How to See a Play

A general realization of all this will definitely affect one's theater habit and make for the good of all that concerns the art of the playhouse. It will lead the properly prepared person to see a good play competently done, but with no supreme or far-famed actor in the company, in preference to a foolish play, or worse, carried by a "star"; or a play negligible as art or hopelessly passé as art or interpretation of life for which an all-star cast has been provided, as if to take the eye of the spectator off the weaknesses of the drama. Often a standard play revived by one of these hastily gathered companies of noted players resolves itself into an interest in individual performances which must lack that organic unity which comes of longer association. The opportunity afforded to get a true idea of the play is made quite secondary, and sometimes entirely lost sight of.

Nor will the trained observer in the theater be cheated by the dollar mark in his theatrical entertainment. He will come to feel that an adequate stock company, playing the best plays of the day, may afford him more of drama culture for an expenditure of fifty cents for an excellent seat than will some second-rate traveling company which presents a drama that is a little more recent but far less worthy, to see which the charge is three or four times that modest sum. All over the land to-day nominally cultivated folk will turn scornfully away from a fifty-cent show, as they call it, only because it is cheap in the literal sense, whereas the high-priced offering is cheap in every other sense but the cost of the seat. Such people overlook the nature of the play presented, the playwright's reputation, and the quality of the performance; incapable of judging by the real tests, they stand confessed as vulgarians and ignoramuses of art. We shall not have intelligent audiences in American theaters, speaking by and large, until theater-goers learn to judge dramatic wares by some other test than what it costs to buy them. Such a test is a crude one, in art, however infallible it may be in purely material commodities; indeed, is it not the wise worldling in other fields who becomes aware in his general bartering that it is unsafe to estimate his purchase exclusively by the price tag?

To one who in this way makes the effort to inform himself with regard to the things of the theater – plays, players and playwrights – concerning dramatic history both as it appertains to the drama and the theater; and concerning the intellectual as well as esthetical and human values of the theater-going experience, it will soon become apparent that it offers him cultural opportunity that is rich, wide and of ever deepening enjoyment. And taking advantage of it, he will dignify one of the most appealing pleasures of civilization by making it a part of his permanent equipment for satisfactory living.

Other aspects of this thought may now be expounded, beginning with a review of the play in its history; some knowledge of which is obviously an element in the complete appreciation of a theater evening. For the proper viewing of a given play one should have reviewed plays in general, as they constitute the body of a worthy dramatic literature.

CHAPTER III

UP TO SHAKESPEARE

THE recent vogue of plays like The Servant in the House, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, The Dawn of To-morrow, and Everywoman sends the mind back to the early history of English drama and is full of instruction. Such drama is a reversion to type, it suggests the origin of all drama in religion. It raises the interesting question whether the blasé modern theater world will not respond, even as did the primitive audiences of the middle ages, to plays of spiritual appeal, even of distinct didactic purpose. And the suggestion is strengthened when the popularity is recalled of the morality play of Everyman a few years since, that being a revival of a typical mediæval drama of the kind. It almost looks as if we had failed to take into account the ready response of modern men and women to the higher motives on the stage; have failed to credit the substratum of seriousness in that chance collection of human beings which constitutes a theater audience. After all, they are very much like children, when under the influence of mob psychology; sensitive, plastic to the lofty and noble as they are to the baser suggestions that come to them across the footlights. In any case, these late experiences, which came by way of surprise to the professional purveyors of theatrical entertainment, give added emphasis to the statement that the stage is the child of mother church, and that the origin of drama in the countries whereof we have record is always religious. The mediæval beginnings in Europe and England have been described in their details by many scholars. Suffice it here to say that the play's birthplace is at the altar end of the cathedral, an extension of the regular service. The actors were priests, the audience the vast hushed throngs moved upon by incense, lights, music, and the intoned sacred words, and, for the touch of the dramatic which was to be the seed of a wonderful development, we may add some portion of the sacred story acted out by the stoled players and envisaged in the scenic pomp of the place. The lesson of the holy day was thus brought home to the multitude as it never would have been by the mere recital of the Latin words; scene and action lent their persuasive power to the natural associations of the church. Such is the source of modern drama; what was in the course of time to become "mere amusement," in the foolish phrase, began as worship; and if we go far back into the Orient, or to the south-lying lands on the Mediterranean, we find in India and Greece alike this union of art and worship, whether the play began within church or temple or before Dionysian altars reared upon the green sward. The good and the beautiful, the esthetic and the spiritual, ever intertwined in the story of primitive culture.

And the gradual growth from this mediæval beginning is clear. First, a scenic elaboration of part of the service, centering in some portion of the life and death of Christ; then, as the scenic side grew more complex, a removal to the grounds outside the cathedral; an extension of the subject-matter to include a reverent treatment of other portions of the Bible narrative; next, the taking over of biblical drama by the guilds, or crafts, under the auspices of the patron saints of the various organizations, as when, on Corpus Christi day, one of the great saints' days of the year, a cycle of plays was presented in a town with the populace agog to witness it, and the movable vans followed each other at the street corners, presenting scene after scene of the story. Then a further extension of motives which admitted the use of the lives of the saints who presided over the guilds; and finally the further enlargement of theme due to the writing of drama of which the personages were abstract moral qualities, giving the name of Morality to this kind of play. Such, described with utter simplicity and brevity, was the interesting evolution.

Aside from all technicalities, and stripped of much of moment to the specialist, we have in this origin and early development a blend of amusement and instruction; a religious purpose linked with a frank recognition of the fact that if you make worship attractive you strengthen its hold upon mankind – a truth sadly lost sight of by the later Puritans. The church was wise, indeed, to unite these elements of life, to seize upon the psychology of the show and to use it for the purpose of saving souls. It was not until the sixteenth century and the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare that the play, under the influence of renaissance culture and the inevitable secularization of the theater in antagonism to the Puritan view of amusement, waxed worldly, and little by little lost the ear-marks of its holy birth and upbringing.

The day when the priests, still the actors of the play, walked down the nave and issued from the great western door of the cathedral, to continue the dramatic representations under the open sky, was truly a memorable one in dramatic history. The first instinct was not that of secularization, but rather the desire for freer opportunity to enact the sacred stories; a larger stage, more scope for dramatic action. Yet, although for generations the play remained religious in subject-matter and intent, it was inevitable that in time it should come to realize that its function was to body forth human life, unbounded by Bible themes: all that can happen to human beings on earth and between heaven and hell and beyond them, being fit material for treatment, since all the world's a stage, and flesh and blood of more vital interest to humanity at large than aught else. The rapid humanization of the religious material can be easily traced in the coarse satire and broad humor introduced into the Bible narratives: a free and easy handling of sacred scene and character natural to a more naïve time and by no means implying irreverence. Thus, in the Noah story, Mrs. Noah becomes a stout shrew whose unwillingness to come in out of the wet and bestow herself in dry quarters in the Ark must have been hugely enjoyed by the fifteenth century populace. And the Vice of the morality play degenerates into the clown of the performance, while even the Devil himself is made a cause for laughter.

Another significant step in the advance of the drama was made when the crafts took over the representations; for it democratized the show, without cheapening it or losing sight of its instructional nature. When the booths, or pageants as they were called, drew up at the crossing of the ways and performed their part in some story of didactic purport and broadly human, hearty, English atmosphere, with an outdoor flavor and decorative features of masque and pageantry, the spectators saw the prototype of the historic pageants which just now are coming again into favor. The drama of the future was shaping in a matrix which was the best possible to assure a long life, under popular, natural conditions. These conditions were to be modified and distorted by other, later additions from the cultural influence of the past and under the domination of literary traditions; but here was the original mold.

The method of presentation, too, had its sure effect upon the theater which was to follow this popular folk beginning. The movable van, set upon wheels, with its space beneath where behind a curtain the actors changed their costumes, suggests in form and upfitting the first primitive stages of the playhouses erected in the second half of the sixteenth century. Since but one episode or act of the play was to be given, there was no need of a change of scene, and the stage could be simple accordingly. Contemporary cuts show us the limited dimensions, the shallow depth and the bareness of accessories typical of this earliest of the housings of the drama, for such it might fairly be called. Obviously, on such a stage, the manner and method of portrayal are strictly defined: done out of doors, before a shifting multitude of all classes, with no close cohesion or unity, since another part of the story was told in another spot, the play, to get across – not the footlights, for there were none – but the intervening space which separated actors and audience, must be conveyed in broad simple outline and in graphic episodes, the very attributes which to-day, despite all subtleties and finesse, can be relied upon to bring response from the spectators in a theater. It must have been a great event when, in some quiet English town upon a day significant in church annals, the players' booths began their cycle, and the motley crowd gathered to hear the Bible narratives familiar to each and all, even as the Greek myths which are the stock material of the Greek drama were known to the vast concourse in the hillside theater of that day. In effect the circus had come to town, and we may be sure every urchin knew it and could be found open-mouthed in the front row of spectators. No possibility here of subtlety and less of psychologic morbidity. The beat of the announcing drum, the eager murmur of the multitude, the gay costumes and colorful booth, all ministered to the natural delight of the populace in show and story. The fun relieved the serious matter, and the serious matter made the fun acceptable. With no shift of scenery, the broadest liberty, not to say license, in the particulars of time and place were practiced; the classic unities were for a later and more sophisticate drama. There was no curtain and therefore no entr'act to interrupt the two hours' traffic of the stage; the play was continuous in a sense other than the modern.

As a result of these early conditions, the English play was to show through its history a fluidity, a plastic adaptation of material to end, in sharp contrast with other nations, the French, for one, whose first drama was enacted in a tennis court of fixed location, deep perspective and static scenery.

On the holy days which, as the etymology shows, were also holidays from the point of view of the crowd, drama was vigorously purveyed which made the primitive appeals of pathos, melodrama, farce and comedy. The actors became secular, but for long they must have been inspired with a sense of moral obligation in their work; a beautiful survival of which is to be seen at Oberammergau to-day. And the play itself remained religious in content and intention for generations after it had walked out of the church door. The church took alarm at last, aware that an instrument of mighty potency had been taken out of its hands. It is not surprising to find various popes passing edicts against this new and growingly influential form of public entertainment. It seemed to be on the way to become a rival. This may well have had its effect in the rapid taking over of the drama by the guilds, as later it was adopted by still more worldly organizations.

It was not from the people that the change to complete secularization of subject-matter and treatment came; but from higher cultural sources: from the schools and universities, touched by renaissance influences; as where Bishop Still produced Gammer Gurton's Needle for school use, the first English comedy; or from court folk, as when Lord Buckhurst with his associate, Sackville, wrote the frigid Gorbudoc based on the Senecan model and honorable historically because it is the first English tragedy. The play of Plautian derivation, Ralph Roister Doister, our first comedy of intrigue, is another example of cultural influences which came in to modify the main stream of development from the folk plays.

This was in the sixteenth century, but for over two centuries the genuine English play had been forming itself in the religious nursery, as we saw. Now these other exotic and literary influences began to blend with the native, and the story of the drama becomes therefore more complex. The school and the court, classic literature and that of mediæval Europe, which represented the humanism it begot, fast qualified the product. But the straightest, most natural issue from the naïve morality and miracle genre is the robustious melodrama illustrated by such plays as Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Marlowe's Edward II; which in turn lead directly on to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Hamlet and chronicle history drama like Richard III; and on the side of farce, Gammer Gurton's Needle, so broadly English in its fun, is in the line of descent. And in proportion as the popular elements of rhetoric, show and moralizing were retained, was the appeal to the general audience made, and the drama genuinely English.

Up to 1576 we are concerned with the history of the drama and there is no public theater in the sense of a building erected for theatrical performances. After the strolling players with their booths, plays were given in scholastic halls, in schools and in private residences; while the more democratic and direct descendant of the pageants is to be seen in the inn yards where the stable end of the courtyard, inclosed on three sides by its parallelogram of galleries, is the rudimentary plan for the Elizabethan playhouse, when it comes, toward the end of the sixteenth century. But with the year 1576 and the erection in Shoreditch of the first Theater on English soil – so called, because it had no rivals and the name was therefore distinctive – the proper history of the institution begins. It marks a most important forward step in dramatic progress.

There is significance in the phrase descriptive of this first building; it was set up "in the fields," as the words run: which means, beyond city limits, for the city fathers, increasingly Puritan in feeling, looked dubiously upon an amusement already so much a favorite with all classes; it might prove a moral as well as physical plague spot by its crowding together of a heterogeneous multitude within pent quarters. Once started, the theater idea met with such hospitable reception that these houses were rapidly increased, until by the century's end half a dozen of the curious wooden hexagonal structures could be seen on the southward bank of the Thames, near the water, central in interest as we now look back upon them being The Globe, built in 1599 from the material of the demolished Shoreditch playhouse, and famed forever as Shakespeare's own house. Here at three o'clock of the afternoon upon a stage open to the sky and with the common run of spectators standing in the pit where now lounge the luxuriant occupants of orchestra seats, while those of the better sort sat on the stage or in the boxes which flanked the sides of the house and suggested the inn galleries of the earlier arrangement, were first seen the robust predecessors of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd and Peele and Nash; and later, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson and the other immortals whose names are names to conjure with, even to this day. Played in the daylight, and most crudely lighted, the play was deprived of the illusion produced by modern artificial light, and the stage, projecting far down into the audience, made equally impossible the illusion of the proscenium arch, a picture stage set apart from life and constituting a world of its own for the representation of the mimic story. There was small need for make-up on the part of the actors, since the garish light of day is a sad revealer of grease paint and powder; and the flaring cressets of oil that did service as footlights must, it would seem, have made darkness visible, when set beside the modern devices. It is plain enough that under these conditions a performance of a play in the particulars of seeing and hearing must have been seriously limited in effect. To reach the audience must have meant an appeal that was broadly human, and essentially dramatic. Fine language was indispensable; and a language drama is exactly what the Elizabethan theater gives us. Compelling interest of story, skillful mouthing of splendid poetry, virile situations that contained the blood and thunder elements always dear to the heart of the groundlings, these the play of that period had to have to hold the audiences. Impudent breakings in from the gentles who lounged on the stage and blew tobacco smoke from their pipes into the faces perchance of Burbage and Shakespeare himself; vulgar interpolations of some clown while the stage waited the entrance of a player delayed in the tiring room must have been daily occurrences. And yet, from such a stage, confined in extent and meager in fittings, and under such physical limitations of comfort and convenience, were the glories of the master poet given forth to the world. Our sense of the wonder of his work is greatly increased when we get a visualized comprehension of the conditions under which he accomplished it. It is well to add that one of the most fruitful phases of contemporary scholarship is that which has thrown so much light upon the structure of the first English theaters. We now realize as never before the limits of the scenic representation and the necessary restriction consequent upon the style of drama given.

Another interesting and important consideration should also be noted here; and one too generally overlooked. The groundlings in the pit, albeit exposed to wind and weather and deprived of the seats which minister to man's ease and presumably dispose him to a better reception of the piece, were yet in a position to witness the play as a play superior to that of the more aristocratic portions of the assemblage. However charming it may have been for the sprigs of the nobility to touch elbows with Shakespeare on the boards as he delivered the tender lines of old Adam in As You Like It, or to exchange a word aside with Burbage just before he began the immortal soliloquy, "To be or not to be," it is certain that these gentry were not so advantageously placed to enjoy the rendition as a whole as were master Butcher or Baker at the front. And it would seem reasonable to believe that the nature of the Elizabethan play, so broadly humorous, so richly romantic, so large and obvious in its values and languaged in a sort of surplusage of exuberance, is explained by the fact that it was the common herd to whom in particular the play was addressed in these early playhouses: not the literature in which it was written so much as the unfolding story and the tout ensemble which they were in a favorable position to take in. To the upper-class attendant at the play the unity of the piece must have been less dominant. And surely this must have tended to shape the play, to make it a democratic people's product. For it is an axiom that the dominant element in an audience settles the fate of a play.

But this new plaything, the theater, was not only the physical embodiment of the drama, it became a social institution as well. Nor was it without its evils. The splendors of Elizabethan literature have often blinded criticism to the more sleazy aspects of the problem. But investigation has made apparent enough that the Puritan attitude toward the new institution was not without its excuse. As we have seen, from the very first a respectable middle class element of society looked askance at the playhouse, and while this view became exaggerated with the growth of Puritanism in England, there is nothing to be gained in idealizing the stage conditions of that time, nor, more broadly, to deny that the manner of life involved and in some regards the nature of the appeal at any period carry with them the likelihood of license and of dissipation. The actor before Shakespeare's day had little social or legal status; and despite all the leveling up of the profession due to him and his associates, the "strolling player" had to wait long before he became the self-respecting and courted individuality of our own day. Women did not act during the Elizabethan period, nor until the Restoration; so that one of the present possibilities of corruption was not present. But on the other hand, the stage was without the restraining, refining influence of their presence; a coarser tone could and did prevail as a result. The fact that ladies of breeding wore masks at the theater and continued to do so into the eighteenth century speaks volumes for the public opinion of its morals; and the scholar who knows the wealth of idiomatic foulness in the best plays of Shakespeare, luckily hidden from the layman in large measure, does not need to be told of the license and lewdness prevalent at the time. The Puritans are noted for their repressive attitude toward worldly pleasures and no doubt part of their antagonism to the playhouse was due to the general feeling that it is a sin to enjoy oneself, and that any institution which was thronged by society for avowed purposes of entertainment must derive from the devil. But documentary evidence exists to show that an institution which in England made possible the drama of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ford, Jonson and Dekkar, writings which we still point to with pride as our chief contribution to the creative literature of the world, could include abuses so flagrant as to call forth the stern denunciations of a Cromwell, and later even shock the decidedly easy standards of a Pepys. The religious element in society was, at intervals, to break out against the stage from pulpit or through the pen, in historical iteration of this early attitude; as with Collier in his famed attack upon its immorality at the close of the seventeenth century, and numerous more modern diatribes from such clergymen as Spurgeon and Buckley.

And in order to understand the peculiar relation of the respectable classes in America to the theater, it is necessary to realize that those cherishing this antipathy were our forefathers, the Puritan settlers. The attitude was inimical, and of course the circumstances were all against a proper development of the function of the playhouse. Art and letters upon American soil, forsooth, had to await their day in the seventeenth and following centuries, when our ancestors had to give their full strength to more utilitarian matters, or to the grave demands of the future life. The Anglo-Saxon notion that the theater is evil is to be traced directly to these historic causes; and transplanted to so favorable a soil as America, it has produced most unfortunate results in our dramatic history, the worst of all being the general unenlightened view respecting the use and usufruct of an institution in its nature capable of so much good alike to the masses and the classes.

CHAPTER IV

GROWTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

PREPAREDNESS in the appreciation of a modern play presupposes a knowledge of the origin and early development of English drama, as briefly sketched in the preceding pages. It also, and more obviously, involves some acquaintance with the master dramatists who led up to or flourished in the Elizabethan period, with Shakespeare as the central figure; it must, too, be cognizant of the gradual deterioration of the product in the post-Elizabethan time; of the temporary close of the public theaters under Puritan influence during the Commonwealth; and of the substitution for the mighty poetry of Shakespeare and his mates of the corrupt Restoration comedy which was introduced into England with the return of the second Stuart to the throne in 1660. This brilliant though brutally indecent comedy of manners, with Congreve, Wycherley, Etherage, Vanbrugh and Farquhar as chief playwrights, while it represents in literature the moral nadir of the polite section of English society, is of decided importance in our dramatic history, because it reflected the manners and morals of the time, and quite as much because it is conspicuous for skillful characterization, effective dialogue and a feeling for scene and situation – all elements in good dramaturgy.

This intelligent attempt to know what lies historically behind present drama will also make itself aware of the falling away early in the eighteenth century, in favor of the new literary form, the Novel; and the all too brief flashing forth of another comedy of manners with Sheridan and Goldsmith, which retained the sparkle, wit and literary flavor of the Restoration, with a later decency and a wholesomer social view; to be followed again by a well-nigh complete divorce of literature and the stage until well past the middle of the nineteenth century, when began the gradual re-birth of a drama which once more took on the quality of letters and made a serious appeal as an esthetic art and a worthy interpretation of life: what may be called the modern school initiated by Ibsen.

All this interesting growth and wonderfully varied accomplishment may be but lightly touched upon here, for admirable studies of the different periods and schools by many scholars are at hand and the earnest theater student may be directed thereto for further reading. The work of Professor Schelling on Elizabethan drama is thorough and authoritative. The modern view of Shakespeare and his contribution (referred to in Chapter III) will be found in Professor Baker's Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist and Professor Matthews' Shakespeare as a Playwright. The general reader will find in The Mermaid Series of plays good critical treatment of the main Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan plays, together with the texts, so that a practical acquaintance with the product may be gained. The series also includes the Restoration dramas in their best examples. For the Sheridan-Goldsmith plays a convenient edition is that in the Drama section of the Belles Lettres series of English Literature, where the representative plays of an author are printed with enlightening introductions and other critical apparatus. In becoming familiar with these aids the reader will receive the necessary hints to a further acquaintance with the more technical books which study the earlier, more difficult part of dramatic evolution, and give attention to the complex story of the development of the theater as an institution.

A few things stand out for special emphasis here in regard to this developmental time. Let it be remembered that the story of English drama in its unfolding should be viewed in twin aspects: the growth of the play under changing conditions; and the growth of the playhouse which makes it possible. What has been said already of the physical framework of the early English theater throws light at once, as we saw, upon the nature of the play. And in fact, throughout the development, the play has changed its form in direct relation to the change in the nature of the stage upon which the play has been presented. The older type is a stage suitable for the fine-languaged, boldly charactered, steadily presented play of Shakespeare acted on a jutting platform where the individual actor inevitably is of more prominence, and so poorly lighted and scantily provided with scenery that words perforce and robustious effects of acting were necessitated, instead of the scenic appeals, subtler histrionism and plastic face and body work of the modern stage which has shrunk back to become a framed-in picture behind the proscenium arch. As the reader makes himself familiar with Marlowe, who led on to Shakespeare, with the comedy and masque of Ben Jonson, with the romantic and social plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, the lurid tragic writing of Webster, the softer tragedy of Ford and the rollicking folk comedy, pastoral poetry or serious social studies of Dekkar and Heywood, he will come to realize that on the one hand what he supposed to be the sole touch of Shakespeare in poetic expression was largely a general gift of the spacious days of Elizabeth, poetry, as it were, being in the very air men breathed[1 - A fact humorously yet keenly suggested in Bernard Shaw's clever piece, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.]; and yet will recognize that the Stratford man walked commonly on the heights only now and again touched by the others. And as he reads further the plays of dramatists like Massinger, Tourneur, Shirley, and Otway he will find, along with gleams and glimpses of the grand manner, a steady degeneration from high poetry and tragic seriousness to rant, bombast, and the pseudo-poetry that is rhetoric, with the declension of tragedy into melodrama. High poetry gradually disintegrates, and the way is prepared for the Restoration comedy.

In reflecting upon the effect of a closing of the public theaters for nearly twenty years (1642-1660) the student will appreciate what a body blow this must have been to the true interests of the stage; and find in it at least a partial explanation of the rebound to the vigorous indecencies of Congreve and his associates (Wycherley, Etherage, Vanbrugh, Farquhar) when the ban was removed; human nature, pushed too far, ever expressing itself by reactions.

The ineradicable and undeniable literary virtues of the Restoration writers and their technical advancement of the play as a form and a faithful mirror of one phase of English society will reconcile the investigator to a picture of life in which every man is a rake or cuckold and every woman a light o' love; a sort of boudoir atmosphere that has a tainted perfume removing it far from the morning freshness of the Elizabethans. And consequently he will experience all the more gratitude in reaching the eighteenth century plays: The School for Scandal, The Rivals, and She Stoops to Conquer, when they came a generation later. While retaining the polish and the easy carriage of good society, these dramas got rid of the smut and the smirch, and added a flavor of hearty English fun and a saner conception of social life; a drama rooted firmly in the fidelities instead of the unfaithfulnesses of human character. These eighteenth century plays, like those of the Restoration —The Plain Dealer, The Way of the World, The Man of Mode, The Relapse, and The Beaux Stratagem– were still played in the old-fashioned playhouses, like Drury Lane, or Covent Garden, with the stage protruding into the auditorium and the classic architecture ill adapted to acoustics, and the boxes so arranged as to favor aristocratic occupants rather than in the interests of the play itself. The frequent change of scene, the five-act division of form, the prologue and epilogue and the free use of such devices as the soliloquy and aside remind us of the subsequent advance in technic. These marks of a by-gone fashion we are glad to overlook or accept, in view of the essential dramatic values and permanent contribution to letters which Sheridan and Goldsmith made to English comedy. But at the same time it is only common sense to felicitate ourselves that these methods of the past have been outgrown, and better methods substituted. And we shall never appreciate eighteenth century play-making to the full until we understand that the authors wrote in protest against a sickly sort of unnatural sentimentality, mawkish and untrue to life, which had become fashionable on the English stage in the hands of Foote, Colman and others. Sheridan brought back common sense and Goldsmith dared to introduce "low" characters and laughed out of acceptance the conventional separation of the socially high and humble in English life. His preface to The Good Natured Man will be found instructive reading in relation to this service.

From 1775 to 1860 the English stage, looked back upon from the vantage point of our time, appears empty, indeed. It did not look so barren, we may believe, to contemporaries. Shakespeare was doctored to suit a false taste; so great an actor-manager as Garrick complacently playing in a version of Lear in which the ruined king does not die and Cordelia marries Edgar; an incredible prettification and falsification of the mighty tragedy! Jonson writes for the stage, though the last man who should have done so. Sheridan Knowles, in the early nineteenth century, gives us Virginius, which is still occasionally heard, persisting because of a certain vigor and effectiveness of characterization, though hopelessly old-fashioned in its rhetoric and its formal obeyance of outworn conventions, both artistic and intellectual. The same author's The Honeymoon is also preserved for us through possessing a good part for the accomplished actress. Later Bulwer, whose feeling for the stage cannot be denied, in Money, Richelieu, and The Lady of Lyons, shows how a certain gift for the theatrical, coupled with less critical standards, will combine to preserve dramas whose defects are now only too apparent.

As the nineteenth century advances the fiction of Reade and Dickens is often fitted to the boards and the fact that the latter was a natural theater man gave and still gives his product a frequent hearing on the stage. To meet the beloved characters of this most widely read of all English fictionists is in itself a pleasure sufficient to command generous audiences. Boucicault's London Assurance is good stage material rather than literature. Tom Taylor produced among many stage pieces a few of distinct merit; his New Men and Old Acres is still heard, in the hands of experimental amateurs, and reveals sterling qualities of characterization and structure.

But the fact remains, hardly modified by the sporadic manifestations, that the English stage was frankly separating itself from English literature, and by 1860 the divorce was practically complete. There was a woful lack of public consideration for its higher interests on the one hand, and no definite artistic endeavor to produce worthy stage literature on the other. Authors who wrote for the stage got no encouragement to print their dramas and so make the literary appeal; there was among them no esprit de corps, binding them together for a self-conscious effort to make the theater a place where literature throve and art maintained its sovereignty. No leading or representative writers were dramatists first of all. If such wrote plays, they did it half heartedly, and as an exercise rather than a practical aim. It is curious to ask ourselves if this falling away of the stage might not have been checked had Dickens given himself more definitely to dramatic writing. His bias in that direction is well known. He wrote plays in his younger days and was throughout his life a fine amateur actor: the dramatic and often theatric character of his fiction is familiar. It was his intention as a youth to go on the stage. But he chose the novel and perhaps in so doing depleted dramatic history.

Literature and the stage, then, had at the best a mere bowing acquaintance. Browning, who under right conditions of encouragement might have trained himself to be a theater poet, was chagrined by his experience with The Blot on the 'Scutcheon and thereafter wrote closet plays rather than acting drama. Swinburne, master of music and mage of imagination, was in no sense a practical dramatist. Shelley's dramas are also for book reading rather than stage presentation, in spite of the fact that his Cenci has theater possibilities to make one regret all the more his lack of stage knowledge and aim. Bailey's Festus is not an acting play, though it was acted; the sporadic drama, in fact, between 1850 and 1870, light or serious, was frankly literary in the academic sense and not adapted to stage needs; or else consisted of book dramatizations from Reade and Dickens; or simply represented the journeymen work of prolific authors with little or no claim to literary pretensions.

The practical proof of all this can be found in the absence of drama of the period in book form, except for the acting versions, badly printed and cheaply bound, which did not make the literary appeal at all. Where to-day our leading dramatists publish their work as a matter of course, offering it as they would fiction or any other form of literature, the reading public of the middle century neither expected nor received plays as part of their mental pabulum, and an element in the contemporary letters. The drama had not only ceased to be a recognized section of current literature, but was also no longer an expression of national life. The first faint gleam of better things came when T. W. Robertson's genteel light comedies began to be produced at the Court Theater in 1868. As we read or see Caste or Society to-day they seem somewhat flimsy material, to speak the truth; and their technic, after the rapid development of a generation, has a mechanical creak for trained ears. But we must take them at the psychologic moment of their appearance, and recognize that they were a very great advance on what had gone before. They brought contemporary social life upon the stage as did Congreve in 1680, Sheridan in 1765; and they made that life interesting to large numbers of theater-goers who hitherto had abstained from play acting. And so Caste and its companion plays, of which it is the best, drew crowded houses and the stage became once more an amusement to reckon with in polite circles. The royal box was once more occupied, the playhouse became fashionable, no longer quite negligible as a form of art. To be sure, this was a town drama, and for the upper classes, as was the Restoration Comedy and that of the eighteenth century. It was not a people's theater, the Theater Robertson, but it had the prime merit of a more truthful representation of certain phases of the life of its day. And hence Robertson will always be treated as a figure of some historical importance in the British drama, though not a great dramatist.

In the eighteen eighties another influence began to be felt, that of Ibsen. The great dramatist from the North was made known to English readers by the criticism and translations of Gosse and Archer; and versions of his plays were given, tentatively and occasionally, in England, as in other lands. Thus readers and audiences alike gradually came to get a sense of a new force in the theater: an uncompromisingly truthful, stern portrayal of modern social conditions, the story told with consummate craftsmanship, and the national note sounding beneath the apparent pessimism. Here were, it was evident, new material, new method and a new insistence upon intellectual values in the theater. It can now be seen plainly enough that Ibsen's influence upon the drama of the nineteenth century is commensurate in revolutionary results with that of Shakespeare in the sixteenth. He gave the play a new and improved formula for play-writing; and he showed that the theater could be used as an arena for the discussion of vital questions of the day. Even in France, the one country where dramatic development has been steadily important for nearly three centuries, his influence has been considerable; in other European lands, as in England, his genius has been a pervasive force. Whether he will or no, the typical modern dramatist is a son of Ibsen, in that he has adopted the Norwegian's technic and taken the function of playwright more seriously than before.

Both with regard to intellectual values and technic, then, it is no exaggeration to speak of the modern drama, although it be an expression of the spirit of the time in reflecting social evolution, as bearing the special hallmark of Ibsen's influence. A word follows on the varied and vital accomplishment of the present period.

CHAPTER V

THE MODERN SCHOOL

WE have noted that Ibsen's plays began to get a hearing in England in the eighteen nineties. In fact, it was in 1889 that Mr. J. T. Grein had the temerity to produce at his Independent Theater in London A Doll's House, and followed it shortly afterward by the more drastic Ghosts. The influence in arousing an interest in and knowledge of a kind of drama which entered the arena for the purpose of social challenge and serious satiric attack was incalculable. Both Jones and Pinero, honorable pioneers in the making of the new English drama, and still actively engaged in their profession, had begun to write plays some years before this date; but it may be believed that the example of Ibsen, if not originating their impulse, was part of the encouragement to let their own work reflect more truthfully the social time spirit and to study modern character types with closer observation, allowing their stories to be shaped not so much by theatric convention as by honest psychologic necessity.

Jones began with melodrama, of which The Silver King (1882), Saints and Sinners (1884) and The Middle Man (1889) are examples; Pinero with ingenious farces happily associated with the fortunes of Sir Squire Bancroft and his wife, The Magistrate (1885) being an excellent illustration of the type. The dates are significant in showing the turning of these skillful playwrights to play-making that was more serious in the handling of life and more artistic in constructive values; they are practically synchronous with the introduction of Ibsen into England. Both authors have now long lists of plays to their credit, with acknowledged masterpieces among them. Pinero's earlier romantic style may be seen in the enormously successful Sweet Lavender, a style repeated ten years later in Trelawney of the Wells; his more mature manner being represented in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, the best of a number of plays which center in the woman who is a social rebel, the dramatist's tone being almost austerely grim in carrying the study to its logical conclusion. For a time Sir Arthur seemed to be preoccupied with the soiled dove as dramatic inspiration; but so fine a recent play as The Thunderbolt shows he can get away from it. Jones' latest and best work as well has a tendency to the serious satiric showing-up of the failings of prosperous middle-class English society; this, however, in the main, kept in abeyance to story interest and constructive skill in its handling: Mrs. Dane's Defense, The Case of Rebellious Susan, The Liars, The Rogue's Comedy, The Hypocrites, and Michael and His Lost Angel stand for admirably able performances in different ways.

At the time when these two dramatists were beginning to produce work that was to change the English theater Bernard Shaw, after writing several pieces of fiction, had begun to give his attention to plays so advanced in technic and teaching that he was forced to wait more than a decade to get a wide hearing in the theater. His debt to the Norwegian has been handsomely acknowledged by the Irish dramatist, wit and philosopher who was to become the most striking phenomenon of the English theater: with all the differences, an English Ibsen. A little later, in the early eighteen nineties, another brilliant Irishman, Oscar Wilde, wrote a number of social comedies whose playing value to-day testifies to his gift in telling a stage story, while his epigrammatic wit and literary polish gave them the literary excellence likely to perpetuate his name. For the comedy of manners, light, easy, elegant, keen, and with satiric point in its reflection of society, nothing of the time surpasses such dramas as Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance. The author's farce – farce, yet more than farce in dialogue and characterization —The Importance of Being Earnest, is also a genuine contribution in its kind. And the strange, somber, intensely poetic Salome is a remarkable tour de force in an unusual field.

The tendency to turn from fiction to the drama as another form of story telling fast coming into vogue is strikingly set forth and embellished in the case of Sir James Barrie, who, after many successes in novel and short story, became a dramatist some twenty years ago and is now one of the few men of genius writing for the stage. His Peter Pan, The Little Minister, The Admirable Crichton, and What Every Woman Knows are four of over a dozen dramas which have given him world fame. Uniquely, among English writers whose work is of unquestionable literary quality, he refrains from the publication of plays; a very regrettable matter to countless who appreciate his rare quality. He is in his droll way of whimsy a social critic beneath the irresponsible play of a poet's fancy and an idealist's vision. His keen yet gentle interpretations of character are solidly based on truth to the everlasting human traits, and his poetry is all the better for its foundation of sanity and its salt of wit. One has an impulse to call him the Puck of the English theater; then feels compelled to add a word which recognizes the loving wisdom mingling with the pagan charm. Sir James is as unusual in his way as Shaw in his. Of late he has shown an inclination to write brief, one-act pieces, thereby adding to our interest in a form of drama evidently just beginning to come into greater regard.

For daring originality both of form and content Bernard Shaw is easily the first living dramatist of England. He is a true son of Ibsen, in that he insists on thinking in the theater, as well as in the experimental nature of his technic, which has led him to shape for himself the drama of character and thesis he has chosen to write. To the thousands who know his name through newspaper publicity or the vogue of some piece of his in the playhouse, Shaw is simply a witty Irishman, dealer in paradox and wielder of a shillelah swung to break the heads of Philistines for the sheer Celtic love of a row. To the few, however, an honorable minority now rapidly increasing, he is a deeply earnest, constructive social student and philosopher, who uses a popular amusement as a vehicle for the wider dissemination of perfectly serious views: a socialist, a mystic who believes in the Life Force sweeping man on (if man but will) to a high destiny, and a lover of fellow man who in his own words regards his life as belonging to the community and wishes to serve it, in order that he may be "thoroughly used up" when he comes to die. He has conquered as a playwright because beneath the sparkling sally, the startling juxtaposition of character and the apparent irreverence there hides a genuinely religious nature. Shaw shows himself an "immoralist" only in the sense that he attacks jejune, vicious pseudo-morals now existent. For sheer acting values in the particulars of dialogue, character, scenic effectiveness, feeling for climax and unity of aim such plays as Candida, Arms and the Man, Captain Brassbound's Profession, The Devil's Disciple, John Bull's Other Island, Man and Superman, The Showing Up of Blanco Posnett, and others yet, are additions to the serious comedy of England likely to be of lasting luster, so far as contemporary vision can penetrate.

One of the most interesting developments of recent years has been the Irish theater movement, in itself part of the general rehabilitation of the higher imaginative life of that remarkable people. The drama of the gentle idealist poet Yeats, of the shrewdly observant Lady Gregory and of the grimly realistic yet richly romantic Synge has carried far beyond their little country, so that plays like Yeats' The Land of Heart's Desire and The Hour Glass, Lady Gregory's Spreading the News and Synge's Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World are heard wherever the English language is understood, this stage literature being aided in its travels by the excellent company of Irish Players founded to exploit it and giving the world a fine example of the success that may come from a single-eyed devotion to an ideal: namely, the presentation for its own sake of the simple typical native life of the land.

It should be remembered that while these three leaders are best known, half a dozen other able Irish dramatists are associated with them, and doing much to interpret the farmer or city folk: writers like Mayne, Boyle, McComas, Murray, and Robinson.

Under the stimulus of Shaw in his reaction against the machine-made piece and the tiresome reiteration of sex motives, there has sprung up a younger school which has striven to introduce more varied subject-matter and a broader view, also greater truth and subtler methods in play-making. Here belong Granville Barker, with his Voysey Inheritance (his best piece), noteworthy also as actor-manager and producer; the novelists, Galsworthy and Bennett; and Masefield, whose Tragedy of Nan contains imaginative poetry mingled with melodrama; and still later figures, conspicuous among them the late Stanley Houghton, whose Hindle Wakes won critical and popular praise; others being McDonald Hastings with The New Sin; Githa Sowerby, author of the grim, effective play, Rutherford and Son; Elizabeth Baker, with Chains to her credit; Wilfred Gibson, who writes brief poignant studies of east London in verse that in form is daringly realistic; Cosmo Hamilton, who made us think in his attractive The Blindness of Virtue; and J. O. Francis, whose Welsh play, Change, was recognized as doing for that country the same service as the group led by Yeats and Synge has performed for Ireland.

A later Synge seems to have arisen in Lord Dunsany, whose dramas in book form have challenged admiration; and since his early death St. John Hankin's dramatic work is coming into importance as a masterly contribution to light comedy, the sort of drama that, after the Wilde fashion, laughs at folly, satirizes weakness, refrains from taking sides, and never forgets that the theater should offer amusement.

Of all these playwrights, rising or risen, who have got a hearing after the veterans first mentioned, Galsworthy seems most significant for the profound social earnestness of his thought, the great dignity of his art and the fact that he rarely fails to respect the stage demand for objective interest and story appeal. Some of these new dramatists go too far in rejecting almost scornfully the legitimate theater mood of amusement and the necessity of a method differing from the more analytic way of fiction. Mr. Galsworthy, however, though severe to austerity in his conceptions and nothing if not serious in treatment, certainly puts upon us something of the compelling grip of the true dramatist in such plays as The Silver Box, Strife and, strongest of them all and one of the finest examples of modern tragedy, Justice, where the themes are so handled as to increase their intrinsic value. This able and high-aiming novelist, when he turns to another technic, takes the trouble to acquire it and becomes a stage influence to reckon with. The Pigeon, the most genial outcome of his dramatic art, is a delightful play: and The Eldest Son, The Fugitive and The Mob, if none of them have been stage successes, stand for work of praiseworthy strength.

On the side of poetry, and coming a little before the Irish drama attracted general attention, Stephen Phillips proved that a poet could learn the technic of the theater and satisfy the demands of reader and play-goer. Saturated with literary traditions, frankly turning to history, legend, and literature itself for his inspiration, Mr. Phillips has written a number of acting dramas, all of them possessing stage value, while remaining real poetry. His best things are Paolo and Francesca and Herod, the former a play of lovely lyric quality and genuinely dramatic moments of suspense and climax; the latter a powerful handling of the Bible motive. Very fine too in its central character is Nero; and Ulysses, while less suited to the stage, where it seems spectacle rather than drama, is filled with noble poetry and has a last act that is a little play in itself. Several of Mr. Phillips' best plays have been elaborately staged and successfully produced by representative actor-managers like Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Sir George Alexander.

Still with poetry in mind, it may be added that Lawrence Binyon has given evidence of distinct power in dramatic poetry in his Attila, and the delicate Pierrot play, Prunella, by Messrs. Housman and Granville Barker is a success in quite another genre.