TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
_Books by Brander Matthews_
These Many Years, Recollections of a New Yorker
BIOGRAPHIES
Shakspere as a Playwright
Molière, His Life and His Works
ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS
The Principles of Playmaking
French Dramatists of the 19th Century
Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more or less importance
Aspects of Fiction, and other Essays
The Historical Novel, and other Essays
Parts of Speech, Essays on English
The Development of the Drama
Inquiries and Opinions
The American of the Future, and other Essays
Gateways to Literature, and other Essays
On Acting
A Book About the Theater
The Principles of Playmaking, and other Discussions of the Drama
Essays on English
The Tocsin of Revolt and other Essays
Playwrights on Playmaking, and other Studies of the Stage
Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local Color
PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING
AND OTHER
STUDIES OF THE STAGE
PLAYWRIGHTS ON
PLAYMAKING
AND OTHER STUDIES OF THE STAGE
BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK · LONDON
1923
Copyright, 1923, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1923
[Illustration: (colophon)]
TO THE MEMORY OF
E. L. BURLINGAME
My Friend for more than Forty Years
PREFATORY NOTE
As I have trod the long trail which leads slowly to the summit of
three score years and ten, and as I am now swiftly descending into
the dim valley beyond, this sheaf of essays is probably the last that
I shall garner; and my septuagenarian vanity prompts me to set down
here the theories of the theater that I have made my own after half a
century of playgoing and of persistent effort to spy out the secrets
of stage-craft. To me these theories appear so indisputable and,
indeed, so obvious that I am ever surprized when I chance to see them
challenged. They are not many, and they can be declared briefly.
I. The drama is an art, the laws of which (like those of all the
other arts) are unchanging through the ages, altho their application
has varied from century to century and from country to country.
II. The drama (again like the other arts) has its conventions,
that is to say, its implied contracts between the artist and his
public, without which it could not exist; and while some of these
conventions are essential and therefore permanent, others are local
and accidental, and therefore temporary.
III. The dramatist, whether he is truly a poet or only an adroit
playwright, has always composed his plays with the hope and
expectation of seeing them performed, by actors, in a theater, and
before an audience; and therefore what he has composed has always
been conditioned, consciously or unconsciously, by the players, by
the playhouses, and by the playgoers of his own race and of his own
time.
These three theories may be more or less implicit in the ‘Poetics’
of Aristotle and in the ‘Dramaturgy’ of Lessing; and it would ill
become me not to confess frankly my indebtedness to Francisque
Sarcey, for first calling attention to the necessity of dramatic
conventions. Among the moderns the influence of the audience seems to
have been hinted at first by Castelvetro; James Spedding saw clearly
the probable influence exerted upon Shakspere by his fellow actors
in the Globe Theater; and Gaston Boissier pointed out the probable
influence exerted upon Plautus and Terence by the theaters of Rome;
but I venture to believe that I had no predecessor in utilizing all
three of these influences to elucidate the technic of Sophocles, of
Shakspere and of Molière,—to say nothing of the dramatists of our own
day.
IV. I believe that I was also the first to show that the principle
of Economy of Attention, which Herbert Spencer applied only to
Rhetoric, was applicable to the other arts and more particularly to
the drama.
V. Perhaps I may claim a share in the wide acceptance of Brunetière’s
‘Law of the Drama,’—that the drama is differentiated from the other
forms of story-telling by the fact that an audience desires to behold
a conflict, a stark assertion of the human will, a clash of character
upon character.
These theories of the theater, which I feel to be mine, wherever
I may have derived them, I have discussed now and again in the
present volume, as I discussed them earlier in the ‘Principles of
Playmaking,’ in the ‘Development of the Drama,’ in the ‘Study of the
Drama’ and in my biographies of Shakspere and Molière. In many years
of lecturing to graduate classes I have found them useful in arousing
the interest of students always eager to acquire insight into
technic. What a dramatist meant to do—that is something about which
we may endlessly dispute. What he actually did—that is something we
can test and measure.
B. M.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
CONTENTS
PAGE
I _Playwrights on Playmaking_ 1
II _Undramatic Criticism_ 17
III _Old Plays and New Playgoers_ 37
IV _Tragedies with Happy Endings_ 57
V _On the Advantage of Having a Pattern_ 79
VI _Did Shakspere Write Plays to Fit His Actors?_ 97
VII _Strange Shaksperian Performances_ 119
VIII _Thackeray and the Theater_ 137
IX _Mark Twain and the Theater_ 159
X _Henry James and the Theater_ 185
XI _Stage Humor_ 205
XII _The “Old Comedies”_ 227
XIII _The Organization of the Theater_ 245
XIV _Memories of Actors_ 281
I
PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING
I
PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING
I
We have no right to expect that a creator of art should be also a
critic of art. He is a creator because he can create, because he
can paint a picture, model a statue, tell a story in action on the
stage or delineate character in narrative; and he needs only enough
of the critical faculty to enable him to achieve the obligatory
self-criticism, without which he may go astray. If he is a born
story-teller, for instance, he may tell stories by native gift,
almost without taking thought as to how he does it; and even if he
does it very well, he may be an artist in spite of himself, so to
speak. He may achieve his effects without analyzing his processes,
perhaps without understanding them or even perceiving them. His
methods are intuitive rather than rational; they are personal to him;
and he cannot impart them to others.
He may in fact misconceive his own effort and see himself in a false
light, sincerely believing that he is doing his work in one way
when he is really doing it in another. Zola, for one, was entirely
at fault in the opinion he held about his own novels; he was so
uncritical that he supposed himself to be a Realist, avid of facts,
whereas he was unmistakably a Romanticist, planning epic edifices
symmetrical and fantastic and forcing the facts he diligently
sought for to fit as best they could into the structure of the
dream-dwelling he was building. Zola was a tireless worker dowered
with constructive imagination, but he was not more intelligent than
the average man; and he was distinctly deficient in critical insight,
as was swiftly disclosed when he ventured to discuss the principles
of novel-writing and the practices of his fellow-craftsmen.
But there are artists, and not a few, who are keenly intelligent
and who are able to philosophize about their calling; and whenever
they are moved to talk about the technic of their several arts we
shall do well to listen that we may learn. We can make our profit
from what Horace and Wordsworth have to say about poetry and from
what Pope and Poe have to say about versification. We can gain
enlightenment from the remarks of Reynolds and Fromentin and La Farge
on painting and from the remarks of Fielding and Scott, Howells and
Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson about fiction. We must, of
course, make our allowances in each case for the personal equation
and for the predilection the artist-critic is likely to possess for
the special school of art to which he himself belongs,—and also for
the forgivable intolerance he sometimes reveals toward those who are
students in other schools.
When the artist who is also a critic addresses the public, he has
his eyes directed more often than not particularly to his fellow
practitioners. Thus it is that he tends to deal more especially with
technic and to talk about the processes of the craft and about the
best method of achieving needed effects. Nor is this to be deplored,
since we need all the information we can get about technic to enable
us to appreciate the artist’s accomplishment,—and who can supply this
information so satisfactorily as the artist himself? There may be
other points of view than the artist’s, there is that of the public,
for one, but the artist’s must ever be the most significant; and what
this is we can learn only from him. He at least has practised what he
is preaching; and this fact gives a validity to his discourse.
Even in this twentieth century there are critics not a few who
persist in dealing with the drama as literature only, deliberately
ignoring its necessary connection with the theater. This is a
wilful error, which vitiates only too many estimates of the masters
of tragedy and comedy, Sophocles, Shakspere, and Molière. Perhaps
the best corrective is a consideration of the utterances of the
dramatists who have discussed the principles of playmaking. Here we
may find light, even if it is sometimes accompanied by more or less
heat.
The list of the dramatists who have been tempted to talk about
the drama as an art is long, far longer indeed than is suspected
by those who have never sought to seek them out. It includes Lope
de Vega, Ben Jonson and Dryden, Corneille and Molière, Goethe,
Lessing and Grillparzer, Voltaire and Goldoni, Victor Hugo and the
two Dumas, Ernest Legouvé and Jules Lemaître, Bronson Howard and
William Gillette, Arthur Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. These are
all the names of professional playwrights whose dramas, comic and
tragic, withstood the ordeal by fire in the theater. Yet it may be
well to point out that they divide themselves into two groups. We
may put into the first group those who were critics by profession
and whose reputation is due rather to their critical acumen than to
their playmaking skill,—Ben Jonson and Dryden, Lessing and Jules
Lemaître. Then we put into a second group those who were critics only
on occasion, their fame being based on their creative work,—Lope de
Vega, Corneille and Molière, Grillparzer and Pinero, to name only a
few. It is from these latter that we have a right to expect the most
significant statements.
II
The first thing we discover when we compare the opinions of the
professional playwrights is that they agree in accepting the judgment
of the audience as decisive and final. As their plays were composed
for the delight of the spectators, they all feel that they are bound
to accept the verdict rendered in the theater. They know better than
any one else how vain is the hope of an appeal to any other tribunal.
They were seeking success on the stage, not in the study; they
desired to arouse and retain the interest of their own contemporaries
in their own country. They gave no thought to posterity or to foreign
nations. They recognized that they had no right to complain if they
could not win over the jury by which they had chosen to be tried. In
so far as the dramatists have expressed their opinion on this point
they are unanimous.
In Professor William Lyon Phelps’s lively little book on the
‘Twentieth Century Theater,’ he has told us about an unnamed author,
who “profoundly influenced not only the stage but also modern
thought” and who nevertheless maintained that the “true dramatist
must not think of the box-office while he is writing his plays. He
must express himself, which is the only reason for writing at all.
If what he writes happens to be financially successful, so much the
better. But he must not think of popular success while at work.”
We cannot doubt the sincerity of these sentiments, since Professor
Phelps has frankly informed us that the majority of this author’s
pieces “have been failures on the stage.”
The practise of this unnamed author is in sharp opposition to that
of Shakspere and Molière, who were shrewd men of business, both of
them. Shakspere was susceptible to every veering shift in popular
taste, giving the public sex-plays, ‘Measure for Measure’ and ‘All’s
Well That Ends Well,’ when other playwrights had stimulated the taste
for that type of piece, and following the footsteps of Beaumont and
Fletcher after these collaborators had won the favor of playgoers
with their more or less spectacular dramatic-romances. Molière made
haste to bolster the bill with a robust farce when the box-office
receipts revealed to him that the ‘Misanthrope’ was not financially
successful. Goethe displayed his customary insight when he told
Eckermann that the greatest of English dramatists and the greatest of
French dramatists, “wished, above all things, to make money by their
theaters.”
This wish of theirs did not interfere with the ability of Shakspere
and of Molière “to express himself.” Of course, the dramatic poet
desires to express himself; but if he is a born playwright, he
never thinks of trying to express himself except in conformity to
the conditions of the dramatic art with its triple dependence on the
playhouse itself, the players and the playgoers. Professor Phelps’s
unnamed author may have “profoundly influenced” both the stage and
modern thought, but he was not a born playwright or he would have
ever had “popular success” in mind while he was at work. If he did
not value the winning of the suffrages of his constituents, why
did he present himself at the polls? There are abundant facilities
for self-expression in the novel and in the lyric. In the drama
self-expression must take thought of the public, of its likes and its
dislikes, of its many-headedness and of the variety of its tastes.
The opinions enunciated by this unnamed author are contrary to the
practise of Shakspere and Molière, and they are also contrary to
the precepts of Lope de Vega and Corneille, who also profoundly
influenced both the stage and what in their own day was “modern
thought.” Lope de Vega proclaimed his deference to the Italian
theorists of the theater, regretting only that the playwrights who
worked according to their precepts died “without fame and guerdon.”
Then he tells us (with his tongue in his cheek) that “when I have to
write a play I lock in the precepts with six keys ... and I write
in accordance with that art which they devised who aspired to the
applause of the crowd, for since the crowd pays for the plays, it
is fitting to talk foolishly to it to satisfy its taste.” Less than
a quarter of a century later Corneille said almost exactly the same
thing, perhaps sadly but certainly not ironically:
Since we write plays to be performed, our first object is to please
the court and the people, and to attract many to the performances.
We must, if we can, obey the precepts, so as not to displease the
learned and to receive unanimous applause; but above all we must
win the vote of the people.
And Molière less than thirty years later is equally plain-spoken:
I am willing to trust the decision of the multitude, and I hold
it as difficult to combat a work which the public approves as to
defend one which it condemns.
It may be noted that Corneille desired to gain, if possible, the
good opinion of the learned, while he held it essential to gain
that of the crowd. The younger Dumas once imagined his father
replying to those who had asked him if he would not be satisfied if
he had achieved the commendation of the best judges only: “No, the
approbation of these judges would not amply indemnify me for the
coldness of the others, because the drama, which appeals to the many,
cannot be satisfied with the approval of the few.” In putting this
opinion into the mouth of the elder Dumas, his son was but expressing
the belief of every successful playwright who has been moved to
discuss the art of the drama; and it may be well to recall the fact
that in their own day all the great dramatists were only successful
playwrights, their popularity being beyond question even if their
greatness was still in doubt.
III
There are other beliefs of the successful playwrights, perhaps not
so unanimously expressed, yet widely held. One of them is that
the playwright, like the poet, is born and not made. The younger
Dumas declared that a man “may become a painter, a sculptor, even a
musician, by study—but not a playwright.... It is a freak of nature,
which has constructed the vision as to enable him to see things in
a certain way.” He added that this very rare faculty is revealed in
the first attempt at playwriting, however unambitious this juvenile
effort may be. Goethe had said almost the same thing, asserting that
“writing for the stage is something peculiar.... It is a craft which
one must understand and it requires a talent which one must possess.”
In other words, the playwright, like the poet again, must be born,
and he must be made also, after he is born, since he needs to master
the technic of the trade.
On another occasion Goethe spoke of the prolixity of Schiller’s
earlier pieces, a fault which Schiller was never quite able to
overcome. Goethe commented that it “is more difficult than is
imagined to control a subject properly, to keep it from overpowering
one, and to concentrate one’s attention on that alone which is
absolutely essential.” The younger Dumas, who always knew what he was
driving at, declared that the first qualification of the accomplished
dramatist was logic, which “must be implacable from beginning to
end.... The playwright must unfailingly place before the spectator
that part of the being or thing for or against which he wishes to
draw a conclusion.”
Sir Arthur Pinero agrees with Dumas in holding that
dramatic, like poetic, talent is born, not made; if it is to
achieve success it must be developed into theatrical talent by
hard study and generally by long practice. For theatrical talent
consists in the power of making your characters not only tell a
story by means of dialog but tell it in such skilfully devised form
and order as shall, within the limits of an ordinary theatrical
representation, give rise to the greatest amount of that peculiar
kind of emotional effect the production of which is the one great
function of the theater.
This theatrical talent has to be exercised within the limits of the
theater as this exists at the time when the dramatist lives. The
principles of playmaking are eternal, no doubt, but the practices of
playmaking are modified by the constantly changing conditions of the
stage.
Pinero likens the art of the drama to the art of war, the permanent
principles of playmaking to strategy, and its variable principles
to tactics. Strategy is to-day what it was yesterday; and it was
succinctly defined during our Civil War by General Forrest, when he
said it consisted in “getting there first with the most men”—that is
to say, in gaining an advantageous position for yourself and putting
the enemy in a disadvantageous position. It is therefore unchanging
in its essential elements, Foch profiting by the example of Napoleon
and Cæsar, Hannibal and Alexander. But tactics are in incessant
modification, as the soldier has new implements put in his hands by
the inventions of the ages, gunpowder unhorsing the man in armor and
tanks taking the place of elephants. While the strategy of the drama
is constant, its tactics “are always changing,” so Pinero has put it;
and
every dramatist whose ambition it is to produce live plays is
absolutely bound to study carefully, and I may add respectfully—at
any rate not contemptuously—the conditions that hold good for his
own age and generation.
The strategy of Shakspere is that of Sophocles, of Molière and of
Ibsen, even if the later men did not recognize their own obedience
to the laws which had governed the earlier. The tactics of Sophocles
were diametrically opposed to those of Shakspere, because the Greek
dramatist built his massive plays to conform to the conditions of
the immense open air theater of Athens with its extraordinarily
intelligent spectators, whereas the English dramatist had to
adjust his pieces, comic and tragic, to the bare platform of the
half-timbered London playhouse, with its gallants seated on the stage
and its rude and turbulent groundlings standing in the unroofed yard.
So the tactics of Molière and Ibsen are strangely unlike, the French
author fitting his comedies to a long, narrow theater, dimly lighted
by candles, with the courtiers accommodated on benches just behind
the curtain and with the well-to-do burghers of Paris making up the
bulk of the audience, while the stern Scandinavian found his profit
in the modern picture-frame stage, with its realistic sets and with
its spectators comfortably seated in front of the curtain. Each of
the four followed the methods of his own time and place; and each in
turn made the best of the theatrical conditions which confronted him.
But however much they may differ in practice, in tactics they worked
in accord with the same principles, and employed the same strategy.
Bronson Howard admitted that Aeschylus “taught the future world the
art of writing a play” but he “did not create the laws of dramatic
construction. Those laws exist in the passions and sympathies of
the human race.” A little later in the same address, Bronson Howard
declared that the laws of dramatic construction “bear about the same
relation to human character and human sympathies as the laws of
nature bear to the material universe.” In other words, the drama is
what it is, what it always has been, what it always will be, because
human nature is what it is and was and will be. And this brings us
back to the inexorable fact that the eternally dominating element
in the theater is the audience. “The dramatist,” so Bronson Howard
reminded us, “must remember that his work cannot, like that of the
novelist or the poet, pick out the hearts, here and there, that
happen to be in sympathy with its subject. He appeals to a thousand
hearts at the same moment; he has no choice in the matter; he must do
this.” That is to say, the drama is immitigably “a function of the
crowd,” as Mr. Walkley has aptly called it.
Finally, Bronson Howard pointed out that there is no great difficulty
in obeying the laws of dramatic construction, even if it may be
impossible to declare them with precision. “Be honest and sincere” in
using
your common sense in the study of your own and other people’s
emotions.... The public will be your jury. That public often
condescends to be trifled with by mere tricksters, but believe me,
it is only a condescension, and very contemptuous. In the long
run, the public will judge you, and respect you, according to your
artistic sincerity.
What has here been quoted from the critical writings of the
dramatists may seem to some rather elementary; but it is perhaps all
the more valuable. As Diderot once said, “a man must have a deep
knowledge of any art or science before he is in possession of its
elements.”
(1920)
II
UNDRAMATIC CRITICISM
II
UNDRAMATIC CRITICISM
I
As criticism has to find its material in the work of the creators it
is not surprizing that the masters of the craft have appeared during
periods of abundant creation or shortly thereafter. Aristotle was
not separated by many years from Sophocles and Euripides. Boileau
was the most intimate friend of Molière; and Sainte-Beuve was the
contemporary of Hugo and Balzac, altho he did not greatly care for
either of them. Coleridge lived in an epoch of ample productivity;
and so did Matthew Arnold. Lessing was stimulated by Voltaire and
Diderot; and he prepared the way for Goethe and Schiller. And these
are only a few of the critics who have held their own by the side of
the creators.
But when the creative impulse relaxes, when there is no longer
a succession of masterpieces demanding appreciation, then is it
that the criticasters have their turn, the pigmies who promulgate
edicts for those who are still striving to attain the twin summits
of Parnassus. It was not in the rich abundance of Athens but in
the thin sterility of Alexandria that the laws of poetry were
codified with Draconian severity. It was not under Louis XIV but
under Napoleon, when French literature was dying of inanition, that
Népomucène Lemercier declared the twenty-five rules which the writer
of tragedy must obey and the twenty-two to which the writer of comedy
must conform.
There was no living Latin drama when Horace penned his epistle on
poetry, and the theaters of Rome were given over to unliterary
spectacle. It is unlikely that Horace had ever had occasion to see
a worthy play worthily acted. No doubt he had read the works of the
great Greeks, but that could not disclose to him the full emotional
force of their dramas revealed only by actual performance. To judge
a play by reading it is like judging a picture by a photograph. The
greater the drama the more completely does it put forth its power
when it is made to live by the actor in the theater and before the
audience. As a result of Horace’s lack of experience as a spectator,
what he has to say about the principles of playmaking has little
validity. He is not exercising his own keen critical faculty; he is
merely echoing the opinions of Alexandrian criticasters. His counsel
to aspiring dramatists was not practical; it was academic in the
worst sense of the word. In fact, Horace was only going through the
motions of giving advice, since there were no aspiring dramatists in
Rome, as there were then no stages on which a play could be acted and
no company of actors to perform it.
A comparison of the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle with the ‘Art of Poetry’
of Horace is as amusing as it is profitable. Aristotle is the
earliest and the shrewdest of dramatic critics. Horace had no
intimacy with the theater. Horace is sketching from a lay-figure
in a studio, whereas Aristotle is drawing from the living model in
the open air. When Aristotle discusses the effect of an episode
upon an audience, we can be sure that he himself was once one of
that audience, and that his memory had retained the intonations and
the gestures of the actors as well as the unformulated response
of the spectators to the emotional appeal of the plot. Aristotle
is as insistent in taking the audience in account as Sarcey was;
and his dramatic criticism is as technical as Sarcey’s. Horace had
never thrilled to a situation as it slowly unfolded itself in the
theater; and therefore what he has to say about the principles of
playmaking is more or less beside the mark. It is hit or miss; it may
be right or it may be wrong; it is supported by no understanding of
dramaturgy; it is undramatic criticism.
The theories which Horace took over second-hand from the Alexandrian
criticasters, the supersubtle Italians of the Renascence took
third-hand from him. They suffered, as Horace had suffered, from
the lack of a living dramatic literature in their own tongue. In
the pride of their newfound learning they looked with contempt
upon the unliterary types of drama then popular, the Sacred
Representations and the Comedy-of-Masks. They never suspected
that in these artless exhibitions there were the germs out of
which a noble dramatic literature might be evolved. They could not
foresee that the Elizabethans would develop their tragedy from the
English Mystery-Plays, which were no cruder than the Italian Sacred
Representations, and that in the ‘Étourdi’ Molière would lift into
literature the loose and lively Comedy-of-Masks. And because they
refused to do what Shakspere and Molière were to do, they left Italy
barren of drama for centuries. The most of the dramatic poems which
are catalogued in the histories of Italian literature were unacted
and unactable,—altho now and again one or another did achieve
performance by amateurs before an audience of dilettants.
So it is that the host of theorists of the theater in Renascence
Italy are undramatic critics, not because they lacked acuteness, but
because they knew nothing of the actual theater, the sole region
where drama can live, move and have its being. Only infrequently does
one of them,—Castelvetro, for example,—venture to give a thought
to the audience for whose delight a drama ought to be prepared.
As they had no acquaintance with any stage, except the sporadic
platform of the strolling acrobat-comedians whom they despised,
they had no concrete knowledge as a foundation for their abstract
speculation. They were working in a vacuum. And it is small wonder
that they complicated their concepts until they had elaborated the
Classicist doctrines of the Three Unities and of the total separation
of Comedy from Tragedy. The Classicist code was so hampering to the
free expansion of the drama that Corneille cried out against its
rigor, that Lope de Vega paid it lip-service but disregarded it
unhesitatingly, and that Shakspere never gave it a thought—excepting
only when he was writing his last play, the ‘Tempest.’
II
Horace’s mistake was in his adventuring himself beyond the boundaries
of his knowledge; and the blunder of the Renascence critics was
caused by their scornful disregard of the contemporary types of
drama in their own time, artless as these might be. But nowadays
the theater is flourishing and every man has frequent opportunity
to see worthy plays worthily performed and to acquaint himself with
the immediate effect of a worthy performance upon the spectators.
No apology is acceptable for the undramatic criticism which we
discover in not a few of the learned treatises which profess to
expound and explain the masterpieces of the mighty dramatists who
lived in Periclean Athens and in Elizabethan England. Some of the
scholars, who discuss Sophocles and Shakspere, deal with these expert
playwrights as if their pieces had been composed not to be seen in
swift action in the theater but to be read at leisure in the library.
In their eyes ‘Œdipus the King’ and ‘Othello’ are only dramatic
poems, and not poetic dramas. They study the printed page under the
microscope; and they make no effort to recapture the sound of the
spoken word or to visualize the illustrative action.
The undramatic critic of this type has no apprehension of the
principles of playmaking, as these are set forth by Aristotle and
by Lessing, by Sarcey and by Brunetière. He has made no effort to
keep abreast of the “state of the art” of dramatic criticism. He
seems never to have considered the triple influence exerted on the
form and on the content of a play by the theater for which it was
composed, by the actors for whom its characters were intended
or by the audience for whose pleasure it was written. It is only
occasionally that we have proffered to us a book like the late
Professor Goodell’s illuminating analysis of ‘Athenian Tragedy,’ in
which we are agreeably surprized to find a Greek scholar elucidating
the masterpieces of the Greek drama by the aid of Brunetière’s ‘Law
of the Drama’ and Archer’s ‘Playmaking.’ Professor Goodell firmly
grasped the fact that the art of the drama is unchanging, no matter
how various its manifestations may be in different centuries and in
different countries. And he was therefore able to cast light upon the
plays of the past by his observation of the plays of the present.
Less satisfactory is an almost contemporary volume on ‘Greek
Tragedy,’ which covers the same ground. Altho Professor Norwood has
not found his profit in Brunetière or Archer, he makes a valiant
effort to visualize actual performance in the Theater of Dionysus
more than twenty centuries ago. He deals with Greek plays as poetic
dramas and not merely as dramatic poems. But he has fallen victim to
the wiles of the late Professor Verrall, one of the most ingenious of
undramatic critics; and in his discussion of ‘Agamemnon’ of Æschylus
he gives Verrall credit for having solved a series of difficulties.
Professor Norwood even goes so far as to declare that “Verrall’s
theory should probably be accepted.”
I doubt if a single one of the alleged difficulties even occurred to
any of the spectators present at the first performance of the play.
The action of ‘Agamemnon’ is swift, irresistible, inevitable; and
the audience was allowed no time for cavil. As the story unrolled
itself in the theater it was convincing; and if any doubt arose
in the mind of any spectator as to anything that had occurred, it
could arise only after he had left the theater; and then it was
too late. As a play, performed by actors, in a theater, before an
audience, ‘Agamemnon’ triumphs. Only when it is considered in the
study do we perceive any “difficulties.” In fact, when so considered
one difficulty is likely to strike many readers; and it repays
consideration.
The play begins with a long monolog from a watchman of the roof of
Agamemnon’s palace. The king is at the siege of Troy; and when the
beleaguered city is taken a series of beacons on the intervening
hills will be lighted, one after another, to convey the glad news.
Suddenly the watchman sees the distant flame, the wireless message
that Troy has fallen and that the monarch is free to return home.
In real life it would be two or three weeks before Agamemnon would
arrive; yet in the play, before it is half over, the king comes in;
he enters his palace, where he is done to death by his guilty wife
and her paramour, Ægisthus. The exigencies of the two hours’ traffic
of the stage often compel a playwright to telescope time; but no
other dramatist has ever dared so violent a compression as this.
And this is how Verrall solves the difficulty “with lucidity, skill
and brilliance,” so Professor Norwood tells us. The story of the
series of beacons is a lie concocted by the wife and her lover. There
is only one beacon, which Ægisthus lights when he discovers the
landing of Agamemnon; it is to warn his accomplice that she may make
ready to murder her husband. And as Agamemnon is actually on shore
when this single beacon flames up, he is able to arrive in the middle
of the play. If we accept this solution of the difficulty we are
compelled to believe that Æschylus wrote a play, instantly accepted
as a masterpiece, which had to wait for more than two thousand
years for a British scholar to explain away an impossibility. This
explanation is undoubtedly lucid and skilful and brilliant; but none
the less is it a specimen of undramatic criticism. It could never
have been put forward by anyone who had an elementary knowledge of
the principles of playmaking.
A dramatist never tells lies to his audience; and the audience always
accepts the statements of his characters as true—unless he himself
takes care to suggest that a given statement is false. The play has
to be taken at its face value. The characters talk on purpose to
convey all needful information to the spectators. Æschylus may make
the queen lie to the king, but when she does this the audience is
aware of the truth or surmises it. The dramatist never hesitates to
let his characters deceive one another; but if he knows his business
he does not deceive the spectators. In real life Agamemnon could
not arrive for a fortnight after Troy had fallen; but the Athenian
audience could not wait in their seats two weeks, so Æschylus frankly
brings on Agamemnon; and the spectators were glad to behold him,
asking no inconvenient questions, because they were eager to see what
would happen to him. It might be a contradiction of the fact, but it
was not a departure from the truth, since the king would assuredly
come home sooner or later. Everyone familiar with Sarcey’s discussion
of the conventions of the drama is aware that the spectators in the
theater are never sticklers for fact; they are willing to accept a
contradiction of fact, if that contradiction is for their own profit,
as it was in this case. And they accept it unthinkingly; and it is
only when they hold the play in their hands to pick it to pieces that
they discover any “difficulty.”
III
To say this is to say that Verrall, however lucid and skilful
and brilliant, was a discoverer of mares’ nests. And a host of
undramatic critics have skilfully exercised their lucid brilliance
in discovering mares’ nests in Shakspere’s plays. Most of them are
stolid Teutons, with Gervinus and Ulrici in the forefront of the
procession. They analyzed the tragedies of Shakspere with the sincere
conviction that he was a philosopher with a system as elaborate
as those of Kant and Hegel; and they did not seem to suspect that
even if a dramatist is a philosopher he is—and must be—first of
all a playwright, whose invention and construction are conditioned
by the theater for which he is working. Even in the greatest plays
philosophy is a by-product; and the main object of the great
dramatist is always to arouse and retain and reward the interest of
his immediate audience.
He must make his story plain to the comprehension of the average
playgoer; and he must therefore provide his characters with motives
which are immediately apparent and instantly plausible. Shakspere
is ever anxious that his spectators shall not be misled, and he
goes so far as to have his villains, Richard III and Iago, frankly
inform the audience that they are villains, a confession which in
real life neither of these astute scoundrels would ever have made to
anybody. The playwright knows that if he loses his case before the
jury, he can never move for a retrial; the verdict is without appeal.
It may be doubted whether any dramatist has ever cared greatly for
the opinion of posterity. Assuredly no popular playwright—and in
their own day every great dramatist was a popular playwright—would
have found any compensation for the failure of his play in the hope
and expectation that two hundred or two thousand years later its
difficulties might be explained by a Verrall, however lucid and
skilful and brilliant this belated expounder might be.
There are two Shaksperian mares’ nests which may be taken as typical,
altho the eggs in them are not more obviously addled than in a host
of others. One was discovered in ‘Macbeth,’ in the scene of Banquo’s
murder. Macbeth incites two men to make way with Banquo; but when the
deed is done, three murderers take part in it. Two of them are the
pair we have seen receiving instructions from Macbeth. Who is the
third? An undramatic critic once suggested that this third murderer
is no less a person than Macbeth himself, joining his hired assassins
to make sure that they do the job in workmanlike fashion. The
suggester supported his suggestion by an argument in eight points,
no one of which carries any weight, because we may be sure that if
Shakspere had meant Macbeth to appear in person, he would have taken
care to let the audience know it. He would not have left it hidden to
be uncovered two and a half centuries after his death by the skilful
lucidity of a brilliant undramatic critic.
It is reasonably certain that Burbage, who acted Richard III and
Hamlet, also acted Macbeth; and Shakspere would never have sent this
renowned performer on the stage to take part in a scene without
justifying his share in it and without informing the spectators that
their favorite was before them. Shakspere was an actor himself; he
knew what actors wanted and what they liked; he took good care of
their interests; and we may rest assured that he never asked Burbage
to disguise his identity. If he had meant the third murderer to be
Macbeth, we should have had the stage direction, “Enter two murderers
with Macbeth disguised.” As it is, the stage direction reads “Enter
three murderers.”
The other mare’s nest has been found in ‘King Lear.’ It has often
been pointed out that Cordelia is absent from a large portion of
the action of the tragedy, altho her presence might have aided
its effectiveness. It has been noted also that Cordelia and the
Fool are never seen on the stage together. And this has prompted
the suggestion that the Fool is Cordelia in disguise. Here again
we see the undramatic critic at his worst. If Shakspere had meant
this, he would have made it plain to the spectators the first time
Cordelia appeared as the Fool,—otherwise her assumption of this part
would have been purposeless, confusing, futile. Whatever poignancy
there might be in the companioning of the mad king by his cast-off
daughter all unknown to him, would be unfelt if her assumption of the
Fool’s livery was not at once recognized. The suggestion is not only
inacceptable, it is unthinkable by anyone who has even an elementary
perception of the playmaking art. It could have emanated only from
an undramatic critic who was familiar with ‘King Lear’ in the study
and not on the stage, who regarded the sublimest of Shakspere’s
tragedies as a dramatic poem and not as a poetic drama planned for
the playhouse.
Yet this inept suggestion can be utilized to explain the fact that
Cordelia and the Fool never meet before the eyes of the spectators.
The cast of characters in ‘King Lear’ is very long; and quite
possibly it called for more actors than there were in the limited
company at the Globe. We know that in the Tudor theater a performer
was often called upon to sustain two parts. It is possible that the
shaven lad who impersonated Cordelia was the only available actor
for the Fool, and that therefore Cordelia—at whatever loss to the
effectiveness of the play—could not appear in the scenes in which the
Fool had to appear. Cordelia did not don the disguise of the Fool;
but the same performer may have doubled the two parts. That much of
supposition can be ventured for whatever it may be worth.
IV
It is in England and in Germany that the undramatic critics have been
permitted to disport themselves most freely and most frequently.
In France they have never been encouraged to pernicious activity.
That the French have not suffered from this pest may be due to the
honorable existence of the Théâtre Français, where the masterpieces
of French tragedy and of French comedy have been kept alive on the
stage for which they had been written; or it may be due to the fact
that in the literature of France the drama has been continuously more
important than it has been in the literature of any other country.
In England and in Germany the drama has had its seasons of abundance
and its seasons of famine, whereas in France, altho there might be
poor harvests for a succession of years, harvests of some sort
there always have been. No period in French literature is as devoid
of valid drama as that in English literature during the first
three-quarters of the nineteenth century. From 1800 to 1870 the plays
of our language which were actable were unreadable and the plays
which were readable were unactable. It is in the periods of penury,
when there is a divorce between literature and the drama, that the
undramatic critic is inspired to chase rainbows. As there is then
no vital drama in the theater, and as the pieces then exhibited on
the stage have little validity, the undramatic critic is led to the
conclusion that since the theater can get along without literature,
so the drama can get along without the theater. And that way madness
lies.
There is this excuse for the supersubtle critics of the Italian
Renascence that they lived not long removed from the middle ages,
in which all memory of the acted drama had been lost and in which
the belief was general that the comedies of Plautus and Terence had
been composed, not for performance by actors in a theater and before
an audience, but for a single reciter who should deal with them as
a modern elocutionist might stand and deliver ‘Pippa Passes’ or the
‘Cenci.’ But there is no excuse for the English-speaking expounders
of Sophocles and Shakspere, because they cannot help knowing that
the plays of the Athenian were written to be performed in the Theater
of Dionysus and that the plays of the Elizabethan were written to be
performed in the Globe theater.
A friend of mine, not yet forty, told me that as an undergraduate
he had read half-a-dozen Greek plays with a professor, who was an
enthusiastic admirer of Greek literature, who had spent a winter in
Athens, and who had acquired modern Greek. This professor spared
no pains to make his students appreciate the poetic beauty of
Athenian tragedy; but never once did he call their attention to
the circumstances of original performance or arouse their interest
by pointing out the theatrical effectiveness of the successive
situations. To this ardent lover of Greece and of Greek literature,
the ‘Agamemnon,’ the ‘Œdipus,’ and the ‘Medea’ were only poems in
dialog; they were not plays composed to be acted, adjusted to the
conditions of the Athenian theater, and conforming to the conventions
tacitly accepted by the Attic audience.
But worse remains behind. The writer of the chapters on Shakspere
in the composite ‘Cambridge History of English Literature,’
deals skilfully and cautiously with the dates of composition and
performance of each of the plays; but he criticizes them with no
examination of their theatrical effectiveness. It is scarcely too
much to say that he considers them as dramatic poems intended to
be read rather than as poetic dramas intended to be acted. Nothing
in either of his chapters is evidence that he ever saw a comedy
or a tragedy of Shakspere’s on the stage. He reveals no knowledge
of the principles of playmaking; and it may be doubted whether he
suspects the existence of these principles. And in one passage of his
commentary he has given us the absolute masterpiece of undramatic
criticism:
It is, of course, quite true that all of Shakspere’s plays were
written to be acted; but it may be questioned whether this is much
more than an accident arising from the fact that the drama was
the dominant form of literature. It was a happy accident, because
of the unique opportunity this form gives of employing both the
vehicles of poetry and prose.
(1921)
III
OLD PLAYS AND NEW PLAYGOERS
III
OLD PLAYS AND NEW PLAYGOERS
I
Every dramatist is of necessity subdued to what he works for—the
playgoers of his own generation in his own country. Their approval
it is that he has to win first of all; and if they render a verdict
against him he has no appeal to posterity. It is a matter of record
that a play which failed to please the public in its author’s
lifetime never succeeded later in establishing itself on the
stage. Partizans may prate about the dramatic power of the ‘Blot
in the ’Scutcheon,’ but when it is—as it has been half-a-dozen
times—galvanized into a semblance of life for a night or a fortnight,
it falls prone in the playhouse as dead as it was when Macready first
officiated at its funeral. Even the ‘Misanthrope,’ mightiest of
Molière’s comedies and worthy of all the acclaim it has received, was
not an outstanding triumph when its author impersonated Alceste, and
it has rarely rewarded the efforts of the succession of accomplished
actors who have tried to follow the footsteps of the master; it
is praised, it is admired; but it does not attract the many to
the theater, because it does not give them abundantly the special
pleasure that only the theater can bestow. ‘Tartuffe’ and the ‘Femmes
Savantes’ do this and also half-a-score of Molière’s lighter and less
ambitious pieces, supported by stories more theatrically effective
than that of the ‘Misanthrope.’