A play is a story devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an
audience.
This plain statement of fact affords an exceedingly simple definition of
the drama,--a definition so simple indeed as to seem at the first glance
easily obvious and therefore scarcely worthy of expression. But if we
examine the statement thoroughly, phrase by phrase, we shall see that it
sums up within itself the entire theory of the theatre, and that from this
primary axiom we may deduce the whole practical philosophy of dramatic
criticism.
It is unnecessary to linger long over an explanation of the word "story." A
story is a representation of a series of events linked together by the law
of cause and effect and marching forward toward a predestined
culmination,--each event exhibiting imagined characters performing imagined
acts in an appropriate imagined setting. This definition applies, of
course, to the epic, the ballad, the novel, the short-story, and all other
forms of narrative art, as well as to the drama.
But the phrase "devised to be presented" distinguishes the drama sharply
from all other forms of narrative. In particular it must be noted that a
play is not a story that is written to be read. By no means must the drama
be considered primarily as a department of literature,--like the epic or
the novel, for example. Rather, from the standpoint of the theatre, should
literature be considered as only one of a multitude of means which the
dramatist must employ to convey his story effectively to the audience. The
great Greek dramatists needed a sense of sculpture as well as a sense of
poetry; and in the contemporary theatre the playwright must manifest the
imagination of the painter as well as the imagination of the man of
letters. The appeal of a play is primarily visual rather than auditory. On
the contemporary stage, characters properly costumed must be exhibited
within a carefully designed and painted setting illuminated with
appropriate effects of light and shadow; and the art of music is often
called upon to render incidental aid to the general impression. The
dramatist, therefore, must be endowed not only with the literary sense, but
also with a clear eye for the graphic and plastic elements of pictorial
effect, a sense of rhythm and of music, and a thorough knowledge of the
art of acting. Since the dramatist must, at the same time and in the same
work, harness and harmonise the methods of so many of the arts, it would be
uncritical to centre studious consideration solely on his dialogue and to
praise him or condemn him on the literary ground alone.
It is, of course, true that the very greatest plays have always been great
literature as well as great drama. The purely literary element--the final
touch of style in dialogue--is the only sure antidote against the opium of
time. Now that Aeschylus is no longer performed as a playwright, we read
him as a poet. But, on the other hand, we should remember that the main
reason why he is no longer played is that his dramas do not fit the modern
theatre,--an edifice totally different in size and shape and physical
appointments from that in which his pieces were devised to be presented. In
his own day he was not so much read as a poet as applauded in the theatre
as a playwright; and properly to appreciate his dramatic, rather than his
literary, appeal, we must reconstruct in our imagination the conditions of
the theatre in his day. The point is that his plays, though planned
primarily as drama, have since been shifted over, by many generations of
critics and literary students, into the adjacent province of poetry; and
this shift of the critical point of view, which has insured the
immortality of Aeschylus, has been made possible only by the literary
merit of his dialogue. When a play, owing to altered physical conditions,
is tossed out of the theatre, it will find a haven in the closet only if it
be greatly written. From this fact we may derive the practical maxim that
though a skilful playwright need not write greatly in order to secure the
plaudits of his own generation, he must cultivate a literary excellence if
he wishes to be remembered by posterity.
This much must be admitted concerning the ultimate importance of the
literary element in the drama. But on the other hand it must be granted
that many plays that stand very high as drama do not fall within the range
of literature. A typical example is the famous melodrama by Dennery
entitled _The Two Orphans_. This play has deservedly held the stage for
nearly a century, and bids fair still to be applauded after the youngest
critic has died. It is undeniably a very good play. It tells a thrilling
story in a series of carefully graded theatric situations. It presents
nearly a dozen acting parts which, though scarcely real as characters, are
yet drawn with sufficient fidelity to fact to allow the performers to
produce a striking illusion of reality during the two hours' traffic of the
stage. It is, to be sure--especially in the standard English
translation--abominably written. One of the two orphans launches wide-eyed
upon a soliloquy beginning, "Am I mad?... Do I dream?"; and such sentences
as the following obtrude themselves upon the astounded ear,--"If you
persist in persecuting me in this heartless manner, I shall inform the
police." Nothing, surely, could be further from literature. Yet thrill
after thrill is conveyed, by visual means, through situations artfully
contrived; and in the sheer excitement of the moment, the audience is made
incapable of noticing the pompous mediocrity of the lines.
In general, it should be frankly understood by students of the theatre that
an audience is not capable of hearing whether the dialogue of a play is
well or badly written. Such a critical discrimination would require an
extraordinary nicety of ear, and might easily be led astray, in one
direction or the other, by the reading of the actors. The rhetoric of
Massinger must have sounded like poetry to an Elizabethan audience that had
heard the same performers, the afternoon before, speaking lines of
Shakespeare's. If Mr. Forbes-Robertson is reading a poorly-written part, it
is hard to hear that the lines are, in themselves, not musical. Literary
style is, even for accomplished critics, very difficult to judge in the
theatre. Some years ago, Mrs. Fiske presented in New York an English
adaptation of Paul Heyse's _Mary of Magdala_. After the first
performance--at which I did not happen to be present--I asked several
cultivated people who had heard the play whether the English version was
written in verse or in prose; and though these people were themselves
actors and men of letters, not one of them could tell me. Yet, as appeared
later, when the play was published, the English dialogue was written in
blank verse by no less a poet than Mr. William Winter. If such an
elementary distinction as that between verse and prose was in this case
inaudible to cultivated ears, how much harder must it be for the average
audience to distinguish between a good phrase and a bad! The fact is that
literary style is, for the most part, wasted on an audience. The average
auditor is moved mainly by the emotional content of a sentence spoken on
the stage, and pays very little attention to the form of words in which the
meaning is set forth. At Hamlet's line, "Absent thee from felicity a
while"--which Matthew Arnold, with impeccable taste, selected as one of his
touchstones of literary style--the thing that really moves the audience in
the theatre is not the perfectness of the phrase but the pathos of Hamlet's
plea for his best friend to outlive him and explain his motives to a world
grown harsh.
That the content rather than the literary turn of dialogue is the thing
that counts most in the theatre will be felt emphatically if we compare
the mere writing of Molière with that of his successor and imitator,
Regnard. Molière is certainly a great writer, in the sense that he
expresses clearly and precisely the thing he has to say; his verse, as well
as his prose, is admirably lucid and eminently speakable. But assuredly, in
the sense in which the word is generally used, Molière is not a poet; and
it may fairly be said that, in the usual connotation of the term, he has no
style. Regnard, on the other hand, is more nearly a poet, and, from the
standpoint of style, writes vastly better verse. He has a lilting fluency
that flowers every now and then into a phrase of golden melody. Yet Molière
is so immeasurably his superior as a playwright that most critics
instinctively set Regnard far below him even as a writer. There can be no
question that M. Rostand writes better verse than Emile Augier; but there
can be no question, also, that Augier is the greater dramatist. Oscar Wilde
probably wrote more clever and witty lines than any other author in the
whole history of English comedy; but no one would think of setting him in
the class with Congreve and Sheridan.
It is by no means my intention to suggest that great writing is not
desirable in the drama; but the point must be emphasised that it is not a
necessary element in the immediate merit of a play _as a play_. In fact,
excellent plays have often been presented without the use of any words at
all. Pantomime has, in every age, been recognised as a legitimate
department of the drama. Only a few years ago, Mme. Charlotte Wiehe acted
in New York a one-act play, entitled _La Main_, which held the attention
enthralled for forty-five minutes during which no word was spoken. The
little piece told a thrilling story with entire clearness and coherence,
and exhibited three characters fully and distinctly drawn; and it secured
this achievement by visual means alone, with no recourse whatever to the
spoken word. Here was a work which by no stretch of terminology could have
been included in the category of literature; and yet it was a very good
play, and _as drama_ was far superior to many a literary masterpiece in
dialogue like Browning's _In a Balcony_.
Lest this instance seem too exceptional to be taken as representative, let
us remember that throughout an entire important period in the history of
the stage, it was customary for the actors to improvise the lines that they
spoke before the audience. I refer to the period of the so-called _commedia
dell'arte_, which flourished all over Italy throughout the sixteenth
century. A synopsis of the play--partly narrative and partly
expository--was posted up behind the scenes. This account of what was to
happen on the stage was known technically as a _scenario_. The actors
consulted this scenario before they made an entrance, and then in the
acting of the scene spoke whatever words occurred to them. Harlequin made
love to Columbine and quarreled with Pantaloon in new lines every night;
and the drama gained both spontaneity and freshness from the fact that it
was created anew at each performance. Undoubtedly, if an actor scored with
a clever line, he would remember it for use in a subsequent presentation;
and in this way the dialogue of a comedy must have gradually become more or
less fixed and, in a sense, written. But this secondary task of formulating
the dialogue was left to the performers; and the playwright contented
himself with the primary task of planning the plot.
The case of the _commedia dell'arte_ is, of course, extreme; but it
emphasises the fact that the problem of the dramatist is less a task of
writing than a task of constructing. His primary concern is so to build a
story that it will tell itself to the eye of the audience in a series of
shifting pictures. Any really good play can, to a great extent, be
appreciated even though it be acted in a foreign language. American
students in New York may find in the Yiddish dramas of the Bowery an
emphatic illustration of how closely a piece may be followed by an auditor
who does not understand the words of a single line. The recent
extraordinary development in the art of the moving picture, especially in
France, has taught us that many well-known plays may be presented in
pantomime and reproduced by the kinetoscope, with no essential loss of
intelligibility through the suppression of the dialogue. Sardou, as
represented by the biograph, is no longer a man of letters; but he remains,
scarcely less evidently than in the ordinary theatre, a skilful and
effective playwright. _Hamlet_, that masterpiece of meditative poetry,
would still be a good play if it were shown in moving pictures. Much, of
course, would be sacrificed through the subversion of its literary element;
but its essential interest _as a play_ would yet remain apparent through
the unassisted power of its visual appeal.
There can be no question that, however important may be the dialogue of a
drama, the scenario is even more important; and from a full scenario alone,
before a line of dialogue is written, it is possible in most cases to
determine whether a prospective play is inherently good or bad. Most
contemporary dramatists, therefore, postpone the actual writing of their
dialogue until they have worked out their scenario in minute detail. They
begin by separating and grouping their narrative materials into not more
than three or four distinct pigeon-holes of time and place,--thereby
dividing their story roughly into acts. They then plan a stage-setting for
each act, employing whatever accessories may be necessary for the action.
If papers are to be burned, they introduce a fireplace; if somebody is to
throw a pistol through a window, they set the window in a convenient and
emphatic place; they determine how many chairs and tables and settees are
demanded for the narrative; if a piano or a bed is needed, they place it
here or there upon the floor-plan of their stage, according to the
prominence they wish to give it; and when all such points as these have
been determined, they draw a detailed map of the stage-setting for the act.
As their next step, most playwrights, with this map before them, and using
a set of chess-men or other convenient concrete objects to represent their
characters, move the pieces about upon the stage through the successive
scenes, determine in detail where every character is to stand or sit at
nearly every moment, and note down what he is to think and feel and talk
about at the time. Only after the entire play has been planned out thus
minutely does the average playwright turn back to the beginning and
commence to write his dialogue. He completes his primary task of
play-making before he begins his secondary task of play-writing. Many of
our established dramatists,--like the late Clyde Fitch, for example--sell
their plays when the scenario is finished, arrange for the production,
select the actors, and afterwards write the dialogue with the chosen actors
constantly in mind.
This summary statement of the usual process may seem, perhaps, to cast
excessive emphasis on the constructive phase of the playwright's problem;
and allowance must of course be made for the divergent mental habits of
individual authors. But almost any playwright will tell you that he feels
as if his task were practically finished when he arrives at the point when
he finds himself prepared to begin the writing of his dialogue. This
accounts for the otherwise unaccountable rapidity with which many of the
great plays of the world have been written. Dumas _fils_ retired to the
country and wrote _La Dame aux Camélias_--a four-act play--in eight
successive days. But he had previously told the same story in a novel; he
knew everything that was to happen in his play; and the mere writing could
be done in a single headlong dash. Voltaire's best tragedy, _Zaïre_, was
written in three weeks. Victor Hugo composed _Marion Delorme_ between June
1 and June 24, 1829; and when the piece was interdicted by the censor, he
immediately turned to another subject and wrote _Hernani_ in the next three
weeks. The fourth act of _Marion Delorme_ was written in a single day. Here
apparently was a very fever of composition. But again we must remember that
both of these plays had been devised before the author began to write them;
and when he took his pen in hand he had already been working on them in
scenario for probably a year. To write ten acts in Alexandrines, with
feminine rhymes alternating with masculine, was still, to be sure, an
appalling task; but Hugo was a facile and prolific poet, and could write
very quickly after he had determined exactly what it was he had to write.
It was with all of the foregoing points in mind that, in the opening
sentence of this chapter, I defined a play as a story "devised," rather
than a story "written." We may now consider the significance of the next
phrase of that definition, which states that a play is devised to be
"presented," rather than to be "read."
The only way in which it is possible to study most of the great plays of
bygone ages is to read the record of their dialogue; and this necessity has
led to the academic fallacy of considering great plays primarily as
compositions to be read. In their own age, however, these very plays which
we now read in the closet were intended primarily to be presented on the
stage. Really to read a play requires a very special and difficult exercise
of visual imagination. It is necessary not only to appreciate the dialogue,
but also to project before the mind's eye a vivid imagined rendition of the
visual aspect of the action. This is the reason why most managers and
stage-directors are unable to judge conclusively the merits and defects of
a new play from reading it in manuscript. One of our most subtle artists
in stage-direction, Mr. Henry Miller, once confessed to the present writer
that he could never decide whether a prospective play was good or bad until
he had seen it rehearsed by actors on a stage. Mr. Augustus Thomas's
unusually successful farce entitled _Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots_ was
considered a failure by its producing managers until the very last
rehearsals, because it depended for its finished effect on many intricate
and rapid intermovements of the actors, which until the last moment were
understood and realised only in the mind of the playwright. The same
author's best and most successful play, _The Witching Hour_, was declined
by several managers before it was ultimately accepted for production; and
the reason was, presumably, that its extraordinary merits were not manifest
from a mere reading of the lines. If professional producers may go so far
astray in their judgment of the merits of a manuscript, how much harder
must it be for the layman to judge a play solely from a reading of the
dialogue!
This fact should lead the professors and the students in our colleges to
adopt a very tentative attitude toward judging the dramatic merits of the
plays of other ages. Shakespeare, considered as a poet, is so immeasurably
superior to Dryden, that it is difficult for the college student unfamiliar
with the theatre to realise that the former's _Antony and Cleopatra_ is,
considered solely as a play, far inferior to the latter's dramatisation of
the same story, entitled _All for Love, or The World Well Lost_.
Shakespeare's play upon this subject follows closely the chronology of
Plutarch's narrative, and is merely dramatised history; but Dryden's play
is reconstructed with a more practical sense of economy and emphasis, and
deserves to be regarded as historical drama. _Cymbeline_ is, in many
passages, so greatly written that it is hard for the closet-student to
realise that it is a bad play, even when considered from the standpoint of
the Elizabethan theatre,--whereas _Othello_ and _Macbeth_, for instance,
are great plays, not only of their age but for all time. _King Lear_ is
probably a more sublime poem than _Othello_; and it is only by seeing the
two pieces performed equally well in the theatre that we can appreciate by
what a wide margin _Othello_ is the better play.
This practical point has been felt emphatically by the very greatest
dramatists; and this fact offers, of course, an explanation of the
otherwise inexplicable negligence of such authors as Shakespeare and
Molière in the matter of publishing their plays. These supreme playwrights
wanted people to see their pieces in the theatre rather than to read them
in the closet. In his own lifetime, Shakespeare, who was very scrupulous
about the publication of his sonnets and his narrative poems, printed a
carefully edited text of his plays only when he was forced, in
self-defense, to do so, by the prior appearance of corrupt and pirated
editions; and we owe our present knowledge of several of his dramas merely
to the business acumen of two actors who, seven years after his death,
conceived the practical idea that they might turn an easy penny by printing
and offering for sale the text of several popular plays which the public
had already seen performed. Sardou, who, like most French dramatists, began
by publishing his plays, carefully withheld from print the master-efforts
of his prime; and even such dramatists as habitually print their plays
prefer nearly always to have them seen first and read only afterwards.
In elucidation of what might otherwise seem perversity on the part of great
dramatic authors like Shakespeare, we must remember that the
master-dramatists have nearly always been men of the theatre rather than
men of letters, and therefore naturally more avid of immediate success with
a contemporary audience than of posthumous success with a posterity of
readers. Shakespeare and Molière were actors and theatre-managers, and
devised their plays primarily for the patrons of the Globe and the Palais
Royal. Ibsen, who is often taken as a type of the literary dramatist,
derived his early training mainly from the profession of the theatre and
hardly at all from the profession of letters. For half a dozen years,
during the formative period of his twenties, he acted as producing manager
of the National Theatre in Bergen, and learned the tricks of his trade from
studying the masterpieces of contemporary drama, mainly of the French
school. In his own work, he began, in such pieces as _Lady Inger of
Ostråt_, by imitating and applying the formulas of Scribe and the earlier
Sardou; and it was only after many years that he marched forward to a
technique entirely his own. Both Sir Arthur Wing Pinero and Mr. Stephen
Phillips began their theatrical career as actors. On the other hand, men of
letters who have written works primarily to be read have almost never
succeeded as dramatists. In England, during the nineteenth century, the
following great poets all tried their hands at plays--Scott, Southey,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Mrs. Browning,
Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and Tennyson--and not one of them produced a
work of any considerable value from the standpoint of dramatic criticism.
Tennyson, in _Becket_, came nearer to the mark than any of the others; and
it is noteworthy that, in this work, he had the advantage of the advice
and, in a sense, collaboration of Sir Henry Irving.
The familiar phrase "closet-drama" is a contradiction of terms. The species
of literary composition in dialogue that is ordinarily so designated
occupies a thoroughly legitimate position in the realm of literature, but
no position whatsoever in the realm of dramaturgy. _Atalanta in Calydon_ is
a great poem; but from the standpoint of the theory of the theatre, it
cannot be considered as a play. Like the lyric poems of the same author, it
was written to be read; and it was not devised to be presented by actors on
a stage before an audience.
We may now consider the significance of the three concluding phrases of the
definition of a play which was offered at the outset of the present
chapter. These phrases indicate the immanence of three influences by which
the work of the playwright is constantly conditioned.
In the first place, by the fact that the dramatist is devising his story
for the use of actors, he is definitely limited both in respect to the kind
of characters he may create and in respect to the means he may employ in
order to delineate them. In actual life we meet characters of two different
classes, which (borrowing a pair of adjectives from the terminology of
physics) we may denominate dynamic characters and static characters. But
when an actor appears upon the stage, he wants to act; and the dramatist is
therefore obliged to confine his attention to dynamic characters, and to
exclude static characters almost entirely from the range of his creation.
The essential trait of all dynamic characters is the preponderance within
them of the element of will; and the persons of a play must therefore be
people with active wills and emphatic intentions. When such people are
brought into juxtaposition, there necessarily results a clash of contending
desires and purposes; and by this fact we are led logically to the
conclusion that the proper subject-matter of the drama is a struggle
between contrasted human wills. The same conclusion, as we shall notice in
the next chapter, may be reached logically by deduction from the natural
demands of an assembled audience; and the subject will be discussed more
fully during the course of our study of _The Psychology of Theatre
Audiences_. At present it is sufficient for us to note that every great
play that has ever been devised has presented some phase or other of this
single, necessary theme,--a contention of individual human wills. An actor,
moreover, is always more effective in scenes of emotion than in scenes of
cold logic and calm reason; and the dramatist, therefore, is obliged to
select as his leading figures people whose acts are motivated by emotion
rather than by intellect. Aristotle, for example, would make a totally
uninteresting figure if he were presented faithfully upon the stage. Who
could imagine Darwin as the hero of a drama? Othello, on the other hand, is
not at all a reasonable being; from first to last his intellect is
"perplexed in the extreme." His emotions are the motives for his acts; and
in this he may be taken as the type of a dramatic character.
In the means of delineating the characters he has imagined, the dramatist,
because he is writing for actors, is more narrowly restricted than the
novelist. His people must constantly be doing something, and must therefore
reveal themselves mainly through their acts. They may, of course, also be
delineated through their way of saying things; but in the theatre the
objective action is always more suggestive than the spoken word. We know
Sherlock Holmes, in Mr. William Gillette's admirable melodrama, solely
through the things that we have seen him do; and in this connection we
should remember that in the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from which
Mr. Gillette derived his narrative material, Holmes is delineated largely
by a very different method,--the method, namely, of expository comment
written from the point of view of Doctor Watson. A leading actor seldom
wants to sit in his dressing-room while he is being talked about by the
other actors on the stage; and therefore the method of drawing character by
comment, which is so useful for the novelist, is rarely employed by the
playwright except in the waste moments which precede the first entrance of
his leading figure. The Chorus Lady, in Mr. James Forbes's amusing study of
that name, is drawn chiefly through her way of saying things; but though
this method of delineation is sometimes very effective for an act or two,
it can seldom be sustained without a faltering of interest through a
full-grown four-act play. The novelist's expedient of delineating character
through mental analysis is of course denied the dramatist, especially in
this modern age when the soliloquy (for reasons which will be noted in a
subsequent chapter) is usually frowned upon. Sometimes, in the theatre, a
character may be exhibited chiefly through his personal effect upon the
other people on the stage, and thereby indirectly on the people in the
audience. It was in this way, of course, that Manson was delineated in Mr.
Charles Rann Kennedy's _The Servant in the House_. But the expedient is a
dangerous one for the dramatist to use; because it makes his work
immediately dependent on the actor chosen for the leading role, and may in
many cases render his play impossible of attaining its full effect except
at the hands of a single great performer. In recent years an expedient long
familiar in the novel has been transferred to the service of the
stage,--the expedient, namely, of suggesting the personality of a character
through a visual presentation of his habitual environment. After the
curtain had been raised upon the first act of _The Music Master_, and the
audience had been given time to look about the room which was represented
on the stage, the main traits of the leading character had already been
suggested before his first appearance on the scene. The pictures and
knickknacks on his mantelpiece told us, before we ever saw him, what manner
of man he was. But such subtle means as this can, after all, be used only
to reinforce the one standard method of conveying the sense of character in
drama; and this one method, owing to the conditions under which the
playwright does his work, must always be the exhibition of objective acts.
In all these general ways the work of the dramatist is affected by the fact
that he must devise his story to be presented by actors. The specific
influence exerted over the playwright by the individual performer is a
subject too extensive to be covered by a mere summary consideration in the
present context; and we shall therefore discuss it fully in a later
chapter, entitled _The Actor and the Dramatist_.
At present we must pass on to observe that, in the second place, the work
of the dramatist is conditioned by the fact that he must plan his plays to
fit the sort of theatre that stands ready to receive them. A fundamental
and necessary relation has always existed between theatre-building and
theatric art. The best plays of any period have been fashioned in
accordance with the physical conditions of the best theatres of that
period. Therefore, in order fully to appreciate such a play as _Oedipus
King_, it is necessary to imagine the theatre of Dionysus; and in order to
understand thoroughly the dramaturgy of Shakespeare and Molière, it is
necessary to reconstruct in retrospect the altered inn-yard and the
converted tennis-court for which they planned their plays. It may seriously
be doubted that the works of these earlier masters gain more than they lose
from being produced with the elaborate scenic accessories of the modern
stage; and, on the other hand, a modern play by Ibsen or Pinero would lose
three-fourths of its effect if it were acted in the Elizabethan manner, or
produced without scenery (let us say) in the Roman theatre at Orange.
Since, in all ages, the size and shape and physical appointments of the
theatre have determined for the playwright the form and structure of his
plays, we may always explain the stock conventions of any period of the
drama by referring to the physical aspect of the theatre in that period.
Let us consider briefly, for purposes of illustration, certain obvious ways
in which the art of the great Greek tragic dramatists was affected by the
nature of the Attic stage. The theatre of Dionysus was an enormous edifice
carved out of a hillside. It was so large that the dramatists were obliged
to deal only with subjects that were traditional,--stories which had long
been familiar to the entire theatre-going public, including the poorer and
less educated spectators who sat farthest from the actors. Since most of
the audience was grouped above the stage and at a considerable distance,
the actors, in order not to appear dwarfed, were obliged to walk on stilted
boots. A performer so accoutred could not move impetuously or enact a scene
of violence; and this practical limitation is sufficient to account for the
measured and majestic movement of Greek tragedy, and the convention that
murders and other violent deeds must always be imagined off the stage and
be merely recounted to the audience by messengers. Facial expression could
not be seen in so large a theatre; and the actors therefore wore masks,
conventionalised to represent the dominant mood of a character during a
scene. This limitation forced the performer to depend for his effect mainly
on his voice; and Greek tragedy was therefore necessarily more lyrical than
later types of drama.
The few points which we have briefly touched upon are usually explained, by
academic critics, on literary grounds; but it is surely more sane to
explain them on grounds of common sense, in the light of what we know of
the conditions of the Attic stage. Similarly, it would be easy to show how
Terence and Calderon, Shakespeare and Molière, adapted the form of their
plays to the form of their theatres; but enough has already been said to
indicate the principle which underlies this particular phase of the theory
of the theatre. The successive changes in the physical aspect of the
English theatre during the last three centuries have all tended toward
greater naturalness, intimacy, and subtlety, in the drama itself and in the
physical aids to its presentment. This progress, with its constant
illustration of the interdependence of the drama and the stage, may most
conveniently be studied in historical review; and to such a review we shall
devote a special chapter, entitled _Stage Conventions in Modern Times_.
We may now observe that, in the third place, the essential nature of the
drama is affected greatly by the fact that it is destined to be set before
an audience. The dramatist must appeal at once to a heterogeneous multitude
of people; and the full effect of this condition will be investigated in a
special chapter on _The Psychology of Theatre Audiences_. In an important
sense, the audience is a party to the play, and collaborates with the
actors in the presentation. This fact, which remains often unappreciated by
academic critics, is familiar to everyone who has had any practical
association with the theatre. It is almost never possible, even for trained
dramatic critics, to tell from a final dress-rehearsal in an empty house
which scenes of a new play are fully effective and which are not; and the
reason why, in America, new plays are tried out on the road is not so much
to give the actors practice in their parts, as to determine, from the
effect of the piece upon provincial audiences, whether it is worthy of a
metropolitan presentation. The point is, as we shall notice in the next
chapter, that since a play is devised for a crowd it cannot finally be
judged by individuals.
The dependence of the dramatist upon his audience may be illustrated by the
history of many important plays, which, though effective in their own age,
have become ineffective for later generations, solely because they were
founded on certain general principles of conduct in which the world has
subsequently ceased to believe. From the point of view of its own period,
_The Maid's Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher is undoubtedly one of the
very greatest of Elizabethan plays; but it would be ineffective in the
modern theatre, because it presupposes a principle which a contemporary
audience would not accept. It was devised for an audience of aristocrats in
the reign of James I, and the dramatic struggle is founded upon the
doctrine of the divine right of kings. Amintor, in the play, has suffered a
profound personal injury at the hands of his sovereign; but he cannot
avenge this individual disgrace, because he is a subject of the royal
malefactor. The crisis and turning-point of the entire drama is a scene in
which Amintor, with the king at his mercy, lowers his sword with the
words:--
But there is
Divinity about you, that strikes dead
My rising passions: as you are my king,
I fall before you, and present my sword
To cut mine own flesh, if it be your will.
We may imagine the applause of the courtiers of James Stuart, the
Presumptuous; but never since the Cromwellian revolution has that scene
been really effective on the English stage. In order fully to appreciate a
dramatic struggle, an audience must sympathise with the motives that
occasion it.
It should now be evident, as was suggested at the outset, that all the
leading principles of the theory of the theatre may be deduced logically
from the axiom which was stated in the first sentence of this chapter; and
that axiom should constantly be borne in mind as the basis of all our
subsequent discussions. But in view of several important points which have
already come up for consideration, it may be profitable, before
relinquishing our initial question, to redefine a play more fully in the
following terms:--
A play is a representation, by actors, on a stage, before an audience, of a
struggle between individual human wills, motivated by emotion rather than
by intellect, and expressed in terms of objective action.