Art makes things which need to be distributed; business distributes things
which have been made: and each of the arts is therefore necessarily
accompanied by a business, whose special purpose is to distribute the
products of that art. Thus, a very necessary relation exists between the
painter and the picture-dealer, or between the writer and the publisher of
books. In either case, the business man earns his living by exploiting the
products of the artist, and the artist earns his living by bringing his
goods to the market which has been opened by the industry of the business
man. The relation between the two is one of mutual assistance; yet the
spheres of their labors are quite distinct, and each must work in
accordance with a set of laws which have no immediate bearing upon the
activities of the other. The artist must obey the laws of his art, as they
are revealed by his own impulses and interpreted by constructive criticism;
but of these laws the business man may, without prejudice to his
efficiency, be largely ignorant. On the other hand, the business man must
do his work in accordance with the laws of economics,--a science of which
artists ordinarily know very little. Business is, of necessity, controlled
by the great economic law of supply and demand. Of the practical workings
of this law the business man is in a position to know much more than the
artist; and the latter must always be greatly influenced by the former in
deciding as to what he shall make and how he shall make it. This influence
of the publisher, the dealer, the business manager, is nearly always
beneficial, because it helps the artist to avoid a waste of work and to
conserve and concentrate his energies; yet frequently the mind of the maker
desires to escape from it, and there is scarcely an artist worth his salt
who has not at some moments, with the zest of truant joy, made things which
were not for sale. In nearly all the arts it is possible to secede at will
from all allegiance to the business which is based upon them; and Raphael
may write a century of sonnets, or Dante paint a picture of an angel,
without considering the publisher or picture-dealer. But there is one of
the arts--the art of the drama--which can never be disassociated from its
concomitant business--the business of the theatre. It is impossible to
imagine a man making anything which might justly be called a play merely to
please himself and with no thought whatever of pleasing also an audience
of others by presenting it before them with actors on a stage. But the mere
existence of a theatre, a company of actors, an audience assembled,
necessitates an economic organisation and presupposes a business manager;
and this business manager, who sets the play before the public and attracts
the public to the play, must necessarily exert a potent influence over the
playwright. The only way in which a dramatist may free himself from this
influence is by managing his own company, like Molière, or by conducting
his own theatre, like Shakespeare. Only by assuming himself the functions
of the manager can the dramatist escape from him. In all ages, therefore,
the dramatist has been forced to confront two sets of problems rather than
one. He has been obliged to study and to follow not only the technical laws
of the dramatic art but also the commercial laws of the theatre business.
And whereas, in the case of the other arts, the student may consider the
painter and ignore the picture-dealer, or analyse the mind of the novelist
without analysing that of his publisher, the student of the drama in any
age must always take account of the manager, and cannot avoid consideration
of the economic organisation of the theatre in that age. Those who are most
familiar with the dramatic and poetic art of Christopher Marlowe and the
histrionic art of Edward Alleyn are the least likely to underestimate the
important influence which was exerted on the early Elizabethan drama by
the illiterate but crafty and enterprising manager of these great artists,
Philip Henslowe. Students of the Queen Anne period may read the comedies of
Congreve, but they must also read the autobiography of Colley Cibber, the
actor-manager of the Theatre Royal. And the critic who considers the drama
of to-day must often turn from problems of art to problems of economics,
and seek for the root of certain evils not in the technical methods of the
dramatists but in the business methods of the managers.
At the present time, for instance, the dramatic art in America is suffering
from a very unusual economic condition, which is unsound from the business
standpoint, and which is likely, in the long run, to weary and to alienate
the more thoughtful class of theatre-goers. This condition may be indicated
by the one word,--_over-production_. Some years ago, when the theatre trust
was organised, its leaders perceived that the surest way to win a monopoly
of the theatre business was to get control of the leading theatre-buildings
throughout the country and then refuse to house in them the productions of
any independent manager who opposed them. By this procedure on the part of
the theatre trust, the few managers who maintained their independence were
forced to build theatres in those cities where they wished their
attractions to appear. When, a few years later, the organised opposition to
the original theatre trust grew to such dimensions as to become in fact a
second trust, it could carry on its campaign only by building a new chain
of theatres to house its productions in those cities whose already existing
theatres were in the hands of the original syndicate. As a result of this
warfare between the two trusts, nearly all the chief cities of the country
are now saddled with more theatre-buildings than they can naturally and
easily support. Two theatres stand side by side in a town whose
theatre-going population warrants only one; and there are three theatres in
a city whose inhabitants desire only two. In New York itself this condition
is even more exaggerated. Nearly every season some of the minor producing
managers shift their allegiance from one trust to the other; and since they
seldom seem to know very far in advance just where they will stand when
they may wish to make their next production in New York, the only way in
which they can assure themselves of a Broadway booking is to build and hold
a theatre of their own. Hence, in the last few years, there has been an
epidemic of theatre building in New York. And this, it should be carefully
observed, has resulted from a false economic condition; for new theatres
have been built, not in order to supply a natural demand from the
theatre-going population, but in defiance of the limits imposed by that
demand.
A theatre-building is a great expense to its owners. It always occupies
land in one of the most costly sections of a city; and in New York this
consideration is of especial importance. The building itself represents a
large investment. These two items alone make it ruinous for the owners to
let the building stand idle for any lengthy period. They must keep it open
as many weeks as possible throughout the year; and if play after play fails
upon its stage, they must still seek other entertainments to attract
sufficient money to cover the otherwise dead loss of the rent. Hence there
exists at present in America a false demand for plays,--a demand, that is
to say, which is occasioned not by the natural need of the theatre-going
population but by the frantic need on the part of warring managers to keep
their theatres open. It is, of course, impossible to find enough
first-class plays to meet this fictitious demand; and the managers are
therefore obliged to buy up quantities of second-class plays, which they
know to be inferior and which they hardly expect the public to approve,
because it will cost them less to present these inferior attractions to a
small business than it would cost them to shut down some of their
superfluous theatres.
We are thus confronted with the anomalous condition of a business man
offering for sale, at the regular price, goods which he knows to be
inferior, because he thinks that there are just enough customers available
who are sufficiently uncritical not to detect the cheat. Thereby he hopes
to cover the rent of an edifice which he has built, in defiance of sound
economic principles, in a community that is not prepared to support it
throughout the year. No very deep knowledge of economics is necessary to
perceive that this must become, in the long run, a ruinous business policy.
Too many theatres showing too many plays too many months in the year cannot
finally make money; and this falsity in the economic situation reacts
against the dramatic art itself and against the public's appreciation of
that art. Good work suffers by the constant accompaniment of bad work which
is advertised in exactly the same phrases; and the public, which is forced
to see five bad plays in order to find one good one, grows weary and loses
faith. The way to improve our dramatic art is to reform the economics of
our theatre business. We should produce fewer plays, and better ones. We
should seek by scientific investigation to determine just how many theatres
our cities can support, and how many weeks in the year they may
legitimately be expected to support them. Having thus determined the real
demand for plays that comes from the theatre-going population, the managers
should then bestir themselves to secure sufficient good plays to satisfy
that demand. That, surely, is the limit of sound and legitimate business.
The arbitrary creation of a further, false demand, and the feverish
grasping at a fictitious supply, are evidences of unsound economic methods,
which are certain, in the long run, to fail.