was also an actor: a profession given over to the sons of

Belial; and a playwright who actually wrote his immortal poetry in the

shape of theater plays. This was sad, indeed! The result was that in

both the older teaching and academic criticism emphasis was always

placed upon Shakespeare the poet, the great mind; and Shakespeare the

playwright was hardly explained at all; or if explained the

illumination was more like darkness visible, because those in the seats

of judgment were so ignorant of play technic and the requirements of the

theater as to make their attempts well-nigh useless. It remained for our

own time and scholars like George P. Baker and Brander Matthews, with

intelligent, sympathetic comprehension of the play as a form of art and

the playhouse as conditioning it, to study the Stratford bard primarily

as playwright and so give us a new and more accurate portrait of him as

man and creative worker.

I hope it is beginning to be apparent that intelligent play-going starts

long before one goes to the theater. It means, for one thing, some

acquaintance with the history of drama, and the theater which is its

home, both in the development of English culture and that of other

important nations whose dramatic contribution has been large. This

aspect of culture will be enlarged upon in the following chapters.

Much can be done--far more than has been done--in this historical

survey in school and college to prepare American citizens for rational

theater enjoyment. There is nothing pedantic in such preparation. Nobody

objects to being sufficiently trained in art to distinguish a chromo

from an oil masterpiece or to know the difference in music between a

cheap organ-grinder jingle and the rhythmic marvels of a Chopin. It is

equally foolish to be unable to give a reason for the preference for a

play by Shaw or Barrie over the meaningless coarse farce by some stage

hack. It is all in the day's culture and when once the idea that the

theater is an art has been firmly seized and communicated to many all

that seems bizarre in such a thought will disappear--and good riddance!

The first and fundamental duty to the theater is to attend the play

worthy of patronage. If one be a theater-goer, yet has never taken the

trouble to see a certain drama that adorns the playhouse, one is open to

criticism. The abstention, when the chance was offered, must in fact

either be a criticism of the play or of the person himself because he

refrained from supporting it.

But let it be assumed that our theater-goer is in his seat, ready to do

his part in the patronage of a good play. How, once there, shall he show

the approval, or at least interest, his presence implies?

By making himself a part of the sympathetic psychology of the audience,

as a whole; not resisting the effect by a position of intellectual

aloofness natural to a human being burdened with the self-consciousness

that he is a critic; but gladly recognizing the human and artistic

qualities of the entertainment. Next, by giving external sign of this

sympathetic approval by applause. Applause in this country generally

means the clapping of the hands; only exceptionally, and in large

cities, do we hear the _bravos_ customary in Europe.

But suppose the play merit not approval but the reverse; what then? The

gallery gods, those disthroned deities, were wont more rudely to

supplement this manual testimony by the use of their other extremities,

the feet. The effect, however, is not desirable. Yet, in respect of

this matter of disapproval, it would seem as if the British in their

frank booing of a piece which does not meet their wishes were exercising

a valuable check upon bad drama. In the United States we signify

positive approval, but not its negation. The result is that the cheaper

element of an audience may applaud and so help the fate of a poor play,

while the hostility of those better fitted to judge is unknown to all

concerned with the fortunes of the drama, because it is thus silent. A

freer use of the hiss, heard with us only under rare circumstances of

provocation, might be a salutary thing, for this reason. An audible

expression of reproof would be of value in the case of many unworthy

plays.

But perhaps in the end the rebuke of non-attendance and the influence of

the minatory word passed on to others most assists the failure of the

play that ought to fail. If the foolish auditor approve where he should

condemn, and so keep the bad play alive by his backing, the better view

has a way of winning at the last. Certainly, for conspicuous success

some qualities of excellence, if not all of them, must be present.

But intelligent play-going means also a perception of the art of acting,

so that the technic of the player, not his personality, will command the

auditor's trained attention and he will approve skill and frown upon its

absence.

And while it is undoubtedly more difficult to convey this information

educationally, the ideal way being to see the best acting early and late

and to reflect upon it in the light of acknowledged principles,

something can certainly be done to prepare prospective theater-goers for

appreciation of the profession of the player; substituting for the

blind, time-honored "I know what I like," the more civilized: "I approve

it for the following good and sufficient reasons." Even in school, and

still more in college, the teacher can cooeperate with the taught by

suggesting the plays to be seen, amateur as well as professional; and by

classroom discussion afterward, not only of the plays but concerning

their rendition. Students are quick to respond when this is done, for

the vital object lesson of current drama always appeals to them, and

they are glad to observe a connection between their amusement and their

culture. At present, or at least up to a very recent time, the

eccentricity of such a procedure would all but have endangered the

position of the teacher so foolhardy as to act upon the assumption that

the drama seen the night before could be in any way used to impart

permanent lessons concerning a great art to the minds of the pupils.

Luckily, a more liberal view is taking the place of this crass

Philistinism.

In a proper appreciation of the actor the hearer will look beyond the

pulchritude of an actress or the fit of an actor's clothes; he will

judge Miss Ethel Barrymore by her power of envisaging the part she

assumes, and not be overly interested in an argument as to her increase

of avoirdupois of late years. He will not allow himself to consume time

over the question whether Mr. William Gillette in private life is

addicted to chloral because Sherlock Holmes is a victim of that most

reprehensible habit.

And above all he will constantly remind himself that acting is the art

of impersonation, exactly that; and, therefore, just as high praise goes

to the player who admirably portrays a disagreeable part as to one in

whose mouth the playwright has set lines which make him beloved from

curtain to curtain. Yet the majority of persons in a typical American

theater audience hopefully confuse the part with the player, and award

praise or blame according as they like or dislike the part itself.

The intelligent auditor will also give approval to the stage artist who,

instead of drawing attention to himself by the use of exaggerated

methods, quietly does his work, keeps always within the stage picture,

and trusts to his truthful representation to secure conviction and

reward. How common is it to see some player overstressing his part, who,

instead of being boohed and hissed as he deserves and as he infallibly

would be in some countries, receives but the more applause for his

inexcusable overstepping of the modesty of his art. It becomes part of

the duty of our intelligent play-goer to teach such pseudo-artists their

place, for as long as they win the meed of ill-timed and ignorant

approval, so long will they flourish.

Nor will the critic of the acceptable actor fail to observe that the

latter prefers working for the ensemble--_team work_, in the sporting

phrase--to that personal display disproportionate to the general effect

which will always make the judicious grieve. In theatrical parlance,

"hogging the stage" has flourished simply for the reason that it

deceives a sufficient number in the seats to secure applause and so

throws dust in the eyes of the general public as to its true iniquity.

The actor is properly to be judged, not by his work detached from that

of his fellows, but ever in relation to the totality of impression which

means a play instead of a personal exhibition. It is his business to

cooeperate with others in a single effect in which each is a factor in

the exact measure of the importance of his part as conceived by the

dramatist. Where a minor part becomes a major one through the ability of

a player, as in the famous case of the elder Sothern's Lord Dundreary,

it is at the expense of the play; _Our American Cousin_ was negligible

as drama, and hence it did not matter. But if the drama is worth while,

serious injury to dramatic art may follow.

Again, the intelligent play-goer will carefully distinguish in his mind

between actor and playwright. Realizing that "the play's the thing," he

will demand that even the so-called star (too often an actor foisted

into prominence for a non-artistic reason) shall obey the laws of his

art and those of drama, and not unduly minimize for personal reasons the

work of his coadjutors in the play, nor that of the playwright who

intended him to go so far and no further. The actor who, whatever his

fame, and no matter how much an unthinking audience is complaisant when

he does it, makes a practice of giving himself a center-of-the-stage

prominence beyond what the drama calls for, is no artist, but a show

man, neither more nor less, who deserves to be rated with the

mountebanks rather than with the artists of his profession. But it may

be feared that "stars" will continue to seek the stage center and crowd

others of the cast out of the right focus, to say nothing of distorting

the work of the dramatist, under the goad of megalomania, so long as a

goodly number of unintelligent spectators egg him on. His favorite line

of poetry will be that of Wordsworth:

"Fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky." It is to help the

personnel of such an audience that our theater-goer needs his training.

A general realization of all this will definitely affect one's theater

habit and make for the good of all that concerns the art of the

playhouse. It will lead the properly prepared person to see a good play

competently done, but with no supreme or far-famed actor in the company,

in preference to a foolish play, or worse, carried by a "star"; or a

play negligible as art or hopelessly _passe_ as art or interpretation

of life for which an all-star cast has been provided, as if to take the

eye of the spectator off the weaknesses of the drama. Often a standard

play revived by one of these hastily gathered companies of noted players

resolves itself into an interest in individual performances which must

lack that organic unity which comes of longer association. The

opportunity afforded to get a true idea of the play is made quite

secondary, and sometimes entirely lost sight of.

Nor will the trained observer in the theater be cheated by the dollar

mark in his theatrical entertainment. He will come to feel that an

adequate stock company, playing the best plays of the day, may afford

him more of drama culture for an expenditure of fifty cents for an

excellent seat than will some second-rate traveling company which

presents a drama that is a little more recent but far less worthy, to

see which the charge is three or four times that modest sum. All over

the land to-day nominally cultivated folk will turn scornfully away from

a fifty-cent show, as they call it, only because it is cheap in the

literal sense, whereas the high-priced offering is cheap in every other

sense but the cost of the seat. Such people overlook the nature of the

play presented, the playwright's reputation, and the quality of the

performance; incapable of judging by the real tests, they stand

confessed as vulgarians and ignoramuses of art. We shall not have

intelligent audiences in American theaters, speaking by and large, until

theater-goers learn to judge dramatic wares by some other test than what

it costs to buy them. Such a test is a crude one, in art, however

infallible it may be in purely material commodities; indeed, is it not

the wise worldling in other fields who becomes aware in his general

bartering that it is unsafe to estimate his purchase exclusively by the

price tag?

To one who in this way makes the effort to inform himself with regard to

the things of the theater--plays, players and playwrights--concerning

dramatic history both as it appertains to the drama and the theater; and

concerning the intellectual as well as esthetical and human values of

the theater-going experience, it will soon become apparent that it

offers him cultural opportunity that is rich, wide and of ever deepening

enjoyment. And taking advantage of it, he will dignify one of the most

appealing pleasures of civilization by making it a part of his permanent

equipment for satisfactory living.

Other aspects of this thought may now be expounded, beginning with a

review of the play in its history; some knowledge of which is obviously

an element in the complete appreciation of a theater evening. For the

proper viewing of a given play one should have reviewed plays in

general, as they constitute the body of a worthy dramatic literature.

CHAPTER III

UP TO SHAKESPEARE

The recent vogue of plays like _The Servant in the House_, _The Passing

of the Third Floor Back_, _The Dawn of To-morrow_, and _Everywoman_

sends the mind back to the early history of English drama and is full of

instruction. Such drama is a reversion to type, it suggests the origin

of all drama in religion. It raises the interesting question whether the

blase modern theater world will not respond, even as did the primitive

audiences of the middle ages, to plays of spiritual appeal, even of

distinct didactic purpose. And the suggestion is strengthened when the

popularity is recalled of the morality play of _Everyman_ a few years

since, that being a revival of a typical mediaeval drama of the kind. It

almost looks as if we had failed to take into account the ready response

of modern men and women to the higher motives on the stage; have failed

to credit the substratum of seriousness in that chance collection of

human beings which constitutes a theater audience. After all, they are

very much like children, when under the influence of mob psychology;

sensitive, plastic to the lofty and noble as they are to the baser

suggestions that come to them across the footlights. In any case, these

late experiences, which came by way of surprise to the professional

purveyors of theatrical entertainment, give added emphasis to the

statement that the stage is the child of mother church, and that the

origin of drama in the countries whereof we have record is always

religious. The mediaeval beginnings in Europe and England have been

described in their details by many scholars. Suffice it here to say that

the play's birthplace is at the altar end of the cathedral, an extension

of the regular service. The actors were priests, the audience the vast

hushed throngs moved upon by incense, lights, music, and the intoned

sacred words, and, for the touch of the dramatic which was to be the

seed of a wonderful development, we may add some portion of the sacred

story acted out by the stoled players and envisaged in the scenic pomp

of the place. The lesson of the holy day was thus brought home to the

multitude as it never would have been by the mere recital of the Latin

words; scene and action lent their persuasive power to the natural

associations of the church. Such is the source of modern drama; what was

in the course of time to become "mere amusement," in the foolish phrase,

began as worship; and if we go far back into the Orient, or to the

south-lying lands on the Mediterranean, we find in India and Greece

alike this union of art and worship, whether the play began within

church or temple or before Dionysian altars reared upon the green sward.

The good and the beautiful, the esthetic and the spiritual, ever

intertwined in the story of primitive culture.

And the gradual growth from this mediaeval beginning is clear. First, a

scenic elaboration of part of the service, centering in some portion of

the life and death of Christ; then, as the scenic side grew more

complex, a removal to the grounds outside the cathedral; an extension of

the subject-matter to include a reverent treatment of other portions of

the Bible narrative; next, the taking over of biblical drama by the

guilds, or crafts, under the auspices of the patron saints of the

various organizations, as when, on Corpus Christi day, one of the great

saints' days of the year, a cycle of plays was presented in a town with

the populace agog to witness it, and the movable vans followed each

other at the street corners, presenting scene after scene of the story.

Then a further extension of motives which admitted the use of the lives

of the saints who presided over the guilds; and finally the further

enlargement of theme due to the writing of drama of which the personages

were abstract moral qualities, giving the name of Morality to this kind

of play. Such, described with utter simplicity and brevity, was the

interesting evolution.

Aside from all technicalities, and stripped of much of moment to the

specialist, we have in this origin and early development a blend of

amusement and instruction; a religious purpose linked with a frank

recognition of the fact that if you make worship attractive you

strengthen its hold upon mankind--a truth sadly lost sight of by the

later Puritans. The church was wise, indeed, to unite these elements of

life, to seize upon the psychology of the show and to use it for the

purpose of saving souls. It was not until the sixteenth century and the

immediate predecessors of Shakespeare that the play, under the influence

of renaissance culture and the inevitable secularization of the theater

in antagonism to the Puritan view of amusement, waxed worldly, and

little by little lost the ear-marks of its holy birth and upbringing.

The day when the priests, still the actors of the play, walked down the

nave and issued from the great western door of the cathedral, to

continue the dramatic representations under the open sky, was truly a

memorable one in dramatic history. The first instinct was not that of

secularization, but rather the desire for freer opportunity to enact the

sacred stories; a larger stage, more scope for dramatic action. Yet,

although for generations the play remained religious in subject-matter

and intent, it was inevitable that in time it should come to realize

that its function was to body forth human life, unbounded by Bible

themes: all that can happen to human beings on earth and between heaven

and hell and beyond them, being fit material for treatment, since all

the world's a stage, and flesh and blood of more vital interest to

humanity at large than aught else. The rapid humanization of the

religious material can be easily traced in the coarse satire and broad

humor introduced into the Bible narratives: a free and easy handling of

sacred scene and character natural to a more naive time and by no means

implying irreverence. Thus, in the Noah story, Mrs. Noah becomes a stout

shrew whose unwillingness to come in out of the wet and bestow herself

in dry quarters in the Ark must have been hugely enjoyed by the

fifteenth century populace. And the Vice of the morality play

degenerates into the clown of the performance, while even the Devil

himself is made a cause for laughter.

Another significant step in the advance of the drama was made when the

crafts took over the representations; for it democratized the show,

without cheapening it or losing sight of its instructional nature. When

the booths, or pageants as they were called, drew up at the crossing of

the ways and performed their part in some story of didactic purport and

broadly human, hearty, English atmosphere, with an outdoor flavor and

decorative features of masque and pageantry, the spectators saw the

prototype of the historic pageants which just now are coming again into

favor. The drama of the future was shaping in a matrix which was the

best possible to assure a long life, under popular, natural conditions.

These conditions were to be modified and distorted by other, later

additions from the cultural influence of the past and under the

domination of literary traditions; but here was the original mold.

The method of presentation, too, had its sure effect upon the theater

which was to follow this popular folk beginning. The movable van, set

upon wheels, with its space beneath where behind a curtain the actors

changed their costumes, suggests in form and upfitting the first

primitive stages of the playhouses erected in the second half of the

sixteenth century. Since but one episode or act of the play was to be

given, there was no need of a change of scene, and the stage could be

simple accordingly. Contemporary cuts show us the limited dimensions,

the shallow depth and the bareness of accessories typical of this

earliest of the housings of the drama, for such it might fairly be

called. Obviously, on such a stage, the manner and method of portrayal

are strictly defined: done out of doors, before a shifting multitude of

all classes, with no close cohesion or unity, since another part of the

story was told in another spot, the play, to get across--not the

footlights, for there were none--but the intervening space which

separated actors and audience, must be conveyed in broad simple outline

and in graphic episodes, the very attributes which to-day, despite all

subtleties and finesse, can be relied upon to bring response from the

spectators in a theater. It must have been a great event when, in some

quiet English town upon a day significant in church annals, the players'

booths began their cycle, and the motley crowd gathered to hear the

Bible narratives familiar to each and all, even as the Greek myths which

are the stock material of the Greek drama were known to the vast

concourse in the hillside theater of that day. In effect the circus had

come to town, and we may be sure every urchin knew it and could be found

open-mouthed in the front row of spectators. No possibility here of

subtlety and less of psychologic morbidity. The beat of the announcing

drum, the eager murmur of the multitude, the gay costumes and colorful

booth, all ministered to the natural delight of the populace in show and

story. The fun relieved the serious matter, and the serious matter made

the fun acceptable. With no shift of scenery, the broadest liberty, not

to say license, in the particulars of time and place were practiced;

the classic unities were for a later and more sophisticate drama. There

was no curtain and therefore no entr'act to interrupt the two hours'

traffic of the stage; the play was continuous in a sense other than the

modern.

As a result of these early conditions, the English play was to show

through its history a fluidity, a plastic adaptation of material to end,

in sharp contrast with other nations, the French, for one, whose first

drama was enacted in a tennis court of fixed location, deep perspective

and static scenery.

On the holy days which, as the etymology shows, were also holidays from

the point of view of the crowd, drama was vigorously purveyed which made

the primitive appeals of pathos, melodrama, farce and comedy. The actors

became secular, but for long they must have been inspired with a sense

of moral obligation in their work; a beautiful survival of which is to

be seen at Oberammergau to-day. And the play itself remained religious

in content and intention for generations after it had walked out of the

church door. The church took alarm at last, aware that an instrument of

mighty potency had been taken out of its hands. It is not surprising to

find various popes passing edicts against this new and growingly

influential form of public entertainment. It seemed to be on the way to

become a rival. This may well have had its effect in the rapid taking

over of the drama by the guilds, as later it was adopted by still more

worldly organizations.

It was not from the people that the change to complete secularization of

subject-matter and treatment came; but from higher cultural sources:

from the schools and universities, touched by renaissance influences; as

where Bishop Still produced _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ for school use, the

first English comedy; or from court folk, as when Lord Buckhurst with

his associate, Sackville, wrote the frigid _Gorbudoc_ based on the

Senecan model and honorable historically because it is the first English

tragedy. The play of Plautian derivation, _Ralph Roister Doister_, our

first comedy of intrigue, is another example of cultural influences

which came in to modify the main stream of development from the folk

plays.

This was in the sixteenth century, but for over two centuries the

genuine English play had been forming itself in the religious nursery,

as we saw. Now these other exotic and literary influences began to blend

with the native, and the story of the drama becomes therefore more

complex. The school and the court, classic literature and that of

mediaeval Europe, which represented the humanism it begot, fast qualified

the product. But the straightest, most natural issue from the naive

morality and miracle genre is the robustious melodrama illustrated by

such plays as Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_ and Marlowe's _Edward II_; which

in turn lead directly on to Shakespeare's _Titus Andronicus_, _Hamlet_

and chronicle history drama like _Richard III_; and on the side of

farce, _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, so broadly English in its fun, is in

the line of descent. And in proportion as the popular elements of

rhetoric, show and moralizing were retained, was the appeal to the

general audience made, and the drama genuinely English.

Up to 1576 we are concerned with the history of the drama and there is

no public theater in the sense of a building erected for theatrical

performances. After the strolling players with their booths, plays were

given in scholastic halls, in schools and in private residences; while

the more democratic and direct descendant of the pageants is to be seen

in the inn yards where the stable end of the courtyard, inclosed on

three sides by its parallelogram of galleries, is the rudimentary plan

for the Elizabethan playhouse, when it comes, toward the end of the

sixteenth century. But with the year 1576 and the erection in Shoreditch

of the first Theater on English soil--so called, because it had no

rivals and the name was therefore distinctive--the proper history of the

institution begins. It marks a most important forward step in dramatic

progress.

There is significance in the phrase descriptive of this first building;

it was set up "in the fields," as the words run: which means, beyond

city limits, for the city fathers, increasingly Puritan in feeling,

looked dubiously upon an amusement already so much a favorite with all

classes; it might prove a moral as well as physical plague spot by its

crowding together of a heterogeneous multitude within pent quarters.

Once started, the theater idea met with such hospitable reception that

these houses were rapidly increased, until by the century's end half a

dozen of the curious wooden hexagonal structures could be seen on the

southward bank of the Thames, near the water, central in interest as we

now look back upon them being The Globe, built in 1599 from the material

of the demolished Shoreditch playhouse, and famed forever as

Shakespeare's own house. Here at three o'clock of the afternoon upon a

stage open to the sky and with the common run of spectators standing in

the pit where now lounge the luxuriant occupants of orchestra seats,

while those of the better sort sat on the stage or in the boxes which

flanked the sides of the house and suggested the inn galleries of the

earlier arrangement, were first seen the robust predecessors of

Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd and Peele and Nash; and later,

Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson and the other immortals

whose names are names to conjure with, even to this day. Played in the

daylight, and most crudely lighted, the play was deprived of the

illusion produced by modern artificial light, and the stage, projecting

far down into the audience, made equally impossible the illusion of the

proscenium arch, a picture stage set apart from life and constituting a

world of its own for the representation of the mimic story. There was

small need for make-up on the part of the actors, since the garish light

of day is a sad revealer of grease paint and powder; and the flaring

cressets of oil that did service as footlights must, it would seem, have

made darkness visible, when set beside the modern devices. It is plain

enough that under these conditions a performance of a play in the

particulars of seeing and hearing must have been seriously limited in

effect. To reach the audience must have meant an appeal that was

broadly human, and essentially dramatic. Fine language was

indispensable; and a language drama is exactly what the Elizabethan

theater gives us. Compelling interest of story, skillful mouthing of

splendid poetry, virile situations that contained the blood and thunder

elements always dear to the heart of the groundlings, these the play of

that period had to have to hold the audiences. Impudent breakings in

from the gentles who lounged on the stage and blew tobacco smoke from

their pipes into the faces perchance of Burbage and Shakespeare himself;

vulgar interpolations of some clown while the stage waited the entrance

of a player delayed in the tiring room must have been daily occurrences.

And yet, from such a stage, confined in extent and meager in fittings,

and under such physical limitations of comfort and convenience, were the

glories of the master poet given forth to the world. Our sense of the

wonder of his work is greatly increased when we get a visualized

comprehension of the conditions under which he accomplished it. It is

well to add that one of the most fruitful phases of contemporary

scholarship is that which has thrown so much light upon the structure of

the first English theaters. We now realize as never before the limits of

the scenic representation and the necessary restriction consequent upon

the style of drama given.

Another interesting and important consideration should also be noted

here; and one too generally overlooked. The groundlings in the pit,

albeit exposed to wind and weather and deprived of the seats which

minister to man's ease and presumably dispose him to a better reception

of the piece, were yet in a position to witness the play as a play

superior to that of the more aristocratic portions of the assemblage.

However charming it may have been for the sprigs of the nobility to

touch elbows with Shakespeare on the boards as he delivered the tender

lines of old Adam in _As You Like It_, or to exchange a word aside with

Burbage just before he began the immortal soliloquy, "To be or not to

be," it is certain that these gentry were not so advantageously placed

to enjoy the rendition as a whole as were master Butcher or Baker at

the front. And it would seem reasonable to believe that the nature of

the Elizabethan play, so broadly humorous, so richly romantic, so large

and obvious in its values and languaged in a sort of surplusage of

exuberance, is explained by the fact that it was the common herd to whom

in particular the play was addressed in these early playhouses: not the

literature in which it was written so much as the unfolding story and

the tout ensemble which they were in a favorable position to take in. To

the upper-class attendant at the play the unity of the piece must have

been less dominant. And surely this must have tended to shape the play,

to make it a democratic people's product. For it is an axiom that the

dominant element in an audience settles the fate of a play.

But this new plaything, the theater, was not only the physical

embodiment of the drama, it became a social institution as well. Nor was

it without its evils. The splendors of Elizabethan literature have often

blinded criticism to the more sleazy aspects of the problem. But

investigation has made apparent enough that the Puritan attitude toward

the new institution was not without its excuse. As we have seen, from

the very first a respectable middle class element of society looked

askance at the playhouse, and while this view became exaggerated with

the growth of Puritanism in England, there is nothing to be gained in

idealizing the stage conditions of that time, nor, more broadly, to deny

that the manner of life involved and in some regards the nature of the

appeal at any period carry with them the likelihood of license and of

dissipation. The actor before Shakespeare's day had little social or

legal status; and despite all the leveling up of the profession due to

him and his associates, the "strolling player" had to wait long before

he became the self-respecting and courted individuality of our own day.

Women did not act during the Elizabethan period, nor until the

Restoration; so that one of the present possibilities of corruption was

not present. But on the other hand, the stage was without the

restraining, refining influence of their presence; a coarser tone could

and did prevail as a result. The fact that ladies of breeding wore masks

at the theater and continued to do so into the eighteenth century speaks

volumes for the public opinion of its morals; and the scholar who knows

the wealth of idiomatic foulness in the best plays of Shakespeare,

luckily hidden from the layman in large measure, does not need to be

told of the license and lewdness prevalent at the time. The Puritans are

noted for their repressive attitude toward worldly pleasures and no

doubt part of their antagonism to the playhouse was due to the general

feeling that it is a sin to enjoy oneself, and that any institution

which was thronged by society for avowed purposes of entertainment must

derive from the devil. But documentary evidence exists to show that an

institution which in England made possible the drama of Shakespeare,

Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ford, Jonson and Dekkar, writings which

we still point to with pride as our chief contribution to the creative

literature of the world, could include abuses so flagrant as to call

forth the stern denunciations of a Cromwell, and later even shock the

decidedly easy standards of a Pepys. The religious element in society

was, at intervals, to break out against the stage from pulpit or through

the pen, in historical iteration of this early attitude; as with Collier

in his famed attack upon its immorality at the close of the seventeenth

century, and numerous more modern diatribes from such clergymen as

Spurgeon and Buckley.

And in order to understand the peculiar relation of the respectable

classes in America to the theater, it is necessary to realize that those

cherishing this antipathy were our forefathers, the Puritan settlers.

The attitude was inimical, and of course the circumstances were all

against a proper development of the function of the playhouse. Art and

letters upon American soil, forsooth, had to await their day in the

seventeenth and following centuries, when our ancestors had to give

their full strength to more utilitarian matters, or to the grave demands

of the future life. The Anglo-Saxon notion that the theater is evil is

to be traced directly to these historic causes; and transplanted to so

favorable a soil as America, it has produced most unfortunate results in

our dramatic history, the worst of all being the general unenlightened

view respecting the use and usufruct of an institution in its nature

capable of so much good alike to the masses and the classes.

CHAPTER IV

GROWTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Preparedness in the appreciation of a modern play presupposes a

knowledge of the origin and early development of English drama, as

briefly sketched in the preceding pages. It also, and more obviously,

involves some acquaintance with the master dramatists who led up to or

flourished in the Elizabethan period, with Shakespeare as the central

figure; it must, too, be cognizant of the gradual deterioration of the

product in the post-Elizabethan time; of the temporary close of the

public theaters under Puritan influence during the Commonwealth; and of

the substitution for the mighty poetry of Shakespeare and his mates of

the corrupt Restoration comedy which was introduced into England with

the return of the second Stuart to the throne in 1660. This brilliant

though brutally indecent comedy of manners, with Congreve, Wycherley,

Etherage, Vanbrugh and Farquhar as chief playwrights, while it

represents in literature the moral nadir of the polite section of

English society, is of decided importance in our dramatic history,

because it reflected the manners and morals of the time, and quite as

much because it is conspicuous for skillful characterization, effective

dialogue and a feeling for scene and situation--all elements in good

dramaturgy.

This intelligent attempt to know what lies historically behind present

drama will also make itself aware of the falling away early in the

eighteenth century, in favor of the new literary form, the Novel; and

the all too brief flashing forth of another comedy of manners with

Sheridan and Goldsmith, which retained the sparkle, wit and literary

flavor of the Restoration, with a later decency and a wholesomer social

view; to be followed again by a well-nigh complete divorce of literature

and the stage until well past the middle of the nineteenth century, when

began the gradual re-birth of a drama which once more took on the

quality of letters and made a serious appeal as an esthetic art and a

worthy interpretation of life: what may be called the modern school

initiated by Ibsen.

All this interesting growth and wonderfully varied accomplishment may be

but lightly touched upon here, for admirable studies of the different

periods and schools by many scholars are at hand and the earnest theater

student may be directed thereto for further reading. The work of

Professor Schelling on Elizabethan drama is thorough and authoritative.

The modern view of Shakespeare and his contribution (referred to in

Chapter III) will be found in Professor Baker's _Development of

Shakespeare as a Dramatist_ and Professor Matthews' _Shakespeare as a

Playwright_. The general reader will find in The Mermaid Series of plays

good critical treatment of the main Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan

plays, together with the texts, so that a practical acquaintance with

the product may be gained. The series also includes the Restoration

dramas in their best examples. For the Sheridan-Goldsmith plays a

convenient edition is that in the Drama section of the Belles Lettres

series of English Literature, where the representative plays of an

author are printed with enlightening introductions and other critical

apparatus. In becoming familiar with these aids the reader will receive

the necessary hints to a further acquaintance with the more technical

books which study the earlier, more difficult part of dramatic

evolution, and give attention to the complex story of the development of

the theater as an institution.

A few things stand out for special emphasis here in regard to this

developmental time. Let it be remembered that the story of English drama

in its unfolding should be viewed in twin aspects: the growth of the

play under changing conditions; and the growth of the playhouse which

makes it possible. What has been said already of the physical framework

of the early English theater throws light at once, as we saw, upon the

nature of the play. And in fact, throughout the development, the play

has changed its form in direct relation to the change in the nature of

the stage upon which the play has been presented. The older type is a

stage suitable for the fine-languaged, boldly charactered, steadily

presented play of Shakespeare acted on a jutting platform where the

individual actor inevitably is of more prominence, and so poorly lighted

and scantily provided with scenery that words perforce and robustious

effects of acting were necessitated, instead of the scenic appeals,

subtler histrionism and plastic face and body work of the modern stage

which has shrunk back to become a framed-in picture behind the

proscenium arch. As the reader makes himself familiar with Marlowe, who

led on to Shakespeare, with the comedy and masque of Ben Jonson, with

the romantic and social plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, the lurid tragic

writing of Webster, the softer tragedy of Ford and the rollicking folk

comedy, pastoral poetry or serious social studies of Dekkar and Heywood,

he will come to realize that on the one hand what he supposed to be the

sole touch of Shakespeare in poetic expression was largely a general

gift of the spacious days of Elizabeth, poetry, as it were, being in the

very air men breathed[A]; and yet will recognize that the Stratford man

walked commonly on the heights only now and again touched by the others.

And as he reads further the plays of dramatists like Massinger,

Tourneur, Shirley, and Otway he will find, along with gleams and

glimpses of the grand manner, a steady degeneration from high poetry and

tragic seriousness to rant, bombast, and the pseudo-poetry that is

rhetoric, with the declension of tragedy into melodrama. High poetry

gradually disintegrates, and the way is prepared for the Restoration

comedy.

In reflecting upon the effect of a closing of the public theaters for

nearly twenty years (1642-1660) the student will appreciate what a body

blow this must have been to the true interests of the stage; and find in

it at least a partial explanation of the rebound to the vigorous

indecencies of Congreve and his associates (Wycherley, Etherage,

Vanbrugh, Farquhar) when the ban was removed; human nature, pushed too

far, ever expressing itself by reactions.

The ineradicable and undeniable literary virtues of the Restoration

writers and their technical advancement of the play as a form and a

faithful mirror of one phase of English society will reconcile the

investigator to a picture of life in which every man is a rake or

cuckold and every woman a light o' love; a sort of boudoir atmosphere

that has a tainted perfume removing it far from the morning freshness of

the Elizabethans. And consequently he will experience all the more

gratitude in reaching the eighteenth century plays: _The School for

Scandal_, _The Rivals_, and _She Stoops to Conquer_, when they came a

generation later. While retaining the polish and the easy carriage of

good society, these dramas got rid of the smut and the smirch, and added

a flavor of hearty English fun and a saner conception of social life; a

drama rooted firmly in the fidelities instead of the unfaithfulnesses

of human character. These eighteenth century plays, like those of the

Restoration--_The Plain Dealer_, _The Way of the World_, _The Man of

Mode_, _The Relapse_, and _The Beaux Stratagem_--were still played in

the old-fashioned playhouses, like Drury Lane, or Covent Garden, with

the stage protruding into the auditorium and the classic architecture

ill adapted to acoustics, and the boxes so arranged as to favor

aristocratic occupants rather than in the interests of the play itself.

The frequent change of scene, the five-act division of form, the

prologue and epilogue and the free use of such devices as the soliloquy

and aside remind us of the subsequent advance in technic. These marks of

a by-gone fashion we are glad to overlook or accept, in view of the

essential dramatic values and permanent contribution to letters which

Sheridan and Goldsmith made to English comedy. But at the same time it

is only common sense to felicitate ourselves that these methods of the

past have been outgrown, and better methods substituted. And we shall

never appreciate eighteenth century play-making to the full until we

understand that the authors wrote in protest against a sickly sort of

unnatural sentimentality, mawkish and untrue to life, which had become

fashionable on the English stage in the hands of Foote, Colman and

others. Sheridan brought back common sense and Goldsmith dared to

introduce "low" characters and laughed out of acceptance the

conventional separation of the socially high and humble in English life.

His preface to _The Good Natured Man_ will be found instructive reading

in relation to this service.

From 1775 to 1860 the English stage, looked back upon from the vantage

point of our time, appears empty, indeed. It did not look so barren, we

may believe, to contemporaries. Shakespeare was doctored to suit a false

taste; so great an actor-manager as Garrick complacently playing in a

version of _Lear_ in which the ruined king does not die and Cordelia

marries Edgar; an incredible prettification and falsification of the

mighty tragedy! Jonson writes for the stage, though the last man who

should have done so. Sheridan Knowles, in the early nineteenth century,

gives us _Virginius_, which is still occasionally heard, persisting

because of a certain vigor and effectiveness of characterization, though

hopelessly old-fashioned in its rhetoric and its formal obeyance of

outworn conventions, both artistic and intellectual. The same author's

_The Honeymoon_ is also preserved for us through possessing a good part

for the accomplished actress. Later Bulwer, whose feeling for the stage

cannot be denied, in _Money_, _Richelieu_, and _The Lady of Lyons_,

shows how a certain gift for the theatrical, coupled with less critical

standards, will combine to preserve dramas whose defects are now only

too apparent.

As the nineteenth century advances the fiction of Reade and Dickens is

often fitted to the boards and the fact that the latter was a natural

theater man gave and still gives his product a frequent hearing on the

stage. To meet the beloved characters of this most widely read of all

English fictionists is in itself a pleasure sufficient to command

generous audiences. Boucicault's _London Assurance_ is good stage

material rather than literature. Tom Taylor produced among many stage

pieces a few of distinct merit; his _New Men and Old Acres_ is still

heard, in the hands of experimental amateurs, and reveals sterling

qualities of characterization and structure.

But the fact remains, hardly modified by the sporadic manifestations,

that the English stage was frankly separating itself from English

literature, and by 1860 the divorce was practically complete. There was

a woful lack of public consideration for its higher interests on the one

hand, and no definite artistic endeavor to produce worthy stage

literature on the other. Authors who wrote for the stage got no

encouragement to print their dramas and so make the literary appeal;

there was among them no esprit de corps, binding them together for a

self-conscious effort to make the theater a place where literature

throve and art maintained its sovereignty. No leading or representative

writers were dramatists first of all. If such wrote plays, they did it

half heartedly, and as an exercise rather than a practical aim. It is

curious to ask ourselves if this falling away of the stage might not

have been checked had Dickens given himself more definitely to dramatic

writing. His bias in that direction is well known. He wrote plays in his

younger days and was throughout his life a fine amateur actor: the

dramatic and often theatric character of his fiction is familiar. It was

his intention as a youth to go on the stage. But he chose the novel and

perhaps in so doing depleted dramatic history.

Literature and the stage, then, had at the best a mere bowing

acquaintance. Browning, who under right conditions of encouragement

might have trained himself to be a theater poet, was chagrined by his

experience with _The Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ and thereafter wrote closet

plays rather than acting drama. Swinburne, master of music and mage of

imagination, was in no sense a practical dramatist. Shelley's dramas are

also for book reading rather than stage presentation, in spite of the

fact that his _Cenci_ has theater possibilities to make one regret all

the more his lack of stage knowledge and aim. Bailey's _Festus_ is not

an acting play, though it was acted; the sporadic drama, in fact,

between 1850 and 1870, light or serious, was frankly literary in the

academic sense and not adapted to stage needs; or else consisted of book

dramatizations from Reade and Dickens; or simply represented the

journeymen work of prolific authors with little or no claim to literary

pretensions.

The practical proof of all this can be found in the absence of drama of

the period in book form, except for the acting versions, badly printed

and cheaply bound, which did not make the literary appeal at all. Where

to-day our leading dramatists publish their work as a matter of course,

offering it as they would fiction or any other form of literature, the

reading public of the middle century neither expected nor received plays

as part of their mental pabulum, and an element in the contemporary

letters. The drama had not only ceased to be a recognized section of

current literature, but was also no longer an expression of national

life. The first faint gleam of better things came when T. W. Robertson's

genteel light comedies began to be produced at the Court Theater in

1868. As we read or see _Caste_ or _Society_ to-day they seem somewhat

flimsy material, to speak the truth; and their technic, after the rapid

development of a generation, has a mechanical creak for trained ears.

But we must take them at the psychologic moment of their appearance, and

recognize that they were a very great advance on what had gone before.

They brought contemporary social life upon the stage as did Congreve in

1680, Sheridan in 1765; and they made that life interesting to large

numbers of theater-goers who hitherto had abstained from play acting.

And so _Caste_ and its companion plays, of which it is the best, drew

crowded houses and the stage became once more an amusement to reckon

with in polite circles. The royal box was once more occupied, the

playhouse became fashionable, no longer quite negligible as a form of

art. To be sure, this was a town drama, and for the upper classes, as

was the Restoration Comedy and that of the eighteenth century. It was

not a people's theater, the Theater Robertson, but it had the prime

merit of a more truthful representation of certain phases of the life of

its day. And hence Robertson will always be treated as a figure of some

historical importance in the British drama, though not a great

dramatist.

In the eighteen eighties another influence began to be felt, that of

Ibsen. The great dramatist from the North was made known to English

readers by the criticism and translations of Gosse and Archer; and

versions of his plays were given, tentatively and occasionally, in

England, as in other lands. Thus readers and audiences alike gradually

came to get a sense of a new force in the theater: an uncompromisingly

truthful, stern portrayal of modern social conditions, the story told

with consummate craftsmanship, and the national note sounding beneath

the apparent pessimism. Here were, it was evident, new material, new

method and a new insistence upon intellectual values in the theater. It

can now be seen plainly enough that Ibsen's influence upon the drama of

the nineteenth century is commensurate in revolutionary results with

that of Shakespeare in the sixteenth. He gave the play a new and

improved formula for play-writing; and he showed that the theater could

be used as an arena for the discussion of vital questions of the day.

Even in France, the one country where dramatic development has been

steadily important for nearly three centuries, his influence has been

considerable; in other European lands, as in England, his genius has

been a pervasive force. Whether he will or no, the typical modern

dramatist is a son of Ibsen, in that he has adopted the Norwegian's

technic and taken the function of playwright more seriously than before.

Both with regard to intellectual values and technic, then, it is no

exaggeration to speak of the modern drama, although it be an expression

of the spirit of the time in reflecting social evolution, as bearing the

special hallmark of Ibsen's influence. A word follows on the varied and

vital accomplishment of the present period.