The community masque, _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_, is primarily
intended to honor the memory of Shakespeare on the three-hundredth
anniversary of his death. But its significance goes further than the
purpose of commemoration. Mr. Percy MacKaye, the author, tells me that
he sees his masque as part of a movement which shall bring poetry to the
service of the entire community, which shall make poetry democratic, in
the best sense of the word, and that the result of this movement will be
to create conditions likely to produce out of the soil of America a
great renascence of the drama.
Mr. MacKaye undoubtedly is the busiest poet in the United States of
America. When he talked to me about the significance of the community
masque, rehearsals of the various groups that are to take part in it
were going on all over the city. Every few minutes he was called away
to confer with some of the directors of the masque, or some of the
actors taking part in it. For a while Mr. John Drew was with us, talking
of his appearance, in the character of Shakespeare, in epilogue. Mr.
Robert Edmund Jones, the designer of the inner scenes, brought over some
new drawings, and there were telephone conversations about music and
costumes and other important details of the monster production.
"The fact," said Mr. MacKaye, "that the masque is a poem primarily
intended to be heard rather than to be read, is itself a movement toward
the earlier and more democratic uses of poetry. Poetry appeals
essentially to the ear, and is an art of the spoken word, yet, on
account of our conditions of life, the written word is considered
poetry.
"This was not true in Shakespeare's time. And in the sort of work that I
am doing is shown a return to the old ideal. A masque is a poem that can
be visualized and acted. First of all it must be a poem, otherwise it
cannot be anything but a more or less warped work of art.
"With much of the new movement in the theater I am heartily in sympathy;
but the movement seems to me one-sided. A large part of it has to do
with visualization. Emphasis is laid on the appeal to the eye rather
than the appeal to the ear, because the men of genius, like Gordon
Craig, who have been leaders in the movement, have been interested in
that phase of dramatic presentation.
"Now I think that this one-sidedness is regrettable. When Gordon Craig
called his book on dramatic visualization _The Art of the Theater_ he
was wrong. He should have called it 'An Art of the Theater.'
"These men have neglected part of the human soul. They have forgotten
that the greatest part of the appeal of a drama is to the ear. The ear
brings up the most subtle of all life's associations and connotations.
By means of the ear the motions and ideas are conjured up in the mind of
the audience.
"Now, while the new movement in the theater is visual in character, the
new movement in poetry is, so to speak, audible. The American poets are
insisting more and more on the importance of the spoken word in poetry,
as distinct from its shadow on the printed page. Whether they write
_vers libre_ or the usual rhymed forms, they appreciate the fact that
they must write poems that will be effective when read aloud. Surely
this is a wholesome movement, likely to tend more and more toward
definite dramatic expression on the part of the poets, whether to
audiences through actors on the stage, or to audiences gathered to hear
the direct utterances of the poets themselves.
"This being so, the stage tending more toward visualization, and poetry
tending more and more toward the spoken word, where shall we look for
the co-ordinating development? I think that we shall find it in the
community masque. The community masque draws out of the unlabored and
untrammeled resources of our national life its inspiration and its
theme. It requires our young poets to get closely in touch with our
national life, with our history and with contemporary attitudes and
ideals. To do this it is first of all necessary to have the poetic
vision. The great need of the day is of the poet trained in the art of
the theater.
"The pageant and the masque offer the ideal conditions for the rendering
of poetry. The poet who writes the lyric may or may not ordinarily be
the one to speak it. In the masque the one who speaks the poem is the
one chosen to do so because of his special fitness for the task. I have
chosen my actors for the Shakespeare masque with special reference to
their ability to speak poetry."
"But what has this to do," I asked, "with making poetry more
democratic?"
"For one thing," Mr. MacKaye answered, "it gives the poet a larger
audience. People who never read poetry will listen to poetry when it is
presented to them in dramatic form. I have found that the result of the
presentation of a community masque is to interest in poetry a large
number of people who had hitherto been deaf to its appeal. In St. Louis,
when I started a masque, that queer word with a 'q' in it was understood
by a comparatively small number. But after the masque was produced
nearly every high-school boy and girl in the town was writing masques.
"No one can observe the progress of the community masque without seeing
that it is surely a most democratic art form. I read my St. Louis masque
before assemblies of ministers, in negro high schools, before clubs of
advertising-men, at I. W. W. meetings--before men of all conditions of
life and shades of opinion. It afforded them a sort of spiritual and
intellectual meeting-place, it gave them a common interest. Surely that
is a democratic function.
"The democracy of the masque was forcefully brought to my attention
again at the recent dinner by Otto Kahn to the Mayor's Honorary
Committee for the New York Shakespeare Celebration. After James M. Beck
had made a speech, Morris Hillquit, also a member of the committee,
arose and addressed the company. He pointed out more clearly than I have
heard it done before that in this cause extremes of opinion met, that
art was producing practical democracy.
"And yet," said Mr. MacKaye, hastily, "the masque stands for the
democracy of excellence, not the democracy of mediocrity. What is art
but self-government, the harmonizing of the elements of the mind? There
can be no art where there is no discipline, there can be no art where
there is not a high standard of excellence.
"As I said," he continued, "the original appeal of poetry was to the ear
as well as to the eye. In the days when poetry was a more democratic art
than it has been in our time and that of our fathers, the poet spoke his
poems to a circle of enthralled listeners. The masque is spoken through
many mouths, but it might be spoken or chanted by the bard himself.
"There has never before been so great an opportunity for the revival of
the poetic drama. Ordinarily when a poetic drama is presented the cast
has been drawn from actors trained in the rendition of prose. Inevitably
the tendency has been for them to give a prose value to the lines of
poetry. In selecting a cast for a masque, special attention is given to
the ability of the actors to speak poetry, so the poem is presented as
the poet intended.
"It may be that the pageant and masque movement represents the full
flowering of the renascence of poetry which all observers of
intellectual events have recognized. But these movements are perennial;
I do not like to think of a renascence of poetry because I do not think
that poetry has been dead. I feel that it is desirable for the poets to
become aware of the opportunities presented to them by the masque, the
opportunities to combine the art of poetry with the art of the theater,
and thus put poetry at the service of mankind.
"I have felt that the Poetry Society of America, an organization whose
activities certainly are stimulating and encouraging to every friend of
the art, might serve poetry better if its members were to place more
emphasis on creation and less on criticism. At their meetings now
criticism is the dominant note. Poems written by the members are read
aloud and criticized from the floor. This is excellent, in its place,
but its effect is to lay stress on the critical function of the poet,
which, after all, is not his main function. What the members of the
Poetry Society should do is to seek co-operatively to create something.
And for this the masque offers them a golden opportunity.
"The flowering of poetry is a thing of infinite variety. There must be
variety in a masque if the masque is to continue to be a worthy and
popular art form. Standardization would be fatal to the masque, and I
have stood out against it with all the power I possess. The masque and
the pageant must not degenerate into traveling shows, done according to
a fixed receipt. There must be the vision in it, and when the people see
the vision they respond marvelously."
Percy MacKaye is the son of Steele MacKaye, the author of _Hazel Kirke_
and other popular plays. From the very beginning of his literary career
his chief ambition has seemed to be to bring about a closer
_rapprochement_ between poetry and the drama.
When Mr. MacKaye was graduated from Harvard, in 1897, there were in that
university no courses, technical or otherwise, in the modern drama. The
official acceptance of his own commencement part _On the Need of
Imagination in the Drama of To-day_ was the first official sanction of
the subject, which was commented upon by the _Boston Transcript_ as
something unprecedented in the annals of university discussion,
especially of Harvard. It was not until seven or eight years had passed
that Prof. George P. Baker began his courses in dramatic technique.
The development of the pageant and the masque has been for years the
object of Mr. MacKaye's tireless endeavors. He has spoken of the masque
as "the potential drama of democracy." Two years ago in St. Louis he had
his first technical opportunity on a large scale to experiment in
devising this sort of communal entertainment. There, during five
performances, witnessed by half a million people, some seven thousand
citizens of St. Louis took part in his masque, in association with the
pageant by Thomas Wood Stevens.
"The outgoing cost of the St. Louis production," said Mr. MacKaye, "was
$122,000; the income, $139,000. The balance of $17,000 has been devoted
to a fund for civic art. If these seem large sums, we must look back to
the days of the classic Greek drama and remember that the cost of
producing a single play by Sophocles at Athens was $500,000.
"The St. Louis production was truly a drama of, for, and by the people,
a true community masque. _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ is a community
masque, given as the central popular expression of some hundreds of
supplementary Shakespearian celebrations.
"I call this work a masque, because it is a dramatic work of symbolism,
involving in its structure pageantry, poetry, and the dance. But I have
not thought to relate its structure to a historic form; I have simply
sought by its structure to solve a problem of the art of the theater.
That problem is the new one of creating a focus of dramatic technique
for the growing but groping movement vaguely called 'pageantry,' which
is itself a vital sign of social evolution--the half-desire of the
people not merely to remain receptive to a popular art created by
specialists, but to take part themselves in creating it; the
desire,--that is, of democracy consistently to seek expression through
a drama of and by the people, not merely for the people.
"Six years ago, after the pageant-masque of the city of Gloucester,
Massachusetts, I wrote, in _Scribner's Magazine_, an article in which I
said that I found in the three American pageant-masques which I had seen
recently, the Gloucester Pageant, the Masque at Aspet, and the
California Redwood Festival, the expression of community spirit focused
by co-operating artists in dramatic form. I said then, what I feel even
more strongly after my work with the St. Louis Pageant and the
Shakespearian Masque, that pageantry is poetry for the masses.
"The parade of Election Day, the processions of Antics and Horribles on
the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day, the May-Queen rituals of
children--these make an elemental appeal to every one. What is this
elemental appeal? Is it not the appeal of symbolism, the expression of
life's meanings in sensuous form? Crude though it may be, pageantry
satisfies an elemental instinct for art, a popular demand for poetry.
This instinct and this demand, like other human instincts and demands,
may be educated, refined, developed into a mighty agency of
civilization. Refinement of this deep, popular instinct will result
from a rational selection in correlation of the elements of pageantry.
Painting, dancing, music, and sculpture (the last as applied to classic
groupings) are appropriately the special arts for selecting those
elements, and drama is the special art of correlating them.
"The form of pageantry most popular and impressive in appeal as a fine
art is that of the dramatic pageant, or masque. It is not limited to
historic themes. All vital modern forces and institutions of our nation
might appropriately find symbolic expression in the masque.
"And in this would be seen the making of art democratic. Thus would the
art of poetry and the art of the drama be put at the service of mankind.
Artistic gifts, which now are individualized and dispersed, would be
organized to express the labors and aspirations of communities,
reviving, for the noblest humanism of our own times, the traditions of
Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Jonson, and Inigo Jones. The development of the
art of public masques, dedicated to civic education, would do more than
any other agency to provide popular symbolic form and tradition for the
stuff of a noble national drama. The present theaters cannot develop a
public art, since they are dedicated to a private speculative business.
The association of artists and civic leaders in the organization of
public masques would tend gradually to establish a civic theater, owned
by the people and conducted by artists, in every city of the nation.
"I expressed these ideas," said Mr. MacKaye, "some years ago, before the
pageant movement had reached its present pitch of popularity. All my
experiences since that time have given me a firmer conviction that the
masque is the drama of democracy, and I believe that the chief value of
the Shakespearian masque is as a step forward in the progress of the
co-operative dramatic and poetic expression of the people.
"_Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ will be given at the City College Stadium
May 23d, 24th, 25th, 26th, and 27th. After its New York performance it
will be available for production elsewhere on a modified scale of stage
performance. After June 1st it is planned that a professional company,
which will co-operate with the local communities, will take the masque
on tour.
"The subtitle of _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ is _A Community Masque of
the Art of the Theater_, _Devised and Written to Commemorate the
Tercentenary of the Death of Shakespeare_. The dramatic-symbolic motive
of the masque I have taken from Scene 2 of Act I of _The Tempest_, where
Prospero says:
It was mine art
When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape
The pine and let thee out.
"The art of Prospero I have conceived as the art of Shakespeare in its
universal scope--that many-visioned art of the theater, which age after
age has come to liberate the imprisoned imagination of mankind from the
fetters of brute force and ignorance; that same art which, being usurped
or stifled by groping part-knowledge, prudery, or lust, has been botched
in its ideal aims, and has wrought havoc, hypocrisy, and decadence.
Caliban is in this masque that passionate child-curious part of us all,
groveling close to his origin, yet groping up toward that serener plane
of pity and love, reason, and disciplined will, on which Miranda and
Prospero commune with Ariel and his spirits.
"The theme of the masque--Caliban seeking to learn the art of
Prospero--is, of course, the slow education of mankind through the
influences of co-operative art--that is, of the art of the theater in
its full social scope. This theme of co-operation is expressed earliest
in the masque through the lyric of Ariel's Spirits taken from _The
Tempest_; it is sounded, with central stress, in the chorus of peace
when the kings clasp hands on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and, with
final emphasis, in the gathering together of the creative forces of
dramatic art in the Epilogue.
"So I have tried to make the masque bring that message of co-operation
which I think all true art should bring. And the masque is the form
which seems to me destined to bring about this desired co-operation, to
bring back, perhaps, the conditions which existed in the spacious days
of the great Greek drama. The growth in popularity of masques and
pageants is preparing the way for a new race of poet dramatists, of
poets who will use their knowledge of the art of the theater to
interpret the people to themselves. And out of this new artistic
democracy will come, let us hope, our new national poetry and our new
national drama."