An excerpt
from THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE by Clayton Hamilton
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.
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