Historical drama

“ If what is called history is so near mythology as, many times, to be confounded with it, what about romance and the historical drama in which events, entirely imaginative, must of necessity find a place? ”

“ Nothing that is human is foreign to her. From Attila to Napoleon, from the fields of Catalauni to Waterloo, from the Crusades to the Convention, the destinies of the world have been fought for and decided on her soil. The heart of Europe beat within the breasts of her monarchs, her thinkers, and her Revolutionary leaders. No matter how great this people has been in the realm of intellect it has been preeminently great in deeds. Action is the most sublime creation of France, its theater, its drama, its epic. France accomplished what other nations dreamed. ”

“ The only writers who, like Vitet, [1] really understood the historical drama, were contemplative souls, who never intended their plays to be acted. "There is something false, something insulting to the intelligence in the disproportionate attention paid nowadays to the historical anecdote, the trifling incident of the past at the expense of what is vital and living in history. ”

“ Like a great, powerful drama drawn from the universal history of man and represented before our eyes, so her life passes before us; and surprised, wondering, we gaze on, indifferent whether the heroine of such a tragedy be Creole, French, or to what nation she may owe her birth. ”

“ It is not our intention to give the dilettante of this sort of history a frigid miniature, interesting as a matter of fashion and local color; we must rather resuscitate the forces of the past, and revive their motive power to action." [2] "The drama of our day," wrote Schiller, "must combat the torpor, the sloth, the lack of character, and intellectual vulgarity of the day; it must therefore exhibit strength and character; it must stir and exalt the heart. Pure beauty is limited to the happy nations. ”

“ The details of movement and accessories required in a historical drama are in the way of the necessary process of focussing the music on the grand emotions of the play. The simplification of the story, so that its central situations are emotional and not merely theatric, is impossible when historic truth is preserved. But all mythology is the embodiment of primary world-thoughts. It is the poetry of peoples, and he who looks below the surface will find in it the whole heart of a nation. And thus the personages of mythologic story became world-types. ”

“ The drama is a picture of individual character, social life, and, to some degree—in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese plays to a considerable degree—physical nature. If its characters and social life are patchworks of different ages—sentiments of blood-revenge blended with courtly refinement, associations of Elizabethan London in the Rome of Cæsar or the Athens of Alcibiades—we only enjoy the medley seriously so long as we are unconscious of the historical contrasts which, to the eye of those who can see them, cannot but lend the most solemn tragedy a look of caricature. ”

“ In such works as these history as well as the novel is carried beyond itself, and raised to a higher power.
The national epic is not so broad in its sweep, not so consciously an interpretation of universal experience as what might be called the Epic of Man. Here again it is not an individual that is the hero of the story, but something that might almost be personified, a force working in the lives of men; only, in this case, the stage of the drama is the Nation at some tremendous moment in its history. ”

“ But this knowledge of the past does more than instil lessons of tolerance: such indulgent skepticism is but the first step. The spectacle of change only increases the solidity of what remains unchangeable. It is one of the chief assets of history that it separates the rock from the sands that cover it. ”

“ What really matters is the development of their minds through the intelligence, and the training of the powers of observation. History will teach them to come out of themselves, and observe the souls of others—friends and enemies alike. They will once more find themselves in the past, where characters are much the same as they are now, only different in appearance, with the same vices and weakness as themselves ”

“ This happens to some extent in every historical novel. Apart from any conscious description of the background of his story the novelist must always be betraying the peculiar conditions of a particular century, since the fate and fortunes of the actors in his drama are the result of their entanglement in the affairs of the time and in the system of things of the particular moment. ”

“ In order that a drama may be properly historical, it is necessary that it should be the history of the people to whom it is addressed. In the composition, care must be taken that there appear no dramatic improbability, as the reality is taken for granted. ”

“ If, for example, a man would represent any impressive course or body of historical events, the historic order and process of the thing plainly necessitate a form very different from that of the Classic Drama: the work must needs use considerable diversity of time and place, else narrative and description will have to be substituted, in a great measure, for representation; that is, the right dramatic form must be sacrificed to what, after all, has no proper coherence or consanguinity with the nature and genius of the work. ”

“ In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play, more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it. ”

“ And on such lines it is clear that the historical dramatist’s only aim must be to present in accurate though artistic form a selection of the incidents and circumstances of the hero’s life and times, and place them in such mutual relation that they throw new light on the nature and destiny of the man. ”

“ The marvelous story of humanity is enacted again for our edification, instruction, and delight. We behold civilizations begin, struggle, triumph, and decay, giving place to higher and nobler as they pass away. Poet, lawgiver, and soldier sing their songs, make their codes, and fight their battles again, while we follow the never-dying effects of song, of law, and of battle. We sit down with 'princes, potentates, and powers,' watching them, as they think, governing the world.... Shut up in a little room we can witness the whole drama of man's history played on the vast stage of the world. ”

“ Whereas, the history of our ancient kings—the events of their reigns, I mean,—are like stars in the sky;—whatever the real interspaces may be, and however great, they seem close to each other. The stars—the events—strike us and remain in our eye, little modified by the difference of dates. An historic drama is, therefore, a collection of events borrowed from history, but connected together in respect of cause and time, poetically and by dramatic fiction. ”

“ But it is not the existence of the key or the character of the plot, but the existence of the drama of modern European politics, that is the first feature of our sketch: the existence of the powers by whom the drama is played and between whom the balance is maintained. Medieval history may, it is true, be read as a drama, but it is not one in which the plot is obvious; it is rather more a series of dramas which may be combined, like Greek trilogies, but have unities and plots of their own. The history of each great nation is a drama by itself ”

“ In countries like Germany, Scandinavia, England, and even in America—though in a lesser degree—the drama is the vehicle which is really making history, king history, disseminating radical thought in ranks not otherwise to be reached. ”

“ I contented myself with the humbler task to employ Romance in the aid of History,—to extract from authentic but neglected chronicles, and the unfrequented storehouse of Archaeology, the incidents and details that enliven the dry narrative of facts to which the general historian is confined,—construct my plot from the actual events themselves, and place the staple of such interest as I could create in reciting the struggles, and delineating the characters, of those who had been the living actors in the real drama. ”

“ History then becomes a world of living figures,--a theatre that presents to us a majestic drama, varied by alternate scenes of the grandest achievements and the most touching episodes of human existence. ”

“ He became ambitious, however, of a more select audience, and produced in 1854 his only book of importance, ‘The Divine Drama of History and Civilisation,’ a striking and grandiose view of the development of human destiny as it presented itself to his untrained but fertile imagination. ”

“ This is simply the natural drama, an exercise of the imagination which always has been and which, probably, always will be, a source of great pleasure. In the early days of the world nothing was more natural than for the people to re-enact the history of their country—to represent the great heroes, the great battles, and the most exciting scenes the history of which has been preserved by legend. I believe this tendency to re-enact, to bring before the eyes the great, the curious, and pathetic events of history, has been universal. ”

“ To me, whose profession it is to see pictures in the words of other men and to produce them, this historic page has appealed very strongly as the proper setting for a human drama—an inviting canvas upon which the imagination may paint a moving picture of the emotions, desires and passions—the loves and hates—of men and women like ourselves—against the somber and sometimes lurid background of historic fact. ”

“ We have not yet, it would seem, found the object of our search—a Great Poem. Let us extend our quest into the Elizabethan age. We are at once sucked into the theatre. With the whole drama of that age we are conversant and familiar; but whether we understand it or not, is another question. It aspires to give representations of Human Life in all its infinite varieties, and inconsistencies, and conflicts, and turmoils produced by the Passions. ”

“ For history to be written with the complete form of a drama, doubtless is impossible; but there are periods, and these the periods, for the most part, of greatest interest to mankind, the history of which may be so written that the actors shall reveal their characters in their own words; where mind can be seen matched against mind, and the great passions of the epoch not simply be described as existing, but be exhibited at their white heat in the souls and hearts possessed by them. ”

“ Such a history resembles an ingenious, fictitious narrative, exactly in the degree in which an old dramatic chronicle of the life and death of some distinguished character, where all the various agents appear and disappear as in the page of history, approaches a regular drama, in which every person introduced plays an appropriate part, and every point of the action tends to one common catastrophe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If their histories were to have any life at all, it must be the life of the drama or the dramatic narrative, and not that of the philosophical history, or even of those medieval chronicles, which, however unphilosophical, are still obliged by the greatness of their subject to dwarf the individual actors in comparison with the greatness of Kingdoms, Church, and Empire. ”

“ Those old plays, such as they were, with their rude, bold attempts to combine religion and mirth, instruction and sport, may almost be described as having been the nerves upon which the whole mental character of the nation formed itself. The spirit which began so early to work in them kept on asserting itself more and more strongly from age to age, till the Drama became emphatically a popular passion; as indeed must always be the case before any thing deserving the name of a National Drama can possibly arise. ”

“ These brutal aspects of that horrid drama of history, running through more than the course of a full generation, are depicted for the mimic stage by Shakespeare, in Henry VI and Richard III, with a vividness that brings before us the ghastly realities of the historic theatre itself, and with such realization of the rude forces at work as calls for all the poet's refining art to make their representation tolerable to modern spectators. ”

“ Our readers are beginning to become so accustomed to the spiced dishes of Continental Problem drama,—reaction against which has set in there long ago,—that fears may well be entertained that the rude simple fare of the Historic Drama will be rejected with scorn. ”

“ The chronicle history play may claim attention first, not because it was demonstrably earlier in appearance than the others, but because it engaged the efforts of nearly every dramatic writer of the period, and because in its disregard of foreign influence or parallel in its methods and structure, and in its devotion to the demands of the London theatres, it is most typical of the drama of the period. ”