English drama

“ Here it is possible to represent only by a few masterpieces the vast stores of the drama in France, Germany, England, Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, and Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To-day, English drama, with only a few exceptions better than any written since the seventeenth century, comes often to the stage. From month to month the drama is making history. In England and the United States to-day it is wonderfully alive, independent, ambitious, seeking new ways of expression on an infinite variety of subjects. ”

“ There is an English drama. The demand for it has been felt, and the supply is forthcoming. Or, rather, it has come. It is a strenuous youngster, determined to keep alive, bearing up pluckily, if with trouble, against all the maladies of childhood, against the dangers of evil influences—the brutal roughness of some, and the undue tenderness of others. Its growth is slow and laborious ”

“ It is indeed true that the Drama shot ahead with amazing rapidity as soon as it came to feel the virtue of Shakespeare's hand. We have nothing more dreary, dismal, and hopeless than the course of the English Drama down to his time. The people would have dramatic entertainments, and hundreds of minds, apparently, were ever busy furnishing them wooden things in dramatic form. ”

“ In this chapter I am going to talk about these beginnings of the English theater and of its literature. All plays taken together are called the drama, and the writers of them are called dramatists, from a Greek word dran, to act or do. For dramas are written not to be read merely, but also to be acted.
To trace the English drama from its beginnings we must go a long way back from the reigns of Henry VII and of Henry VIII, down to which the life of Dunbar has brought us. ”

“ THE LITERARY MERIT OF OUR LATTER-DAY DRAMA
In trying to present our own opinions upon a question at issue, we can often find an advantage in getting first of all a clear statement of the other side. This must serve as an excuse for here quoting a paragraph (from a British magazine) which chanced to get itself copied in an American newspaper:
The truth is, our dramatists have long since forgotten that the English language is still the medium of the English drama, and that no branch of literary art is worth a word of praise that wantonly divorces itself from literature. ”

“ But he would be wise who should be able to indicate the ideal, artistic and intellectual, of the English drama of today. It is violently and hopelessly irresponsible. When one says "English drama" one uses the term for convenience' sake; one means simply the plays that are acted at the London theatres and transferred thence to the American. They are neither English nor a drama; they have not that minimum of ponderable identity at which appreciation finds a starting-point. ”

“ All these early plays were written, for the most part, in a mingling of prose and wretched doggerel, and add nothing to our literature. Their great work was to train actors, to keep alive the dramatic spirit, and to prepare the way for the true drama.
3. The Artistic Period of the Drama. The artistic is the final stage in the development of the English drama. It differs radically from the other two in that its chief purpose is not to point a moral but to represent human life as it is. ”

“ Although as a general rule the English drama found its romance rather in what it imagined to be realism than in conscious idealization, yet the contrast between the imaginative and refined creations of the fancy and the often coarse and gross transcripts from common life are too frequent even to require specific mention, and many shades even of imaginative painting, many degrees of idealism, may frequently be met with in the course of a single play. ”

“ For ten years the English theatre-going public had been led to take an increasing interest in their national drama,—I mean the drama as a picture of life in opposition to a funny theatrical entertainment,—and during those ten years that drama had grown in strength of purpose, in largeness of aim, in vividness of character-painting, in every quality that promised England a living school of drama. ”

“ The English drama, it is evident, is regarded as a literary institution, for which an arbitrary literary origin is to be accepted. Conformably with this conception, the same author remarks: “The principal reason for the existence of any players at all must be looked for in Court fashion and Royal patronage.” It is very clear that the people, the folk, are nowhere in this account. The usual conception of the origin of our drama may be stated in a few words as follows: It arose from the miracle-plays and mysteries, which gave way to moralities and interludes ”

“ Drama was the natural form of literature in an age when most people were illiterate and yet when all were eager for literary entertainment. Drama was therefore the main current of artistic production, the prose novel being quite a minor, almost an insignificant, tributary. Realising then the inevitable limitations which surrounded our English fiction at its birth we can understand its infantile imperfections and the subsequent arrest of its development. ”

“ It is perhaps one of the strongest arguments in favour of the general plan of the English drama, and one of the best proofs that dramatic poetry ought to be judged by very different principles from those by which other kinds of poetry are criticised, that one of the principal merits of the French actors consists in hiding the chief peculiarities of their own dramatic school. ”

“ You may count full many a thousand by this route before you are one with divine philosophy. Whereas a single flight of brains will reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the right use of the senses, Reality’s infinite sweetness; for these things are in philosophy; and the fiction (and drama) which is the summary of actual Life, the within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring, philosophy’s elect handmaiden.”
“Dirty drab and rose-pink, with their silly cancelling contest”—does not that sum up the English drama of the last few years? ”

“ Now if we consider on the one hand the character of the plays presented, and on the other the average culture of the people, that popularity is surprising. It seems to me the explanation is to be found in the natural aptitude of the English people for the drama, an aptitude which shows itself throughout our history. ”

“ What the English drama is in search of, what it is about to create,—with or without Ibsen’s assistance,—is a new form in which to reproduce that dualism which has struck and disconcerted every observer, native or foreign, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Taine. ”

“ In the reign of Elizabeth the drama outshone fiction; in the reign of Victoria the novel crowded out the drama. There are signs that a literary era is commencing, in which the drama will again regain to the full its position as a literature. More and more the bigger creative artists will turn to a form which by its economy of means to ends, and the chance it gives not merely of observing but of creating and displaying character in action, has a more vigorous principle of life in it than its rival. ”

“ 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. ”

“ However, after taking all the elements into account, it may confidently be asserted that within the lifetime of the present generation of playgoers radical changes will have taken place, and even if we may not possess tragedy of the highest quality we shall have a theatre of modern English drama—serious comedy and also light comedy and farce—really expressive of current life and thought and fine enough in style to render the most critical Englishman proud of his country's drama. ”

“ His experiments in prose first taught men that style was a matter worthy of careful study, he was among the earliest of those who realised the utility of blank verse for dramatic purposes, he wrote the first English novel in our language, and finally he is not only deservedly recognised as the father of English comedy, but by his mastery of dramatic technique he laid such a burden of obligation upon future playwrights that he placed English drama upon a completely new basis. ”

“ English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind. ”

“ The whole English drama is here, as a plant in its seed, and Marlowe is to Shakespeare what Perugino was to Raphael.
SECTION V.—Formation of the Drama
Gradually art is being formed; and toward the close of the century it is complete. Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Webster, Massinger, Ford, Middleton, Heywood, appear together, or close upon each other, a new and favored generation, flourishing largely in the soil fertilized by the efforts of the generation which preceded them. ”

“ Those who have followed me in this long study of mine, and who have watched the evolution of the English drama through its successive stages, are in a position to see for themselves what advance it has made already during the last thirty years. There is the advance first of all in the taste of the public. The democracy has gone through its course of education ”

“ At the time M. Filon wrote, the English drama was a force in the land, and had the promise of a long and vigorous future. Now those who were leading it stand, for the moment, defeated and discredited before their countrymen. But the movement is not killed. It is only scotched. The English drama will always have immortal longings and aspirations, though we may not be chosen to satisfy them. ”

“ The French, indeed, tho’ a Nation of great Levity, can attentively listen to long declamatory Speeches, when an English Audience wou’d fall asleep; who love Action and Bus’ness, love Plot and Design; Variety of Incidents is their Delight, but yet that Plot must be founded on Reason and Probability, and conduce to the Main Action of the Drama. ”

“ There are facts antecedent to the Shakespeare drama, facts of folk-lore essentially, to which the attention of students of the drama may be appropriately invited in these pages. When we are told that the origin of the English drama was the miracle and mystery-plays, which were organised by the priests and monks of religious houses, we, who seek for causes, ask: Why did the Church organise these dramatic representations? In most cases we receive no answer. ”

“ Were there no English drama, we should have to seek for the reasons—psychological, social, æsthetic—why the Anglo-Saxon race, which produced a Shakespeare at a time when it counted a bare three millions and covered a mere patch of ground, should now be able to produce but [Pg 32] clowns and dancers, when it is forty times as numerous, and has spread itself throughout the world. ”

“ The modern critics and comparers of English and French drama are fond of contrasting the full, rich, even prodigal characterization, rhetorical and lyrical beauty of the Shakespearean drama with the cold, clear, logical, but resistless movement of the French. ”

“ And yet there is no drama in the piece, for a drama involves a situation which develops and changes, a plot which works out. The duel between the king and prelate in the play, no less than in our history books, is merely a succession of indecisive encounters. ”

“ The annals of English drama proper in the period reaching from the closing years of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the great Revolution include, together with numerous names relatively insignificant, many illustrious in the history of our poetic literature. Among Shakespeare’s contemporaries and The later Elizabethan drama.successors there is, however, but one who by the energy of his genius, not less than by the circumstances of his literary career, reached undisputed primacy among his fellows. ”

“ There is no Theatre in the world has anything so absurd as the English Tragi-Comedy. 'Tis a Drama of our own invention; and the fashion of it is enough to proclaim it so. Here, a course of mirth; there, another of sadness and passion; a third of honour ”

“ But these moments in which the dramatist and his English spectators are out of sympathy are rare. Shakespeare taught them to be surprised in no way at seeing human nature sink to the lowest depths after rising to giddy heights. ”

“ The fact is, that, though England has produced the very best dramatic poet that ever lived, and some of the best dramatic performers, yet that the drama, as a matter of sentiment and feeling, and, as it were, of constitutional necessity, does not tally with the spirit even of the English people; and, as the Scotch have all the business habits of the English, together with a much greater degree of starchedness of character, and incapability of purse, the theatre cannot possibly flourish among them. ”

“ It fixed the practice and traditions of the national theater. It decided that the drama was to deal with the whole of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and comedy, prose and verse, in the same play, without limitations of time, place, and action. It decided that the English play was to be an action, and not a dialogue, bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts, dances, processions, hangings, riots, plays within plays, drunken revels, beatings, battle, murder, and sudden death. ”

“ The consciousness of the importance to dramatic art of an inner spiritual theme as a central formative principle led to the nicer differentiation of character,—to the evolution of true dramatic personages from the puppets of the earlier drama, through a deeper inquiry into the inward springs of action.
The centralizing of the visible presentation around a spiritual theme brought about several secondary changes in English drama. ”