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THE AMERICAN DRAMATIST

By Montrose J. Moses
REPRESENTATIVE BRITISH DRAMAS
REPRESENTATIVE CONTINENTAL DRAMAS
REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN DRAMAS
REPRESENTATIVE CONTINENTAL ONE-ACT PLAYS
HENRIK IBSEN: THE MAN AND HIS PLAYS
A TREASURY OF PLAYS FOR CHILDREN
THE AMERICAN DRAMATIST
By M. J. Moses and V. Gerson
CLYDE FITCH AND HIS LETTERS
822.9
M9a
1725

L
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
GEORGE HANDEL HILL ("YANKEE" HILL) AS Hiram Dodge, IN
"THE YANKEE PEDLAR; OR, OLD TIMES IN VIRGINIA."
Hill regaled London audiences with this play during November, 1836, and they
recognized in this "Down-Easter" "a counterpart of our 'Canny Yorkshire lad.'"
See page 99
J
THE

AMERICAN DRAMATIST
BY
MONTROSE J. MOSES
ILLUSTRATED

NON REFERT
BONOS HABEASI
LB·&
1∙M
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1925
Copyright, 1911, 1917, 1925,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved
Published November, 1925
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
THE MEMORY OF
THREE AMERICAN DRAMATISTS
BRONSON HOWARD
JAMES A. HERNE
CLYDE FITCH
1
PREFACE
THE American Drama is a fact; it has a body, whatever
the value of its spirit. In its local sense, it is a reflection of
local conditions and type characteristics. In its technical
sense, it exhibits special mannerisms, and shows itself following
prescribed theatrical fashions. The American Dramatist has
evolved from a definite social background, and his product
-the American Drama has been shaped partly by that,
and has been limited by the economics that have preponder-
ately governed the American Theatre.
There are recognizable causes to be found for every literary
activity. If at one time the American stage was filled with
cartoon types of native hue, it was because some excellence
of acting made them the accepted fashion; if society drama
was modelled on a French pattern, it was because American
managers were encouraging French plays, importing them
cheaply and adapting them wholesale; if a certain school
of playwrights wrote with a robust technique, it was because
the personality of Edwin Forrest was resonant and animal;
if Bronson Howard was hailed joyously as the Dean of Amer-
ican Drama, he must have successfully stemmed a current
that opposed him.
In 1911, I wrote a book which I called "The American
Dramatist." Until then, no one had ever treated the subject
in the compass of a single volume. The survey was designed
to show that there was an ample field of play writing thus
far neglected by the literary historian. A conventional be-
lief had grown up that no such thing as an American Drama
existed. Excepting a few articles and a few slim bibliograph-
vii
Preface
ical lists, the records had heretofore remained scattered and
unexamined.
Since then the situation has changed completely. In every
quarter touching every phase of theatre activity. the
field has been opened up by research. Libraries and indi-
viduals have gathered a majority of the early plays, rare in
their first editions, sere and yellow in their leaves. Dramas,
never before published, have been brought to light, until now
there are but few gaps left in this field of study. Without
difficulty the student may recreate the whole life of the Amer-
ican Theatre.
In 1917, I revised "The American Dramatist." New
activities of an interesting kind were making themselves.
felt; new men were breaking away from set conventions and
breaking out into new channels; the competitive cinema was
disrupting certain quarters of the theatre and turning the
thoughts of our novelists and dramatists and actors toward
the screen; artists were championing the scenic theories of
foreign stage directors; little theatres were "mothering"
young hopefuls like Dunsany and Eugene O'Neill. A "rev-
olution" in the theatre had begun.
The War halted everything for a time. But there was to
be no slumping back into old theatre conditions when activity
was resumed. The "revolution" had come to stay; the
methods of the old manager were doomed; the actor, the
scenic artist, the director, took on new meaning. The drama-
tist became experimental in form. A new American Theatre
was evident.
Rather than revise my book a second time, I determined
to recast it entirely to take advantage of all the changes
I had witnessed, all the materials I had in a way helped to
unearth. Thus I began to write the book anew in the light
of enriched sources. When I first started my studies in
American Drama, A. M. Palmer, Bronson Howard, and Clyde
Fitch were alive. From them I received kindly encourage-
ment and friendly aid. To many collections, now scattered,
I was given generous access. The consequence is, "The
American Dramatist" of 1911 contains data not procurable
viii
Preface
elsewhere. I have taken advantage of such material in the
present volume, adding thereto what will round out the work
of men who were then alive. In every way the subject of
American Drama is here viewed from the standpoint of the
most authentic data.
With all the unearthing of sources, however, it may well
be asked: Has the result been worth the labor? Governor
Robert Hunter wrote his "Androboros" in 1714. Actually,
play writing in America antedated the first regular theatre
by several years. But for our purposes, we may consider
our drama history to cover about two hundred years. During
that time no overshadowing genius has caught the enthusiasm
of the literary critic. The student is therefore confronted
by a long series of plays, variable in their quality, oftentimes
monstrous in their plot and sentiment, uninspired in their
conscious imitation of accepted models. One has to read a
long way before one recognizes here a bit of worthy dialogue,
there a flash of creative characterization. From a strictly
literary standpoint, the early American Drama is a meagre
body. If it has color and warmth which it occasionally
has, in type
-the infusion of such life is largely due to the
creative force of some actor, like Forrest, or Dan Marble, or
"Yankee" Hill, or James H. Hackett, poured into the me-
chanical mould. It is not necessary for anyone interested in
knowing the character and extent of early play writing in
America to go through the entire mass of material which the
meticulous student goes through with fervor. There are plays
that typify certain tendencies, certain tastes, certain methods;
and these suffice to mark the chief stages of progression in
American Drama. There may be variable qualities in the
Stage Yankee from play to play, differing ways of expressing
Republican sentiments in the host of early romantic and
historical plays. Social customs may differ in the list of
dramas whose themes are similar to "Fashion."
But one
play may be sufficiently representative of its class, to satisfy
our need.
My intention in the following pages, therefore, is to em-
phasize only those plays most distinctive of their kind: and
ix
Preface
to leave for lists the mention of further titles which have
merely an academic value. I shall use plays as illustrating
what the dramatist was attempting to do in his effort to
create a native drama. In this connection it will be neces-
sary as well to indicate what forces, habits, or customs made
him do the obvious, the imitative thing, instead of striking
out anew. The study of early American Drama is more
valuable from its social side than from its literary angle. The
demands of the actor are to be found in it; it is to be seen re-
acted upon by local and national event; it is journalistic in
its realism. Looked at as a theatre commodity ---which in
the main it was our early American Drama exploited what-
ever excellence it had for theatre effect. Sometimes the
plays were written with no idea of production; thus
they smacked of the mustiness of the closet, yet even then
had no tang of literary flavor. Catching at the rhythms
of the Elizabethans, mustering the sonorous names of Greek
mythology, and invoking the heroes of Plutarch — showing
thereby the influence of an "old stock" culture these
writers of dialogue wrote "effusions" rather than plays.
The mediocrity of much of this material was early recog-
nized; I shall show later that it was not accepted by the con-
temporary critics without demur, that always there has been
a plea for better drama, for the use of more native subjects.
While there was always an effort to "boost" a native "infant
industry", there has been no blind acceptance of American
Drama merely because it was a native product. There may
have been reasons for this poverty of expression, this monot-
ony of invention. The American Dramatist has not failed,
in his prefatory notes to his slim little printed volumes, to
voice his case against a foreign market, and the lack of an ade-
quate copyright law. His personal problems, therefore,
and his intentions, have probably more value, and more
meaning for us, than many of the plays that came from his
pen. Such expressions as he has uttered in protest against
conditions have been noted in the following pages. They
are a part of social history.
The American Drama, in the modern sense, began with



X
Preface
Bronson Howard's stand in 1870. A period of fifty-five years
has elapsed. In this time there have been carried over from
the past types and traditions; there have been continued
certain characteristics that have always been identified as
strictly American: directness of motive, quickness of action,
downrightness of purpose, an unsophisticated surprise at
moral independence, a puritanical indirectness when dealing
with emotion, a naïve identification of strength with bluster.
In this respect the American Drama has never grown up.
But newer elements have found their way to the American
stage — a riper technique, a more serious intention of using
the theatre as something other than a house of cards, a clearer
notion of the need for ideas, a less slavish consideration of
what the manager wants. Such progressions will be noted
as they fall due.
Our drama has worked very closely with the theatre; our
theatre has very persistently worked our dramatists. From
Dunlap's day, the player has prompted the playwright, and
the long period in the theatre, known as the "golden days of
acting", encouraged a very poor product in dramatic author-
ship. It must have taken an exceptional creative ability on
the part of Wignall to make popular such a bare outline of
song and talk as one finds on reading Dunlap's "Darby's
Return." This is only one instance of a common occurrence
in the history of the American Theatre. There are constant
evidences of eulogistic appraisals of American dramas as they
appeared, but the judgments were based on the thing seen,
not on the thing read. One often forgets the drama in the
acting.
The dramatist is, therefore, to be considered in this book,
not as an entity, but as part of a development. At times
his personality warrants emphasis because he has seriously
tried now and again to impress that personality on the theatre.
Then it is that he justifies special consideration.
So, the general design of the present study is to emphasize
the individual contributions to the idea of an American Drama,
to summarize the identifying qualities of those dramatists.
who have anything of an individual position, to enumerate
A
xi
Preface
those elements in the theatre that have served to check the
original flow of native creativeness, thus limiting the drama-
tist's work.
When any new play comes, we ask ourselves: "Is this
the American Drama?" We hail it for a while and then say,
"No, it is not." Every new experiment that relieves us a
while from the exactions and limitations of a commercial
theatre, we welcome as the "solution" of our dramatic ills.
All ages have faced the theatre in the same way: we pass
from one set of menaces to another; we are continually
advancing new remedies. The theatre, though always ill,
is alive. And a study of American Drama shows this quality
of aliveness.
During the many years I have worked on this subject,
I have been brought in contact with those whose perspective
has stretched far back into early American Drama while it
was in the making. Some of our actor-families first begin
with the starting of our national existence. From these
older men I have had the record by word of mouth, and I
have amplified it by the written document. Printed remi-
niscences go down through the decades in graphic recounting
of personal experiences in opening up pioneer territory.
Diaries and letters are to be had which make warm a story
long dead. Plays that I have edited have invariably called
from obscurity some relative of a dramatist, encouraged to
draw from some chest a theatre document of value. Such
incidents relieve the routine of research and are grateful to
the worker. Access to private papers has led to pleasant
and profitable hours of theatre talk. One likes to believe
that some of this "first-handedness" has crept into this
book. But so many bricks go into the making of a building
that it is impossible to give full credit to all: I must be con-
tent with expressing my sincere appreciation of the constant
help I have had from many. My bibliographies may mention
them by name, but I wish here to take note of the kindly
spirit of coöperation I have met in nearly every direction I
have turned.
Diverse memories crowd in upon me as I bring to a close
xii
Preface
a piece of work begun some years ago.
Hours rich in the
beauty of association are bound up in the study of the men
and plays this book discusses. Much that is steadying to one
who must deal with facts of history has been given me. This
rewriting of "The American Dramatist" is but a reliving
of those days which brought to me a hand that upheld and
a faith that was unswerving. One cannot consider as a work
of mere labor that which has about it so much one wants to
remember and to relive.
NEW YORK,
June, 1925.
MONTROSE J. MOSES
Xili
}
}
CHAPTER
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE
•
I THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND
II OUR COLONIAL THEATRE.
•
III THE DRAMATIST OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA
IV WILLIAM DUNLAP AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
V AMERICAN DRAMATISTS AND THEIR INFANT INDUS-
TRY: DRAMATICK CRITICKS, PRIZE PLAYS, THE
NON-COPYRIGHT MENACE
VI DRAMA OF TYPES AND MANY FORMS: 1800-1870.
VII AND THE AMERICAN DRAMA CRIED, "HA, HA!”
PRIZE PLAYS AGAIN, JOHN HOWARD PAYNE,
SCHOOLS OF PLAYWRIGHTS, GEORGE H. BOKER.
VIII THE PROLIFIC DION BOUCICAULT
IX WANTED SOME NATIVE DRAMATISTS IN THE SEV-
ENTIES: AN UNACCENTED PHASE OF AUGUSTIN
DALY
X BRONSON HOWARD: DEAN OF THE AMERICAN DRAMA
XI JAMES A. HERNE AND THE REALISTIC Drama
XII DAVID BELASCO AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE
vii
I
18
39
56
77
92
115
146
171
189
208
SWITCHBOARD
230
XIII FORMS OF AMERICAN DRAMA: COMEDY AND THE
AMERICAN DRAMATIST EDWARD HARRIGAN AND
CHARLES HOYT, GEORGE ADE AND George M.
COHAN IN PARTICULAR.
260
XIV CONCERNING A CERTAIN TYPE OF MELODRAMA: THE
10. 20. 30
292
XV
Contents
CHAPTER
XV CONCERNING CLYDE FITCH AND THE LOCAL SENSE
XVI THE CASE OF PERCY MACKAYE AND HIS FATHER.
XVII THE STORY OF THE WELL-MADE PLAY: AUGUSTUS
THOMAS, WILLIAM GILLETTE, AND SOME BOX-
OFFICE DRAMATISTS
XVIII THE AMERICAN DRAMATIST'S NEGLECTED OPPOR-
TUNITY: PAGEANTRY. SHOULD THE POETIC
DRAMA BE DRAMATIZED? JOSEPHINE PRESTON
PEABODY
XIX THE CASE OF THE AMERICAN ONE-ACT PLAY
XX EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE "NEW" DRAMA
XXI THE ROSTER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
•
PAGE
309
329
351
371
·
391
415
440
443
•
461
xvi
ILLUSTRATIONS
George Handel Hill ("Yankee" Hill) as Hiram Dodge in
"The Yankee Pedlar; or Old Times in Virginia". Frontispiece
A Typical American Background. Frank Mayo as Davy
Crockett
Facsimile Pages from the Diaries of William Dunlap
A Typical Poster, Announcing the Play "Davy Crockett,"
by James E. Murdock
Two Poses of John E. Owens as Solon Shingle in "The Peo-
ple's Lawyer"
Lithographed Music Covers; Mrs. G. C. Howard as Topsy
and Her Daughter Cordelia as Eva, in "Uncle Tom's
Cabin "
An Early Program of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" at the Academy
of Music .
PAGE
14
58-59
92
100
108
IIO
F. S. Chanfrau as Mose in B. A. Baker's "A Glance at New
York"
II2
A Wallack's Theatre program of 1876. Mr. and Mrs. W. J.
Florence in "The Mighty Dollar"
113
W. J. Florence, as The Hon. Bardwell Slote in "The Mighty
Dollar"
114
American Actor-Managers of the Forties, William E.
Burton, John Brougham, and James H. Hackett
118
Edwin Forrest in the Title Rôle of Robert T. Conrad's
"Jack Cade"
122
xvii
Illustrations
John Howard Payne and Washington Irving
A Rare Program of "Metamora" with Edwin Forrest in the
Title Rôle
Knickerbocker Contemporaries, Nathaniel Parker Willis.
and Anna Cora Mowatt .
Philadelphia Playwrights, Richard Penn Smith and Robert
T. Conrad
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
Dion Boucicault as Con in his play "The Shaughraun'
The Boucicault Poster
PAGE
126
129
130
134
152
152
158
A Wallack's Theatre Program of 1874. Dion Boucicault in
"The Shaughraun"
169
American Managers Who Dictated to the American Drama-
tist for over a Half-Century, Augustin Daly, Albert M.
Palmer and Charles Frohman .
176
John T. Raymond as Colonel Mulberry Sellers in Mark
Twain's "The Gilded Age"
184
Colonel Sellers meets Mark Twain
184
Bronson Howard, Steele MacKaye and William Gillette
198
James A. Herne .
218
David Belasco
234
Early Minstrels, Forerunners of the Age of Jazz.
262
Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart in "The Mulligan Guards"
282
Poster for Augustin Daly's "Under the Gaslight"
294
Fay Davis and Clyde Fitch.
John Mason and Augustus Thomas
Percy MacKaye and Eugene O'Neill
320
320
426
✓
xviii
THE AMERICAN DRAMATIST
THE
AMERICAN DRAMATIST
CHAPTER ONE
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND
I
THE American Theatre has passed through many phases,
every one of which has had effect upon the playwright. But
perhaps there has been no greater menace to his welfare and
furtherance than the early lack of faith in him as an American,
and the later commercial exploiting of him as a more or less
successful workman. It has taken a long time for us to realize
the significance of the American Theatre as a social institution,
and we have championed the National Theatre idea in the
vain hope that such would make visible to the people some-
thing which in reality should not be a building but a commu-
nity feeling for the value of an art.
We have, for many decades, fought to free the theatre from
the calculating touch of the mere speculator, and we have
succeeded to an extent far beyond our expectation. We have
won him over to a partial belief that a good thing pays, to a
desire for artistic production, to an interest in, if not partici-
pation in, the Experimental Theatre. The education that
has been done to train the public to a better understanding of
the best that has been written and is being written for the
stage can be measured in its effect by the increasing demand
for the printed play, and for technical books on the art of the
theatre.
I
The American Dramatist
The success of the Little Theatre movement in localities of
the smallest range, once dominated by school and church per-
formances of mediocre sort, has left an indelible mark upon
citizens of all classes those coming from the farms of Dakota,
from the mountains of North Carolina, from the hills of Geor-
gia, from the crowded thoroughfare of Grand Street, the un-
prepossessing stable on Macdougal Street in New York, and
the wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The civic conscious-
ness is aware of the theatre as never before: school, college,
church, legislature are keyed to the growth and far-reaching
effectiveness of the theatre in America.
We are beginning now to know something of drama as an
art, and of the theatre as a social institution. Our masques
and pageants have indicated to us what the value of communal
expression might be; the affiliation of the actor with labor
(in the Equity) and his participation in the shaping of an art
playhouse (in the Actors Theatre, New York) have proven
that, under conditions of mutual faith in the power of the
theatre, the highest artistic results are obtainable. In such
atmosphere the American playwright will become other than
he has been.
In every true movement of progress, the dramatist of worth
has risen above condition, made use of what his age had to
offer him, and has somehow, in the end, carried the torch
beyond his generation. Ibsen was once at the outpost, a
lonely beacon against social wreck; Hauptmann was once
among the arch-symbolists and arch-realists; Stanislavsky
was once the last word in realistic producing. But the drama
always wants to be other than it is. Strindberg calls Ibsen
old-fashioned; Hasenclever departs from Hauptmann; Meyer-
hold and Tiaroff differ with Stanislavsky. So it is that once
Bronson Howard's "The Henrietta", then Moody's "The
Great Divide", then Eugene O'Neill's "Beyond the Horizon",
and now John Howard Lawson's "Processional" have, at
various times, been the hopeful limits of the American play-
wright outside the conventional.
Changes come slowly. They must carry with them social,
economic, æsthetic, and spiritual adjustments. An institution
2
The American Background
must somewhere be attached, otherwise it might be blown
away by experiment; audiences cannot be forced, they must
be persuaded. For a long while the American theatre man-
ager held fast to his type of drama that spelled success, until
he was assured of a different demand. Hugo and "Hernani",
Dumas and "La Dame aux Camélias", Zola and "Thérèse
Raquin", Becque and "Les Corbeaux", Antoine and the
experimental group were mileposts away from French classic
theatre convention: they were not at first in the safety zone
even of a subsidized theatre. The record of Shaw in Victorian
England is no better nor the fate of Ibsen or Maeterlinck
or Tolstoy or Björnson in the hands of official censorship.
Yet, in such fight, the theatre has always won, and in such
opposition virility of purpose has come from the writer of
conviction, who possessed a social conscience and a vision.
II
The American background, from the period of colonization,
was English. It has been difficult for us, so far as a native
drama is concerned, to escape that fact. With the spirit of
the Cavalier, we transplanted the theatre of David Garrick to
the bare, crude boards of Williamsburg, Va.; with the deter-
mination of the Roundhead we brought into New England
austerity and a Puritan prejudice against player folk. Both
these elements persisted. It was well for us that we had a
theatre spirit which we could thus import; otherwise it might
have been a long while before we would have had time to
create one for ourselves. After all, we were Englishmen, and
might have been Englishmen still had George III heeded the
wisest of his Parliamentarians and the most level-headed of
his colonists. But politically independent though we after-
wards became, with a growing consciousness of our natural
background and an increasing appreciation of our local
peculiarities, we still produced English poets, English story-
tellers, essayists, and dramatists, with a grafting upon the
stock of American ways and manners.
3
The American Dramatist
The first expressions of communal art came from the people.
Greek drama developed from a national sentiment and from
national religious custom. The modern stage -
which, in
came into
a way, was the stage we imported from London
existence through a church necessity, and by way of a vulgar
tongue and guild support. Institutionally, the art of repre-
senting life has always been called into use for social purposes.
The old vocero, or tribal songs of grief, the dithyrambic chorus
about the altar of Dionysus, the tropes of the church service,
made appeal to the crowd: there were a social relation, a
spiritual meaning. The whole art value of drama is at first
determined by the extent of its hold on the crowd: the type
of drama is often determined by that broad appeal.
But, while our society in America was largely of English
flavor, and while, before the national period, it was con-
structed on class distinctions, the Republican principle did
not give the theatre any definite outlet for creating a native
drama of any individual social distinction, that it might call
its own.
Add to which, there must be taken into account
that most of our actors and managers were in the English
tradition. They brought us Shakespeare as he was played
in London: they stepped from Drury Lane and Covent
Garden to the boat that took them across seas. They found
the Southern planter with an English Library full of Farquhar
and Dryden, Addison and Steele; they heard of the New
England divine preaching a sermon no different because of a
different land.
Speaking of the "fixed" condition out of which the Ameri-
can Theatre evolved, a manager once bewailed the fact that
musical comedy would always have to be imported from
abroad because our democracy had deprived us of a pic-
turesque peasantry. The vital theatre is always close to life,
and is conscious of that life which is closest to it. While it
may, in its greatest examples, transcend nationality, it is
usually moved by a time spirit that recognizes its locality.
Ibsen in Scandinavia, Hauptmann and Sudermann in Germany,
Tolstoy in Russia, Shaw in England were swept by the same
social movements. The Renaissance spirit was of similar
4
The American Background
character wherever it manifested itself. Mediævalism sought
much the same expression in the religious life of France,
Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. Philosophical attitudes to-
ward life, as they expressed themselves in art, knew no bound-
aries, though they carried with them variable external signs.
In this country we were never part of such movements. We
were born to take what others went through in travail. Even
our national development was based on a sort of borrowed ideal-
ism, as shown in the wording of some of our public documents.
One cannot, therefore, expect our theatre to stand alone,
and to grow instantly from the soil. It had a long and devious
road to travel a road of imitation, not of experiment.
It was always based on models, until such time as a stand was
taken for the recognition of drama as American — and even
then it was difficult to persuade the manager of the wisdom
of the declaration.
So, in the study of American Drama, one must constantly
watch for the model used. Royall Tyler did not take long to
write our first social comedy "The Contrast" after
seeing a performance of "The School for Scandal." John
Howard Payne and those who followed his pattern of roman-
tic drama were not unfamiliar with the school of Sheridan
Knowles. We have followed the English formula, and taken,
by way of England, what Europe had to give. It was only
the cheaper drama of France and Germany that came to us
directly, hurried here for quick translation and adaptation.
Even the present form of "Expressionism" is an imported
product.
But the American playwright has come to learn, even in his
imitation, something of the structure of plays; he has worked
out for himself, in a hard school, the technique of the theatre,
and he has found conflict at the basis of American life. Some
of his drama has been moving, even if not logical; it has been
vigorous, even if not always soundly motivated. He has
often identified theatrical clash with life force, violent ex-
pression with deep emotion. But somehow his drama has
articulated when played, even though it so often creaks when
it is read,
5
The American Dramatist
He has exerted his efforts to write plays for the theatre.
In doing so he has not tried to express himself but to copy
others in accord with the style of acting prevalent. If, by
chance, expression of personal faith or declaration of political
conviction crept into his dialogue, he excused the intrusion!
When the so-called social drama came upon us by way of Jones.
and Pinero and Shaw, he was still reticent about convincing
an audience, that paid for admission, of the presence of social
evil in a community. And it was only in flashes that character
was truthfully treated in relation to actual condition: then
it was done in reportorial fashion, not with full conviction.
It is always necessary to keep drama close to life, a drama
which not only draws from life but in turn reacts upon it.
None of our dramatists in the past were intense, absorbed
in their work. They wrote rapidly, they made compromises
with their themes. If they wrote blank verse, their lines.
echoed others; they aimed often for sonority; they heard
elocution, a pumping grandeur which characterized the old
acting. They were not constant in their quality; and they
were nearly always accidental in their choice of subject.
This latter was as far away from Arizona as Ossian, and much
more closely related to Ossian.
One has to realize all these negative points that militated
against the quick development of a rich dramatic literature,
to give true value to those positive excellences which mark
the history of American Drama. We are nearest the native.
flavor when we discuss the use of the 'red man in Indian plays,
the appearance of the Yankee in quasi-dialect comedies, the
rise and fall of Negro minstrelsy, and the rural drama which
rose to such excellent realism in the dramas of James A. Herne.
We read W. D. Howells on Harrigan, and learn there was a
Goldoni in our midst; we follow Brander Matthews and
realize that in Weber and Fields we had our native Aris-
tophanes. The exalted values we place upon our "lively arts"
in the theatre are indication of how earnestly we have watched
for and hoped for a drama that was worth while and represen-
tative.
The mere craftsmanship of the American play has improved
6
The American Background
""
with the years. While we still manipulate the drama, we
have gradually come to regard it as an organism not wholly
at the caprice of the dramatist. There are too many in the
audience nowadays who have read their Aristotle, Freytag,
Price, Baker, and Archer, to be moved entirely by the "made
play. The deep and vital problems of human nature are be-
ing exalted above the mere effectiveness of situation. Social
relations and their exact foundations are challenging us. We
have to thank the foreign drama for this. It has taught us
by example. Since the days when Fitch, Thomas, and
Gillette dominated the Frohman stage, we have had no need
to be ashamed of structure.
But we have not yet fully learned to meet life in our own
way on the stage. We are still bringing the European mold
and trying to make it fit American expression. Yet to-day,
more than ever, we are conscious of our own quality; we are
drawing from the soil. And there are indications that we are
reaching for a form that is our own. There were constant
evidences of realistic treatment of character in our early
dramas. But they were not free to develop of themselves.
We have to meet life in our own way and not have it met for
us in the European way. We learned from social drama to
look deep into the springs of action: through it we escaped
a superficiality which was deadening. Social forces, spiritual
forces lie deep; surface treatment passes them by. Hence,
it is not cleverness but understanding that is required for
their full and ample explanation.
III
What are the essentials of an American play? Do these
essentials change with the added problems that face our
nation from administration to administration, or are they
factors deeply ingrained in our character? There is some-
thing fundamental in the distinction which makes Henry
Arthur Jones British and Augustus Thomas American. Spir-
itual, mental, and social environments differ. Of course the
7
The American Dramatist
primary test of any play is its moving quality. But many
American plays that have enthralled their own public have
failed to appeal to London audiences, and vice versa.
There
are national distinctions, though the interference of national-
ity does not make for the most universal drama.
A dramatist's point of view is shaped by the body politic
in which he lives; no matter if he is a critic of his time, he is
none the less of it: its very irritations have served to shape
him. In the human sense, the essentials of an American play
should reflect the essential basis of American life. "A play
written in English" does not define it, for that is the lan-
guage used by Masefield, Galsworthy, and Shaw. "A play
written in Americanese" only partly applies to it, for still it
would be English reduced to American dialect, as Yorkshire,
Devonshire, and Celtic variations are a dialect. "Plays
written on American themes" is not a sufficient mark of
identification, for then John Drinkwater, with his "Lincoln"
and "Lee", would be an American dramatist. Some years
ago, Bronson Howard wrote to me: "By the term I should
mean any play that is written by an American, or in America
by a foreign resident, that is produced here, and that deals
with any subject - using America in the sense of the United
States. The phrase, American Drama, if extended to a full
description, would be 'Plays written in the United States,
chiefly in the English language.
>
There are too many holes in such a definition to discuss
it seriously. "Locality makes the American drama," Hamlin
Garland once asserted, and Augustus Thomas' opinion was
that American themes written by Americans would suffi-
ciently cover the meaning. But, underlying these various.
efforts to identify distinguishing native marks, these drama-
tists of the period of Howard were reticent about defining too
sharply what they meant by American Drama; as a play-
wright Howard had to be careful about his Americanisms;
as a man he was sufficiently acute in intellect to see candidly
wherein our American characteristics were a limitation
rather than an asset in the development of a national drama.
So, these men of the theatre always ended their discussions
8
The American Background
of the cant phrase "American Drama" by saying truthfully
that "humanity is universal, whether garbed in a COW-
puncher's outfit or a king's uniform." Thomas, in trying to
stretch the boundaries of the American Theatre, has as-
serted, "There are very few good lines in a play that go to waste,
and with their general acceptance as good, there is little dis-
position to regard the nationality of the author. A good
line by anybody secures immediate recognition by any
audience of understanding." But the good line is a weakness
of American Drama, rather than a strength; we have plenty
of good lines, but not too many good plays.
So we must look deeper for the American Drama. "There
is none," declared Harry B. Smith, the librettist, some years
ago, "in the sense that there is a French drama or an English
drama. Our plays are clever, run a season or two, and then
are relegated to the top shelf. There will be no American
Drama until plays are written that endure, and take their
place in the body of literature." Certainly a survey of our
two hundred years of play writing offers no such striking
examples. We would sacrifice our whole native heritage in
drama now for one Shakespeare, for one Molière, for one
Sheridan. Inasmuch as we have no such single example, we
content ourselves by watching the hesitant way in which the
American Drama has felt for its native life. And it has felt for
it in its own way, an unsophisticated way, a childish way
fearful lest its soul be seen, its hunger and inadequacy stand
confessed putting on a brave front — the front of extreme
youthful mentality.
The early dramatists had a habit of introducing patriotic
touches in distinctly foreign plays: the English censor was
always on the lookout for Republican sentiments in the few
American plays that were brought to London in the early
days. The homespun commonplaceness of the downright
honest Yankee was also as much a rubber-stamp convention
as any stage Irishman of the period. The Yankee in Tom
Taylor's "Our American Cousin" an Englishman's con-
ception - was not so different from Solon Shingle, or Adam
Trueman in Mrs. Mowatt's "Fashion."
9
The American Dramatist
American audiences have always wanted the square deal,
have always wanted conventional virtue to conquer. The
large heart rather than the subtle one, the direct deed rather
than the evasive thought, the terse answer rather than the
veiled meaning have always compelled sympathetic interest
in an American crowd. Most of our dramatists have learned
directness through newspaper work. Howard, Thomas, Ade,
Hoyt began as reporters.
-
و,
The quality of "uplift" has oftenest been associated with
the word "American." The American dramatist has over-
done, through external action, the belief in the indisputable
right to rise above environment. Democracy, we have been
taught, knows but one level - the equity of justice; it knows
but one defeat, the confession of incompetence. There are
no barriers drawn except those that separate success from non-
success. The American is placed upon the highroad of life,
and there comes to him the American slogan, "It's up to you.
All means justify that end, and so in many of our plays our
ethics become doubtful, our manners become vulgar. The
American is very frank about the effect, the goal; he is very
slack about his motives. Eager to claim his indisputable
right to rise above environment, he is not as eager to rise above
himself. We must accept him as he is, on a pinnacle. He
has got there, however inadequate he be, however dense to
what he sees or what his responsibilities are. The tragedy of
George Kelly's "The Show-Off", of Rachel Crothers's
"Expressing Willie" was not recognized.
"In defeat," writes some one, "the American sows the seed
of victory; . . . for there is no event, not the worst, but
God is of and in it. And for Edipus in his remorse, and
Oswald in his imbecility, there is infinite certainty of good.
Paradoxical as it is, the fact is clear that, in the heart of a
Georgia mob, in Whitman's verse, and in the cowpuncher's
respect for a woman, there lives the same spirit whose large-
ness and delicacy, whose tenderness and unconquerable dar-
ing, made American life the most vital in the world."
This nobility of attitude, this epic strength.
have garbed in outward melodramatic color - have always
which we
ΙΟ
The American Background
been active in our native drama. "All America is divided
into two classes," wrote Owen Wister in "The Virginian",
"the quality and the equality. The latter will always rec-
ognize the former when mistaken for it. Both will be with
us until our women bear nothing but kings." Then he added
his interpretation of a free democracy:
"It was through the Declaration of Independence," he
said, "that we Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality
of man, for we abolished a cut-and-dried aristocracy. We
had seen little men artificially held up in high places, and great
men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-
loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature.
There-
fore we decreed that every man should thenceforth have
equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we
acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying,
'Let the best man win, whoever he is.' Let the best man
win! That is America's word. That is true democracy."
This best man standard has been variously interpreted by
the American dramatist; the tenableness of the theory held
more consistently in the early plays than in the later, be-
cause right and wrong were more markedly defined. But the
best man might be the one with swifter fists: we saw that in
the 10-20-30 melodrama, we see it nightly in the moving-
picture. It was not interpreted subtly.
Speaking of his hero and heroine in "The Gentleman from
Indiana", Booth Tarkington said: "The genius of the
American is adaptability, and both were sprung from pioneers
whose mean life depended on that quality." In this accept-
ance of inherited environment is found the infinite source of
action. Later on in this narrative, there runs through the
hero's mind a definition of success: "To accept the worst
that Fate can deal, and to wring courage from it instead of
despair." This is one of the dominant characteristics in
American life, and we have striven to accent it in our drama.
Our characters are made optimistic, resilient, though they
are not made to reason why.
Our dramatists have speeded up action so as not to explain
it; they have moved audiences by sheer swiftness, by quick
II
The American Dramatist
grasp of striking moments, by bravado. "I'm a business
man, Miss Dearborn," explained Curtis Jadwin, in Channing
Pollock's dramatization of Frank Norris's "The Pit." "It
doesn't take me long to discover what I want, and, when I
find that thing, I generally get it. I want you to marry me.
On the principle that to the swift belongs the race, such
sentimental negotiation always thrills the American, who
"wants what he wants when he wants it." Jadwin, the
stage conception of the business speculator, utters defiance
against any leisure-class subtlety or idleness. He exclaims,
"Oh, it's not the money, Laura; it never was. It was the
excitement. I had to do something. I couldn't sit around
and twiddle my thumbs. I don't believe in lounging around
clubs, or playing the race, or murdering game birds, or run-
ning some poor, helpless fox to death.
وو
In such expressions of an active life, one often detected
the American dramatist's reaction to the Continental im-
portation. In the plays of the Boucicault-Howard period, if
a character had to commit adultery or attempt it, the charac-
ter must be French. To contemplate the wickedness of dis-
solute life, the character must be a Quex or a Baron Chevrial.
The stage must not be made to reflect degradation; we
were smug in our slogan, so tersely put by the Salvation
Army: no matter how far down a man may be, he is never
out.
In Richard Harding Davis's "Soldiers of Fortune", Clay,
the hero, says to the society Langham girl, who has taunted
him with the satisfaction he finds in labor:
"No, . . . I don't amount to much, but, my God! . .
when you think what I was. If I wished it, I could
drop this active work to-morrow, and continue as an adviser -
but I like the active part better. I like doing
as an expert
things myself. . . It's better to bind a laurel to the plow
than to call yourself hard names."
The tragedy of incompetence, so often hinted at in the
American Drama, was not a deep-seeing one. If the heroes
of the early American plays were sentimental, the heroes of
the later plays were largely muscular. The man who could
12
The American Background
swing from a rope into the midst of a mutinous crew was the
hero of the crowd. This crowd knew nothing of the eternal
man around whom the forces of destiny might be swirling,
against which a strong arm was nothing, but a brave soul
was everything.
IV
One might write a book on "The Ordeal of the American
Drama", and slay the childish things with which we have
been content to amuse ourselves. We have never seriously
dealt with history, we have never dealt with politics, we have
never honestly faced our business problems. Van Wyck
Brooks shows, rather ruthlessly, but no less truthfully, that
we have never unflinchingly faced our national failings, as he
faced what he considers to be the failings of Mark Twain.
Our dramatists have used no crucible, they have seen through
no burning-glass. They have gilded their fairies, as in a
"Midsummer Night's Dream." If Eugene O'Neill removes
the ass's head, he is considered bold, unsavory. The social
fervor of our playwrights has been tenuous, intermittent.
Not any of it has changed to the slightest degree a wrong con-
dition, as Galsworthy's "Justice" checked an English prison
policy. We have splashed around in a rich sea of American
humanity, making use of only the dynamic externals. We
have been much more moved by the theories of dramatic
technique than by theories of American ways, customs, and
institutions. We have learned to do the "trick" by imita-
tion. But being a trick, the American Drama only stands
analysis in its articulation, not in its consistency of idea.
The playwright knows how to turn novels into plays, how to
dig plays from investigation reports and editorials. He has
press-agented American life in fulsomeness, but his body of
ideas has been "half-baked."
It is true, he faced many taboos - the American Dramatist
of over a hundred years. And despite our battle against
them, which gives us freedom now to discuss once muted ques-
tions, he is still reticent. If we are given frank talk in drama,
13
The American Dramatist
it is the foreigner writing, so the conservatives say, not the
true American, the one hundred percenter.
Yet one cannot say that the book which exploits the hun-
dred per cent. American unreservedly is the book that is now
widest read. There has been an irony in American Drama
for many years, that became stronger with the growth of
realism in our literature. Charles Hoyt's farces, George
Ade's "Fables in Slang", Mr. Dooley took some of the gilt
from our wrongly placed patriotism. Paul Leicester Ford's
"The True George Washington" showed how history might
be humanized. Magazine "muck-raking" took something
from the smugness of cities. All this paved the way for such
pictures as Sinclair Lewis has given us in "Main Street" and
"Arrowsmith", and as John Howard Lawson jazzed to-
gether in "Processional."
Now that the theatre "revolution" has opened a broader
field for the American Drama, we may hope for a stronger
treatment of American life on the stage. It was looked for,
in the nineties, when Frank Norris gave us "The Octopus",
James Lane Allen "The Reign of Law", and Ellen Glasgow
"The Deliverance." Would an American dramatist give us
a play with a similar touch of the soil, a similar fibre of Ameri-
can character, facing problems of inheritance, environment,
and spiritual struggle? I suppose Moody's "The Great
Divide" might be said to have answered the hope, though it
is nearer relationship to "Davy Crockett." The New Eng-
landisms of Octave Thanet, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E.
Wilkins-Freeman antedated a long while the genre dramas of
"Trifles" by Susan Glaspell, "Beyond the Horizon" by
Eugene O'Neill, and "Icebound" by Owen Davis. Herne's
"Shore Acres" is a much nearer connection. The past history
of the American Drama does not show the close interchange
of playwright and writer. Of course we had dramatizations
of Scott and Cooper and Dickens; the work of J. K. Paulding
and Irving was utilized; "Uncle Tom's Cabin" became at
once a tract and a drama and a novel. Nevertheless, in spite
of the fact that the man of letters wrote plays, letters and
drama in the history of the American Theatre have been a
14

A TYPICAL AMERICAN BACKGROUND. FRANK MAYO AS Davy Crockett.
"O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best."
UNIV
BA
The American Background
separate thing. If the American dramatist changes from
imitator to originator of forms to hold native rhythms, it
will be due to something that has happened to the theatre.
itself which has freed him from box-office restrictions.
What has he had to cope with, other than the mental limita-
tions of the men who have controlled the theatre since the
days of the Theatrical Trust? American life gave him the
incentive for movement. People are trained for swiftness by
the "movies."
'movies." I know men who will read nothing but
"swift" stories. From the American newspaper he saw the
value of the scare-line, of underscoring. While at the height
of his melodrama period, when Owen Davis was turning out
such pieces as "Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model" and
"Convict 999", he wrote, after studying his audiences in-
tently, "I soon found that humanity was the keynote of their
interest; that the elemental passions appealed to under a
coating of sugar by the Broadway dramatist were the same
as those aroused by the Third Avenue playwright without the
coating. In all plays, whether given in the two-dollar houses,
or in the less imposing ten-twenty-thirty-cent places of
amusement, there must be at bottom some big, dominant,
human emotion. On Broadway, you must hide the springs
that move your puppets and be subtle, moving toward
your climax circuitously."
How carefully these men were trained to avoid the very
substance from which great drama comes, how very unob-
servant they were in their examination of the springs of human
motive, how very distrustful of not to say ignorant of -
a logical progressiveness to their stories. Even such sensi-
tive workers as Moody failed to see how easily, through
external effectiveness, their inner reason might be thrown
askew. "The Great Divide" crumbles before a few very
direct questions.
press
When Ibsen and, later, Shaw, were uttering what the
called "disagreeable truths", the optimistic professional
American shuddered. "Give us no half-lights," he gasped;
mellow light that soothes the mind was his specialty. “I
cannot see," Charles Klein once said to me, "how Bernard
15
The American Dramatist
Shaw, who denies everything from pure love to pure music,
can be a public benefactor; only the man who affirms what is
good tells the whole truth." Mr. Herne, our first realist in
the theatre, was more far-seeing. "If a disagreeable truth
is not also an essential," he wrote, "it should never be used
in art.
The difference between these two statements shows
that great barrier which separated the playwright of ex-
pediency from the dramatist who possessed sincerity and had
an impulse to get at the truth of things.
وو
According to Langdon Mitchell, the "plain" American is
nothing more than the unfinished, half-baked man, and we
should not be proud of him. He has diagnosed "The Ameri-
can Malady", and I read into it "The Malady of the American
Dramatist." He sees nowhere intellectual interest, he sees
everywhere the vulgarity of a nomadic people in Ford cars.
He looks for ideals, noble behavior, intellectual enjoyments,
the pleasure of art, the simple life of Horace, and he finds
America headed neither for an Athenian Culture nor for a
"thrice-hammered hardihood of Rome." What he does see
is a false conception of what makes life good, an empty valua-
tion of leisure, a forgetfulness of robustness and adventure
out of which is ever born a rich popular culture. Remember-
ing that, he writes:
"These United States are a man's country. The wilderness.
is not so far away; it invites and can be enjoyed without pay-
ing a ransom. If you are weary of the college campus, or of
the suburban felicities, or of what Philadelphians call the
'Main Line', you take the train to New Brunswick, or the
Navajo Reservation, and refresh yourself with hardship and
the simple life. To sum up my patriotism, I believe that I
like American life for many of the same reasons for which the
sailor likes what he calls dirty weather: there is, in our state
of affairs, something chaotic and adverse which calls for action
and provokes high spirits.
It is not so very difficult for the discerning American.
to accept Mr. Mitchell's criticisms of the crowds, whether
young or old, as rather disdainful of the arts and sciences,
well-intentioned and empty-headed at twenty-five and fifty.
16
The American Background
"We look in the magic glass," writes Mr. Mitchell, "and
the glass is truly magic with the grace and truth of genius, and
we see our American brother's face. It is a very sad face,
but not sad with thought; not furrowed by dark experience;
not weary with having lived. No, the face, as it appears on
this canvas, wears the mournful, baffled expression of a soul
which does not know how to live, and has not lived."
Strange, writes George Santayana, in his "Character and
Opinion in the United States", that America with its vigor,
goodness, hope, should not be able to breed "clean thinking,
honest judgment, and rational happiness." Not so strange,
writes Professor James Harvey Robinson, in "The Mind in
the Making", when we consider that
"One awful thing that the Book of the Past makes plain is
that with our animal heritage we are singularly oblivious to
the large concerns of life. We are keenly sensitive to little
discomforts, minor irritations, wounded vanity and various
danger signals; but our comprehension is inherently vague
and listless when it comes to grasping intricate situations and
establishing anything like a fair perspective in life's problems
and possibilities. Our imagination is restrained by our own
timidity, constantly reinforced by the warnings of our fellows,
who are always urging us to be safe and sane, by which they
mean convenient for them, predictable in our conduct and
graciously amenable to the prevailing standards."
A study of American Drama will show this to have been
our dominant ill. The playwright has not had authority in
the theatre, he has not demanded anything of the theatre.
He has served the theatre painstakingly. A view of more
recent manifestations will show that those ills are slowly
being removed from us. Such plays as "Dulcy", "Beggar
on Horseback", "Processional", "The Adding Machine",
"The Hairy Ape", measure an impulse in American Drama
away from those falsities of the "heroic" which once held
American audiences as moving and truthful.
17
CHAPTER TWO
OUR COLONIAL THEATRE
T
SCHOLARSHIP has brought to light many interesting details
regarding the commencement of the American Theatre.
Thomas Godfrey's "The Prince of Parthia" was the ñrst
play by an American to be presented on the professional stage,
in 1767. The demands of the colonial theatre cannot be said
to have done much either to foster or to hasten the playwright.
It was too busy establishing itself. America had long before
figured in the drama through mention by Chapman, Jonson,
and Marston in "Eastward Hoe!" (1605); Shakespeare's
"Tempest" had spoken of "the still-vex'd Bermooths"; the
voice of a reverend had spoken ill of actors in Virginia as early
as 1609. Paul L. Ford states that in a masque given at White-
hall, February 15, 1612, some actors, lately returned from
America, and wearing Indian dress, appeared. And in "The
Widow Ranter; or, Bacon in Virginia", Mrs. Aphra Behn
dealt with an American subject, while, in her novel, "Oroo-
noko” (1696), she showed her concern for slavery. History
recounts that while in America, Sir William Berkeley, Governor
of Virginia, wrote a play, "The Lost Lady" (1641), which
greatly antedates the other royal governor, of New York, who
wrote "Androboros" (1714). These beginnings are con-
flicting and not even yet satisfactorily cleared. One authority
states that the first dramatic performance given on American
soil was in French, at Port Royal, Acadia - a masque written
18
Our Colonial Theatre
by Marc Lescarbot, on the return of Sieur de Poutrincourt.
One might stretch the point and speak of the musicians and
jugglers who set forth across the peninsula of Yucatan, in
1524, with Cortès; or look into the constitution of the "Ordre
de Bon Temps", with which Champlain kept up the spirit of
his colony in the winter of 1606-1607- when other masques
or entertainments than that by Lescarbot might be found.¹
In Quebec, during 1694, the Church frowned upon an amateur
performance of "Tartuffe", which is prior to Professor Tyler's
mention of a student recital of a "pastoral colloquy" before
the Governor, at Williams and Mary College, in 1702. James-
town, according to Bruce, was not stranger to plays, and the
old fathers of Massachusetts, in 1685, were scandalized by
the setting up of a dancing-master's "show" on lecture days,
with the brazen assertion that "by one play he could teach
more divinity than Mr. Willard or the Old Testament."
The theatre historian has to correct the incomplete asser-
tions of Dunlap, Ireland, Seilhamer, and others regarding the
priority of theatre buildings in America. The records of the-
atricals in Jamaica have yet to be traced before this can be
done, for Kingston was a port via which players came from
London to the colonies. Anthony Aston declares he himself
arrived in Charles-Town, 1703, to give performances; faced
by worry, he, "a gentleman, lawyer, poet, actor, soldier",
etc., etc.,“full of shame, poverty, nakedness, and hunger
turned 'Player and Poet', and wrote one play on the subject
of the country."
The latest claimant to establishing the first theatre in
America is Eola Willis, who writes, in "The Charleston
Stage": "As a matter of fact, Charles-Town had a permanent
theatre fifteen years before the opening of the Nassau Street
Theatre in New York, thirty-odd years before the erection of
the Southwark in Philadelphia, and almost forty years pre-
vious to the building of what Seilhamer thought to be the
first theatre in this town."
¹ Sce mention of "Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France", Paris, 1609. In this is
found, "Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France." Consult my "Representa-
tive Plays", i, 5.
19
The American Dramatist
In the popular mind, the American theatre begins with the
name Hallam, the place Williamsburg, Va., the time 1752.
But the Murray-Kean ventures were ahead of it in America,
playing in New York at the theatre in Nassau Street, March
5, 1750; and Hallam's advance agent to America, Robert
Upton, neglected his employer's business, appropriated some
of his master's funds, and, in the winter of 1751-1752, began
starring in Shakespeare, Rowe, Vanbrugh, and Otway, with
farces by Garrick and Dodsley. By the time the Hallams
arrived, some of their thunder had been stolen, and inroads
had been made on the novelty of their repertory.
Both Tyler and Eola Willis suggest the early appearance of
the amateur actor in colonial theatricals. In the Virginia
Gazette for September 10, 1736, was the following:
This evening will be performed at the Theatre by the
young gentlemen of the College the Tragedy of "Cato", and
on Monday, Wednesday and Friday will be acted the follow-
ing comedies by the young Gentlemen and Ladies of the country
"The Busybody" and "The Recruiting Officer" and "The
Beaux' Stratagem.
"
The italics are mine to stress the importance of determining
whether or not these were amateurs or thus far unrecorded
professional actors who attracted the attention of Colonel
Thomas Jones and challenged the curiosity of Colonel William
Byrd. I have gone thus into some detail, not to prove any-
thing about play writing, unless it be to show that even
before the American dramatist was launched, the Indian and
the Negro had appeared on the stage and in literature, the
amateur had asserted his claim both as writer and actor, the
theatre had taken root, and a royal governor had put into a
play never acted - "Androboros" a local problem in-
volving church government and political favor.
1
¹ Hornblow gives as sources: Mary Newton Standard's "Colonial Virginia. Its
People and Customs" and the Virginia Magazine of Historical Biography, 240, 241.
20
Our Colonial Theatre
II
>
From the time of the arrival of the Hallams, theatre history
is not so difficult to trace. The seasons' plays, the character
of the company, their reception in New York, Philadelphia,
Annapolis, Baltimore, and Williamsburg, are matter of theatre
history. They do not concern us here except in so far as they
throw light on the manners of the time. Some claim that
when Garrick's "Lethe" was first performed by Hallam in
Williamsburg, Singleton's prologue for the occasion was the
first thing written for and addressed to an American audience.
But Eola Willis gives an earlier prologue to "The Orphan"
spoken in Charles-Town, Tuesday, January 24, 1734-1735, and
written by an unsigned poet of South Carolina. These carly
days set the pace for all phases of the theatre: the dramatic
critic Y.Z. (an unknown quantity !) ventures his comments on
Miss Hallam's Imogen in the Maryland Gazette for September
6, 1770; another critic, Candidus, shows fervor over Douglass's
production of "The Tempest", January 19, 1770, at the
Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia. One can see how im-
portant it is for all these fine points to be assembled in order
to gauge the spirit of the colonial theatre, the state of culture
in the theatre centres of the time. The Firginia Gazette,
the Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and
Rhode Island papers need to be as systematically fine-combed
as the South Carolina papers seem recently to have been by
Miss Willis.
Such research will not likely add any new name to the
roster of American dramatists-no Gazette or Post-Boy is
likely to rob Royall Tyler of being our first playwright of
American social manner. But it would show the handicaps
under which the manager and actor labored to gain effects,
the care calculated to win favor of the public. The companies
were not overlarge; casts show Hallam and Douglass doubling
parts; Mrs. Hallam playing Juliet to her son's Romeo. Some-
times one gets suggestions, in the advertisements, of scenic
effects and the part played by music and dance. At other
times, the printed play gives indication of stage manipulation.
21
The American Dramatist
As excellent instances of how near the colonial stage was to
the stage of the Elizabethans, Professor Oral Coad cites
from "The Conquest of Canada; or, The Siege of Quebec"
and Andrew Barton's "The Disappointment; or, The Force
of Credulity" (1767).
The more one gathers of theatrical small talk and tradi-
tional ways, the more the colonial theatre becomes a replica
of London Town. There was overcrowding of beaux on the
stage; there was sometimes trouble with the groundlings.
Actors showed their vagaries either by riding in coaches or
having private alleys to the stage door, so as to avoid the gaze
of ogling trespassers. That the companies were not always
supplied with the plays they needed is guessed at by the
occasional advertisement, requesting the loan of the text.
Thus, one imagines that the colonial theatre was not, after
all, either Drury Lane or Covent Garden. But that, as the
buildings increased in size and permanence - if fires would
allow them to be permanent they became more nearly
imitative of the "home" article. So that Tyrone Power and
other visitors to America in the early national period (1832)
commented favorably on the amplitude of their surroundings.
The barrel hoop and candle lit the house, however, and
Wignell, so it is said, dressed for the part, marched before
Washington to the President's box with tallow dips in each
hand.
III
The colonists were not wanting in social grace or mental
stimulus. Literary taste was shaped by Pope and Dryden;
the student love for the best was likely to be found on the
most isolated plantation, or else dominated in the city home.
¹ Dunlap quotes the public notice of December 31, 1761: "Complaints having
been several times made that a number of gentlemen crowd the stage and very
much interrupt the performance, and as it is impossible the actors, when thus ob-
structed, should do that justice to their parts they otherwise would; it will be taken
as a particular favour if no gentleman will be offended that he is absolutely refused
admittance at the stage-door, unless he has previously secured himself a place in
either the stage or upper boxes."
22
Our Colonial Theatre
Archibald Henderson remarks the friendship of Godfrey for
Archibald Maclaine, the Shakespearean scholar, who lived
in Wilmington, North Carolina; he enumerates some of the
distinguished names of subscribers to the 1765 edition of
"The Prince of Parthia." It would seem that the "classical
scholars of Cape Fear" were no whit less stimulating to the
attractive Godfrey than the poetic society of Philadelphia, or
the student atmosphere of the Philadelphia Academy under
the guidance of Provost Smith. I emphasize such a bit of
research as this by Doctor Henderson in his excellent reprint
of "The Prince of Parthia", because I think that a similar
survey of other centres with their culture would be en-
lightening. Annapolis, Baltimore, Newport, Albany, Perth
Amboy are as significant in theatre history as Philadelphia,
New York, and Boston.
These were the towns known to Hallam and Douglass,
John Henry and Harper, Miss Cheer, John Hodgkinson,
Mrs. Merry, and others who later faced the same colonists,
turned citizens of a new republic, and combatted the same
Puritan prejudices which stayed the early progress of the
American Theatre. Dunlap is the source for measuring the
quality and worth of these actors. The crusty old historian.
for he was old when he set down from memory and hasty
notes his impressions of the playhouse -brushed shoulders.
with these Thespians, did business with them as manager,
wrote for them as playwright. Prejudiced, inaccurate as he
is, yet in Dunlap there is the warmth of nearness.
Such a
paragraph as the following stirs the imagination more thor-
oughly than the accuracy of a date: "Perth Amboy, then the
capital of the province of New-Jersey, and the residence of
his majesty's governors, judges, treasurers, attorney-generals,
and collectors, with a garrison usually of a regiment of foot,
occasionally received the visits of the Thespians, and the
writer has heard old ladies speak, almost in raptures, of the
beauty and grace of Mrs. Douglass, and the pathos of her
personation of Jane Shore.'
The "elegant females" of Congreve and Cibber required a
grace which the early actress compassed in figure and costume.
23
The American Dramatist
The romantic glamor around Miss Hallam, so pleasantly
fictionized by John Esten Cooke, in his novel, "The Virginia
Comedians", is heightened in the Maryland Gazette poem by
an ardent swain to the portrait of the vivacious actress by
Peale the only authentic sketch we have, since the canvas
seems to be lost. The traditional beauty of the Storer sisters
especially of Maria, who became Mrs. Henry was the
talk of pre-Revolutionary theatregoers. William B. Wood,
in his "Recollections", speaks of the fairy Maria: "She
usually came full-dressed to the theatre in the old family
coach; and the fashion of monstrous hoops worn at that day
made it necessary for Mr. Henry to slide her out sideways,
take her in his arms and carry her like an infant to the stage
entrance.'
So, the records of the colonial theatre show the actor-
managers building playhouses, appealing to legislatures and
the public through newspapers -- against religious prej-
udice and discriminating law; ingratiating themselves in
favor of subscribers. The actors who came to the colonies
were eager to let the "provincials" know that they were
players of reputation, with a long list of rôles in which they
had been hailed in England. Miss Cheer's scope was enor-
mous. Seilhamer gives a page to the parts she assumed in
two years. But then, all the players who came out to the
colonies were trained in the light of big repertories: Shake-
speare, Farquhar and Congreve, Rowe, Garrick and Centlivre,
Goldsmith, Gay and Bickerstaff, Lillo, Cumberland and
Foote, Otway, Cibber and Home- to mention them in the
random way they were produced. And, in that great variety,
only two American plays to be given by what was known as
the American Company!
IV
Opposition to plays and players concentrated in greatest
heat and effectiveness in the northern colonies. It likewise
showed itself in South Carolina and Virginia, though the
Cavalier spirit gave it little countenance. Cotton Mather,
in 1686, is said to have anathematized stage plays. Chief
24
Our Colonial Theatre
Justice Samuel Sewall, of Massachusetts, protested (1714)
against acting in Boston: "Let not Christian Boston," he
said, "goe beyond Heathen Rome in the practice of Shameful
Vanities." Down in Virginia, after the launching of Hallam
and his comedians, the Rev. Samuel Davies complained,
1755, that plays and romances were more read than
history of the Blessed Jesus."
..
the
In every quarter there were launched sectarian appeals and
political bills which sometimes passed as law, only to be
abrogated later. Town objection, state objection, protests
in the papers, fulsome defence of the stage by actor and play-
goer, references to actor folk and profane plays in the gov-
ernor's annual messages, punishment of malefactors, humorous
evasions of the law, exciting escapes from pursuing officers
of justice
the picture is one of added excitement to a career
otherwise fraught with uncertainty and strenuousness. There
was a vagabond reputation attached to the word "player"
which was not at all assuaged by the appearance of roist'rous
Anthony Aston: there was an unsavory brilliancy attached
to the saucy looseness of London's most notorious actresses
of the Garrick period. Seilhamer suggests that, in 1782,
famous "Perdita" Robinson swept a Maryland gallant off
his feet, even as she scandalized the English court. While
this seems not likely, the menace was ever present to the
colonial divine and to the "superior straightlaced" of the
colonial community.
Sometimes, a town as a whole would protest against the
theatre; at other times, a sect like the Quakers would appeal
to the General Assembly. The newspapers from week to
week carried debates for and against the subject, signed
Philodemus and Amanda. These attacks on the unlawfulness
of the theatre would often be answered by the actors; Doug-
lass, for example, defended his calling from onslaught in
Goddard's Pennsylvania Chronicle for February 9, 1767, and
thereafter until May 4. Hallam and Henry, in 1790, appealed
to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. The opposi-
tion was largely based on the fear that the presence of a play-
house and players would undermine the sentiments which
25
The American Dramatist
the pulpit was trying to instil into the hearts of the colonists;
and would assuredly attract the mind of youth away from
the ordinary duties of daily living. The fervor created in
Albany, during December, 1785, is a typical example of the
heated contests carried on by opposing forces. An appeal
to the Mayor was drawn up. Such luxury and dissipation
as a theatre were not needed there. These citizens might be
called by the players mere rustics, but if they were rustics
they did not want to be instructed in manners by any plays
the actors might bring in their repertory. The theatre in
Albany was to be opened "by Authority", but the Gazette
avowed that "Such is the spirit of the people that one word
as a signal, would lay the play-house in a few minutes to the
ground." The drama, in the contest, met with great vic-
tory. Four voted for the appeal; nine against it, including
the Mayor and Recorder. This was one among many times
the "authorities" were on the side of the theatre; and there
were other instances where laws against players were set
aside.
Humorous indeed are the ways in which actors, like Doug-
lass, attempted to appease the wrath of these "holy" oppo-
nents of the drama. Refused permission by the magistrate
to open his new theatre, called Cruger's Wharf, in the autumn
of 1758, Douglass hastened to explain that it was not a theatre
but an "Historic Academy", wherein he proposed to give
dissertations on subjects "Moral, Instructive and Entertain-
ing." His desire was "to speak in Public with Propriety."
In 1761, when he went to Newport, he issued the type of
playbill which masqueraded for the benefit of the town.
A NEWPORT PLAYBILL¹
King's Arms Tavern Newport, Rhode Island. On Monday, June
10, at the Public Room of the above Inn, will be delivered a Series
of MORAL DIALOGUES, in Five Parts, Depicting the Evil Effects of
Jealousy and other Bad Passions, and Proving that Happiness can
1 From "The Romance of the American Theatre", by Mary Caroline Crawford.
Little, Brown, and Company, Boston, 1913.
26
Our Colonial Theatre
only Spring from the Pursuit of Virtue. MR. DOUGLASS will repre-
sent a noble and magnificent Moor named Othello, who loves a
young lady named Desdemona, and after he has married her, harbors
(as in too many cases) the dreadful passion of jealousy.
Of Jealousy, our being's bane,
Mark the small cause, and the most dreadful pain.
MR. ALLYN will depict the character of a specious villain, in the
regiment of Othello, who is so base as to hate his commander on
mere suspicion, and to impose on his best friend. Of such character,
it is to be feared, there are thousands in the world, and the one ques-
tion may present to us a salutary warning.
The man that wrongs his master and his friend,
What can he come to but a shameful end?
MR. HALLAM will delineate a young and thoughtless officer, who is
traduced by Mr. Allyn, and getting drunk, loses his situation and his
general's esteem. All young men, whatsoever, take example from
Cassio.
The ill effects of drinking would you see?
Be warned and keep from evil company.
MR. MORRIS will represent an old gentleman, the father of Desde-
mona, who is not cruel, or covetous, but is foolish enough to dislike
the noble Moor, his son-in-law, because his face is not white, for-
getting that we all spring from one root. Such prejudices are numer-
ous and very wrong.
Fathers beware what sense and love ye lack,
'Tis crime, not color, makes the being black.
MR. QUELCH will depict a fool, who wishes to become a knave, and
trusting one gets killed by him. Such is the friendship of rogues
take heed.
When fools would knaves become, how often you'll
Perceive the knave not wiser than the fool.
MRS. MORRIS will represent a young and virtuous wife, who being
wrongfully suspected, gets sinothered (in an adjoining room) by her
husband.
Reader, attend; and ere thou goest hence
Let fall a tear to hapless innocence.
27
The American Dramatist
MRS. DOUGLASS will be her faithful attendant, who will hold out a
good example to all servants, male and female, and to all people in
subjection.
Obedience and gratitude
Are things as rare as they are good.
Various other dialogues, too numerous to mention here, will be
delivered at night, all adapted to the improvement of the mind
and manners. The whole will be repeated Wednesday and Satur-
day. Tickets, six shillings each, to be had within. Commence-
ment at 7, conclusion at half-past ten, in order that every spectator
may go home at a sober hour and reflect upon what he has seen before
he retires to rest.
God save the king
And long may he sway
East, North, and South,
And fair America.
In 1790, a petition to open a theatre in Boston was pre-
sented to the Massachusetts State Legislature. It was re-
jected, November, 1791. Samuel Adams, who was the chief
opponent, was of different frame of mine toward the theatre
from his descendant, John Quincy Adams. A town meeting
to abrogate the prohibitory measure was not successful.
Adams dominated. One H. G. Otis spoke in fiery terms at
Faneuil Hall against the play. Adams thundered: "Thank
God there is one young man willing to step forth in the good
old cause of morality and religion." That the sentiment for
drama was strong is seen by the fact that Adams's voice was
drowned in torrents of disapproval. But the law remained,
and, despite it, the "Moral Lecture" crept in, and Governor
Hancock, not thus to be hoodwinked, had the company,
headed by Harper, arrested. There was a riot. The Gov-
ernor's portrait was dragged from the stage box by a mob, and
stamped upon: George III could not have been more roughly
handled. To the theatre went audiences, armed with clubs.
The legislature later repealed the bill, but Adams, then Gov-
ernor, refused to sign it, and the theatre persisted in the light
of public favor rather than of legal sanction. Thus, the
28
Our Colonial Theatre
playhouse began in Boston as an Exhibition in Exhibition
Rooms.
The arresting of actors, intent on plying their trade, on
retrieving their small fortunes invested in precarious ven-
tures, was not an uncommon occurrence; and they had a
rough time of it. This opposition, which was thus generally
met with in Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, Con-
necticut, and Massachusetts, was peculiarly stressed on the
side of the playhouse and the player, not of the play. In the
name of extravagant waste of money, of perversion of morals
by the presence of loose and enticing persons, it was repre-
sented that there was done "manifest injury" to "this young
colony and grievous scandal of religion and the laws of this
Government." Later, in the early national period, we were
able to see the theatre in Charleston, S. C., praised because it
kept the youth of the city away from the gaming table. But
the prejudice to "iniquitous play actors" persisted and handi-
capped the theatre for many a day, cropping up at all times.
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a typical descendant of
this prejudice when she gave her reasons for refusing to put
her sanction on a dramatization of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
V
With all this opposition, however, the drama did not fare
ill in the colleges. At William and Mary, at the College of
Philadelphia, at the College of New Jersey, at Harvard and
Yale, and at minor schools, such as that over which Hugh
Henry Brackenridge presided, not only did the undergradu-
ates present such pieces as "Cato", but they produced
playwrights, and encouraged the preparation of "dialogues"
which became regular features of commencement programs.
While in tone these "dialogues" were at first evidences of
allegiance to the English throne, they were likewise com-
mentaries on the rising tide of feeling which increased with
force, leading to the Revolution.
There has already been quoted the notice of September 10,
1736, heralding the presentation of "Cato" at the College
29
The American Dramatist
of William and Mary. The fact that this antedates 1750 or
1752, usually supposed to mark the start of theatricals in
Williamsburg, is not of as much significance as that amateur
theatricals flourished before the regular theatre; and that
these amateurs represented college undergraduates and
townsfolk as well. The efforts of the amateur in colonial
theatricals Charleston was particularly dependent on them,
according to Miss Eola Willis-and when the redcoats took
possession of the playhouses have yet to be thoroughly
traced. The temper of the Williamsburg faculty would be of
inestimable value, if it could be determined. But the heads
of our educational institutions did not frown upon the arts.
Provost Smith, in Philadelphia, gave encouragement to the
verses of Thomas Godfrey; President Witherspoon, at
Princeton, gave advice to Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and
countenanced the writing of such a "dialogue" as "The
Rising Glory of America", composed by Philip Freneau
and Brackenridge. Strange that theological students and
their teachers should be abetting drama, while religion out-
side should be making every effort to handicap it.
Albert Matthews published a note in the New York Nation
(March 19, 1914), relative to early plays in Harvard. He
consulted the Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, of the Class of
1761, and the written records of the College. The first refer-
ence is June 22, 1758, "Roman Father: a Play." In July,
"Cato" was given with increasing perfection. In 1759,
June 20, Ames said, "The Recruiting Officer', acted by our-
selves, then Public." They took the "play" to Boston, with-
out demur, and seem only to have encountered faculty cen-
sure, when their undergraduate spirits made merry over some
"profane farce." So, in the hotbed of Massachusetts opposi-
tion, the drama flourished. Matthews even suggests the
probability of a drama, "Gustavus Vasa ", being written by
a Rev. Benjamin Colman, and given at one of the college
commencements. If this should be established by full evi-
dence, it would be sufficient to make this play the first tragedy
written in America, thus antedating "The Prince of Parthia"
since Colman graduated from Harvard in 1692. Neverthe-
30
Our Colonial Theatre
less, drama for Boston and its environs was supported many
years before a professional theatre was established, and when
they could not get their plays at Harvard they travelled to
Newport for them. The Abbé Robin's views, in 1781, of
what he saw at Harvard and elsewhere, do not surprise us :
Their pupils often act tragedies, the subject of which is
generally taken from their national events, such as the Battle
of Bunkers-Hill, the burning of Charlestown, the death of
General Montgomery, the capture of Burgoyne, the treason
of Arnold, and the Fall of British Tyranny. You will easily
conclude that in such a new nation as this, these pieces must
fall infinitely short of that perfection to which our European
literary productions of this kind are wrought up; but, still,
they have a greater effect upon the mind than the best of
ours would have among them, because those manners and
customs are delineated, which are peculiar to themselves, and
the events are such as interest them above all others. The
drama is here reduced to its true and Ancient origin.
Thus early do we meet with a conception of the intent and
scope of an American Drama which we lived up to only inter-
mittently and with not too much fervor.
It was shortly after Robin's description that Barnabas Bid-
well perpetrated a "dialogue" called "The Modern Mistake",
written while he was a Junior at Yale College, and given by
the Brothers in Unity. Professor Coad's investigations show
that this was not the same drama as "The Mercenary Match",
which was written, published, and acted, according to Dunlap,
while Bidwell was a Senior at College.
The colleges were, therefore, the havens that sheltered our
early playwrights. From Pennsylvania came Godfrey and
Nathaniel Evans, from Princeton Freneau, Hopkinson, and
Brackenridge, from Harvard an unauthenticated Colman, and
from Yale Barnabas Bidwell. The "dialogue" that was
mostly in vogue was nothing more than a political broadside,
showing the temper of the times. The titles alone measure
the quality of their sentiment: "The Military Glory of Great
Britain ", an entertainment by the "Graduates of the College.
of New Jersey", "held in Nassau-Hall, New Jersey, Sept. 29th,
31
The American Dramatist
1762 ", gave place to Freneau and Brackenridge's "The Rising
Glory of America", in 1771. Hopkinson, for the Commence-
ment of 1761, breathed, with the aid of the Rev. Provost
Smith, sentiments in a dialogue and ode, memorializing "his
late gracious Majesty George II." As well did they perpetu-
ate in an "exercise" the accession of "His
the accession of "His present Gracious.
Majesty, George III", for May 18, 1762.
Nathaniel Evans wrote a "dialogue" for the Commence-
ment of the Philadelphia College with a facility that showed
the form more cut for poetic expression than for drama. Such
efforts were merely crude essayals, partaking more of platform
eloquence than of stage effectiveness. But the college atmos-
phere clung to one dramatist in the person of Thomas Godfrey,
Jr., who seems to have been a particular protegé of "Provost
Smith, and the particular good friend of Nathaniel Evans,
and John Green, the portrait painter. All three, after God-
frey's death, combined to eulogize him in a volume of his
"Juvenile Poems on Various Subjects, with The Prince of
Parthia." A young man, with proclivities toward music,
painting, and poetry, spoken of by the ladies of Philadelphia
town as "our poet", contributed this one play, "The Prince of
Parthia," to the theatre, probably inspired to do so by the
excellent work of the American Company, under the redoubt-
able Douglass. This tragedy was produced April 24, 1767,
rather hastily put on by Douglass in place of Andrew Barton's
"The Disappointment; or, The Force of Credulity", an
early comic opera. It had been partly written in Philadelphia
and partly in Wilmington, N. C., whither Godfrey went as a
factor. The fascination of the young man must have been
distinct, because he found himself amidst the "good Society
of the South as much sought after as in Philadelphia.
One will find in this, our first tragedy to be printed in America,
much more inspiration from Addison, Shakespeare, and the
Elizabethans, than from any native impulse. Henderson
refers to an issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette which suggests
that "The Prince of Parthia" was known to a small circle
of Philadelphians two years before it was published; in
that paper, in 1763 the year Godfrey died - it was
JJ
32
Our Colonial Theatre
SOME COLONIAL PLAYS
1714. Hunter, Governor Robert.
1759. Godfrey, Thomas, Jr. (1736-
1763).
1762. Authorship unknown.
1766. Cockings, George.
1766. Rogers, Robert (1727-1795).
1767. Barton, Andrew.
1773. Warren, Mrs. Mercy (1728-
1814).
1774. Jefferson, Thomas (?).
1775. Sewall, Jonathan Mitchell
(1748-1808).
1798. Munford, Colonel Robert.
Androboros: A Biographical
Farce in Three Acts. New
York, 1714.
The Prince of Parthia. Phila-
delphia, 1765.
The Military Glory of Great
Britain. Entertainment
given by the late Candidates
for the Bachelor's Degree at
the close of the anniversary
commencement, held in
Nassau-Hall, New Jersey,
September 29, 1762. Phila-
delphia, 1762.
The Conquest of Canada; or,
The Siege of Quebec. Lon-
don, 1766; Philadelphia,
1772.
Ponteach; or, The Savages of
America. London, 1776.
The Disappointment; or, The
Force of Credulity. Comic
Opera. New York, 1767.
The Adulateur. Boston, 1773.
A Dialogue between a Southern
Delegate and his Spouse, on
his return from the Grand
Continental Congress. 1774.
A Cure for the Spleen; or,
Amusement for a Winter's
Evening. Being the Sub-
stance of a Conversation on
the Times, over a friendly
Tankard and Pipe. New
York, 1775.
The Candidates; or, The
Humors of a Virginia Elec-
tion. Petersburg, 1798.
33
The American Dramatist
spoken of as a tragedy which "breathes all the Pathos of
Otway."
VI
There is only one other play, written by a colonist, that
found production on our stage before the Revolution. This
was George Cockings's "The Conquest of Canada; or, The
Siege of Quebec", printed in 1766, and produced in Philadel-
phia in 1773. It is much more to be wondered at as a native
product than "The Prince of Parthia"; it is a conscious
attempt to use historical material, naïvely English in its ador-
ing speeches, with stage effects which would indicate its author
to be a true dramatist. In his "To the Public", Cockings
writes:
Although the Undertaking is great and arduous for a Person
in my Situation of Life, unassisted, to dare attempt the sole
Composition of a Tragedy; yet I was incited to the Task, by
ruminating on a rapid, and almost uninterrupted Series of
Successes, in 1758, and the great and ever memorable Year of
1759, &c., the glorious Effects of the amicable and happy
Union, which subsisted between our gallant Troops, and in-
trepid Tars. . . .
At first he had bethought him to write about the whole
course of the war, under the all-inclusive title of "The Match-
less Æra", but he finally narrowed down to the Siege of Que-
bec. He continues :
So great, and many, were the remarkable Transactions of
that Siege, and so much Worth, and Bravery, was there dis-
played, I thought there needed no additional Aid of well-
wrought Fiction, or fulsome Adulation, to render it worthy of
a Dramatic Representation. I therefore resolved to send it
forth into the World, dressed in the amiable Garb of impartial
Verity, . . . and designed to adhere strictly to historical
Facts, as much as a Dramatic Performance would allow.
Here, then, is our realist, conscious of situation and char-
acter, near at hand, not drawn from models, character
written from close contact. He declares:
34
Our Colonial Theatre
Not being conversant with the Stage, and consequently not
well acquainted with the Rules of the Drama, as a Dramatic
Writer, perhaps I may have greatly erred in the Composition
of the Play, as to Time, Place, Circumstances, and many other
minute Particulars, which the most judicious and nice Critics
in antient Literature, may think a Work of this Kind deserves.
Why turn to this "antient Literature" for what in spirit
is just as great near home? Cockings asks: Shall we British
be mute when
we read with Pleasure and Admiration the Siege of Calais,
Aquileia, Addison's Cato, and the gallant Defence of the
Thermopylaan Pass; where the Regal Patriot Leonidas,
with his few chosen, and ever renowned Spartans, Thebans,
and Thespians, nobly fell, in the Defence of their Country, its
Privileges and Laws?
It is a spirited war drama, adulatory of British power on
land and water, descriptive of British strategy, measure of
British prowess through the eye of Montcalm. Cockings was
in the English governmental employ in Boston. The Ameri-
can Company, with Hallam, Henry, Douglass, Miss Hallam,
Mrs. Morris, Mrs. Henry, Mrs. Douglass, and Miss
Storer afforded the play a "star" production. The advertise-
ments indicate that amateurs were called in to swell the
pageant, and local militia supplied the necessary color. The
notice said:
It will be taken as a favor if the Town for this night will
dispense with a Farce, as the Stage will be much crowded with
the ARTILLERY, BOATS, &c., necessary for the Representation
of the Piece, and with the men from both Corps, whose as-
sistence the Commanding Officers are good enough to indulge
us with.
It is not my purpose unduly to emphasize "The Conquest
of Canada"; it is an English theme. But the playwright's
point of view was keen, and as such was an early contribu-
tion of value. It did not set out to picture the American
scene, or an American type, as distinctly as Robert Rogers
35
The American Dramatist
J3
did in "Ponteach' -a play not produced, but attempting
in quite a modern spirit to plead the red man's cause.
Rogers was a Major in the French and Indian Wars; he
fought against America in the Revolution, and came very
nearly having meted out to him the punishment usually
accorded a spy, since for some time he pretended to espouse
the American cause. This is our first problem play: the
white man's treatment of the Indian is dwelt upon with every
conscious care for subtlety. But the Indians are not individ-
ualized as the English are, and so, though the Indian type
begins with this play, it has a long road to travel before it
becomes a truthful picture. Forrest's Metamora, Fenimore
Cooper's idealized Chingachcook and Uncas are not so much
better than Rogers's Chekitan, Philip, and Ponteach.
VII
Barnabas Bidwell's "The Mercenary Match" belongs to
the post-Revolutionary period, but, as a college product, it is
linked with the present discussion. Young Bidwell was a
Senior at Yale in 1785; it was this year that the play was
written and published. Says Professor O. S. Coad: "The play
is empty, it is inflated, its sentiments are hackneyed; yet
there is revealed in it a feeling for felicitous poetic phrase and
in general for literary effect hardly to be met with elsewhere
in American drama of the eighteenth century." He likewise
adds that it "belongs to the category of the bourgeois tragedy
of domestic life, a type which flourished in Europe in the
eighteenth century, Lillo being the chief representative in
England, Lessing in Germany, and Diderot in France. In
this respect it is prior to Royall Tyler, supposed, heretofore, to
be the first to treat of domestic life in "The Contrast." The
author was himself conscious of this distinction; he was proud
to make the most of it in his Prologue :
Good friends, who come to hear and see the play,
Our Author bids me just appear and say,
The characters which he unfolds to view,
Are not sublime, although he thinks them true.
33
36
Our Colonial Theatre
He wakes no Grecian hero from his tomb,
Or slumbering patriot of imperial Rome;
He calls no Gallic Prince or British lord,
To walk the stage, and wield the tragic sword,
Employs no Washington to aid his plan,
Or faithless Arnold that disgrace to man: --
But shows the miseries of a man and wife,
A simple circumstance of common life.
Being a tragedy, the author has deemed it necessary to use
blank verse to exploit the triangular situation of one Jenson,
just appointed to a commission abroad, his wife, and an
intriguing gallant. Indeed, unhappy is the lot of a husband
whose wife exclaims:
I own, I can't dislike his character:
But there is something in the whole of him,
Discordant with the wishes of my soul.
His passions never harmonize with mine.
So discordant are they indeed that she and the gallant plot
the death of this man who in his person represents to her a
mercenary match: and the result is the poor fellow is mur-
dered by a sailor, who in his turn is poisoned, while the wife is
crushed to extinction by a contrite heart. Only the despic-
able gallant remains to be punished. Exclaims the Mr.
Worthy, member of Congress, whose political protegé the
dead husband was:
Bind all the rascals fast.
My God! Is this in Boston?
Bidwell's claim to elegant practice in literature was over-
clouded in his later life by his dishonesty in public office, and
his flight across the border to Canada. But Yale blots out
the latter record as not being that of the Barna Bidwell whose
classmates hastened, under the auspices of the Rev. Ezra
Styles, D.D., to enact his play as soon as written. His
attainments in scholarship made him a tutor at Yale in 1787,
and brought him, in 1805, from Brown University, the degree of
LL.D.
37
The American Dramatist
VIII
The characteristics which mark the drama of the colonial
period are worthy of consideration, merely because they repre-
sent the interests of playwrights who began the writing of
drama in America. It was Governor Robert Hunter who,
in 1714, is supposed to have been the first to put his pen to
paper in dramatic form. There is only one copy existent of
"Androboros: A B(i)ographical Farce." It had once be-
longed to David Garrick, John Philip Kemble, and the Duke
of Devonshire. It is now in the library of Mr. Henry E.
Huntington. The authorship of "Androboros" rests upon
the name of Hunter written on the title page. He was the
Royal Governor of the Colony of New York from 1710 to 1719.
The play may be regarded as a muckraking diatribe against
certain matters occurring in Trinity Parish, New York City.
A friend of Addison and Steele, the venomous wit of Hunter
played relentlessly with contemporary matters, Church poli-
tics, and colonial events. America's first satire was born of
contemporary interest, and couched in language of none too
polite a nature. The name "Androboros" signifies man-eater.
All told, these first beginnings are more vital in their mean-
ing if taken as social measure of the time rather than as
artistic value. Their literary merit is of second-hand signifi-
cance. Occasionally the eye of the colonial writer was caught
by the individuality of his local surroundings. But he was an
Englishman at heart. The peculiar tendency on the part of
one writer to discard as valueless to present discussion "The
Conquest of Canada", merely because its theme was not
local, is begging the question. All plays written by the
colonists are aloof from any "national" characteristics.
Because, as yet, they had had little time to nationalize, and
they were still in allegiance to Great Britain. All one can
hope to do with so slim a product is to call attention to its
infant intentions. These intentions are of much more value
than the plays themselves which are curiosities to be prized
largely as- curiosities.
38
CHAPTER THREE
THE DRAMATIST OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA
I
THE more one advances in the study of American Drama,
the more one is impressed with the fact that its bulk value is
social rather than æsthetic. Were there any outstanding
personalities for us to emphasize in our claim that we had an
American Drama of the past, we would unhesitatingly put
into the discard most of the plays we now resurrect in order
to show that we did have writers who early attempted to catch
those realistic characteristics which distinguished the individ-
uals of colonial life. But, after the small particulars are tabu-
lated, the art, the drama part of the product remains almost
nil. It has been pointed out by several painstaking research
workers that, from the very start, our rudimentary playwright
dealt with frontier characters, military characters, and public
officials all crudely handled, but none the less significantly
existent.
As feeling became rife in the colonies, as the rising tide of
bitterness pointed to the inevitable break between Great
Britain and her American possessions, temper grew in inten-
sity in the writing of the time. There has been noted the
change of fervor in "dialogue." The American Theatre was
now ready to reflect the great struggle between Patriot and
Tory. As significant in this respect as the broadside, the
patriotic ballad, the political brief, the drama of the Revolu-
tion-still lacking in art quality-overflowed with social
temper. One must regard the play of the Revolution in the
39
The American Dramatist
same way that Professor Moses Coit Tyler, in his "Literary
History of the American Revolution", regarded every other
form of native writing.
As far as the theatre itself was concerned, the change which
occurred was merely a shift in management. The manager
now wore a red coat; the actors became Majors of the
Guard, Captains of the Engineers, and Lieutenants of the
Regimental Foot. There were sufficient Loyalists in the
colonies to make the theatrical seasons of the war success-
ful. The papers of the period indicate that His Majestie's
officers were good players, were experimental in that they
brought to America for the first time plays which the Ameri-
can Company now exiled in Jamaica because of Congress's
Resolutions of 1774-had not ventured to give. Among
these were Fletcher's "Rule a Wife and Have a Wife", and
Sheridan's "The Rivals", the latter presented by Clinton's
Thespians.
The three phases of British theatricals in America were
each with their special distinction. Burgoyne in Boston
turned his dramatic talents to propaganda purposes, and
shocked the Massachusetts citizen by converting Faneuil
Hall into a playhouse. Howe gave charity performances in
New York and Philadelphia, and, in the latter city, at the
Southwark Theatre, Major André plied the brush as a
scenic artist, and supplied a landscape curtain, whose subject,
color, and perspective have been graphically described by
Durang. Clinton, however, for five years in New York, became
America's first successful commercial theatre manager. He
ran his theatre at a profit; his Thespians asked the coöpera-
tion of certain professional actors and reigning Tory belles;
André again became the much coveted artistic assistant, and
the seasons each offered their special novelties. The inhabi-
tants were made to feel the importance of these military per-
formances; they were besought to aid the theatre whenever
possible. If plays were needed and the records show they
were these plays were advertised for in the current papers,
in such terms as the following, the Royal Gazette, December
22, 1779:
40
The Dramatist of the Revolutionary Era
The managers of the theatre, understanding that a gentle-
man purchased a set of Garrick's Works from Mr. Robert-
son, printer, will be much obliged to that gentleman if he will
resign the purchase over to the theatre for the benefit of
charity, or lend them the particular volume that contains the
comedy of "Catherine and Petruchio.
دو
Oftentimes, performances were handicapped by the absence
of an actor on military duty.
The interdict of Congress, October 20, 1774, against extrav-
agance and dissipation, especially against gaming, cock-
fighting, exhibitions of shews, plays, and other expensive
diversions and entertainments" 1 virtually sealed the theatres
for the colonial soldiery, although I have seen somewhere
mention of Washington's disapproval of the act, and a descrip-
tion of his slipping off to some amusement. Nevertheless,
there must have been disregard of this, otherwise it would not
have been necessary for Congress, October 16, 1778, again to
specify its disapproval, in such set terms as the following:
Whereas, Frequenting playhouses and theatrical entertain-
ments has a fatal tendency to divert the minds of the people
from a due attention to the means necessary to the defense of
the country and the preservation of their liberties;
Resolved, That any person holding an office under the
United States who shall act, promote, encourage or attend
such play, shall be deemed unworthy to hold such office and
shall be accordingly dismissed.
Evidently the success of the British players had challenged
the ingenuity of the American soldiers; but there is also suffi-
cient evidence, in Seilhamer, from a letter of Gérard de Ray-
neval, first minister to the United States, dated November 24,
1778, that the warning was partly actuated by the Presby-
1 The actual wording was (Journal Continental Congress, 1774-1789. Ed., W.
C. Ford, 1, 78. Washington, 1904): "We will in our several stations, encourage
frugality, economy, and industry, and promote agriculture, arts, and the manufac-
tures of this country, especially that of wool; and will discountenance and dis-
courage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and
all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shews, plays and other expensive
diversions and entertainments."
4I
The American Dramatist
terians of the North. For some time Pennsylvania and
Maryland seem to have disregarded the orders of Congress.
SOME PLAYS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
1775. Warren, Mrs. Mercy.
1776. Authorship unknown.
The Group, a farce, in two acts.
As lately acted and as to be
reacted to the wonder of all
superior intelligences, nigh
headquarters at Amboyne.
New York, 1775.
Battle of Brooklyn, The. Farce,
in two acts, as it was performed
on Long Island on Tuesday,
the 27th day of August, 1776,
by the Representatives of the
Tyrants of America assembled
at Philadelphia.
1776. Brackenridge, Hugh Henry The Battle of Bunkers-Hill.
|
(1748-1816).
1776. Warren, Mrs. Mercy.
1776. Leacock, John.
Philadelphia, 1776.
The Blockheads; or, The Af-
frighted Officers. Boston,
1776. (Called forth by Bur-
goyne's "The Blockheads of
Boston.")
The Fall of British Tyranny; or,
American Liberty Triumphant.
Philadelphia, 1776.
1776. Brackenridge, Hugh Henry. The Death of General Montgom-
1779. Warren, Mrs. Mercy.
ery in Storming the City of
Quebec. Philadelphia, 1777.
The Motley Assembly. Boston,
1779.
II
The contest in satire between Loyalist and Royalist,
between Whig and Tory, began before the actual clash in
arms. It ran high, coincident with the event; it misrepre-
sented, prophesied, and the writers rushed into print, the
42
The Dramatist of the Revolutionary Era
"book of the play" being as damp in ink as the handbills
and broadsides which announced the political "news." The
challenges were left unanswered; no person escaped lampoon-
ing. With all their gayety, the British were ever on the alert
to let the Loyalists see that they discounted any serious
outcome of the conflict. There was sufficient Tory sentiment
in the colonies to flatter them in this respect. It is well to
make passing mention of the well known "Mischianza",
a spectacle worthy of some foreign court, whereby Howe's
soldiers registered their esteem for the retiring Commander,
even though he was being deposed under a cloud. Here
was America's first pageant, done with lavishness, and
with an extravagance supported by voluntary subscription.
André was the prime mover, the decorator par excellence.
The instigators did not seem to care for negative criticism of
the affair hurled at them from all quarters, both in Great
Britain and America. Even though Israel Maudit might
score Howe in his "Strictures on the Philadelphia Mischianza,
or Triumph upon leaving America Unconquered", the bril-
liancy of that performance which took place at the Wharton
House, on May 18, 1778, could not be dimmed. André's pen
was active; he designed the tickets, he made costume plates,
he shopped at the draper's, matching colored cloths. He
wrote to Miss Seward, May 23, 1778, "That our sentiments
might be the more unreservedly and unequivocally known, it
was resolved among us that we should give him as splendid an
entertainment as the shortness of time and our present situa-
tion would allow us." Then followed a detailed account.
The drama of the period is well represented by Mrs. Mercy
Warren's "The Adulateur" (1773) and "The Group" (1775);
Brackenridge's "The Battle of Bunkers-Hill" (1776) and
"The Death of General Montgomery" (1777); the Tory
satire, "A Cure for the Spleen" (1775); John Leacock's
"The Fall of British Tyranny" (1776); and Burgoyne's
"The Blockade." Mumford's satire, "The Patriots" (1798),
was directed against pretended patriots; the anonymous
"Battle of Brooklyn" (1776) presented a vulgar cartoon of
Washington and his officers. Naturally, there is a more per-
43
The American Dramatist
sistent dwelling upon contemporary events, and the dramatis
personæ are full of the war spirit, discussing the conflict in
tavern and drawing-room. There are rudimentary attempts.
to depict the Yankee character; negroes move in the back-
ground; the parson as a type holds a decided position; the
merchant, farmer, country justice, the congressional repre-
sentative all these move in a panorama which suggests the
very substance and color of the times.
In the colleges the rising tide of feeling against Great Britain
was nowhere more typically measured than at Princeton
(the College of New Jersey). In 1769, some of the students
formed an American Whig Society, Madison, Brackenridge,
Bradford, and Freneau writing satirical poems. "The Rising
Glory of America ", the combined effort of Brackenridge and
Freneau, was given when the two graduated, September 25,
1771. Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816) was a poor boy
at college; he raked together sufficient funds for his moderate
needs by tutoring. His was the difficult struggle for educa-
tion which characterized so many early Americans. At thir-
teen he had mastered Latin and Greek. He never could have
gone to Princeton had not President Witherspoon consented
to his taking two classes in payment for his tuition. There is
even a legend that he wrote for a certain young man a public
address, in exchange for which he was given a suit of clothes
and a cocked hat. He studied divinity after his graduation,
and became, in 1777, chaplain in the Revolutionary Army,
preaching political sermons on the battlefield. But before
that he taught school at an academy - Sommerset - in
Maryland, where, amidst a cultured society, his wit and
scholarship had free play.
While at the academy, Brackenridge put to good service.
his ability to write dialogue. His students needed much
patriotic entertainment. It is to be inferred from his dedi-
catory effusion to Richard Stockton, Esquire, that "The
Battle of Bunkers-Hill", written in heroic measure, was actu-
ally given, though no date is recorded. But that it was in-
tended largely as an exercise in oratory is not only evinced by
Brackenridge's own statement, but by the dialogue itself
+4
The Dramatist of the Revolutionary Era
which is rotund, and full of proper sentiments against tyr-
anny and in favor of the free-born spirit. Here we have
Warren, Putnam, and Gardiner against Gage, Howe, Bur-
goyne, and Clinton; here Britannia's troops realize that
"these Americans" are after all to be reckoned with. Brack-
enridge makes the British look upon the Patriot in the same
way Cockings made Montcalm regard Wolfe in "The Con-
quest of Canada." The piece was published in 1776, in the
midst of events.
Here, then, was America's first essayal at "educational
dramatics." Brackenridge hoped that his dialogues would
be used in other academies than his own. In 1777, he wrote
"The Death of General Montgomery", dedicated to Thomas
Mifflin, Esquire, and in the published book, addressed a sec-
tion, "The Author to the Public", as follows:
It is my request that the following Dramatic Composition
may be considered only as a school piece. For though it is
written according to the prescribed rules of the Drama, with
the strictest attention to the unities of time, place, and action,
yet it differs materially from the greater part of those modern
performances which have obtained the name of Tragedy. It
is intended for the private entertainment of Gentlemen of
taste, and martial enterprize, but by no means for the exhibi-
tion of the stage. The subject is not love but valour. I
meddle not with any of the effeminating passions, but conse-
crate my muse to the great themes of patriotic virtue, bravery
and heroism.
With respect to the particular merit of the piece, I have only
to say, that I flatter myself it would have been more deserving
of attention, had it been drawn up in less haste. It is found
by all who have attempted it, that at least one year is neces-
sary to the composition of a good Tragedy. The following
was made out at different intervals in the space of a few weeks,
and therefore, according to the rule before mentioned, it
must be supposed to come far short of perfection. Writing in
this way is my amusement, not my business. But here it may
be observed, that no man pays attention to the time spent in
composing, but to the merit of the performance when it makes
its appearance. Could not I have kept this small affair to my-
45
The American Dramatist
self some time longer, if after that period, it would have
been in my power to have produced it more elegant and
pleasing? I answer, that one great foundation of the merit
of any performance is its being seasonable. An oration,
eulogium, or production of any kind, in honour of our brave
countrymen who have fallen, or of those who do yet contend
in the glorious cause of freedom, is likely to do greater good
and will be more acceptable at present, than hereafter, when
the foe is entirely repulsed and the danger over.
For this reason I submit it in its present state to the candid
and generous, with my promise, that when it shall be in my
power to afford time to revise and amend it, I will endeavour
to give it to the world in a Second Edition, more correct and
finished.
The frame of mind here suggested, the attitude toward the
dramatic form, the realization of the merit of contemporane-
ousness are of value as illustrating the motives actuating
Brackenridge in his use of the pen, other than in the writing
of sermons. His ardor as a patriot was unquestioned. He
used always to travel with the Bible in his saddlebags;
licensed to preach, yet he was never ordained, his conscience
interfering. In 1781, he turned to Pittsburgh, having mean-
while studied law. He stood eloquently for the Federal
Constitution, and his later career was largely identified with
the bar of Pennsylvania.
As to the patriotic appeal formulated by Brackenridge in
heroic rhythms, the style is well measured in these few lines
addressed by Gardiner to his men at Bunkers-Hill:
Shall we, the sons of MASSACHUSETTS-BAY,
NEW HAMPSHIRE, and CONNECTICUT; shall we
Fall back, dishonour'd, from our native plains,
Mix with the savages, and roam for food,
On western mountains, or the desert shores,
Of Canada's cold lakes? or state more vile,
Sit down, in humble vassalage, content
To till the ground for these proud conquerors?
No, fellow soldiers, let us rise this day,
Emancipate, from such ignoble choice.
46
The Dramatist of the Revolutionary Era
III
Satire was no more effectively handled than by Mrs. Mercy
Warren (1728-1814), who, while she wrote several plays, like
"The Adulateur" and "The Retreat", before Burgoyne called
forth her venom, was never as partisan as she became in "The
Blockheads" and "The Group." In 1790, she issued a vol-
ume of poems, wherein she included "The Sack of Rome".
play, and "The Ladies of Castile ", dedicated to Washington.
In her preface, she confesses her penchant for "theatrical
amusement", and illustrates in her attitude the fact that
Puritan prejudice was against the theatre rather than against
dramatic form. She writes:
a
Theatrical amusements may, sometimes, have been prosti-
tuted to the purposes of vice; yet, in an age of taste and
refinement, lessons of morality, and the consequences of
deviation, may, perhaps, be as successfully enforced from the
stage, as by modes of instruction, less censured by the severe;
while, at the same time, the exhibition of great historical
events, opens a field of contemplation to the reflecting and
philosophic mind.
Here again we are given an excellent statement of the
motives driving our Revolutionary playwrights. I do not
intend, in this survey, to discuss individual dramas; they
are within reach of the student who cares to continue the
subject more minutely. There is nothing more dull than the
synopsis of a play whose value is more in the mental attitude
of the dramatist than in the play itself. This lady, who used
to wear a pompadour waist, trimmed with lace, whose sleeves
were adorned with puffings of satin, became noted more for
her use of satire than for the novelty of her plays. "The
Adulateur" is no whit less important than "The Group", and
they both are nil except as connected with the historical events
they satirize. They both had their disguises and their keys;
they both held to ridicule important persons, and no one
chuckled more over the thrusts direct than John Adams, who
corresponded vivaciously with Mrs. Warren, even though
47
The American Dramatist
later he was to resent her delineation of him in her history of
the American Revolution. Yet never did he swerve from the
belief that no more powerful pen was wielded at the period
than that directed by "the historical, philosophical, poetical,
and satirical consort of the then Colonel, since General James
Warren of Plymouth, sister of the great, but forgotten, James
Otis." Indeed, so closely identified was she with things satiri-
cal, that "The Motley Assembly" was attributed to her.
"The Adulateur" shows a method similar to "The Group",
though lacking in the strong "occasion" which called forth
the latter. Rees speaks of them both as political pamphlets
which helped to inflame the colonies, and bring resistance
to a head. Thus did Mrs. Warren set example for Mrs.
Stowe.
JJ
The crossing of swords with Burgoyne makes Mrs. Warren
of added picturesqueness. He was a no mean author himself.
One may still read his "The Heiress" (performed at Drury
Lane in 1786), his comic opera, "The Lord of the Manor
and his "Maid of the Oaks" (brought out by Garrick). But
unfortunately the manuscript of "The Blockade of Boston"
is not in existence. It was produced in Faneuil Hall and
Clapp, in "A Record of the Boston Stage", notes that, during
a performance, probably January 8, 1776, prior to the evacua-
tion of the city, a very curious moment occurred. In one
of its merriest scenes, a sergeant, without his hat, and in the
wildest confusion, suddenly rushed on the stage, and shouted
in a voice of thunder, "The rebels the rebels- - they're
attacking the Neck!" which the audience, supposing it to be
a part of the piece, applauded very loudly, being struck with
the soldier's highly natural acting. "A few minutes after-
wards, the beating of drums served to break the illusion, and
the scampering off of the actors put an end to the play."
1
This gives an adequate impression of the nearness of the
event. The piece was a burlesque, a cartoon, written with
that Tory spleen against Washington which marked "The
Battle of Long Island." Quickly, Mrs. Warren responded.
The play had been circulated, and she could answer specifically
1 Noted in the N. E. Chronicle, January 25, 1776.
48
The Dramatist of the Revolutionary Era
with "The Blockheads; or, The Affrighted Officers ", printed
in 1776. What did she say in her prologue?
Your pardon first I crave for this intrusion.
The topic's such it looks like a delusion;
And next your candour, for I swear and vow,
Such an attempt I never made till now.
But constant laughing at the Desp'rate fate,
The bastard sons of Mars endur'd of late,
Induc'd me thus to minute down the notion,
Which put my risibles in such commotion.
By Yankees frighted too! oh, dire to say!
Why Yankees sure at red-coats faint away!
Oh, yes They thought so too for lack-a-day,
Their genʼral turned the blockade to a play :
Poor vain poltroons - with justice we'll retort,
And call them blockheads for their idle sport.
Tory politicians came under the sharp lash of Mrs. Warren's
observation in "The Group", published the day before the
Battle of Lexington. It is well to underscore the event, for
then the lines may be judged in the light of their imminent
fire. "The Group" was sent in portions to General Warren,
who was on the battlefield (1775). The title-page indicates
that it was enacted near headquarters, at Amboyne. It was
anonymous, and those nearest Mrs. Warren showed reti-
cence and were in accord with her desire to remain unknown as
the authoress. The dramatis persone Hazlerod, Meagre,
Hateall, and others with their "swarm of court sycophants,
hungry harpies, and unprincipled danglers", are none other
than such noteworthy persons as Sir William Pepperell and
other public individuals. To the historian, such a document
is of more value than to the theatre chronicler; first-hand
impressions of North and Gage: first-hand temper, which even
mediocre poetry cannot, at this distance, wholly deprive of
warmth.
IV
If John Leacock wrote "The Fall of British Tyranny"
(1776), then he is the author of a chronicle play which is one
of the first, if not the first, in America. Washington, Lee,
49
The American Dramatist
and Putnam stand as though posterity had already placed
the laurel on their brows, invincible, with swords drawn, never
to be sheathed until the issue be decided. Thus, Washington
speaks, prompted by the embittered Leacock :
Finding they cannot conquer us, gladly would they make it
up by a voluntary free-will offering of a million of money in
bribes, rather than be obliged to relish the thoughts of sacri-
ficing their cursed pride and false honour, they sending over
to amuse us (to put us off our guard) a score or two of com-
missioners with sham negotiations in great state, to endeavour
to effect, by bribery, deception and chicanery, what they
cannot accomplish by force. Perish such wretches!-de-
tested be their schemes! - Perish such monsters! - a re-
proach to human understanding - their vaunted boasts and
threats will vanish like smoke, and be no more than like snow
falling on the moist ground, melt in silence, and waste away
-Blasted, forever blasted be the hand of the villainous
traitor that receives their gold upon such terms-
may he be-
come leprous, like Naaman, the Syrian, yea, rather like
Gehazi, the servant of Elisha, that it may stick to him for ever.
The scope of the scene situation indicates the chronicle.
character of "The Fall of British Tyranny" - St James',
Boston ("while the Regulars were flying from Lexington"),
overlooking Charlestown, in a chamber near Boston, where in
touching manner Clarissa learns of her husband's death, Nor-
folk, Montreal, and a camp at Cambridge. Politicians,
ministers, rustics, Whigs, and Tories all vie to lend atmosphere
to this document, 'Tis, indeed, a black picture Leacock gives
of the British.
Just as Mrs. Warren's satires required keys for the proper
understanding of their sentiments, and of the forceful measur-
ing of their cartoon value, so the author of "The Fall of British
Tyranny" aimed his shafts at specific persons. We offer the
identifications as follows: Lord Paramount (Mr. Bute);
Lord Mock Law (Mr. Mansfield); Lord Hypocrite (Mr.
Dartmouth); Lord Poltron (Mr. Sandwich); Lord Catspaw
(Mr. North); Lord Wisdom (Mr. Chatham); Lord Religion
(Bishop of St. Asaph); Lord Justice (Mr. Camden); Lord
50
The Dramatist of the Revolutionary Era
Patriot (Mr. Wilkes); Bold Irishman (Mr. Burke); Judas
(Mr. Hutchinson); Lord Boston (Mr. Gage); Elbow Room
(Mr. Howe); Mr. Caper (Mr. Burgoyne). Against them
the qualities of Washington, Lee, and Putnam are brought.
Bearing the "key" in mind, new meaning is discoverable in
the dialogue. Lord Paramount, alone, struts about, solilo-
quizing:
'Tis I that move the mighty engine of royalty, and with
the tincture of my somniferous opiate or (in the language of
a courtier) by the virtue of my secret influence, I have lulled
the axletree to sleep, and brought on a pleasing insensibility.
Let their champion, Lord Wisdom, groan, he is now
become feeble and impotent, a mere cripple in politics; their
Lord Patriot's squint has lost its basilisk effect and the bold
Irishman may bellow the Keenew till he's hoarse, he's no more
when compar'd to me than an Irish salmon to a Scotch her-
ring: I care not a bawbee for them all. I'll reign in Britain,
I'll be king of their counsels, and chief among the princes.
And no less with marks of identification is brought into
full relief the person of Lord Wisdom, who says:
View both houses of parliament, and count the number of
Tyrants, Jacobites, Tories, Placemen, Pensioners, Sycophants,
and Panders. View the constitution, is she not disrob'd and
dismantled? is she not become like a virgin deflower'd?
View our fleet and armies commanded by bloody, murdering
butchers! View Britain herself as a sheep without a shepherd!
And lastly view America, for her virtue bleeding and for
her liberty weltering in her blood!
But these pictures were no blacker than the British view of
America. Every shade of feeling was registered, belittling the
motives and the personality of the colonials. History has up-
set the British prophesies of conquest, but the bitter feeling
put into the dialogue is still felt and is of value to the student
of social atmosphere. There were half-hearted patriots, too,
who looked on satirically at the efforts of the Whigs; who
sneered whenever events were dark for the Continental Army;
the force of their disapproval descended upon the broad
shoulders of Washington, and was registered against him by
51
The American Dramatist
the dramatist. On the latter score "The Motley Assembly"
(1779) (at first attributed to Mrs. Warren) was aimed at high
society in Boston. Captain Aid blows into Mrs. Flourish's,
where she is chatting with a Tory, Mr. Rant. The Captain,
with wineglass in hand, proposes a toast to "his most Christian
Majesty, and godlike, glorious Washington." His ardor is
coldly received.
"You have not seen all mankind, sir," retorts Mrs. Flourish.
"I believe Mr. Washington, or General Washington, if you
please, is a very honest, good kind of a man, and has taken
infinite pains to keep your army together, and I wish he may
find his account in it. But doubtless there are his equals
so say no more.”
Aid is not to be muffled by such inconsequent treatment of
his chief. "If you meant that as a compliment, Madam," he
declares, “it is really so cold a one, that it has made me shiver.
I will, therefore, with your leave, drop the subject, and take
another glass of wine." The patriotic feeling of this farce is
uppermost. Its "key" lampooned individuals under the
guise of fictitious names. The Harvard copy of the play
identifies them. Boston society is pictured as being sadly
"rakish." The professed patriot is regarded without pity.
What says Careless, a sea captain of hearty bearing:
In mix'd assembly, see, they crowd the place;
Stain to the country, to their sires, disgrace;
Hell in some hearts, but pleasure in each face.
All all are qualified to join this tribe,
Who have a hundred dollars to subscribe.
The real and fictitious patriots are again pictured and the
latter again flayed by the dramatic pen of Col. William Mun-
ford in "The Patriots."
"The Battle of Brooklyn” (1776) — a Tory view of Conti-
nental leaders does not give much credit to the rebel chiefs
who are both cowards and selfish opportunists. What part
the shoemaker, the rum retailer, the farmer, the parson, and
the thief play in the fight for liberty is broadly sketched:
they stop at nothing in their smallness of human nature.
52
The Dramatist of the Revolutionary Era
Washington is dragged to a low level before his own men,
irritating his associates by his vacillation and incompetency.
He thus speaks before Putnam, Sullivan, and Stirling:
General Putnam's wisdom in ordering that road to be
flanked with breast-works, is now apparent. Lord Stirling,
with his usual intrepidity and precision, has reconnoitred their
numbers, which he finds to be about seven thousand. Gen-
eral Sullivan has appointed the hill with exquisite judgment;
where the brigades under him and Lord Stirling, are to take
post, and act as occasion may require. Twelve thousand
men are allotted for the service of sending them back to their
ships. I, with eight thousand, will stay within these lines,
to be called out to the slaughter and pursuit; unless our pres-
ent deliberations alter this plan of operation. My Lord, the
Council expects your opinion.
That his point of view is not unfraught with duplicity is
clearly seen by the following:
My apprehensions from the King's troops, believe me, are
trifling, compared with the risque we run, from the people of
America at large. The tyranny, that our accursed usurpation
has made necessary, which they now feel, and feeling, I fear,
will soon make them see thro' the disguise.
That the Commander comes to hot words with his officers
who have not the highest opinion of his ability, is suggested
in the following scene.
PUTNAM (to WASHINGTON). This is no Boston work, Sir;
they are in earnest! Orders must be immediately issued
for the boats to be in readiness, to carry our people over
to New-York.
WASHINGTON. There is time enough for that, General
Putnam, after we have defended these works. The
account of the battle is what I wish to hear.
PUTNAM. Defend, Sir! we cannot defend these works;
our people won't defend them: if they do not see the
boats; they will swim over, they won't be hemm'd in to
be made minc'd of. If you don't give your orders, I will
give the orders myself.
This is too much for Washington, who wishes to be always
on the credit side. He replies:
53
The American Dramatist
If it must be so, the orders shall originate with me; and as
soon as you have satisfied me on the fate of the day, proper
measures shall be taken.
"A Cure for the Spleen" (1775), probably by Jonathan
Mitchell Sewall, is a well written Tory tract, with the spirit
of New England sharply delineated from the angle of the tap-
room. It declares itself to be a conversation on the times,
over a friendly tankard and pipe, and those who participate
are a country parson, a country justice, an innkeeper, a deacon,
a barber, a Quaker, and a late Representative. Here the
gossip spirit of the country store - New England's real public
hall is entertainingly measured. The arguments advanced
by the several persons are interesting in the light of how events
turned out the vacillating Continental Congress, the foolish
credulity of the people as to liberty - took a turn which the
Tory did not reckon with and could not eventually gainsay.
But, while the issue was trembling in the balance, the Tory
dramatists made the most of it for propaganda sake. These
men who are brought together over pipe and ale are well dif-
ferentiated; they have their rural characteristics well marked.
These small points in themselves are worthy excellences of
our early dramatists: they are materials from which the past,
in all its human quality, is reconstructed. But they are
not enough to make a play. The Revolutionary writers -
Whig and Tory -were special pleaders. Into the mouths
of their characters, they put matters of contemporary interest;
nothing universal was said, nor phrased in a way to give dis-
tinction of style. The structure of these plays was not inevi-
table; it was opportune, to serve a purpose, to prove a
But the fact remains: there was an attempt at real-
istic treatment, there was an effort made to picture all sorts
and conditions of people, there was a generous use of cur-
rent event, there was a portraiture of American character,
lowly and better conditioned. The very fact that the Revo-
lutionary plays did not attempt to be crudely universal,
but specifically partisan, makes them of inestimable value
as human documents. The fervor of this partisan spirit
case.
54
The Dramatist of the Revolutionary Era
gave them style which they might otherwise never have
possessed.

SOME PRE-NATIONAL PLAYS
1784. Markoe, Peter (1735-1792).
The Patriot Chief. Philadelphia, 1784.
1784. Warren, Mrs. Mercy.
1785. Bidwell, Barnabas.
The Ladies of Castile. Boston, 1790.
The Mercenary Match. New Haven, 1785.
1798. Munford, Colonel Robert.
The Patriots. Petersburg, 1798.
55
CHAPTER FOUR
WILLIAM DUNLAP AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
I
THE beginnings of our real American Drama are identified
with the names of two men: William Dunlap (1766-1839)
and Royall Tyler (1757-1826). The former was more of an
innovator, his life was more continuously spent in the cause
of the theatre; but, strange to say, it was from the latter that
Dunlap received the impulse to write plays. The variety of
Dunlap's attainments as a dramatist, a manager, an historian.
-to say nothing of the position he occupies in the early
history of painting and design in this country makes him
a significant figure for study in many directions. His con-
nection with the early actors as a manager; his friendship
with our first literary workers, like Charles Brockden Brown,
James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving; his cor-
respondence with such playwrights as J. N. Barker and M. M.
Noah, give a first-hand value to his impressions, and hence,
though the "History of the American Theatre" was written
when he was beginning to fail in health and memory, though
one must account for prejudice on his part, and imperfect
examination of the facts, there is no better source for early
theatre atmosphere and color than this enthralling book.
While we are not concerned with the record of his activity
with the brush, there was even here a touch of theatricalism,
not in the pains he took to become a copyist of Benjamin
West, but in the religious scenic canvases on a large scale he
attempted for exhibition along a circuit, a museum "stunt'
organized so as to swell his very meagre income.
56
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries
As told by Oral Coad, the "Life of William Dunlap" is a
very fascinating record of unremitting effort to meet the
obligations of life, and at the same time to maintain a certain
standard in art and literature. The one eye that he had was
centered with unending watchfulness on every form of
theatre art that might satisfy his clientele. His reading was
of great variety; his industry in adapting for use the things
he thought might appeal to the stage was enormous.
He was
largely influenced by the style of drama he witnessed when he
visited England. His discrimination as a dramatist was
evident in the way he brought the foreign drama to the
American stage. There being no real check on appropriation
of foreign work without consent or purchase, it will be seen
as Mr. Coad discovered — that while, in many instances,
Dunlap went to the original, whether French or German, he
often made use of the best to be found in the translations which
may have been published beforehand in London. But in some
instances, with an instinct which was dramatic, Dunlap intro-
duced improvements.
If, however, the true value of Dunlap is to be estimated, one
must see how far he bent this universal habit of imitation to
his own needs. He made use of all the forms of drama then
in fashion sentimental comedy, ballad-opera, historical
dialogue, romantic tragedy, and tragi-comedy. If one would
know Dunlap, one must sense the characteristics of the Eng-
lish dramatists then in vogue: O'Keeffe, Garrick, and such.
plays as "Douglas" and "Venice Preserved" are the key.
One must also reckon with certain dominant notes in the
prose literature of the day. He read Mrs. Anne Radcliffe ;
he was familiar with the "terroristic literature" of the Horace
Walpole school. But his culture was such that he could draw
as well on Elizabethan and Greek literature.
Mr. Coad, in his "study ", is to be commended for the
way in which he notes, wherever necessary, those various
influences which had effect upon Dunlap's work. In fact,
Dunlap himself does not hesitate to do the same. But there
scems to have been dominant in him none of the weary
mechanical effort of the "hack" writer. He possessed a
57
The American Dramatist
cramatic Authors of actors of great!
the Boxes from the principal

Ieturnged
22.
& Great Brition
ot to af Chamatic Authors of Curope
ay
adid
15722
to the exclusion of by Acwrsty adopted it. We
went brother to If Theatre of determined
business.
Jan 7 21st Sunday
اختر خود
of self
On monday Cost, Hidghen:
met the Committee as appointed at

។
Bir Parlisle pollock's house and the result of if
was that we should adimet the pro-
muting

-prietors gratis,
in retisch
return an
talked a
ad
the committer
怂
​allouring us
The remaind
abatement, of per centage for=
=merly agreed on, during the time this re=
aqulation shall be in foke, which is to be bele
upon, as an exfediment. The
experiment. The commetter
of their intentions were in the high-
= est degree liberal towards us.
of this week has been passed in unavailling
efforts to forward the frushing of a theatre
by we find at the close of they went that we
must wait another. The company have
ree the disspointment with apparent good
-nature. I have been obliged to borrow
money to pay Cotters debt of have heard
nothing concanny
な
​Fon. I took up
the
07:500, yesterday. Gamitz Ten lyh
hack been very friendlyl. Wegnet and
Facsimile Page from the Diaries of William Dunlap, in the possession of
the New York Historical Society.
58
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries

I stared in 32
but he came not;
I will see him myself." I stred
my room most of the day,
bening "Earl of Epex of All the world's a stage
in the Phouse 480317
6. Mr Hallam
D.
was on the stage at rehear-
but spoke not to
morn
-sal all the name of Jefferson had some
Hoshinoon
attereation this mobining about the ad=
dition which Jefferson Isa
み
​was promes=
=ed to him by Podphuron for his wardrobe
$ 2. Hodgkinson tatted in a
manner
cavalier
and Jefferson on his
on. Jues position re=
told him not to post his name
- Jussal; told him Pnot to
The belts for The
in
Which Swisherson
hem he should not & interniald or said that
g.
he wanted not his services.
I afterwards
bord Hefferson not. to determine rashly, this
I would speak & Hodgkinson agamon
the subject, that
concerned
tu
sum 442
my
interest was afrensu
Strohlodyhunsong and that
should not by ing
stion
question
consent partres. I had a conversation.
soon after with Hodgkinson, he said he mund
red not the money but differen questions
Tsaid
veracity, Il said no, only his mem=
His
Facsimile Page from the Diaries of William Dunlap, in the possession of
the New York Historical Society.
59
The American Dramatist
retentive mind. Often, this fact got him into trouble: much
of his plagiarism was due to the ease with which he fell into
appropriating lines by others. This is a fault with many of
the American dramatists. Boker was thoroughly honest in his
writing. But, line by line, there is much in "Francesca da
Rimini" which makes us start in recognition, if we happen to
know our Shakespeare. As Dunlap said in his preface to
"The Archers": "Should the reader meet with thoughts,
expressions, or even a line, which is not new, I hope he will
acquit me of any intention to impose on him; and consider it
rather as the effect of a treacherous memory. For instance,
the line of Portia's 'So many widows weep their husbands
slain'-
since the printing of the first sheet, I understand to
be the property of Lady Randolph, with only the trifling
alteration of 'How' into 'So." "
Whatever his shortcomings, therefore, William Dunlap
may truly be accounted the Father of the American Drama.
While his accomplishment was not high, his ambition was.
And, after a reading of his "History of the American
Theatre", one realizes that this manager had a commendable.
ideal. He was always watchful of virtue, according to the
lights of the day; he was always sensitive in recording expres-
sions of patriotic sentiment; his eye as a painter was ever
appealed to by the scene. And he was ever alert to bring to
the stage, and focus upon it what, from his full knowledge of
world literature, he deemed would enrich it. He was a man
of his time in taste, subject to the demands of the actors of the
period. One cannot, as I have suggested, quite determine the
value of fragmentary dialogue such as Dunlap's interlude,
"Darby's Return", without knowing something of the acting
capabilities of the then contemporary theatre. One must take
into full account the theatre casts of the day and know some-
thing of the individual eccentricities of the actors. There is
some excuse, therefore, if the historian of the American Drama
dwells sometimes insistently on contemporary theatrical
history as well. Dunlap himself called "Darby's Return" a
"dramatic trifle", though it was raised to glory by the pleasur
able reaction of the newly elected President of the United
60
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries
States, George Washington. The ballad-operas, or musical
plays, which have come down to us with their slim story, their
undecorative dialogue, their sudden lyrical turn, are difficult
to measure in print. Yet all the playwrights of the period
of Dunlap wrote them: Peter Markoe, Susannah Rowson,
J. N. Barker, Samuel Woodworth, and others used the model.
Dunlap himself contributed to the form in "Darby's Return",
"The Archers", "Sterne's Maria", "The Wild Goose Chase"
"The Knight of the Guadalquiver", and "The Glory of
Columbia." J. H. Payne's "Clari" was of such a form, and it
was in this that "Home, Sweet Home" was sung for the first
time. Royall Tyler was a librettist of the same kind. One
finds Sonneck, in his important contribution, "Early Opera
in America", declaring that the musical form for these libret-
tos was similarly fixed. He writes:
If the music to Royall Tyler's libretto, "May Day in Town;
or, New York in an Uproar", was "compiled from the most
eminent masters with an overture and accompaniments",
it must not be supposed that this procedure was characteris-
tic of primitive conditions in America. Such pasticcios were
quite the rage and the proper thing in England. Not that the
English composers lacked sufficient ideas it must be insisted
that they were men of considerable talent, and an English
historian will not find it very difficult to do his countrymen
full justice in this respect in a comprehensive work which
does not yet exist but the powerful influence of the "Beg-
gar's Opera", the classic among English pasticcios, was still
at work.
One sees how important it is for the student, who might
condemn the seemingly trivial forms of such entertainment,
as so many of the musical plays were in the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, to measure the social and theatrical
influences shaping these forms. Coad calls attention to the
effect of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy and tragedy of fate.
on Dunlap's "The Fatal Deception." The value in a com-
parative study of literature is that it not only establishes the
source but it likewise measures the cultural scope of the
dramatist. Dunlap claims that he had read all the plays of
61
The American Dramatist
English dramatic literature, and, in his "To the Public",
written for the 1310 edition of "The Italian Father", he says:
"Those who are well versed in old English dramatic literature,
will perceive that the author has enriched his work from these
obsolete sources without forfeiting his claim to originality in
composition." A study of Dunlap, therefore, necessitates a
watchful comparison of his plays and their background.
There was little strikingly original about Dunlap: he nearly
always had some source. Coad adopts the method com-
mendably in his "Life." One recognizes how important it is
to determine Dunlap's originality—if there was any in his
adequate translations, by knowing, not alone the original
play from which he drew, but the numberless variations of
the same play by others. Whether Caigniez or G. de Pixéré-
court, the English versions were first read. It is well to
note that Dunlap, according to Coad, in "The Voice of Na-
ture" (February, 1803), introduced the first French melo-
drama to New York, thus opening the gates to a flood which
was to overspread the American stage for many a day.
II
There is not a phase of the early American Drama that could
not be made the subject of a special treatise. To my mind
these diverse channels through which flow the various
attempts to express certain interests, certain moods-
whether of romantic comedy or terror are more significant
than the plays themselves. We have had students tracing the
Gothic element in American Literature before 1835; we have
had others studying the realistic presentation of American
character in native American plays prior to eighteen-seventy.
There is still more work to be done in this special form of
criticism. But every treatment shows that the movement is
bigger than the subject-matter of the individual plays. These
channels of interest, which are popularly called fads, attracted
groups of playwrights who were imitative, who followed the
fashions. Dunlap entered this field of the Gothic on the side
of literature and of painting. His canvas, "Death on the
62
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries
Pale Horse", is in the tradition; so are his plays, "Fontain-
ville Abbey", "The Knight's Adventure", "Ribbemont.
The contemporary dramatists of his time resorted on all oc-
casions to the supernatural: John Burk, Hutton, Hillhouse,
Turnbull, and others. The attractiveness of it was in the air,
but, as Mr. Coad has significantly said, the American tempera-
ment transformed the Gothic as it was found in foreign
example. "It is plain," he writes, "that the dominant influ-
ence in American Gothic drama was the 'explained superna-
turalism' that Mrs. Radcliffe popularized. Approximately
four-fifths of the plays written during our period that might
be classed as Gothic are free from actual supernaturalism, but
gain their effect through setting and mysterious occurrences
that arise from natural causes." It is not strange that Dun-
lap should come under the influence of the literature that
popularized it, and that later was to claim the best efforts of
Poe and Hawthorne, even as in England it claimed the atten-
tion of Scott and Coleridge, who made good use of it. After
all, "Rip Van Winkle" is not entirely drawn from the Catskill
Mountains, but was partly brought there by Irving's knowl-
edge of German folk superstition: a supernaturalism trans-
planted from a foreign source to an American scene.
Our playwrights were imitative in psychological treatment,
in the lighting of the American background, as witness Cooper.
They did not know it as Gothic influence; they simply recog-
nized the romance of it, the powerful effectiveness of it, the
melodramatic character of it. They mixed it with their his-
tory because in their history there was a great deal of the
Gothic. Salem during witchcraft days was a hot-bed of
Gothic material; the American Indian brought ample folk-
lore colored with it.
Thus, we have seen Dunlap, both in his ballad-operas and in
his Gothic dramas, following in the channel of the day. His
interest in Kotzebue (1761-1819) might be accounted for in
similar manner. When the time came for him to put history
into his plays, he had less to copy, yet a great deal to be watch-
ful of. There was little propaganda spirit in what he wrote
for the stage- although he possessed definite political
63
The American Dramatist
opinions he was looking out for the interests and sensitivities
of his audience. In his Preface to "André" (1798) he states
his position toward contemporary material of such character.
He writes:
More than nine years ago the Author made choice of the
death of Major André as the subject of a Tragedy, and part
of what is now offered to the public was written at that time.
Many circumstances discouraged him from finishing his Play,
and among them must be reckoned a prevailing opinion that
recent events are unfit subjects for tragedy. These discour-
agements have at length all given way to his desire of bringing
a story on the Stage so eminently fitted, in his opinion, to
excite interest in the breasts of an American audience.
Then Dunlap becomes philosophical in his attitude toward
historical materials, and adds:
In exhibiting a stage representation of a real transaction, the
particulars of which are fresh in the minds of many of the
audience, an author has this peculiar difficulty to struggle
with, that those who know the events expect to see them all
recorded; and any deviation from what they remember to be
fact, appears to them as a fault in the poet; they are disap-
pointed, their expectations are not fulfilled, and the writer is
more or less condemned, not considering the difference be-
tween the poet and the historian, or not knowing that what is
intended to be exhibited is a free poetical picture, not an exact
historical portrait.
Thus does he explain the handling of his materials in the
light of public sensitiveness. But there is another point to
consider. Dunlap writes:
Still further difficulties has the Tragedy of "André" to sur-
mount, difficulties independent of its own demerits, in its way
to public favor. The subject necessarily involves political
questions; but the Author presumes that he owes no apology
to any one for having shown himself an American.
Sketching the stage history of the subject-matter of
"André", Professer Brander Matthews, in an introductory
essay to Dunlap's play, issued as a reprint by the Dunlap
Gif
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries
Society, calls attention to the nearness of events handled by
the dramatist. The play was produced March 30, 1798.
André was hanged October 2, 1780. Arnold and Washington
were still alive. "The play was printed," explains Dunlap
in his "History", "and is forgotten. A portion of it was
incorporated with a holiday drama which the author after-
wards put together, and called 'The Glory of Columbia -
her Yeomanry', which was likewise published, and is occasion-
ally murdered for the amusement of holiday fools." One can
thus see from this that Dunlap did not possess over-enthusiasm
for the historical celebration, though he was called upon
several times to keep pace with the taste of the patriotic
crowd. In the 1812 edition of "Yankee Chronology", he
declares that "The song of Yankee Chronology was written
for the fourth of July last, excepting the last verse. Upon the
arrival of the news of the victory obtained by Captain Isaac
Hull, of the Constitution, over the English frigate, the Guer-
rière, Mr. Cooper called upon the writer and requested an
additional verse, and an introductory interlude. My wishes
were too much in unison with his to allow of hesitation. On
the anniversary of the evacuation of this place, another verse
was requested and given; and the writer would be happy to
evince his gratitude to every defender of his country's rights,
by adding for each a tribute of applause, till his song outdid
Chevy-Chase in number of verses.
ور
Dunlap was too closely in touch with the theatre to deny it
the popular concessions it always asks the dramatist to make.
Nor does it seem that the actors were slow in going to the
managers and dramatists of the day and telling them what
was best to do. Both Wignell and Cooper thus showed no
hesitation in pointing the way to Dunlap. For he was
eager to be sure of public favor; he walked cautiously for all
the innovations and experiments he may have made.
The unfortunate circumstances of his later life, where he had
to fight against penury, made him use all his resources. The
work with his brush, in this respect, was better than the work
with his pen as a dramatist. He did an immense amount of
creative planning: considering the biographies he prepared,
65
The American Dramatist
his art writings and records of the stage; considering his
theatre management and the details attendant thereon, he
stands a very dominant figure in the theatre of his period,
the theatre of national beginnings. He was never stodgy in
his outlook; he was eager for innovation, quick to see the
advantages of novelty. In 1830, he wrote a foreword to "A
Trip to Niagara." In it he said :
The following Farce, for, be it remembered, it makes pre-
tensions to no higher character, was written at the request of
the Managers, and intended by them as a kind of running
accompaniment to the more important product of the Scene-
painter. The author has not hesitated to use any material,
not already appropriated to the drama, which might answer
the important purpose of keeping the audience, or spectators,
in good humour, while the scenery and machinery were in
preparation; but the best jokes, he believes, were never
book'd before. The plan of making the prejudiced traveller
owe his cure to one of his own countrymen, prevents (or was
so intended) any disagreeable nationalities, and serves the
further purpose of giving the author an excuse for the imper-
fections of the French, or Yankee character, as the representa-
tive of both is an Englishman. As his Frenchman is no
Frenchman, and his Yankee an Englishman, he gains this
important advantage, that any mistake of idiom will be
characteristic.
It is well to call attention to this because, like Steele Mac-
Kaye, we find here that Dunlap is interested in a forward-
moving type of entertainment. Coad bases his description
upon accounts in the New York Evening Post, November 28,
1828, et seq. I quote as follows:
It was a farce, written to exploit a new scenic device called
the Eidophusicen or Moving Diorama, by which a series of
scenes could be displayed in rapid succession, so as to produce
the illusion of actually passing the objects represented. The
Diorama was already in use at the Park in connection with
Moncrieff's "London and Paris", but the Bowery threw its
rival into the shade by the size and magnificence of the spec-
tacle involved in "A Trip to Niagara.
>>
66
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries
The plan was at the moment thoroughly in accord with the
mood of Dunlap, who believed in pictorial effects in painting,
and was finishing one of his large religious canvasses for exhi-
bition. For this theater panorama, artists were being sent up
the Hudson, picturing in eighteen scenes the beauties of the
river. Coad records that twenty-five thousand square feet
of painted area were thus used.
III
The career of William Dunlap may be considered from
many angles. There are around him many social atmos-
pheres. In all departments of activity, where he touched,
he was either the centre of interesting events, or was himself
an interesting event. He was born at a vital period in the
history of the country, February 19, 1766; and Perth Amboy,
where he uttered his first infant protest, was the capital of the
Province of New Jersey, a garrison town with a picturesque
aristocracy. He was old enough to have the Revolution
thoroughly impressed upon his mind, and, when his family
themselves Loyalists moved to New York, in 1777, he at-
tended the theatre managed by British redcoats. He came to
know Washington and played the flute before the great man;
he also painted his portrait. His trip abroad, in 1784, gave
him the benefit of Benjamin West's influence on his art, and
brought him in contact with the English theatre of the period
of Siddons, Jordan and Kemble. It was on his return to
America that Dunlap found the town talking about Royall
Tyler's "The Contrast." The spark, either of jealousy or
emulation, became lit in Dunlap, and he sat him down to write
the comedy, "The Modest Soldier; or, Love in New York."
Now enters the theater of the time into Dunlap's life, and
it is not for us here to repeat what he has written in his "His-
tory." In May, 1796, he began his career as director of a
playhouse in association with Hallam and Hodgkinson. The
John Street Theatre, in New York, and the Park Theatre, in
the same city, became scenes of his ceaseless activity. These
were the acting days of Cooper and Mrs. Merry. They were
67
The American Dramatist
also the days of uncertain fights against yellow fever. And if
Dunlap lose money, he might well have laid the blame largely
to circumstances, like the dreaded epidemic, rather than
to his tireless work as director. For no one in the theatre
blamed him; the records indicate that most of his contempo-
raries had the greatest respect for him. The fact is, Dunlap,
under all circumstances of bad luck and poverty, held his
friends by sheer force of personality. And he never seemed
to be downed by the ill turn of condition. He attacked his
painting with the same power that he did the theatre. He left
no stone unturned to better his financial condition. For
theatre management had made him a bankrupt. He met
President Jefferson, and from Mrs. Madison obtained the
loan of a portrait to make a miniature of the First Democrat.
At the request of T. A. Cooper, he became manager, in 1806, of
the Park Theatre, and, as though this were not enough, began
planning immediately a ten-volume edition of his plays.
Only three volumes can be traced. Then entered Stephen
Price into the management of the Park, and the dreams of
Cooper went to pieces. Dunlap resigned. Quite in accord
with the custom of the time, he became enamored with the
idea of establishing a magazine, the Monthly Recorder, that
went through five numbers in 1813, and then expired, thus to
join many another such literary attempt. Thereafter, Dun-
lap's ventures in painting of large canvases became his great
occupation. It is profitable to read his manuscript diaries,
to note the varied alertness of the man, despite his failing
health and the constant urge for income to support his family.
North and South he travelled, even seeking employment for
a while in Canada. From 1822-1825 he press-agented his own
religious paintings. He was an important factor in the art
development of the day, and did much for the establishment
of the National Academy of Design, with Morse, Peale,
Ingham, and others. It was after this that a second period
of playwriting fell upon him, a period when the "History of
the American Theatre" was issued. It was in 1833 (February
28) that he was given a benefit which netted him over
twenty-five hundred dollars. He died in New York, Green-
68
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries
wich Lane, September 28, 1839, and was buried in Perth
Amboy.
IV
The nondramatic writings of William Dunlap were mani-
fold in their interest, and measure of his friendships and pro-
fessional associations. He was equally alert in estimating
his literary contemporaries, his art associates like Stuart, and
his stage companions, like George Frederick Cooke. His
interest in history found outlet in school writing and larger
research. As a contributor to the magazines, he was by no
means inactive. He also ventured several times into fiction,
attempting the novel form, and was often asked to write book
reviews. His canvases hang in many Museums of Art. Mr.
Coad's list of paintings records twenty-five miniatures and
twenty oil portraits. Though some of his plays are direct in
their dialogue, sure in their progressive development, and
interesting in their plot and motivation - I refer particularly
to "The Father; or, American Shandyism" and "Leicester
دو
their value is more nearly that of exemplifying certain in-
fluences in American Drama, than that of literary excellence.
His "André" is the best of the André plays - far better than
John Burk's historical fustian. And, as one reads Dunlap's
dramas, one realizes that his sense of the theatre was more un-
erring than was that of any of his immediate contemporaries.
He was a man of distinct culture, he was well read, he was a
sociable person, taking part in the club life of the period.
He was a prejudiced party who is not that is so actively
engaged in competitive work? in his recording of theatre
history, much of it written from memory, but all of it largely
first-hand narrative. He could moralize about the theatre as
well as paint a portrait in words, which latter virtue pointed
to no mean critical ability. "This excellent old man", Rees
called him, but, in 1845, the name of Dunlap, so Rees declared,
was sinking into obscurity. "I enquired at a book-stand the
other day," he writes, "for Dunlap's 'History of the American
Stage', and the man told me that there was no such book!
Nor had he ever heard of the name. What a commentary
69
The American Dramatist
WILLIAM DUNLAP* (1766-1839)
For full bibliographies see Oral S. Coad's "William Dunlap",
Dunlap Society, 1917.
The Father; or, Ameri-
can Shandyism.
Darby's Return.
Leicester.
Fontainville Abbey.
André.
The Glory of Columbia
Her Yeomanry.
Yankee Chronology, A
Song.
John Street Theatre,
New York, Septem-
ber 7, 1787.
John Street Theatre,
New York, Novem-
ber 24, 1789.
In "Dramatic Works",
Vol. 1, Philadelphia,
1806.
John Street Theatre,
New York, February
17, 1795.
Park Theatre, New
York, March 30,
1798.
Park Theatre, New
York, July 4, 1803.
Park Theatre, New
York, July 4, 1812.
William Dunlap and By Oscar Wegelin.
His Writings.
Diaries (in manuscript). By William Dunlap.
Representative
Literary Collector,
7:69-76, 1904.
New York Histor-
ical Society.
Plays By Montrose J. Moses. New York: E. P.
by American Dram-
atists.
A History of the Amer- By A. H. Quinn.
ican Drama.
Cambridge History of Bibliography.
American Literature.
Dutton & Co.
1918. Vol. I.
New York: Har-
per & Brothers.
Chapter
1923.
IV.
New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons.
1917. Vol. I.
*The table here inserted, and succeeding tables, or "chronologies", attempt to
suggest, in each case, a few distinctive plays of the individual author, and a few
serviceable references to his work.
70
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries
upon our native literature; the puniest thing written across
the water is republished here, and read with avidity while
numerous American MSS. are lying upon our bookseller's
shelves, awaiting the un-approachable period for the poor
devils to raise money to have them published." The value
of Dunlap to-day is different; he has come into his own in the
history of the American Drama. His "record" of the
American Theatre brings more at auction in its American issue
than in its London. But there has not been sufficient interest
manifested in him to issue his Diaries which, still in manuscript,
are full of comment and color, revelatory of his temper and
temperament.
The "History" is a source-book of unending enjoyment.
Let us grant that, in the scholarly sense, Dunlap was not
given to subject his statements to strict verification. There
are, nevertheless, a highmindedness to the narrative, an ample
perspective, a rich comprehension of the theatre in all its
phases, which are quite remarkable, in view of the crude
conditions of the theatre at the time. With no effort, he was
able to bring to his work a familiarity with the literature of
many countries, and he possessed a sense of the dignity of the
theatre as a social institution. He was always eager in his
discussion of national aspects of the drama, and he seems to
have had a desire to be inclusive of the entire country in his
examination, rather than confine himself to the section he
knew best. His bibliographical examination of American
plays is the first of its kind, and, in his narrative, there is evi-
dence that he sought facts from the dramatists themselves.
The student of American Drama is peculiarly fortunate in
respect to the personal narratives of early theatrical life in all
sections of the United States. There are many books of first-
hand record which measure how the country was opened up to
the actor. Perhaps Clapp, Ludlow, Sol Smith, Wemyss, and
Caldwell are richer in their pioneer coloring than Dunlap,
but none of them gives a greater sense of broad perspective
than Dunlap. The reminiscences of Tyrone Power, the elder,
may note more the vagaries of American manners, as Fanny
Kemble and Mrs. Trollope noted them. But Dunlap's
71
The American Dramatist
"History" is a piece of distinctive critical work. He recog-
nized the evils confronting the theatre of his day. He
was always eagerly reaching out for the discovery of some
remedy. One is surprised how pertinent are some of his re-
marks to the theatre as we face it now. It will suffice for us
to make one quotation to measure the vision which he always
brought to the stage. "One great theatre in each great city
of the Union," he writes, "supported and guided by the State,
would remedy every evil attendant on our present playhouse
system. We should then have no managers seeking only to
fill the treasury, or pay hungry creditors
no stars render-
ing all attraction but that of novelty unprofitable. . . . A
theatre, so supported and conducted, must exhibit plays not
less attractive for the purpose of mere amusement, and not
less popular, but, like the novels of Walter Scott and James
Fenimore Cooper, incomparably more fascinating, as well as
instructive, than much of the trash of the stage or the circu-
lating library of former days. Actors, however witty, would
not be indulged in extemporary effusions or expletives, but
speak 'that which is set down for them."" Written in 1833,
these words do not seem so very strange to the ear in 1925.
V
We have said that when Dunlap returned from his trip
abroad, he found the "town" agog over the recent success of
America's first native comedy, "The Contrast", written by
Royall Tyler. It was produced on April 16, 1787, at the John
Street Theatre, by the American Company, headed by Henry
and Hallam, Thomas Wignell playing Jonathan. In Jona-
than enter the first stage Yankee known to the American
Theatre; enter the progenitor of a type which was to flour-
ish for many a day in various forms of crudity, but brought to
perfection of external eccentricity by the excellent acting of a
long line of eccentric players. Tyler blew into the theatre,
so to speak. He had never been inside a playhouse when
matters relating to the capture of Shays, in 1787, sent him to
New York City. Here it was that he witnessed a performance
72
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries
of "The School for Scandal." The urge to write a play can-
not be said to have been entirely due to this one evening's
entertainment. He was a Harvard man, of the class of 1776,
and Yale had given him a degree the same year. He had been
a friend of John Trumbull, and, in '78, had fought with him
against the British. The witty character of his later writings
would indicate that it was not an imitative thing but was
something native with him. And, though he was to be so
prominently identified with the bar, the ease with which he
sat him down and, within three weeks after "The School for
Scandal" evening, produced the manuscript of a comedy
which, whatever its imitative character, at least possessed a
native sprightliness which must have been part of the man,
suggests that he must have possessed some skill with the pen,
must have had within him some literary "itch."
Tyler handed over to Wignell the rights to his little comedy,
and the latter then announced, as was the custom of the day,
that, as soon as he received a sufficient number of subscrip-
tions, he would send "The Contrast" to press. Among the
subscribers, it is to be noted that General Washington was
foremost, and, as indication that the American dramatists
considered themselves a sort of brotherhood, I also record the
names of Peter Markoe, who wrote "The Patriot Chief"
(1783), Samuel Low, whose political drama, "The Politician
Out-witted" (1789), while never produced, was measure of
certain attitudes for and against the Constitution, and Colonel
David Humphreys, who wrote "The Widow of Malabar;
or, The Tyranny of Custom" (1790), a translation from the
French.
The introduction into "The Contrast" of "Yankee
Doodle", recalls the fact that Andrew Barton's opera, "Dis-
appointment; or, The Force of Credulity", printed in 1767,
had, at an earlier date, made use of the ballad. In another
connection also this ballad-opera libretto has significance,
because it was scheduled for performance by Douglass, but
was suddenly withdrawn in favor of Thomas Godfrey's
"The Prince of Parthia."
Tyler wrote other plays of a certain timely interest, one of
73
The American Dramatist
X
them, "The Georgia Spec; or, Land in the Moon", relating
to the wild-cat land deals in Georgia. In "The Doctor in
Spite of Himself" he turned to Molière for inspiration. And,
in accord with the fashion of the time, he wrote an opera-
libretto, entitled "May Day in Town; or, New York in an
Uproar", which has already been noted.
A social study of Tyler's career is needed. There is a
"Life" extant, but it is still in manuscript. Periodical
literature holds his name in certain prominence; so do the
Vermont Bar proceedings. His brother, Colonel John Tyler,
was for a time manager of the Boston Theatre, and it is certain
that Royall was on intimate terms with many of the actors of
his period. But his theatre interests have yet to be fully
revealed. What might be brought to light in that connection,
however, will not add any more to the honor he already pos-
sesses of having given the playhouse its first Yankee, of having
produced a comedy which, however close to Sheridan, was
nevertheless an attempt to paint the social manners of New
York, when its life clustered about the Battery. The New
England conscience in Tyler is here measured in this play.
"The Contrast" represents a certain declaration of personal
independence.
VI
Dunlap's contemporaries may be said to centre in such
dramatists as Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842), James Nelson
Barker (1784-1858), John Howard Payne (1791-1852), M. M.
Noah (1785-1851), and those we have mentioned as having sub-
scribed to Tyler's printed play. The playwrights of the period
all followed in a well-worn channel; their attention was drawn
to the same style of theme; their national interest responded
to the same impulses. Their sentiments were expressed in
similar rhythms. In Minshull's "Rural Felicity" (1801),
George says to Juliana: “Come, permit me to exchange the
essence of two lips for your virgin honey-[Kisses her]
You are my soul's delight." Such sentiments were imitative
of imported romance. Yet there was an attempt on the patt
of these early dramatists to picture lowly character, "Rural
74
William Dunlap and his Contemporaries
وو
Felicity" has a dramatis persone almost entirely composed
of such. The crude attempts at Negro dialect, the humorous
"clownings" of the Connecticut Yankee to be found in
L. Beach's "Jonathan Postfree" (1807), indicate a conscious
effort to scrape together native tokens of originality. But the
Yankee of Beach is stereotyped. It is the same Yankee pic-
tured by Mrs. Mowatt at a later date; it is the same Yankee
conceived by the English dramatist, Tom Taylor. The for-
mula seems to have been to put the Yankee in close contrast
with the "fop" of English drama, to show his directness and
honesty. He may be awkward but he is kind; he may stare
at beauty, but he does not seduce it. "Yankees," exclaims
Postfree, "do not steal girls,' - a suggestion which must
have brought down the house! This is the theme of
Samuel Woodworth's "The Forest Rose" (1825), a pastoral
opera, wherein Postfree of Beach becomes Jonathan Plough-
boy. Woodworth is better known as a poet- especially as
the poet of the "Old Oaken Bucket" than as a dramatist.
But "The Forest Rose" was a very popular piece. It was in
the tradition of "The Beggar's Opera", just as Payne's
"Clari" was. Woodworth was typical, as a playwright, of
the dramatist of his time. He was willing to cater to the
special actor, and aimed some of his Yankee conceits for the
Yankee actor. Like Dunlap, he followed the fashions. He
was prompted in similar manner by the current event. Save to
note these processes by which his plays were evolved, there is
nothing to stress about them as of literary value. The female
conception in all those plays was of the same milk and water
character. In "The Deed of Gift", Mary Moreland refers
to "such imbecile instruments as myself." There are country
characters that smack of Mrs. Malaprop, breaking all rules
of common sense, but striving in vain to speak "according to
Webster." The farmer is always lauded as being the true
king of existence. "Now do I feel," cries one of them, in
"The Deed of Gift", "the enviable independence of an Ameri-
can farmer, a title more honourable to the possessor than any
that an emperor could confer." Again he says: "This is the
blessing for which our fathers fought, and it is a blessing en-
75
The American Dramatist
joyed by the freemen of more than twenty independent States,
which, like so many brilliant stars, compose the constellation
of freedom." No wonder, in the sheer exuberance of the
moment, he should sing a song to the tune of "Yankee
Doodle. No wonder the villain, who was always the oppo-
site of the horny-handed son of honest toil with smooth
speech and smoother hands-was always the object of
scorn!
>>
In view of such simplicity, which was unadorned except ·
with patriotic sentiments, the more one contemplates Dunlap
in comparison with his contemporaries the more solid his
contribution to the American Drama seems to be. I should
say that he was the most important figure in the theatre of
his time, an innovator of marked originality, a worker of seri-
ous ideals. The Father of the American Theatre becomes a
prominent son of the American Drama, with characteristics
worthy to be considered.
76
CHAPTER FIVE
AMERICAN DRAMATISTS AND THEIR INFANT INDUSTRY:
DRAMATICK CRITICKS, PRIZE PLAYS, THE NON-COPY-
RIGHT MENACE
I
His
THE lot of the dramatic critic is not a happy one.
contemporaries do not sing of him in tones to assure him a
golden immortality. He is usually embalmed in contumely:
a crabbed, inattentive, wild fellow, whose praise has its price.
Yet, since the days the vivacious Miss Hallam played Imogen
- when the first dramatic criticism ever published in this
country appeared in the columns of the Maryland Gazette
we have had him with us. This Y. Z. of colonial days-
the grandparent of such a hated progeny, showed himself,
however, to be very much of a human. He saw Miss Hallam
and she conquered; he was charmed, ravished by her delicacy
of manner. "How true and thorough her knowledge of the
part she personated!" he warbles, trying to hide his emotion
beneath some semblance of judgment - for the beauty of Miss
Hallam was a narcotic to most men of the colonies "Her
whole form and dimensions how happily convertible and uni-
versally adapted to the variety of her part." Which gives us
a great deal the flavor of the woman in the eyes of the man.
Cherchez la critique!
It was while reading Dunlap's "History of the American
Theatre" that I found mention of a company of critics, whom
the crochety old gentleman termed "sharp-shooters." They
were banded together for the purpose of correcting the theatre
77
The American Dramatist
evils of the times; presumably they were a sort of club that
went en masse to the theatre, wrote their individual opinions,
and then met at a coffee-house- a sort of Algonquin place
to hear their patent remedies of the cure or kill kind -
read. I started on a hunt for these men in the newspaper
files Messrs. John Wells, Elias Hicks, Samuel Jones, Wil-
liam Cutting, Peter Irving, and Charles Adams — all alive
and prospering in the year 1796.
in the year 1796. And the more I looked, the
faster came pictures of the critical life in this country which
stretched almost to the boundary whence started William
Winter and Rankin Towse. They had their humors these
critics of the early Republic. They knew how to draw fire
from the actor, Hodgkinson; they could play their tricks
upon Dunlap, for, accustomed to sign their articles with ini-
tials, they used the letter "D" quite often, and heaped upon
the one-time dramatist, manager, and painter, the responsibili-
ties for their critical sins. Hence, when he wrote of them we
must take his remarks about them with a grain of salt, as we
must so much in his gossipy, first-hand picture of the Ameri-
can Theatre. For Dunlap could brush critics aside with an
ease greater than any one else except the present-day
public! In his eyes, what was the claim of Charles Adams
as a critic? Merely that he was the son of one President of
the United States and the brother of another! Yet the
stately style of John Wells he could appreciate.
66
From 1800 to 1864, there is much real matter to be gathered
from the critiques of the day. And they were no insignificant
type of men who came under the venomous appellations of
scalpers and tomahawkers", "gentle savages"; men of
"low, egotistic, unfair, malicious character"; "rats."
"rats." The
spleen against the entire tribe mounts and mounts through the
decades, and overflows at the end of the pen of Mr. Sedley,
editor of The Round Table, who, on January 2, 1864, vi-
ciously berates them; accusing them of a reputation far be-
neath that of the lowest bandit on the roadside. He fulmi-
nates: "Managers despise them, yet dare not resist their
suction. Actors despise them, yet dread their waspy stings
in case they ignore them."
78
Dramatick Criticks
---
This article is mentioned with some show of approval by
Alger, the biographer of Forrest, who adds, however, a galaxy
of names that met with the democratic actor's favor, meaning,
of course, that they took toward Forrest the attitude which
won his approval for remember that the meanest critic
is a
"dear fellow" to the man he praises! How meaningless
the names sound now as they are drawn from the news which
stales so fast: Duane, Chandler, and Swift, of Philadelphia;
Dawson, of Cincinnati; Holley, of Louisville; Canenge, of
New Orleans; Leggett and Lawson, of New York; and Oakes,
of Boston. Only one stands forth for special note, James
Hunter, of the Daily Advertiser, in Albany, around 1840, who
seems to have nurtured Forrest in his early days on the stage,
hence one of the best of his day to the actor. Writes
Alger: "He used to sit close to the stage, and watch the actor
with the closest scrutiny, not allowing the smallest particular
to escape his notice. Then at the end of the play he would in
a private interview submit to his protégé the results of his
observation, carefully pointing out every fault and indicating
the remedy." No wonder Forrest stopped playing to go to
the funeral of such a tutor of his talents!
Many are the lively glimpses we get of these old-time critics,
as they went about their work. They were dashing fellows
who brooked no interference. Jonathan Oldstyle - who was
none other than Washington Irving, writing for his brother's
paper, the Morning Chronicle (1802) - makes the picture
more genial, but none the less denoting the careless indifference
of the species. "I have seen one of them perched on the front
of the box with his back to the stage, sucking the head of his
stick and staring vacantly at the audience, insensible to the
most interesting specimens of scenic representation, though
the tear of sensibility was trembling in every eye around him."
But such cold indifference did not always hold, and there were
critics of the period who did not affect the lackadaisical humor
described by Oldstyle. Irving never failed to see the genial
fun of the situation when it came to writing.
No one could feel that William Coleman, of the New York
Evening Post, a friend of Alexander Hamilton, was trivial in
79
The American Dramatist
his attitude toward the theatre. He went evening after
evening to see Hodgkinson, Cooper, and others, and his
column, The Theatre Register, was discriminating in an attempt
to measure the changes in acting at each performance.
This robust critic, fond of pleasure, yet not neglectful of work,
as was his contemporary, Robert Treat Paine, of Boston, was
of prodigious strength; his endurance once carried him from
Greenfield to Northampton on skates. He is known to have
killed his man in a duel in Love Lane, as Twenty-first Street in
New York used to be called, and to have left the body of his
adversary considerately on his doorstep. Was it an actor?
When he was writing about the theatre, Dunlap was manager
of the Park Theatre, and New York was only a few thousand
in population.
His critiques were of a type that distinguished the culture of
the day; and he wrote for the discernment of the same type
of culture. One will find that such style was not confined to a
single section of the country, but was the kind of education
that passed muster at the time everywhere. Men read their
Greek, knew their classics, recited their Shakespeare back-
wards, went to the theatre, and ranged themselves in partisan
spirit around a player, just as they used to do in the London
playhouse. They were raised on their Addison and Pope;
they emulated the wit of Dr. Johnson. Whether Robert
Treat Paine, of Boston, or Edgar Allan Poe, of New York, or
Isaac Harby, of Charleston, the critic of the Old Stock was
just the same, lauding the days of ancient Greece, painting
the picture of the ideal writer of the theatre, chanting the
power of the play in places where others were trying to show
its utter damnation.
While this is no place to discuss them, I have found indem-
nifying traces of dramatic criticism on the trail of Bryant,
Horace Greeley, Whitman. The theatre was an incentive to
them; it drew them by its glitter, though Greeley, in his
"Autobiography", wrote:
I have since thought that the wise way would be to choose
a fit occasion, go once to a good theatre, and never darken the
doors of any playhouse again.
80
Dramatick Criticks
These men were primarily interested in the broad aspects
of the theatre; they were concerned with the moral effects.
of the playhouse, trying, no doubt, to counteract the prejudice
against the theatre that gave rise to so many strictures against
play-acting. But they were also wont to regard the æsthetic
aspects of their subject; when they went to the drama they
looked for the beauty which comes through a thorough com-
prehension of the whole drama, and not alone of any particular
part; they were alert to catch the actor's reading, the manner
in which he placed emphasis. "We are deeply impressed
with the belief that the theatre is highly important to society,"
writes Paine, “as a great publick school, in which all classes
may assemble, to acquire mutual respect from examples of
good breeding, to cultivate morality from the delineations of
life, to enliven social humor from the vivacity of fiction, and
to imbibe correct ideas of classical reading and of our native
tongue from striking instances, however rare, of the force of
elocution and purity of pronunciation."
Of course such a critic was speaking in terms of the
drama he thought the beau ideal of form and expression.
To Paine, the "Merchant of Venice" stood unrivalled in
this respect, and that he loved Dryden's "Spanish Fryar”
was because it used Shakespeare as the model. He was
witnessing the acting of Fennell and Cooper, of Mrs. Stanley
and Bernard.
Isaac Harby, in Charleston, viewed his function as a critic
with relentless severity. "Criticism," he said, "is the right
perception of things; and, like every other faculty, can arrive
at perfection only by practise, and the chastest attention to
truth and delicacy. This discrimination of what is beautiful
or sublime in nature or art, is the same energy, whether applied
to the dissection of an animal body, or the formation of an
artificial one; whether we judge of the excellence of moral or
political institutions, of the taste of an epicurean banquet, of
the works of science, of the flights of poetry, or of the calcula-
tions of the star-gazing sage, who determines the motions of
the planets or the comet's eccentricity, 'In ecstacy of
thought!' still it is CRITICISM. It is the combination of
81
The American Dramatist
judgment and experience, and delicacy of nerve, and feeling
and truth."
To such a critic, the theatre is a powerful engine. It can
raise a passion for good or evil; it can attract in healthy en-
joyment those young men who might otherwise spend their
evenings in the public-house. Thus does Harby exhort:
"Let not, however, only the external form attract let
intellectual beauties also share our feelings. Let the temple
of the dramatic muse become not only the rendezvous of
fashion and of taste, but let it redeem our youth from the dull
excitement of the tavern, the poisonous contact of the gaming
table. Let the theatre entice their steps to the sight of female
circles, of soft and refined emotion; and moulding them, as it
were, by the orphean power of poetry, into creatures of civil-
ized society, open to their gentle ambition those scenes and
objects and attentions, where still linger the last beams and
vestiges of chivalry."
These critics were brought up on what they termed classic
excellence, and in that mood they viewed the work of the
native playwrights; in that mood they wrote plays themselves
for the style of acting they adored.
II
Writing in later life of her family and their professional
attainments, Fanny Kemble once said: "Our American prog-
eny are, as a nation, devoid of the dramatic element, and
have a considerable infusion of that which is theatrical, de-
lighting, like the Athenians of old, in processions, shows,
speeches, oratory, demonstrations, celebrations, and declama-
tions, and such displays of public and private sentiment as
would be repugnant to English taste and feeling; to which
theatrical tendency, and the morbid love of excitement which
is akin to it, I attribute the fact that Americans, both nation-
ally and individually, are capable of a certain sympathy with
the French character, in which we are wanting.
وو
It is the identification of the theatrical with the dramatic
which has been the weakness of the American Drama from its
82
Dramatick Criticks
start, and it is curious to note how it was opposed by the very
type of mind that marks the dramatic critics I have tried to
picture in the preceding pages. They looked for inner mean-
ing and spiritual significance of situation, and when that was
lacking when they were greeted with merely the outward
shell of show, — they spoke in no uncertain terms of the native
product. Does not Dunlap declare that our first efforts in
dramatic literature were deficient in literary education? Did
he not mark that the theatregoers of discrimination, however
much they might desire American plays, could not help but
feel that the dramatists had not "matured their notions of the
result of the great political changes which had taken place, to
know how far to assert independence in literature or govern-
ment, or how far to imitate their European ancestors?" The
fact is, Dunlap, on the adoption of the Federal Constitution,
being a member of the Philological Society, helped to carry
"through the streets of New-York a book inscribed 'Federal
Language', as if any other than the English language
could be desirable.'
But from the very first there was uppermost in the minds
of writers for the theatre in America to make use of something
which would appeal directly to the sentiments and conditions
of the new nation. Dunlap ranged himself in accord with the
notions of James K. Paulding. The latter wrote in the Ameri-
can Quarterly Review:
By a national drama, we mean, not merely a class of dra-
matic productions, written by Americans, but one appealing
directly to the national feeling-founded upon domestic
incidents illustrating or satirizing domestic manners, and,
above all, displaying a generous chivalry in the maintenance
and vindication of those great and illustrious peculiarities of
situation and character by which we are distinguished from all
other nations. We do not hesitate to say that, next to the
interests of eternal truth, there is no object more worthy
the exercise of the highest attributes of mind than that of
administering to the just pride of national character, in-
spiring a feeling for national glory, and inculcating a love of
country.
83
The American Dramatist
While this objective was constantly held in mind, in re-
sponse to feeling, there was but slim result. For nothing in
drama of a national character survived the moment, or is now
able to be revived. The mere outward shell of history was
treated, and Republican sentiments had to be clothed in the
speech of the foreign forum to be assured of a hearing. Not
only that, but a theatre independence was being frustrated
by the managerial starring system, which predetermined the
shape and color of characters in drama. This was dishearten-
ing to the creative writer, and was the constant subject which
heated the critical venom of the Press. In 1845, James Rees,
in his attractive first survey of "The Dramatic Authors of
America", prefaced his history with such sentiments as these:
poesy
The decline of the drama, and the paucity of dramatic
talent among us, have tended greatly to withdraw the atten-
tion of our talented writers from the subject. Another cause
of the decadency of our dramatic literature is the melodra-
matic and pantomimic character of the stage. These have
seized upon the medium through which beauty of sentiment,
sublimity of thought, and the smoothness of verse were con-
veyed to the people; the pathways to the temples of the histri-
onic muse have been obstructed, and the timid child of
turned back, and left the classic ground to be the arena for
open lasciviousness, disgusting monstrosities, base thoughts,
and low desires to exhibit all their vanities to the vulgar and
depraved. The polished productions of our best writers,
supported by the inimitable acting of a Booth and Forrest,
scarcely survive the season which gives them birth. The
well-written and popular play of "Jack Cade" would cease to
attract if it were not coupled with the powerful acting of the
gentleman for whom it was written. There is scarcely a
motive left, or an ambition to be excited, to emulate those
glorious dramatists of the old English school, for if we neglect
Shakespeare, is it to be expected that we will patronize R. T.
Conrad, R. P. Smith, N. P. Willis, D. P. Brown and others?
Specifically, Rees railed against the preponderance of melo-
dramatic trash, the courting of French farces and com-
edies, and the successful inroads of a foreign clique. Our
native drama, according to him, was also handicapped by the
84
Dramatick Criticks
'outré effusions of ignorant cockneys, who send out annually
their flood of folly, inundating our stage with sentiments.
stolen from half the circulating libraries in England, and dis-
gracing it with their vile catch-traps, puppet-like attitudiniz-
ing, and indecent contortions of the artistes imported with
them." Thus was the American dramatist boycotted from
the stage, according to Rees.
The American Quarterly, for 1827, contained the words
already quoted, written by Paulding. Having defined what
he considered to be a national drama, he gave concrete ex-
amples of the inadequacy of the dramatist to do more than
supply the player with sonorous lines which convey little or
nothing "striking, touching or impassioned in the ideas or
language." The yawning reader soon discovers that the
dialogue is merely a mass of words, tolerably arranged. Our
writers, he declares, do not feel that they can claim themselves
worthy of their craft unless they become "great at swearing";
they adopt a melodramatic style, which, to his mind, is noth-
ing more than "a total departure from nature and prob-
ability." "Does it ever occur to a particular class of dramatic
writers," Paulding asks, "that people ought sometimes to
talk common sense, even in a melodrama?" Lofty, noisy, and
measured these are the words hurled in 1827 against the
body of America's dramatic output.
Poe inherited the dramatic instinct from both his father and
mother; it found outlet in fragments of a drama, and in
theatregoing. The Broadway Journal for 1845 was witness
to his conscientiousness as a dramatic critic of Mrs. Mowatt's
"Fashion." The realism attempted by this dramatist was to
him at once the possible strength of a modern drama and cer-
tainly the weakness of drama as then practised. After re-
counting the story of "Fashion", he claims for the whole a
lack of originality both in plot and character; he points to the
trickery of the author's invention, exclaiming: "The day has
at length arrived when men demand rationalities in place of
conventionalities. It will no longer do to copy, even with
absolute accuracy, the whole tone of even so ingenious and
really spirited a thing as the 'School for Scandal.' It was com-
85
The American Dramatist
paratively good in its day, but it would be positively bad at
the present day, and imitations of it are inadmissible at any
day." While such remarks shatter our opinion of Poe as
a critic, they nonetheless contain certain reactions created
by the type of social drama Mrs. Mowatt launched: the
deficiency in verisimilitude of the incongruous and the farcical.
Poe was not in accord with the departure toward the real in
outward stage effect. If "Fashion" succeed at all, he claims,
it will be because of "the very carpets, the very ottomans, the
very chandeliers, and the very conservatories that gained so
decided a popularity for that most inane and utterly des-
picable of all modern comedies the 'London Assurance' of
Boucicault." Thus to Poe "Fashion" was an imitation of
the worst in English modern drama. He writes: "The drama
has not declined, as many suppose: it has only been left out
of sight by everything else. We must discard all models.
The Elizabethan theatre should be abandoned. We need
thought of our own—principles of dramatic action drawn not
from the 'old dramatists' but from the fountain of a Nature
that can never grow old."
It was in 1844 that Dan Marble, one of our first exponents.
of the Yankee type in drama, infatuated all London with his
inimitable acting. He appeared in "The Vermont Wool-
Dealer" and "Yankee Land." "On the Strand," writes a
correspondent to The Spirit of the Times, "I come upon re-
minders of my native land; a real, live Yankee makes John
Bull shake his sides with mirth over racy jokes and Jonathan-
isms." The next year, 1845, Marble offered a prize for new
material in which to exploit his excellences. The Spirit of the
Times begs that our literary men compete in the realm of com-
edy and place it on a footing with our tragedy, — and the
critic points proudly to Willis's "Bianca Visconti” and “Tor-
tesa", together with Epes Sargent's "Velasco." England
had remarked about the vacuity of some of the plays sent
over there with actors whose excellent art was hidden by
the absurdities they had to attempt. Now was the time,
appealed this critic, for the American dramatist to step
forward.
86
Our Infant Industry
The prize comedy was "Family Ties"; facing a few nights
of empty boxes, it died a deserved death. The Albion, for
January 29, 1846, made response: "It is feeble and vapid or
coarsely colloquial, even the smartness of Octave, the
printer, is but a collection of office technicalities and conven-
tional slang." It was a paltry sum to offer, the five hundred
dollars used as a bait to catch the American Drama, suggested
this indignant editor: it was an abortive attempt at comedy
upon which talents of high order, as shown by the actors, were
wasted. How to stop such a show of ineptitude? "It is in
vain to expect that the first talent in the country will exercise
their faculties in this, the most difficult of all literary enter-
prises, for so small a consideration. It will be to the interest
of Managers to foster a Native Drama, but they must pay
European prices for it, nay, they should go beyond the Euro-
pean standard. We may then expect to see our first men com-
ing forward to create a Native Drama that shall reflect honour
on the country.'
وو
III
The American manager was distrustful of the native
product; he was much surer of his foreign purchases, and
so began hiding the American playwright under anonymity.
William Wood, in his excellent volume of reminiscences, is
frank about the case of J. N. Barker, who had just dramatized
for him Scott's "Marmion." He confesses:
The merit of the piece was positive, but the old difficulty
remained. I knew the then prejudice against any native
play, and concocted with Cooper [the actor] a very innocent
fraud upon the public. We insinuated that the piece was a
London one, had it sent to our theatre from New York, where
it was made to arrive in the midst of rehearsal, in the presence
of the actors, packed up exactly like pieces we were in the habit
of receiving from London. It was opened with great_gravity,
and announced without any author being alluded to. None of
the company were in the secret, as I well knew "these actors
cannot keep counsel", not even the prompter. It was played
with great success for six or seven nights, when, believing it
87
The American Dramatist
safe, I announced the author, and from that moment it ceased
to attract.
Those who came to see "Marmion", by one Thomas Mor-
ton, Esquire, stayed away on being told that it was from the
pen of a Philadelphian! This was the crime of 1812; the
impressment of the American dramatist was no concern of an
audience in the American Theatre.
The early playwright also succumbed to the habit of quick
work and of adherence to news value. Richard Penn Smith
wrote "The Eighth of January" (1829) to celebrate the
Jackson victory of the year before, to commemorate the
Battle of New Orleans. In his Preface he wrote:
"The Eighth of January" was merely intended to serve the
occasion on which it was produced, and so little time was
allowed for its composition, that it was sent piecemeal to the
theatre to be copied, and the last act was not written until
after the piece was announced, and within a week of its per-
formance. This much is stated that those who expect a
finished drama may be undeceived at the outset; but as its
success on the stage far exceeded anticipation, the writer is
induced to throw it before the public, trusting that what merit
it appeared to possess in action, may not wholly evaporate on
closer examination.
While Smith recognized the delicacy of introducing to the
stage a noted character still alive, he was thoroughly of the
opinion that it was time for the theatre to feel that such
dramas as this were necessary to be produced on the occasion
of "national festivals."
In 1835, John Howard Payne stated the position of the
dramatic authors of America in regard to lack of copyright
protection. England, through the efforts of Bulwer-Lytton,
had passed a law correcting her neglect of the author's rights,
but in the United States the matter was imminent. Most of
the playwrights of this period were confident that the lack of a
proper protection was being detrimental to the growth of the
drama, in fact, to the growth of all our literature. Payne
wrote:
88
The Non-Copyright Menace
What are our own laws upon this subject?___ We have none.
Dramatists are at the mercy of managers. The now obsolete
law of custom in England still remains feebly imitated with
us; not in four benefits for a success, but in one alone; and
even that one is usually proffered under circumstances so
hopeless that authors seldom avail themselves of the oppor-
tunity. Present a play to a manager, and he delays its pro-
duction till the season is withering, and then flings it upon the
forlorn hope; or, if you ask a certain compensation, he replies,
"We are glutted with plays from England, which we must
produce, because they bring with them a fame which will
excite curiosity; and for these we have only to pay the promp-
ters, who are salaried, to smuggle over all the novelties.
Within a few years some opportunities have been afforded to a
few, employed by certain popular actors, travelling as stars,
to write under their patronage and direction, and for their
own personal aggrandizement; but such a market is very soon
supplied, and perhaps not always the most desirable.
To me
it has never been offered. On the contrary, when I was
abroad, and new productions have occasionally been wanted
from England for any particular purpose in America, I have
seen myself passed over, and the commission tendered to
others, not Americans; and since I have been in America,
play after play have I presented for performance, and have
uniformly been answered, "We can get new plays from Eng-
land, and for nothing."
a
In his Preface to "The Politicians" (1840), Cornelius
Mathews takes the same stand. He is facetious, but none
the less earnest beneath it all, and he was one of the chief
speakers in the copyright cause whenever the subject came up
for debate. The manager is a murderer of native drama;
he even frowns upon native character; he has not allowed "
solitary devil of a republican to show his visnomy on the stage
more than once in a quarter, and then, only with an English
playwright at his back." Mathews waxes eloquent upon the
manner in which our legislators will protect the manufacturer
of a cotton umbrella, or the creator of a four-hooped tub,
but consideration of a vagabond dramatist, never! The
American dramatist is confronted by a cheap array of farces,
89
The American Dramatist
burlesques, and comedies, and the home-born compositions are
brushed aside.
How the dramatist was treated by the manager is seen in the
humorous preface to Harby's play, "The Gordian Knot”,
which he submitted to Alexander Placide, of the Charleston
Theatre. The young author was shunted off from time to
time; now the manager had quite forgotten his script; again,
would he call on the morrow and receive an opinion? Tired
of this method, Harby asked the return of his drama, and,
rather than make a bonfire of it, submitted it to the cold test
of type. But then of a sudden it was again sent for; an
actress wished it for her benefit. The parts were copied, and
the fledgling author was summoned to give a "reading" to the
company. At first they essayed their parts, murdering what-
ever excellence the text carried; openly they jeered and
sneered; openly those seated there showed mirth and satisfac-
tion at the discomfiture of the author. "At last, the 'acting
manager' cried out, 'Damn it, Sully, you'll keep us
here till twelve o'clock; let Mr. Harby read his own play."
Accordingly the patient Harby (who, all this while, kept
pencilling in his mind the many caprices of man, when "drest
in a little brief authority") began to read. "But Mr. Sully
preferred reading himself; and when the author good-
naturedly informed him, that a word containing two syllables,
logically contained more than one, the 'acting manager'
started upon his feet, and with the utmost pomp and magnif-
icence of manner, said, 'Sir, I am manager here; and if you
are determined to teach an actor in my presence, I am deter-
mined not to submit!' Upon uttering which he went off..
Although I kept pursing up my lips with all the nerve I was
master of, I could hardly refrain from bursting into a fit of
laughter. However, I must compliment my philosophy; for
taking up my hat and manuscript, very calmly, I bid the
gentlemen and ladies buenos noches, and came home to my
supper."
In his preface to "Moll Pitcher" (1839), J. S. Jones gives
just as disconcerting impressions of the conditions faced by the
playwright.
90
The Non-Copyright Menace
I have had objections to publishing my plays [he writes];
one, that they were written to be acted to the people, and not
to be read by them; another that by the publication I lost
my ownership, copyright giving no protection against repre-
sentation upon the stage. As "Moll Pitcher" has been often
acted without my leave, no doubt, in time, it would be printed
without consent being asked. I, therefore, choose the least
of two evils, accord my consent, and in this manner acquaint
the critic that the construction of "Moll Pitcher" occupied
but two or three days; that it is a stage drama, depending for
success more upon what is done, and the manner in which the
business of the piece is done, than what is said.
His opinion was that there could never be a standard Ameri-
can Drama until the people would pay for it, meaning, of
course, the people in the theatre.
So the wrangle went on until such time as a new set of mana-
gers undertook the policies of the American Theatre. But
their attitude toward the native material was just the same,
because the outlook was English; the standard repertory was
English. Even the final passage of a copyright bill did not
mend matters much: if it was not the inundation of the
English product, it was the deluge of the stage with French
melodrama.
91
CHAPTER SIX
DRAMA OF TYPES AND MANY FORMS: 1800-1870
I
MANY hours of weary reading must be the fate of the student
who conscientiously familiarizes himself with the dramatists
from 1800 to 1870. And when it is done, one does not rise
refreshed; one's memory is not greatly enriched by scenes of
mighty strength and beauty; the residue seems at first flush
not to have been worth the effort. But there is an aspect of
the American Drama which offers a wealth of material and a
refreshment of interest. I mean the examination of it as
the reflection of American life and taste. From very earliest
times the playwright tried to utilize the American back-
ground; he overlaid the color upon a European model. But,
nonetheless, it was an effort to be native. In the midst of the
romantic, the Gothic, the melodramatic, there are ample
evidences of realistic treatment in these early plays.
These dramas were largely theatre products; the prefaces
to many of the printed versions carefully state that they were
not written to be read but to be acted. The actor seems to
have been the mainstay of this early dramaturgy. One could
hardly believe that a cultured audience would find enjoyment
in such a false piece of writing as John Brougham's "Tempta-
tion; or, The Irish Emigrant" (1849), or "The Game of
Love" (1855), until one examined the casts and estimated
what values the acting must have added to the flimsy texts.
We have never been unconscious of the fact that we had a
dramatic literature. It has not been neglected, even in its
92

OF
HIGH
AIN
LANCOSACK & CO.BUFFALO, NY. WOLVES! What can save us?" "The strong arm of a Backwoodsman.
Collection New York Public Library.
A TYPICAL POSTER, ANNOUNCING THE PLAY "DAVY CROCKETT", BY JAMES E. MURDOCK.
Audiences of the past brought to such drama a simple interest, an unquestioning faith.
܀
Drama of Types and Many Forms
early stages. James Rees's "The Dramatic Authors of
America", published in 1845, is a fascinating record. But
there came a period when there was a lull in the interest of the
literary historian, despite the fact that persistently managers
from generation to generation, and dramatists, with their
individual problems, discussed the drama in the current press,
and lauded the existence of an American product. Then came
Paul Leicester Ford, and Laurence Hutton, and Brander
Matthews, and they began to delve into the records, and
restore some of the main outlines of the past. Research
brings to view many surveys of the drama according to types;
many are the inventories taken of the Indian, Yankee, and
historical plays; many are the hints one finds in the early
magazines that the playwrights in the past utilized current
events, even as closely upon the occurrence as did the drama-
tists of the Revolutionary period.
a
The early drama moved in definite currents; dramatists fol-
lowed in a stream of imitation of each other. We have been
surprised, whenever the old plays have been revived, either as
a whole or in part, to see how quaintly entertaining they are.
It is only their quaintness, their archaic, old-fashioned manner
that amuses us. Crude symptoms of a real humanity may
be seen in them. But, as literature, they are sad failures.
When Mrs. Mowatt's "Fashion" proved to be the success of
New York theatre season several years ago, the value of stock
in early American plays rose. But there are not many old
dramas with similar chances of success. Maybe that is because
the intellectual drama and the realistic problem play have
made us sophisticated, and we can no longer take the blood-
hounds in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or the man bound to the
railroad track in "Under the Gaslight" or the wolves in
"Davy Crockett" with that simple interest, that unquestion-
ing faith which in the past theatre audiences gave them.
The playwrights of the early national period varied very
slightly in plots, themes, emotions, expressions of sentiment.
Their heroes wore the same clothes; their villains had their
stock failings, and gritted their teeth in the same manner.
As a matter of fact, the modern business man on the stage
93
The American Dramatist
who nearly always chews violently on a cigar to show
his emotion or intense thought is not much better than
these. The heroines of these plays are of the "female" kind,
fluttering, clinging, in awe of the superior animal, man. The
American in Europe is just as stereotyped in his manhood
as the modern Cook Tourist is in his inquisitiveness. Yet,
with all this dead level invention, there flows through the
American Drama a contact with life which is of vital interest.
One finds it in flashes of dialogue, in certain characters, in
comments on matters of public interest. Professor P. I.
Reed has done inestimable service in extracting these evi-
dences for a thesis entitled "The Realistic Presentation of
American Characters in Native American Plays Prior to
Eighteen Seventy." The general conclusions reached are as
follows:
Between 1815 and 1870 there were written a small number
of American plays that are worthy of serious consideration.
Although hardly one of these was able to survive its century
and none may be ranked among even the lesser world-master-
pieces, nevertheless there could perhaps be named a half-
dozen that possess adaptability to acting, contain many of the
qualities of good literature, and exhibit unmistakably the
marks of professional craftsmanship and creative genius. But
of these stronger plays, unfortunately, scarcely one has any
realistic significance a fact that proves how completely
American realism was divorced from dignified American
drama. Indeed, prior to 1870, native drama that construc-
tively dealt with wholly American materials had made noth-
ing more than a small beginning.
The American literary student at best has not a plethora
of masterpieces to deal with in the study of American letters.
Our most distinctive creative writers ceased to create when
they approached the theatre. They merely imitated. One
can see that in William Gilmore Simms's "Norman Maurice"
(1851), and in Longfellow's "John Endicott" (1868), and
"Giles Corey of the Salem Farms" (1868). Cooper in the
North and Simms in the South fixed the American Indian in
the minds of the reading public: but they did more than bring
94
Drama of Types and Many Forms
A
the methods of Walter Scott to the backwoods. The Indian
fared equally as well on the stage as he did in fiction. Robert
Rogers's problem play, “Ponteach", has as much dignity to it
as any of its followers. Stone's "Metamora" is as definite
a creation as any figure of the forest in the Leatherstocking
Tales. And I believe that the Yankee dramas as a whole
suggest as vivid a portrait of Yankee traits as Lowell's
"Biglow Papers", even though the latter contains a political
satire which the former scarcely suggested.
The "type" had its distinct characteristics; it is every-
where easily identified. In his speech the Indian was a
white man; also in his philosophical attitude toward his own
gods. The vernacular of the Yankee was as crude as the stage
Negro dialect one finds in Beach's " Jonathan Postfree."
But the Yankee was much more of a caricature than the
Negro. The business type, as represented in Mrs. Mowatt's
"Fashion" and Mrs. Bateman's "Self", has all the tokens of
stress and strain that were later, in the era of Charles Klein,
to be so exploited as signs of "big business." Naturally, the
political type was fashioned after the current model; but it
is interesting to note, in contrast, the advance made by the
American dramatist in depicting national political eccentrici-
ties from the days when Preuss wrote "Fashions and Follies
of Washington Life" (1857), and Hoyt wrote “A Texas Steer"
(1894). In fact, I have suggested many times the advantage
for the student to follow the persistence of type, thus con-
necting the present with the past. Can we not say that there
is a line of progression from Mrs. Mowatt's "Fashion" (1845),
to Mrs. Bateman's "Self" (1856), to Mr. Howard's "Sara-
toga” (1870), to Langdon Mitchell's "The New York Idea'
(1906)? Is it far-fetched to study Paulding's “Nick of the
Wood" (1838) with Murdock's "Davy Crockett ” (1873) and
Moody's "The Great Divide" (1906), to see the refining process
which has befallen the American Drama? Such progression
cannot be noted in the Indian or the historical types. The red
man has been peculiarly put upon the stage with only a
theoretical conception of his tradition and his tragedy. The
theatrical stage Indian is about as dead and as standardized as
95
The American Dramatist
the Indian outside the tobacco shop. And I am afraid that
the historical personage has fared as badly: in the dialogue of
the few plays dealing with historical subjects the characters
are waxen images.
II
There is a long line of Indian plays; they are suggested in
the table that follows. Beginning with the "Ponteach” of
Robert Rogers, they present but small variety in their progress
SOME INDIAN PLAYS
1766. Ponteach; or, The Savages of America. Robert Rogers.
1794. Tammany; or, The Indian Chief. Anne Kemble Hatton.
1808. The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage. James Nelson
Barker.
1828. The Indian Prophecy. G. W. P. Custis. (Presented, 1827)
1829. Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. John Augus-
tus Stone.
1829. William Penn; or, The Elm Tree. Richard Penn Smith.
Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia. G. W. P. Custis.
1831. The Last of the Mohicans. S. E. Glover.
1830.
1832. Oralloossa: Son of the Incas. Robert Montgomery Bird.
1832. The Liberty Tree; or, Boston Boys in '76. J. S. Jones.
1834. The Wept of Wish-ton-wish. Dramatization. (Published,
1856)
1838. Nick of the Woods. L. H. Medina.
1847. Metamora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs. Burlesque.
John Brougham.
1852. De Soto, the Hero of the Mississippi. George H. Miles.
Hutton records many titles of Indian Plays in his article, "The
American Play", Lippincott, 37: 289-298, March, 1886. Rees
declares that a reaction against the Indian drama began in 1846. See
also A. H. Quinn and P. I. Reed.
down to the present, when Mary Austin attempted, in "The
Arrow Maker", produced by the New Theatre in the Spring
of 1911, to square Indian folklore with universal primitive
psychology. Mrs. Austin has written: "Before attempting to
96
Drama of Types and Many Forms
realize the working of Indian psychology, you must first rid
yourself of the notion that there is any real difference between
the tribes of men except the explanations. What determines
man's behaviour in the presence of fever, thunder, and the
separations of death, is the nature of his guess at the causes.
of these things. The issues of life do not vary so much with
the conditions of civilization as is popularly supposed." If
this be so, then Rogers was correct in his rhythms for Chekitan
in "Ponteach" (1766) and Barker, in "The Indian Princess"
(1808), made Pocohontas speak in terms characteristic of all
Indian maidens and white ones as well.
and white ones as well. But there was too
much consciousness of the Indian's "savage error" in the
make-up of the stage red man of the early national period,
even though the "savage child of savage Nature" was always
particular about showing his or her racial pride. And the
dramatist always seems to have had sympathy with the raw
deal given the Indian; whatever eloquence there is in these
plays centres in the injustice meted the red man by the white.
N. H. Bannister's "Putnam, the Iron Son of '76" is repre-
sentative in this respect. Says Oneactah (referring to his son
just gone):
When first upon this throbbing heart thy mother placed
thee, peace, like a dove, smiled o'er the land, and the hatchet
was buried deep in the earth, the club of death lay idle in the
wigwam of my fathers, and the red and the white man were
friends. He has no home now save the habitation of the
reptile in the murky thicket, no hope but to die, no thought
save one, and that is vengeance! Hear it, ye unseen spirits
of my departed fathers: look upon the land ye trod as mas-
ters, let the souls of the past inspire the last drooping limb of
the falling tree to wreak upon its destroyer vengeance eternal
as the red light of heaven; inspire me to conquer or to die.
This dialogue, written in 1845, is not so different from John
Augustus Stone's dialogue in the unlocated "Metamora; or
the Last of the Wampanoags", written in 1829. Forrest's
biographer, Alger, quotes sufficiently from the play to shape
some idea of its whole. Metamora's feeling is uncolored by
97
The American Dramatist
traditions peculiar to his own race, save now and again the
sprinkling of such names as Manito. But he, too, is conscious
of his imminent passing. What does he say :
The pale faces are around me thicker than the leaves of
summer. I chase the hart in the hunting-grounds; he leads
me to the white man's villages. I drive my canoe into the riv-
ers; they are full of the white man's ships. I visit the graves
of my fathers; they are lost in the white man's corn-fields.
They come like the waves of the ocean forever rolling upon
the shores. Surge after surge, they dash upon the beach, and
every foam-drop is a white man. They swarm over the land
like the dove of winter, and the red men are dropping like
withered leaves.
Not any of these plays is existent on the stage to-day. The
one most talked about is "Metamora", partly because Forrest
brought it to such picturesque heights, and partly because its
name was kept alive in a very notable burlesque by John
Brougham, entitled "Po-ca-hon-tas; or, The Gentle Savage'
(1855).
III
No one has, as yet, studied the Yankee and Brother Jona-
than and Uncle Sam and the pedler of New England to see
what relationship they bear each to the other. It is a social
study which will be of value only if done before the older
generation "down East" passes completely away. The evi-
dence is still in the countryside, though modern facilities are
driving the itinerant salesman with a pack on his back into the
unknown. There is very little written on the Yankee; there
is very slight record of his peculiar language or his typical
dress. Literature mentions him, but not with the vividness
with which Dorothy Wordsworth mentions the pedler who used
to frequent the byways of Grasmere and the Lake District.
The gypsy trails in the latest model car; the tinsmith, the
seller of general wares, has become urbane. The character-
istic thing about the stage Yankee was his rustic, almost
clownish manner. Was he an emanation of the dramatist's
98
Drama of Types and Many Forms
invention? Was Uncle Sam the model? Did he embody
some of the characteristics of the Yankee pedler? These
points have yet to be proven.
As has been suggested, the Yankee character is a fascinating study
for some student. Ample evidence of his characteristics is to be
found in the plays, from the time of Royall Tyler. His ear-marks
were in language, costume, and name the latter being particularly
varied, even though Jonathan predominated: for example, Nathan
Yank, Solomon Swop, Industrious Doolittle, Seth Sage, Horsebean
Hemlock, Hiram Dodge, Deuteronomy Dutiful, Obediah Whitcher,
Jedediah, Gumption Cute. The reader is advised to consult such
plays as "The Contrast" (1787), Royall Tyler; "The Modest
Soldier" (1787), Dunlap; "The Politician Out-witted" (1788), Low;
"The Traveller Returned" (1796); "Rural Felicity" (1801), Min-
shull;
"Love and Friendship" (1809), Lindsley; "Tears and
Smiles" (1807), Barker; "Fashionable Follies" (1809), Hutton;
"The Deed of Gift" (1822), Woodworth; "The Saw-Mill" (1824),
Hawkins; "The Forest Rose" (1825), Woodworth; "Montgomery"
(1825), Finn; "The Times" (1829); "A Trip to Niagara" (1829,
1830), Dunlap. Among the dramatists of Yankee types, Joseph S.
Jones was the most prolific. Consult his "The Liberty Tree; or,
Boston Boys in '76" (1832), “The Green Mountain Boy" (1833),
"The People's Lawyer" (1839), "The Silver Spoon" (1852). Corne-
lius A. Logan wrote "Yankee Land" (1834), in which James H.
Hackett played Lot Sap Sago, and also "The Vermont Wool-Dealer"
(1840). Consult P. I. Reed's "The Realistic Presentation of American
Characters in Native American Plays Prior to Eighteen Seventy." See
Moses' "Representative Plays by American Dramatists", Vol. II,
for "The People's Lawyer", and a discussion of Yankee dramas.
We know that he developed by what he fed on in the
theatre; that he was a type observed first hand; but whether
or not his identifying vagaries were caught and noted by the
actor and then passed on to the later dramatists has to be
determined further. Royall Tyler came from the Vermont
hills and lo, the Yankee became the one native mark in a
comedy, "The Contrast", more Sheridan than "homemade."
Did Tyler set the fashion? Was the Yankee made attractive
to the stage because of his dialect or because he was a unique
phase of humanity? It would seem, after one had read
99
The American Dramatist
through some of the correspondence of Hackett and "Yankee"
Hill, after one had weighed the opinions of contemporaries
like Wemyss and Ludlow, that the exploitation of the Yankee
rôle was in large measure due to its adaptability to the actor's
peculiar gifts. Was it always a spontaneous creation on the
part of the playwright-this Yankee type, -or was it merely
the re-dressing of a model in the clothes of New England?
Take, for instance, C. A. Logan's "Yankee Land” (1834),
in which the character of Lot Sap Sago was assumed by
Hackett. Note the costume indications. The acting edition
of the play calls for "Drab long-tail coat; broad stripe vest;
eccentric striped trousers; straps and boots; yeoman crown
hat; bright colored cravat." It is not difficult to recognize
the model for such a being. Take Hackett's "Jonathan in
England" (1828); it was merely Colman's "Who Wants a
Guinea?" converted into the vernacular. Solomon Grundy,
the French cockney, becomes Jonathan, the gen-u-ine Yankee.
The clown of English comedy, says Wemyss, becomes accli-
matized "down East." Hackett was sensitive about his
specialty; he resented Hill following so closely in his self-
relegated territory. But, in the thirties, Hill became su-
preme. Says his biographer:
It was this faculty, to use a hackneyed phrase, of throwing
himself body and spirit, into a part, which gave to his Yankee
a richness and truthfulness not approached by any other actor
before or since his time. He did not merely put on a flaxen
wig, a long-tailed coat, a short vest, a bell-crowned hat, and
straps to his pantaloons long enough for suspenders, nor thus
attired did he content himself by imitating the peculiar drawl
and queer expressions of the Yankee, for the veriest bungler
on earth can do all this, but the spirit of Yankeedom pervaded
every action of his body, peeped from his expressive eyes with
such sly meaning, that it was difficult for the time being, not
to believe it was a mistake in the bills, when they announced
Mr. Hill as Mr. Wheeler, instead of announcing the veritable
Major Wheeler himself.
What were the characteristics of this Yankee type? As
early as Royall Tyler, he was free with his "tarnation
وو
100

HO
OF
UNI
"If I pester you any, jest say so;
I'll take the hint without the kick."
"Squire Winslow, how do you do? I
most broke my shanks on your stairs."
Two POSES OF JOHN E. OWENS, AS Solon Shingle, IN A PLAY BY
J. S. JONES, ORIGINALLY CALLED "THE PEOPLE'S LAWYER."
Reproductions from the collection of Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.

:
:
Drama of Types and Many Forms
expletive; he was a country bumpkin, wide-mouthed as to
city ways. Exclaims Jonathan:
Gor! she's gone off in a swinging passion, before I had time
to think of consequences. If this is the way with your city
ladies, give me the twenty acres of rock, the bible, the cow,
and Tabitha, and a little peaceable bundling.
In "The People's Lawyer" (1839), by Doctor J. S. Jones,
Solon Shingle's father "fit" in the Revolution, he "druv" a
wagon. Such dialect indications as "tew" for too, "gal"
for girl were common. But the stage Yankee departed from
the sociological study of one by being upright in most cases,
whereas, the true pedler was more subtle "shrewd,
witty, insinuating and wheedling", says one writer, but not
always "altogether downright particular honest." To judge
by the evolution of the rôle of Solon Shingle in the hands of the
comedian, John E. Owens, the stage Yankee was molded
by the actor rather than by the playwright. But, despite the
conventional aspects of this stage character, in the many plays
which featured him there was something real about him,
something homely. That he was closely related to the Yan-
kee pedler is borne out by the character of Jonathan in
Lindsley's "Love and Friendship" (1807), who finds himself
in Charleston, S. C., to sell his "notions."
He says:
Here I am, slick 'nough, and where to go next, be cust 'f I
know. This must be Broad-street, and broad 'nough 'tis
tewe, by gum! I've been walkin' up it this good fifteen min-
utes, and darn'd 'f I've got acrost it yit. I must keep tewe
eyes 'bout me, or I shall be intewe King-street, and the black-
barded Jews'll shave the hair off my teeth... . . This here
Charleston's such a rotten hot place, there's no livin' in 't;
then there's sich a tarnation sight 'f negurs, black as the old
feller 'imself, a body kan't stir but they has 'um at their nose
or their heels. It beats all nater! Never fetch me, 'f I don't
wish I was t' hum agin, with all my heart.
When, in 1836, Hill played in London, and took his audi-
ences by storm, the papers were careful to emphasize, for the
ΙΟΙ
The American Dramatist
benefit of the British public, that true as the Yankee was to
the actual type, it must not be thought for an instant that the
stage Yankee was a portrait of all Americans, — rather was
he a class in himself! I am inclined to believe that the species
of entertainment, which Hackett and Hill and Marble gave,
was largely abetted in public favor by the appearance of
Charles Mathews, who was seen in America during 1822 in
programs of varied dialects.
Beach, L.
SOME YANKEE PLAYS
Arranged alphabetically, according to authors
Jonathan Postfree; or, The Honest Yan-
kee. 1807.
Botsford, Mrs. Margaret. The Reign of Reform; or, Yankee Doodle
Conway, H. J.
Durivage, O. E.
Hawkins, Micah.
Humphreys, David.
Jones, Joseph S.
Lindsley, A. B.
Logan, Cornelius A.
Steele, Silas S.
Woodworth, Samuel.
Court. By a Lady. 1830.
Our Jemimy; or, Connecticut Courtship.
Hiram Hireout; or, Followed by Fortune.
1851.
The Stage-Struck Yankee. 1845.
The Saw-Mill; or, A Yankee Trick.
1824 (1829).
The Yankee in England. 1815.
Solon Shingle [The People's Lawyer].
1839.
Love and Friendship; or, Yankee No-
tions. 1807-8 (1809).
Yankee Land.
1834.
The Brazen Drum; or, The Yankee in
Poland. 1841.
The Forest Rose; or, American Farmers.
A Pastoral Opera, with music by John
Davies. 1825.
IV
Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt's "Fashion", first produced at the
Park Theatre, New York, March 24, 1845, represents the
high-water mark in the social drama of the period. It carried
102
Drama of Types and Many Forms
وو
society a little farther uptown, for one must remember that
Tyler's "The Contrast was laid very near the Battery,
where the beaux walked on Sunday afternoons. Mrs. Mow-
att is one of the rare "female" figures to practise the art of
play writing in America, Mrs. Mercy Warren, Charlotte Len-
nox, and Susannah Rowson being her forerunners. Financial
reverses brought her to the stage both as an actress and a
writer. She lived in a day and generation when a "female"
employed in some public work was regarded with amazement.
To practise the art of poetry was a bold enterprise; to write
a novel only excusable under anonymity. There is no more
fascinating reading than Mrs. Mowatt's "Autobiography of
an Actress." Here one is given the measure of her mind, the
atmosphere of the social life which she led, the interests and
concerns of the time. Here one readily understands the
incentive which made her write "Fashion", as a satirical
exposé of a certain parvenuism which she saw around her.
Crude as the play is, in many ways, the ease with which it
caught the public fancy shows the depths to which Mrs.
Mowatt's fun cut. Whenever I read through the play and
come upon Count Jolimaitre, "a fashionable European impor-
tation", I am reminded of the convention of play writing
noted by Bronson Howard as being binding in the years
between 1870 and 1880. In substance, it was that if the play-
wright wished some villainy of faithlessness to be commit-
ted against the female sex, a Frenchman must do it. It is
easy to find in Mrs. Tiffany some relationship to Mrs. Mala-
prop, and many are the plays before "Fashion" and after
that show in similar ways the foolhardiness of the aspiring
mother. Adam Trueman, the farmer from Catteraugus, has
all the downrightness of the Yankee; his Americanism is
unmistakable; it fairly shrieks. In Zeke, Negro delineation
takes on a more realistic form than was usual in the early
plays. Cesar, in "Jonathan Postfree" (1807) talks like a
Chinaman the sheer art of dialect was, slow to evolve in
American literature. Real Negro idioms were not truthfully
put down until Joel Chandler Harris gathered his "Uncle
Remus" stories. What says Cesar:
103
The American Dramatist
I no likee this massa Fopling — I don't know what ole
missee can see in him to make her likee him so much :- he no
half so good as Jemmy Seamore:— and younga missee Maria
she know it; she love one little finger of Jemmy more better
than Fopling's whole body - but I must holee my tongue
here he come
But that the stage black man often had sensibility, just as
the stage Yankee had a preponderance of national virtue, is
seen in another sentiment uttered by Cesar who has failed to
get a tip from Fopling for polishing his shoes:
Me no muchee fear the weight of your cane, massa, such a
little tick no hurtee me much and me didn't expect to feel
the weight of your money-me only try to see if you had any
soul or no.
Thus, long before "Uncle Tom's Cabin", the sentimental
attitude toward the Negro was manifest in the theatre. But
the mechanics of realistic stage dialogue were weak. Zeke,
in "Fashion", and the Negro in Poe's "The Gold Bug", are of
the same pattern.
The casualness with which Mrs. Mowatt dropped into the
theatre is indicated in her narrative. The "E. S." must have
been Epes Sargent.
"Why do you not write a play?" said E. S.-to me one
morning. "You have more decided talent for the stage than
for anything else. If we can get it accepted for the Park
Theatre, and if it should succeed, you have a new and wide.
field of exertion opened to you - one in which success is very
rare, but for which your turn of mind has particularly fitted
you."
'What shall I attempt, comedy or tragedy?"
"Comedy, decidedly; because you can only write what you
feel, and you are 'nothing if not critical' - besides, you will
have a fresh channel for the sarcastic ebullitions with which
you so constantly indulge us.
وو
Mrs. Mowatt acknowledged that she felt she might make
use of the vein of sarcasm which adversity and society had
developed in her to profitable advantage! She approached the
104
Drama of Types and Many Forms
theatre with no high intentions of adding to dramatic litera-
ture. Her confessions are naïve.
There was no attempt in "Fashion" at fine writing [she
says]. I designed the play wholly as an acting comedy. A
dramatic, not a literary, success was what I desired to achieve.
Caution suggested my not aiming at both at once.
وو
It is interesting to note that when her second play, “Ar-
mand; or, The Child of the People", was given in London
(1849), the sub-title was expunged by the licenser, and
was changed to "The Peer and the Peasant. Various
speeches were deleted, which had gone well in Boston and
New York, because they suggested anti-monarchical ten-
dencies. It is to be remembered that the American dramatist
of that period was only too anxious to show his Americanism
in this manner. Jack Cade" lauded the democratic spirit.
And a large part of the bitter differences between Forrest and
Macready, which resulted in the disastrous Astor Place riot,
in New York, was motivated by the strong feeling which
existed between the two nations, and which took the form of
what Lowell called "condescension.
CC
وو
Another point to note was that the publishing of plays
coincident with the performance was not an unusual thing.
Mrs. Mowatt refers to the publication of “Armand” close on
its first performance. She writes:
The copies nightly sold at the door of the theatre caused
great annoyance to the dramatic representatives of the play.
It is a singular fact, that if the eye of an actor chance to rest
upon an individual in the boxes who is deeply absorbed in a
book, and if the actor fancy that the book is of the play then
performing, he will almost invariably forget his part, though
he may have enacted it correctly a dozen of times.
times, the mere leaf-turning of books in the hands of the
audience will throw a whole company into confusion, and the
prompter's voice may be heard vainly attempting to plead
the cause of the author.
Some-
Now, both in Mrs. Mowatt's "Fashion" and Mrs. Sidney
Bateman's "Self" there are to be found the small points of
105
The American Dramatist
current taste which add to their interest as mere social docu-
ments, however trite they may seem to the theatre of to-day
as drama. "Fashion", in its revival recently, lent itself to a
transposition which made it a picturesque caricature of the
manner and decoration of the "fabulous forties." The same
false note of parvenuism that was capitalized by Mrs. Mowatt
is lampooned by Mrs. Bateman. What does Mrs. Apex, the
social climber, say to her husband, the downright American:
You are just the man would like to dress in linsey-woolsey,
and cowhide brogans, while Mary and I, in check aprons and
shilling calicoes, did our own chores. You are just the man
to admire the primitive style.
The character of Unit in "Self" represents "us Republi-
cans", who are better off, he thinks, if we keep our money
hidden in a worsted mit, rather than deposit it in a Wild Cat
Bank. Thus flows contemporary life through the tritest
dialogue and the weakest plot. And the student, unfortu-
nately, who wishes to gather such evidence, as Professor Reed
did for his commendable thesis, must wade through the text
with no hope of being stirred by any abiding dramaturgy.
V
The American Drama is not punctuated by any great his-
torical sense. We have already seen the American stage used
for dramatic broadsides, and the college platforms resounding
to thunderous praise of and invectives against the British
crown during the Revolutionary period. We have also noted
the dramas that came close upon the idolization of Washing-
ton as a leader, during his lifetime; and as well the Tory
sentiments against him which persisted even after the Consti-
tution was launched. We have seen plays which were dra-
matic threnodies on the death of General Montgomery and the
struggle between Wolfe and Montcalm. André and Arnold
came with contemporary fervor to the theatre. But in none
of these plays was the heroic sentiment worth preserving in
its drama form. And just as it is necessary to square up
106
Drama of Types and Many Forms
theatrical character with historical, so, in the discussion of
politics, one must measure the prejudices of the playwright, on
which side he is arguing, as in "Federalism Triumphant ", by
an unknown hand, and "The Politician Out-witted" (1789),
by Samuel Low. In the former you are given a political
satire, the subtitle of which runs, "In the steady habits of
Connecticut Alone, or, The Turnpike road to a fortune
as performed at the Theatres Royal and Aristocratic at Hart-
ford and New Haven, October, 1801." In the latter, under
the guise of a comedy of manners, you are offered a debate
between Federalist and anti-Federalist, conviction here being
woven in with the crudest sort of story. There is ample
evidence that the subject of the Constitution was a welcome
one to the playwright. But the plays were not strictly of an
historical character unless they dealt specifically with certain
historical events, as specific as Bannister's "Putnam, the
Iron Son of '76", or Burnett's "Blanche of Brandywine"
(1858), or Bunce's "Love in '76" (1857). Then the patriotic
spectacle unfolded itself in various ways; in Bannister and
Burnett full of bluster and proper sentiment; in Bunce full
of "bloodless" war, an English comedy spirit, a parlor spright-
liness that had little of the martial about it except in the
soldiers' uniforms. In this respect Bunce was a forerunner of
Fitch. One can measure the very spectacular character of
most of these entertainments by the specifications for their
scenic color. The Bannister play is typical, and probably
among the most extensive. The directions for the Vision
scene are as follows:
Slow music. Three quarters dark. Ethereal firmament,
filled with silver stars. . Eagle flying in the air, to ascend,
looking down upon a lion couchant, on trap . . . to descend.
The goddesses discovered in various groups, bearing blue
wands with silver stars. God of War . . . on small Roman
chariot, to descend. Goddess of Liberty on trap. . . in
small Roman chariot, to descend.
After chorus:
"We will be free, we will be free,"
Music changes. Eagle ascends and lion descends. God-
107
The American Dramatist
.
desses dance around, waving wands. Goddess of Liberty and
Mars point to clouds. Clouds ascend . . . and draw off
and (lights up) the Signers of the Declaration of Independence
discovered, Ben Franklin at the head of table. Music
changes. Panels in flat above figures open and discover
Tableau
General Washington, Major Putnam, Cadwallader, Greene
and American Officers. White fire behind. Clouds descend,
etc. Chorus. Clouds ascend and draw off, and the American
flag discovered on flat (painted). .
In the final scene, the triumph of Washington, as well as of
stage management, is when the General enters on horseback!
Is there small wonder that such fustian should have trained
audiences to expect allegory and spiritual content thus exter-
nalized in chromo style? Is it not quite natural that audi-
ences of the fifties should have hung upon the gorgeously
tinted clouds and sun effects, as Little Eva, robed in white,
sent down upon St. Claire and Uncle Tom a benediction, as she
rode the heavenly way upon the back of a "milk-white dove"?
The patriotic portraits of our great men were always highly
colored. Into their mouths were put the proper sentiments,
but around them was very slight historic atmosphere. Trum-
bull's "The Death of Nathan Hale" (1842) illustrates the
characteristics at their best. But there was another type of
play touching on historical events which was not dependent
on the martial air: "Witchcraft; or, The Martyrs of Salem",
by Cornelius Mathews (1846) and Longfellow's "John Endi-
cott" and "Giles Corey of the Salem Farms." There
is in neither of them any of the palpitant atmosphere which
Hawthorne's "Twice Told Tales" and "Mosses from an
Old Manse" convey; none of the power and effectiveness of
MacKaye's "The Scarecrow." But they are an attempt to
bring to the drama subject-matter distinctively American.
Longfellow shows, in his two plays, no dramatic sense what-
ever; his action is weighted with extraneous detail, his senti-
ments are those of the romantic drama of the period. Being
a poet, he fell into the snare of using fine spiritual distinctions.
in his speeches which were intended only for closet reading;
108

OF
ONIE
OH! I'32 30 WICKED
W
AN SUNG BY
G.C. HOWARD,
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
ROSTAR
GED. C, HUWARU
and repotfully dedicated te
G. L. AIKEN, NY
SEW YORK Ruce Y HORACE WATERS 303
LOYALE
THE SONGS OF THE CELEBRATED
CORDELIA HOWARD.
Written & Choposed by her
FATHER.
BOSTON
MRS. G. C. HOWARD AND HER DAUGHTER CORDELIA
CELEBRATED AS Topsy AND Eva IN AIKEN'S VERSION OF "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN."
Reproductions from lithographed music covers, collection of Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.

Drama of Types and Many Forms
there was little progressive structure to his work, little realiza-
tion of the value of cumulative interest. Cornelius Mathews
knew the theatre more intimately.
History passed through the theatre pictorially, as a pageant,
but not with any sense of value for itself alone. It was not
until many years after the Civil War that the dramatists
dared to write their Union and Confederate plays. But, close
upon the War of 1812, coincident with events even, history
in the making was celebrated upon the stage, and the scenic
artist thrilled his audiences with transparencies. It was not
until 1829 that R. P. Smith wrote his "The Eighth of Janu-
ary", and not until 1830 that he did his "The Triumph of
Plattsburg." But the list of historical plays, or semi-historical,
which has been compiled, indicates that the early dramatist
was not unmindful of the contemporary national event. His
political characters marked the temper of political parties,
as in Heath's "Whigs and Democrats" (1839) and Mathews's
"The Politicians" (1840). Mexico figured in many of the
contemporary plays and has persisted as a territory with color,
even to 1925, when Belasco produced "The Dove", a gringo
melodrama which afforded him ample scope for his decorative
imagination. In the fifties, Mormonism was one of the big
political themes, and Thomas Dunn English's "The Mormons;
or, Life at Salt Lake City" (1858) is perhaps more authentic
for the student than the later drama by Harriet Ford and
Harvey O'Higgins, called "Polygamy" (1914). The theatre
fate of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has been traced in the second
volume of my “Representative Plays by American Drama-
tists", but the significant thing about it was the opposition
its use in the theatre called forth from Mrs. Stowe. Her sense
of propaganda seems to have been wholly wanting; her sense
of morality warped, yet much akin to what the theatre has had
to contend with from earliest days. Asa Hutchinson, close upon
the publication of the story in 1852, made application to the
author to allow him to dramatize it. Her reply was as follows:
I have considered your application and asked advice of my
different friends, and the general sentiment of those whom I
109
The American Dramatist

ACADEMY OF MUSIC
Manager,
INDIANAPOLIS,
Harry G. Clarke | Stage Manager,
La Barker
Friday and Saturday, April 18th & 18th,
AN
BDAY MATEN
H GREAT ARTISTE
MRS.G.C.HOWARD
WILL GIVE
3 GRAND PERFORMANCES I
OF HER ORIGINAL AND WORLD-RENOWNED CHARACTER OF
TOPSY
As performed by her in the principal chies of America, England, Ireland & Sootland, with the most dis-
tinguished approbation in the Great American Drama, with all its original affecta,
hi 6 Acta, 17 Tablesar, and 80 Scenes, of
UNCLE TOM'S
CABIN!
THE GREAT OHILD ACTRESS
LITTLE FLORENCE NEWMAN will appear as EVA
JM WHICH OHÁRACTER (ME TTARDS UNRIVALED.
To lacrosse the attraction, special engagement has been effected with the celebrated Arcoms and actor
who will appear in his
Original Character of
Mr. G. C. HOWARD,
ST. CLAIR
A POWERFUL CAST OF CHARACTERS.
Topsy,
UNCLE TOM..
(u) sigtefly played by hers, with Qo Bongs of “Pro zo
Wicked," so the “Ualou," wrhica by G C- Reward.
GEORGE HARRIS, ■ Fugitive Slavo…….
Mrs. G. C. Howard
MR JOSEPH DELMER
MR JAMES MARRISON
St. Olair, his briginal character, with song "Eva in Heavm.” Mr. G. C. Howard
PENNKAS FLETCHER, a Kastechlag.
SIMON LEO BEE"! (hayo. Čerpret …….
MARIR. a luvve….
GUMPTION CUTE, a Lin Yenkos
DRACON PERRT…………
HÁLST, = Flats Desler……….
TOM LOKI..
J.CLINTON GEORGE SHELST.
BARKER SKROON, el Asctlenser
J*PLUMMER | QUINBO
L
W. BARKT
་་
LE STETSON
&AMBO
NR RAZLBT,
J. TUORNE | ALF MANN.
by
„Mr. JOUN P. GOTTON
LMORTON
W. STEWART
L SMITH
A BOTER
…….J. TTOUS
W. KENWITU
Bya, with the original song “Eva to her Papa,"ae Florence Nowman
eizoed by the From and the Publio to be the Greatest Child Astrom is the World.
KLIZA HABRIS….
AUNT OPEKLIA, from Versoons
MARIE ST. CLAIR,
Man JULIA PARKEB | CASSY..
ADELE CLARKE | CHILOR.
ANNIE MACK | EMILINE.
Save Desizzu, blaren, Plaziers, Chiarus, Exa, Etc.
MR BARRY
........ Ha TUMHISON
Has NEWMAN
SYNOPSIS OP SOHNERY AND INCIDENTS.
Suki to Bondage - Mr. Sbelly's Plantations. A Wieler Night's njoking of the Slavra Tavera na ika bankar of the
VIEW OF TOX UBIO RIVER
Okla. Eliam followed by the Bloodreads "A Hundred Dollars for ʼn Bona”
ESCAPE OF ELIZA ON the FLOATING ICE
AND THE BAFFLED PURSUERA-TIRILLING TABLEAU.
B. Clair's Brams and Grounda on Lake Pontcharralo. His Ophelia's first appourases in the Booth “Babice onder
foot-how shifun." Topsy's Illstory, DE CHILD DAT NEBER WAS DÖRN.
SONG AND BREAKDOWN, "I'SE SO WICKED."
Turers by dhe Biver. The Kestackina "That's my mine ca it" blooting of George and Eliza · Booky Pam
The Haroon Lecaps of Georgs and Niza "Friend thee's pot wanted here Turilling Tables Sunset on the lake.
Hva and Uncle Tom' *1 sos • land of Sprights bright." Eva's Bad Chamber. Lova, Joj, Pance
DEATH OF EVA-SOLEMN AND IMPRESSIVE TABLEAU.
Topey and ibo Sioekinge -I lan'ı half as wicked as I seod to waa.* St Cair to Bra in Clearon. Touy, and Avas
Ophelia The Law of Br. Clak
Slavo Market in New Orleans! Sale of Uncle Tom to Legroe !
Coorship of Aust Ophelia and the Dioscom Logron's Exem—she Whipping. Parlors of Miss Opbalia's la Vermont.
TOPSY BUTTING THE YANKER. SIDE-SPLITTING TABLEAU
Fanation Bose-Sports of the Field Banda · Street in New Orleana Young Belby Goarching for Vocle Tom A Law.
yu'n Inssemsation never Ormdia. Legres's Bouss Omary and Lagre The Lock of lab. The Workings of a Galliy
Comclear. "Do you know I've made up my mind is kill you 7″ The Lim Blow. Besobation. The old bed
DEATH OF UNOLE TOM.
-I've got the Victory; the Lord has given ja 10 me; Glory ba bís ascre'
Magnificent Allegorical Tableau—“EVA IN HEAVEN.”
BOALE OF PRICES-MATINEE
-
ADMISSION, 50 cts. | CHILDREN,
·
25 cts.
EVENING PRICES AS USUAL.
Wsinya, Johnson a Loa l'isposal, pinas Vʻrishng Hoɛm. t7 Bjarn 15. Dufala, sxi de Ana Puu Mao Yast
have consulted SO far
agrees with my own, that
it would not be advisable
to make that
that use of the
work which you propose.
It is thought, with the
present state of theatrical
performances in this coun-
try, that any attempt on
the part of Christians to
identify themselves with
them will be productive of
danger to the individual
character, and to the gen-
eral cause. If the barrier
which now keeps young
people of Christian fami-
lies from theatrical enter-
tainments is once broken
down by the introduction
of respectable and moral
plays, they will then be
open to all the temptations
of those who are not such,
as there will be, as the
world now is, five bad plays
to one good. However
specious may be the idea
of reforming dramatic en-
tertainments, I fear it is
wholly impracticable, and
as a friend to you should
hope that you would not
run the risk of so danger-
ous an experiment. The
world is not good enough
yet for it to succeed.
But, while she stayed
the hand of one ambitious
playwright, there was no
IIO
Drama of Types and Many Forms
copyright protection to stay others. It is interesting to
realize that from the many thousands of performances of
"Uncle Tom's Cabin", neither Mrs. Stowe nor her family
enjoyed any of the financial returns. There is a description
extant of her attending a theatre, hidden in the shadow of
a box, and witnessing the play based on her novel; so deeply
moved does she seem to have been that she gave way to the
mood of the entertainment completely. Said an eye-wit-
ness: "I never saw such delight upon a human face as she
displayed when she first comprehended the full power of
Mrs. Howard's Topsy."
VI
The Yankee and social types, which have been so conscien-
tiously indicated in the thesis by Professor Reed, may be added
to by the local city type so popular in New York, Philadelphia,
and Boston. The "b'hoys" of the days when Chanfrau and
the Bowery Theatre flourished were not so very different from
the b'hoys of Harrigan's plays, and Mose, who made his appear-
ance in Baker's "A Glance at New York" (1848), was destined
to flourish in many companion pieces, going to Philadelphia,
to California, even to China; and always being as welcome
afresh in a new play as Dan Mulligan was in his series. I
believe that in many of these local plays the dramatists took
pattern from London. Very little stretch of imagination was
necessary to put these plays in any locality desired; only
a slight change in externals was required. Boucicault's "The
Poor of New York" was also known as "The Poor of Liver-
pool," and "The Streets of London." The fireman, the rag-
picker, the fast young man, the seamstress, the dry-goods
clerk, the printer - all of them figured as comedy types of
city life.
The surprising thing is that the American Theatre should
have flourished so generally on such poor material as used to
be called into service by the excellent stock companies of the
day. There was a run of frontier drama: Simms, Paulding,
and others were ready to establish the type; there was quick
dramatization of popular stories: Scott, Cooper, and Dickens
III
The American Dramatist
became the rage. But somehow there was a dead level in
these pieces, which we have to judge as dead level merely
because we have not seen them acted with such casts as they
had in those days. The Burtons, the Broughams, in fact,
most of the players dwelt upon so lovingly by Laurence Hut-
ton, in his entertaining volume, "Plays and Players", could
exalt the flimsiest of dramatic material. Which makes me
feel that the palmy days of acting of which the younger
generation never ceases to hear were the trashy days of
drama, except in so far as an actor adhered to the standard
plays. You can read any script separated in subject-mat-
ter by many miles of local atmosphere, and you will still obtain
a sameness, a close adherence to the same shape of sentiment.
Contrast Simms's "Norman Maurice" with Paulding's "The
Bucktails; or, Americans in England." They drank from the
same sources of the Gothic and romantic. There is a horrible
smug security to the "undefiled" American as painted by the
dramatists of the time. The Bucktail lads are insufferable.
What does Henry one of the Rollo heroes
declare re-
garding love and the world of temptation? He is talking in
the quiet of the evening, when the heart is always ready to
become aflame! He says:
'Tis not the light of the moon, the sacred quiet of a calm
evening the repose of a country scene nor the pure
beauties of nature nor the innocent intercourse of a lonely
walk, that inflame the senses, or corrupt the heart. It is at
midnight balls and masquerades, where lascivious music as-
sails the senses - where dazzling lights confound the imagina-
tion, and wines and costly viands pamper the heated appetites.
It is there that virtue melts like wax, and female purity is most
successfully assailed.
Later, when this same model youth views the object of his
affection near him, he exclaims in an aside, which undoubtedly
the shrinking lady must have heard, "Her sprightliness
makes me bold." Simms's "Norman Maurice" is more
heroic, it is more eloquent, but it also has about it the same
trite eddies of emotion, which characterized much of the liter-
112

F. S. CHANFRAU AS Mose, A NEW YORK FIRE BOY, IN B. A. BAKER'S
"A GLANCE AT NEW YORK."
The b'hoys of the Bowery flourished on such drama.
UNIF
WIGH
OF
Drama of Types and Many Forms

ature in England and here
naturally here in America,
because we were brought up
on imitation.
VII
The individual play adds
little to the progressive
WALLACK'S
Proprietor and Manager……….
Doors open at 7:30 P.M.
.Mr. Løster Wallaok
Comments at 8 o'clocs
Engagement of the Talented and Popular Arists,
MR. and MRS

W. J. FLORENCE
who will appear in their famous original characterizations of
Hon. BARDWELL SLOTE & Mrs. Gen'l GILFLORY
march of either the American EVERY EVENING
Theatre or the American
Drama. It is the group ele-
ment which is alone valuable
D
SATURDAY MATINEE
During the Week ending
JUNE ąd, 1876.
for the student to follow. MONDAY EVENING, MAY 29th, 1876,
For that reason, I am ap-
hall be prancied the very excommsful Homecasty Batirical Pickers Barrative of Lobby Lble and Society si Cae
National Capriol, is 4 Azta, written expressly for Mr. and Mrs. Fiormon, bydle B. E. Wood, and musied the

pending tables of plays MIGHTY
which will enable the reader
to go afield and do further
investigation.
There are a
sufficient number of texts of
the old plays available to
put any one in possession of
the fundamental factors in
the drama's history. One of
the signs of growth in inter-
est in the subject is the
accumulation of collections
of plays both in manuscript.
and in type.
The Univer-
sity of Chicago has inherited,
through purchase, Doctor
F. W. Atkinson's collection.
of first edition American
plays; the New York Public
Library is building up rap-
idly from source material a
reference collection of in-
estimable value; Harvard's
DOLLAR!
with
ENTIRELY NEW AND BEAUTIFUL SCENERY,
BY
Messrs. RICHARD MARSTON and JOSEPH CLARK.
ELEGANT FURNITURE AND UNIQUE APPOINTMENTS BY
MR. F, DORRINGTON.
APPROPRIATE INCIDENTAL MUSIC
under the direction of Mr. EDWARD MOLLENHAUR.
AND THE FOLLOWING UNEQUALLED DISTRIBUTION OF GHARACTERS:
Thə Hən. BARD WELL ALDER, …….tom the Coboch Datnak,,
Charisy Broad………………
Moland Vance………
Arthur Esmaltre
Lord Ostragares
Cel. Tam Dart
Moa. #cargo Sarilis
Geo, Washington Skidmore ..
Lafayette Berry
Sanator Was therwiz
Tarquinions Darwin.
Senstar Hogwhistle
Mrs. Qua7 QILFLORY..
Cars Dart
Mauche Blogu thorn
Libby Ray.
Laura #sabright
(who "wezd 1 be coeli, bei be scaide'),
remacam-mack young poemsal su
…………、 ……… - ▲ “ Cherie Disdrecía, *
„as English Tyszk—(ka unguza! character)
1.8 milkomus radway king
masaber from Ialxvacy.
CTU Right…….
Eepresentatives of Cha Feopla,
{
…….. whɔk has trad so long abroad.".
tha mi cosire a wake
…………..…………. df Howbern Farm
W. J. FLOXEWON
Mr. Frank Weston
Mr. J. W. Carroll
MR. W. J. Ferguson
4r. J. W. Kaamoon
R. V. A. Whitacar
1. HL Hallsad
2. C. 2. Edwin
36 2. Atkins
Mr. G. Townsend
Dr. G. G. Sherman
hirs, W. J. FLORENCE ›
„Miss Hay Howard
…Migs Lane Barke
Jkiza Josephine Mater
Bliss Etbel Skavto.
Ladies, One tamen, Lobbyista, Servants, etc., by numerous and sempetant auxiliaries.
SYNOPSIS OF SCENERY AND EVENTS
ACT I.
GRABMORI, House and Crounds, Illuminated for a Fete,
(With distant View of Washington)
By Mr. Jozri Chaka.
“Mast HƐs by Moonlight alona.”
AOT D.
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS.-The Pionio,
Br Ha. Joker Clark.
OLD, QAD STORY."
ACT II.
THE CHINESE ROOM at grabmoRE,
BY MR. Frand MaxxtOE.
FOR YOURB DIVIDED.
AOT IT
THE DRAWING-ROOM, as before.
The Committee of the Whols.
- CARRIED BY A LARGH MAJORITY.”
Daning the evening the Orchrex J. Rasnd ander the direction of a Ervo Mommata vill påchen the filering
Centre D Denies Beiz,”.
chelos selackem of Muung i
-Serat 8plat, bar my Prayer,” arranged for visi
Stage Director.
Promptar.
Freasurer
Laces
Mr. W. B. Floyd
J. 8. Wright
Mr. Theo Hon
BOX OFFICE OPEN FROM 8 A. M. TO 4 P.
Metropolitas Point Hanki Dukking, 119 Broadway, Key Tork.
113
The American Dramatist
وو
Drama Collection is distinctive. In 1909, I made my first
plea for dramatic records to be preserved for the future.
Ì then found that valuable materials were being scattered
by indiscriminate purchase in the auction rooms. The
situation is now changed. To-day, there are few known
dramas in the American field that cannot be secured. There
still remain curious gaps in our history. We hear much of
W. J. Florence's Judge Bardwell Slote, in Benjamin Woolf's
"The Mighty Dollar", but even the playwright's family have
no record of its existence. We hear of John T. Raymond's
Colonel Mulberry Sellers, in Mark Twain's "The Gilded Age.
But thus far Albert Bigelow Paine has not located the manu-
script of the play, over which there had been such dispute
between Mr. Clemens and Raymond. I have already noted
the absence of a full copy of "Metamora", which a member of
the Players Club in New York assures me is in possession of
some old actor of his acquaintance. There are texts, I feel
certain, in trunks belonging to James K. Hackett, wherein
full records of his father's career await his time to collate.
But, in the main, the American Drama is in a healthy state
of availability for the student. Its value is in the bulk. The
individual excellences are minor, if separated from their
stage history
The truth is, before 1870, the actor was su-
preme, the dramatist merely an appendage. The conscious-
ness of this fact, I believe, was one of the handicaps under
which the playwright worked.
114

Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
W. J. FLORENCE, AS The Hon. Bardwell Slote, IN BENJAMIN E. WOOLF'S
"THE MIGHTY DOLLAR."
CHAPTER SEVEN
AND THE AMERICAN DRAMA CRIED, "HA, HA!" PRIZE
PLAYS AGAIN, JOHN HOWARD PAYNE, SCHOOLS OF
PLAYWRIGHTS, GEORGE H. BOKER
I
It is to be doubted whether, even if the American drama-
tist had been free of the theatre tyranny to which the manager,
English bred, was subjecting him, he would have created any
better than he did. The opposition to originality lay very
largely within himself; it was due to his own cultural back-
ground. I have already noted that the prejudice against
play-acting in this country was not a prejudice against plays
but against the theatre and the actor. People were perfectly
willing to hail any sort of closet-drama; they were eager to get
hold of the printed page. Our tastes were clipped by the
Blue Laws which endeavored to create a distrust of all art.
There was a distrust of life; always an effort to correct life.
according to the plan by which we agreed to conduct ourselves
spiritually and civically. Our dramatists never attempted, in
the main, to reflect the spirit of their own time; but they tried
to infuse into a romantic invention some of the oratorical
fustian which had a manner, and little else.
Our political independence was about all we had. The
strength of our thinking went into keeping us politically
independent. Our social problems were fought out on the
stump. We could call a man anything under the spell of
speech. We could, in our daily life, swear, curse, damn at
slaves; but we must be noble in our plays; our passions needs
115
The American Dramatist
must be correct; our speech heightened but never irreverent.
Referring to a line from a play, "The Maid of Florence;
or, A Woman's Vengeance", wherein the heroine, taking
poison, dares to exclaim, "O God! O God!", Rees declares:
“Our managers have very judiciously omitted in representa-
tions all exclamations wherein the name of Deity is used as
above. Connected with the most moral of our plays there are
incidents and language so foreign from our ideas of God, that
His Holy Name so uttered seems, as it were, profane." This
is but one of the myriad prescriptions entangling the drama of
the period -the eras before 1850.
As much as we might find truth in the fact that foreigners.
condescended toward the American in those days, we accepted
the code of England, and read English fiction, giving but slight
encouragement to our own writers. Timidly American humor
rose out of the squire tradition of Washington Irving. Long-
fellow, Lowell, Bayard Taylor preached the foreign culture,
and their thoughts were stamped at times with the foreign
romance. The devotion to the literature of the England of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was as great as the
close adherence of political orators to Roman forensics. Our
youth might wear the buckskins of the forest, but their speech,
their gesture must have the dignity of the Roman toga.
It is, therefore, a second-hand spirit that pervades the
drama of the period. Our writers had been bred on Scott;
they had read their Goldsmith; they could quote their
Shakespeare; they were of the time and age of Sheridan
Knowles, and Bulwer-Lytton. In their moral outlook they
were Victorians. As Van Wyck Brooks says, in his "Ordeal of
Mark Twain", "Yes, the tragic thing about an environment
as coercive as ours is that we are obliged to endow it with the
majesty of destiny itself in order to save our own faces!
We dwell on the conditions that hamper us, destroy us, we
embrace them with an amor fati, to escape from the contem-
plation of our own destruction. We only perceive, we
are only mortified by the slavery of men, when nature has
endowed us with the true hunger and thirst for freedom."
Writing of Whitman, Professor Sherman says, "He lives.
116
Prize Plays
because of the richness of his vital reference, the fulness of the
relation which he established between his book and the living
world." Because of the lack of this live connection, most of
our American dramatists of the period we are discussing do
not live and are not worthy of living. It is very evident
that their plays held their audiences not so much by the
force of their content as by the force of their delivery. They
were constructed on that scale and according to that pattern.
The efforts of these writers were enlisted in many ways,
none more effective than the offering of prizes. Edwin For-
rest perhaps paid oftener than the others; but the principle
was the same, and as prices went in those days with the
foreign market so cheaply to be had even the nominal sum
of five hundred dollars was more than the playwright would
get for a limited number of performances and a benefit to boot.
They are worth contemplating, the announcements of some
of these competitions, for one is able to estimate the motives
behind the offers, one is able to see wherein the actor knows
his own qualities and the public's estimate of those qualities.
The individuality of the American actor before eighteen-sixty
was distinct; each had his own excellence and guarded it
with tenacious jealousy. Some even tried to monopolize
their "line": Hackett's resentment of "Yankee" Hill's
excellence in "way down East" rôles is a typical example.
These competitions set the minds of writers in channels of the
theatre. Nathaniel P. Willis received his incentive from such
an offer, made by James Wallack. But though these prizes
brought a response, they did not improve the quality of the
product, they did not call forth any original work.
Wallack addressed a letter to the editor of the New York
Mirror, George P. Morris, stating his needs in the following
terms:
My Dear Sir:
Packet Ship Sheffield,
May 28th, 1836.
I am most anxious to procure, on my return to the United
States, an original play by a native author, and on some strik-
ing and powerful American subject. Of course, I am desirous
117
The American Dramatist
that the principal character should be made prominent, and
adapted to me and my dramatick capabilities, such as they
may happen to be. Will you be kind enough to offer for such
a production the sum of one thousand dollars, which I will pay
to any writer who will present the best piece of the description
alluded to? All manuscripts will be submitted to a commit-
tee of literary gentlemen of your city, and to the author of the
play selected by them will be adjudged the premium just
specified. Be kind enough to insert the enclosed advertise-
ment in The Mirror; and with very many thanks for the kind
manner in which you have interested yourself in this matter
for me, I am, my dear sir, your obliged and faithful servant,
James Wallack.
The accompanying notice, addressed "To Native Dramat-
ick Authors", called specifically for a subject in American
history. There is no full record of the outcome of this offer,
but the fact that Wallack later accepted for production
Willis's "Tortesa, the Usurer" would lead one to believe that
he found in Willis some one who could shape a rôle to his
romantic figure. In earlier years he had appeared in J. N.
Barker's dramatization of Scott's "Marmion", but that had
satisfied his own English taste rather than brought forth any
play of American theme.
Previous to this, Yankee Hill had met success in Wood-
worth's "The Forest Rose", which seems to have established
his reputation as a delineator of Yankee character. It was
natural that he should try to duplicate his success, and so he
offered a prize of four hundred dollars for a dress to fit his
peculiarities. Verplanck and Washington Irving were on the
committee of judges. Nothing worthy seemed to hit the
taste of the moment, and so the money was given, not as a
prize, but as a price, to Woodworth, for his "The Foundling
of the Sea." Hackett was not idle either, for he encouraged
J. K. Paulding to write "The Lion of the West" for him,
and accepted, by an anonymous writer, "Moderns, or a Trip
to the Springs.' This was in 1830, and the conditions were
$300 for "an original comedy whereof an American should be
the leading character." W. C. Bryant, Halleck, and Prosper
وو
118

WIGH
OF
IND
Brady
Ау
You C. Burton
WILLIAM E. BURTON
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
JOHN BROUGHAM
AMERICAN ACTOR-MANAGERS OF THE FORTIES.
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
JAMES H. HACKETT


Prize Plays
M. Wetmore were the judges. Hackett persuaded Paulding
to enter the lists, and it was soon bruited about that David
Crockett, who was then in the House of Representatives at
Washington, would be the hero. It would seem that the
prize play had to be "doctored" by John Augustus Stone.
In his preface to "The Bucktails; or, Americans in Eng-
land", Paulding wrote:
Hitherto the people of the United States have been almost
entirely dependent on foreign writers for this, one of the most
influential of all the censors of public manners, morals, and
tastes, and it seems obvious that the productions of foreigners,
adapted to actions in a state of society so widely different from
that of our country, can have little application to us, either
as republicans or patriots. Like every other people, we re-
quire a drama of our own, based on our own manners, habits,
character, and political institutions; and such a drama, it
seems to us, if sustained with sufficient spirit by American
writers, would take root and flourish in the United States.
I find in Rees the mention of a play, "Love's Frailty",
written and produced by the Walnut Street Theatre as the
result of a prize offered by the management, and this comment
is made by the astute "Colley Cibber": "Among the com-
petitors for this prize was John Howard Payne, Esq., and his
beautiful play of 'The Italian Bride', for which he at one
time refused three hundred dollars, could not obtain the
premium of fifty dollars, which was paid for so vile a piece of
trash as was ever enacted on the stage. We never heard who
the committee were on this occasion."
There are other prize plays to be noted in this period of the
drama's history: James H. Kennicott's "Irma; or, The Pre-
diction" (1830), Caroline Lee Hentz's "De Lara; or, The
Moorish Bride" (1831), and J. M. Field's "Family Ties'
(1846) for Dan Marble. In a sphere of their own, as centering
around the dominant personality of an American actor, and
as creating a local group which might be designated a
"school", are the dramatists called forth by the encourage-
ment of Edwin Forrest.
In his person Forrest epitomized the flare of the American
119
The American Dramatist
of the time. He was to the stage what Henry Clay was to the
Senate. His voice was the voice of Dickens's American eagle
crying “Ha, ha!" The peculiar characteristics demanded
by Forrest in the dramas he played were no more imperatively
imposed on the dramatists than were the characteristics asked
for in the dramas sought by Wallack, Hackett, Marble, and
Josephine Clifton (for whom Willis wrote "Bianca Visconti”).
But his personal relations with the dramatists stamped his
personality still more sharply on their minds. His fiery
temper, the quality of his resonant voice, the physical strength
of his bearing, required them not to write a part so much as to
sculpture it for him. Thus, nine plays were written for him,
prizes being given as incentives. These were: "Metamora'
and "The Ancient Briton", by Stone; "The Gladiator",
"Oralloosa", "Pelopidas", and "The Broker of Bogata", by
Robert Montgomery Bird; "Caius Marius", by Richard
Penn Smith; "Jack Cade", by Robert T. Conrad; and
"Mohammed, the Arabian Prophet" by George H. Miles.
The last did not fulfil the terms of the award, and so was
accepted merely as the most effective composition received.
Alger believes that the result of Forrest's money offers brought
to the fore over two hundred manuscripts, most of which
luckily rest in oblivion. How did Forrest frame his terms?
Here is a note sent to his friend Leggett, who then edited a
weekly paper, and who inserted therein the communication.
Dear Sir, - Feeling extremely desirous that dramatic let-
ters should be more cultivated in my native country, and
believing that the dearth of writers in that department is rather
the result of a want of the proper incentive than of any defi-
ciency of the requisite talents, I should feel greatly obliged to
you if you would communicate to the public, in the next
number of the "Critic", the following offer. To the author
of the best Tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero or principal
character shall be an aboriginal of this country, the sum of five
hundred dollars, and half of the proceeds of the third repre-
sentation, with my own gratuitous services on that occasion.
The award to be made by a committee of literary and theatri-
cal gentlemen.
I 20
Prize Plays
Thus, at the theatre birth of John Augustus Stone's "Meta-
mora, or the Last of the Wampanoags", there assisted as a
committee of friends, Bryant, Halleck, Lawson, Leggett,
Wetmore, and Brooks. I cannot but feel that Forrest was
so closely behind these writers of Philadelphia that their
plays individualize him rather than the characters they under-
take to portray. Read "Jack Cade", and determine whether
or not the democracy that flaunts its way into certain lines
is not the democracy of Forrest, which rampages through the
two padded volumes of his "Life", by Alger. Yet they
served him with certain devotion, and were in turn recipients
of those surprising evidences of Forrest's thoughtfulness and
gentleness and companionableness, - which characteristics.
were evident in the rare moments of calm the actor had. His
life itself was a fit subject for the type of drama written in his
period. The violent contrast of manly tears and manly rage,
the quick response to grandeur in Nature, the courting of
danger for its own sake - all these made of Forrest a much
feared and much talked of figure. The American National
Drama that he was forever speaking about was the drama
which needs must be colored by his own violent emotion,
an art shaped by the mighty art of Forrest, as Conrad said,
on the occasion of a public dinner tendered the actor.
Forrest's life was fashioned in melodrama; he viewed every-
thing through the roseate warmth of picturesque situation ;
he dramatized the facts of his existence. When he first visited
Genoa, he found an American ship of war in the bay. He had
himself rowed out and asked the commander if he might stand
beneath the folds of the flag. Atop the Alps he cried aloud
so as to try the volume of his voice. The drama that he
wanted must cater to these elements in him. He was as typi-
cal of one phase of Americanism as P. T. Barnum was of an-
other.
Here then were other circumstances shaping the profession
of the playwright. It was a slim encouragement, for the finan-
cial returns, even if the play won a prize, were not sufficient
to make the writing of drama any more than a pastime, a
gentleman's game in the exercise of letters. Colman, the play
121
The American Dramatist
publisher, offered Willis $300 for an edition of “Bianca”; he
had offered only $60 to Epes Sargent for an edition of "Vel-
asco." No wonder they made occasional flights in the theatre
these writers - and took more seriously their political pre-
ferments or editorial duties.
II
John Howard Payne (1791-1852) rose into prominence at
the time when the picturesque formal acting of the day held
ascendency in the work of Edmund Kean. The very mention
of Kean suggests that the American genius, who had won dis-
tinction as a youthful actor in his own country, and before
the acute prejudice of English theatregoers, was in the main
more closely associated with the theatre of London as a play-
wright than he was with any of his home playhouses. He was
involved in the petty jealousies of the patent houses, Covent
Garden and Drury Lane, and he found himself much more of
a hack writer for them than the average American dramatists
felt themselves to be for Simpson or Wallack or others. The
injudicious exploiting of him as an infant Roscius in
imitation of Master Betty and Master Burke destroyed
any hope of his advancement as an actor when he grew of
age. He had shown his ability as writer and as editor in
many juvenalia while in college and after; his mind ma-
tured early.
He turned to literature to eke out his small income when,
as an actor in London, his éclat subsided. With the result
that he was lured according to the theatre fashion of the
day into ordinary adaptation of French pieces, good, bad,
and indifferent, for the managers as they rose and fell, came and
went in the London theatre game. He had a host of friends
who aided him: Kemble, Campbell, Moore, Coleridge,
Southey, Lamb abroad; Charles Brockden Brown and Wash-
ington Irving at home; while in the theatre there were many
to help him in his early years as an actor. It was the period of
his love with Mary Shelley. It was the period of the Siddons,
the O'Neil, the Kemble. His name is connected with that
I22

EDWIN FORREST IN THE TITLE ROLE OF ROBERT T. CONRAD'S "JACK CADE."
"His voice was the voice of Dickens's American eagle crying 'Ha, ha!'"
"Through such a character the democratic spirit breathed in American Drama."
OF
100
*
1
John Howard Payne
of Lord Byron, when the latter was foremost in theatrical
politics. He became a mere tool in the hands of jealous mana-
gers, who played him against each other, tossing his manu-
scripts in ill winds that blew him little good, and subjecting
him to the rivalry of smaller workmen.
But Payne had a temper and was possessed of no business
acumen; he was of a suspicious nature, and only the sane
warning of Washington Irving, who happened to be abroad
during Payne's most tumultuous moments, tided him over
months of despondency and ill-thinking. The plays by which
he is best known were written during his absence abroad. He
went to England an actor of youthful renown; he returned to
America a bitter man and a disappointed dramatist. "The
Maid and the Magpie" had been the first of his French adapta-
tions, soon followed by "Accusation; or, The Family of
D'Anglade." The story of the writing of "Brutus" has already
been told by me in the introduction to the text of the play,
in my "Representative Plays by American Dramatists."
Payne felt rightly that his financial returns on this play were
not commensurate with its popular drawing power, and he
appealed to the Committee in management of the Drury
Lane; while they acknowledged the justice of his plaint,
they used every theatrical trickery to sidetrack him. He was
always being thus sidetracked, even when it came to preparing
a play, "Virginius", for the fickle Edmund Kean, who soon
thereafter shifted to James Sheridan Knowles, thus leaving
Payne in the lurch.
"
The history of cliques in the British theatre is not our
present concern; the existence of them bound and made tragic
the dramatic career of Payne. He must have shown himself
in many ways obnoxious by his temper; but he had to deal
with those who constituted the Macready era of theatre
jealousies, and he was never able to outwit them. His ven-
ture in managing Sadler's Wells was also an ill-advised
attempt. And so, too, did disaster overtake him when he
wrote "Thérèse, the Orphan of Geneva", accepted by Elliston,
of the Drury Lane; it was not only stolen for the provinces
but a new version made by the rival house.
123
The American Dramatist
JOHN HOWARD PAYNE (1791-1852)
Full bibliographies in Moses' "Representative Plays", Vol. II;
also in "The Cambridge History of American Literature", Vol. I,
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917.
Brutus; or, The Fall An Historical Tragedy
of Tarquin.
Accusation;
or, The
Family of D'Ang-
lade.
London, 1818.
New York, 1819.
in Five Acts.
A Melodrama in Three
London,
1817.
Acts.
Boston, 1818.
Thérèse, the Orphan of A Drama in Three New York, 1821.
Geneva.
Clari; or, The Maid of An Opera in Three | London,
Milan.
Ali Pacha; or, The Sig- A Melodrama in Two New York, 1823.
Acts.
London, n.d.
Acts.
1823.
New York, 1823.
net-Ring.
Richelieu.
Acts.
A Domestic Tragedy
London, n.d.
New York, 1826.
founded on Facts in
Five Acts.
Charles the Second; or,
A
The Merry Monarch.
The Fall of Algiers.
A
ard Payne.
Correspondence
Comedy in Two London, n.d. New
York, 1846.
Acts.
Comic Opera in London, n.d.
Three Acts.
Writings of John How- By Oscar Wegelin.
c. 1825.
Literary Collector,
March,
1905,
94-100.
Bib-
liography.
of
Washington Irving
and Payne.
When Payne Wrote
"Home, Sweet
Home."
Edited by T. T. Payne Scribner's, 48: 461–
Luquer.
Letters from Paris,
1822-23. Edited by
T. T. Payne Luquer.
John Howard Payne: By Gabriel Harrison.
Dramatist, Poet, Ac-
tor.
A History of the Amer- By A. H. Quinn.
ican Drama.
482 (October,
1910) 48:597-
616 (November,
1910).
Scribner's,
58:
(De-
742-754
cember, 1915).
Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott Co.,
1885.
New York: Har-
per & Brothers,
1923. Vol. I.
Chapter VII.
124
John Howard Payne
It does not add to our subject to go further into this matter.
Payne continued searching for material in France, despite
his many disappointments, and Elliston was succeeded by
Charles Kemble, who soon received from Payne a package of
manuscripts, which he offered in bulk for about twelve hundred
and fifty dollars. Among these was "Clari; or, The Maid of
Milan." Another theatre had had the manuscript, and when
it was heard that "Clari" was about to be produced it had
originally been called "Angioletta' - a rival production
with the old title was hurried up. Payne suffered more than
any dramatist of the period from the continual competition
which he had to face, because the French sources were not
protected by copyright and became any one's property.
Even in later years an attempt was made to spirit away from
him his right to the song, "Home, Sweet Home", which is now
the one spot in "Clari" to keep it alive in memory. The next
play was the excellent comedy of "Charles the Second.”
In his preface to its first edition Payne wrote:
I understand that the authorship of this comedy has been
claimed by different persons in the public papers on the ground
of their having produced translations of the French original,
which has been performed at the minor theatres. In reply
to this, I would observe that I have never seen any of these
translations. My play was written last autumn at Paris.
It was founded on a printed copy of "La Jeunesse de Henri V”,
of which a number of editions have appeared. The incidents.
and situations are nearly the same, but the dialogue differs
essentially throughout, especially in the part of Captain Copp.
Friendly as he was with Charles Kemble, to whom the piece
was dedicated, and who played the title rôle, Payne made little
out of the success which attended "Charles the Second."
And the hand of Washington Irving played no part in the
public attention given it, though his association with it might
have done something to outwit the ill-luck which seemed to
dog Payne's footsteps. In fact, the two plays which Irving
actually did write or rather adapt for the stage: "Abu Has-
san", from the German text of Franz Karl Heimer, which
Weber had used for his opera; and "The Wild Huntsman”,
125
The American Dramatist
from "Der Freischütz" - while they were submitted without
name to Covent Garden by Payne, according to Mr. G. H.
Hellman, the author of "Washington Irving, Esq.", were de-
clined and stored away, to be issued in book form only
recently by the Bibliophile Society. But a reading of
"Charles the Second" shows a light touch distinctively
Irving's, though probably the structure of the piece was
abetted by the theatre experience of Payne.
The other play in which the two had a hand was "Riche-
lieu", but, according to Harrison, Payne's biographer,
who never once mentions this collaboration, showing how well
the dramatist kept Irving's secret by obliterating all reference
to it from his numerous papers, this new venture was nipped
in the bud under the name of "Richelieu" by a descendant
of the French Cardinal, who appealed to the Lord Cham-
berlain's office. It was given with a new name, and certain
concessions were made in the text. That Kemble may have
known something of Irving's dramatic attempts is suggested
by Mr. Hellman's mention that the English actor asked Irving
to write a play for him; hence the references in Irving's diary
that he wrote feverishly on the script. But the result is lost
to view. And there are only notes to indicate that another
play was in his mind "El Embozado the Cloaked
Figure a study in dual nature. It can be seen from this
latter subject how prone writers were to fall a prey to French
melodrama and German sentimentalism. It reveals that
not only Payne but Irving had succumbed to the fashions of
the time.
Payne was accorded several dramatic benefits on his return
to America, after so many years' absence. He accepted them
in the spirit that they were only what was due him from the
theatre at large, however grateful he might be to the individ-
uals who promoted the enterprises. Such a form of patronage
he did not court, but the state of the dramatist's position and
the unfortunate state of copyright had made play writing a
precarious occupation. To the committee that fostered the
benefit in New Orleans he wrote, thanking them for the check
of over a thousand dollars. In his communication he said:
126

JOHN HOWARD PAYNE
WASHINGTON IRVING
"A literary relationship of a very generous nature.
Reproductions from photographs in the collection of Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y

i
John Howard Payne
Dramatic authorship in the English language — although
the most vexatious, while it is the most widely influential
branch of literature has always been the least protected by
the laws both of America and England. The authors of
France have a permanent interest in every representation of
their plays, and this property descends to their families,
the law obliges theatres to pay them. In England, until very
lately, dramatic writers were sustained by no law but that of
custom, and custom only entitled them to claim the profits
of the third, sixth, ninth, twelfth, twentieth, and fortieth per-
formance of any play from the theatre in which it first
appeared, but from no other; and no sooner had it appeared
than it was at the mercy of the prompters, who made vast
perquisites by supplying early copies to all the provincial
theatres of England, and by forwarding them to the managers
of this country. . . . At length the subject was brought before
the Parliament of England by Mr. Bulwer.
Then he proceeded in the same letter to outline what indig-
nity he had had to go through with managers in America since
his return. They did not hide the fact that plays were smug-
gled over for a nominal bribe; and, even while Payne was
abroad, they passed him over for some one not American.
It was after this benefit, in 1835, that Payne's interests were
turned elsewhere than the theatre. His concern for the
Cherokee Indians recalls Forrest's close companionship with
his Choctaw friends near New Orleans. Payne undertook
to plead the cause of the Cherokees of Alabama and Georgia.
And his tenure of office as Consul at Tunis takes us far afield
from the theatre, though its atmosphere is one that would
have served well a Knowles or Payne romantic or Gothic
drama.
Payne's life was one of violent contrasts: petted and prob-
ably spoiled as a boy by over-adulation; serving twice in
prison - once because he arrived in England at the outset of
the War of 1812, and again because of debt. The hectic
close of his career, and the lapse of time before his body was
brought back from Tunis to this country, rounded out a life
of sixty-one years, mostly of anxiety and travail. He had a
brilliantly constituted mind, -one ripe for development in the
127
The American Dramatist
interests of the theatre; he was an excellent critic; he knew
the fundamentals of acting well, having sat at the knee of
Thomas A. Cooper, as a boy, and watched closely and talked
long with Talma. His name figures in the history of periodical
literature both as editor and contributor. His story has yet
to be fully told. His correspondence has not been more than
touched by his grandnephew, Thayer T. Payne Luquer, in a
series of fascinating papers. For the period of the English
theatre in which he flourished was one of England's interesting
literary periods, and Payne's intimacy with men of such differ-
ing personalities as Lamb and Macready, Bulwer and Coler-
idge, is but barely dwelt upon in Harrison.
The majority of Payne's dramas need not detain the stu-
dent long. Some of them are still in manuscript; others in
editions not easily available. His best products, "Brutus
and “Charles the Second", are reprinted. These show him to
have had a facility in the handling of tragedy and comedy, the
latter aided by Irving. Of this association with Irving more
needs to be written, for it illustrates a literary relationship.
of a very generous nature. It means something for a drama-
tist to hold his own in any field he deems might bring benefit
to the theatres he represents. For Payne was really a house
dramatist, ready to draw to London what he deemed would
be of commercial worth. Recall that he could turn his hand.
to an opera like "Clari" and a melodrama like "Thérèse."
The romantic and the heroic were his forte. But his contri-
butions, save in the way in which he handled his dialogue,
and the freedom he gave to expression, were second-hand
mostly, and were created for the theatre. I believe that
"Brutus" would still hold an audience, if there was an actor
of sufficient forcefulness to drown some of the heroic senti-
ments of the characters, and some of the sentimental hysterics
of the heroine. "Charles the Second" has spirit, but what
detracts from its value is that it is a romance, where poetry and
historic truth are subservient to adventure, rather than a
realistically historical document. But Payne, in the theatre,
was a victim of condition: a condition which was only one of
the many causes for the elimination of the American play-
128
Schools of Playwrights

wright as a literary
force, a force for all
time in any theatre.
III
RICAN
THEATRE.....BOWERY.
FOR THE BENEFIT OF
MR. FAR
PARRAN
Da widib eccstico be bas the pleasore of acsonscube, Ùal
MR. FORREST
Bu kially rolezbicred liu services, dod » 01 uppers, perlope &• Ce Last Time, to the Farcute chargeter af
METAMORA.
TO CÚNCLUDE WITH THE
Arab Chief.
On Wednesday Evening, July 9th, 1884,
Will be asked that I dan Tragedy of
Metamora.
It is not fair to blame
Edwin Forrest for all
the shortcomings of the
dramatists he encour-
aged by his various
prizes; rather should
we praise him for the
variety of the material
he accepted, and then
look for the causes of Char
the weakness in such
drama. Forrest was a
dominating figure; no
wonder the writers of
the time tried to sue for
Metamora
Lord Fiture sld,..
Errington...
Walik,.
Occana,
Wishesek!
Nahmed Ace,,
…….Ns Came-["Ong of Gelahwin,..………
F
Callas T-
· Puyler | Helyout,
Mr_Haste", | Haserker,……….
….Byres { CLid,..
………….. Mr. Fort
„Sizvedena“
...Baldon
Addə
Mrs. Flynn
Mr. A Dea
„Miss Syrpeza
Mrs. McClure
A FANCY DANCE BY MISS JOHNSON,
A Favorite Song, by Mr. Taylor.
Trconclade with the new Drama of the

his favor. John How-Arab Chief:
to
And the Pirate of the East.
Which was acted for several succestá e nights in ilo City of Ecstos with the greatest success.
AD Beg, the Pirate of the Läki,----
Ben Hamel, and eld Doctsŷ------
OTAmin....
Isicoe, Ben Haniel, Dan bier,.
TURKS.
M. Cele 7 -ཎྛཱཤྩ ༔ 2༽-- --
Melle Makr……….
Lemus | Abdalisb…………
ARABS.
of Imael, the Arab Chief, Last of his Tribe
ard Payne, so Harrison
indicates, on his return
to America, sent
Forrest his play of
"Romulus", which so
pleased the actor that
requests were made for
certain changes pre-
paratory to production.
But the changes were
not made and the drama
remains in manuscript.
"Brutus" was of the
Forrest proportion, and
so too, thought Payne,
would have been his
Ben Haus, a Chief,
Hlader, Ben Hassan's Daughter
Harry Lanyard.
Paddy McC¹a, Bests» co,…………….
Tom Splice,...
„Stevetoos | Yoxepà…….
CREW OF THE CONSTELLATION,
Cellus
Baldock
„Aščin
Mr. Hesrag
...Mr Ingersoll
Mrs McClura
Mr. Parson
Gstes
Jonaban Sangra, a Penn Easter…………
Tarks, Anita, Prates, be
BOT 1.---AN ARAD ENCAMPMENT, SCA IN THE DISTANCE SONG…….." NT ARAB STEED.“
ACTR
A Splendid Apartment in the Fortress of Ali Beg.
With a Gallery locking in to an a hacest part of the Fortrest.
huunal's voice is heard for a part of the Fortress where be in confised, ……. Echo Dach……. Iamsel and Hudso
Jonathania o fir-but truc Yankee makes the most of crery thing.
A Coollag misture administered to Dector Ben Hanet…………Song, Iraean.....la Escape plansed…………A Supprism
A Biol Simenei exeruted by Doctor Pen Hamet, with Jonathan's assistance……………AGT –
BARD LANYARD AND SAILONY ASITORE…ACUYSTELATION BLOWN OFF THE COAST.
Jonathan's New Buy to Pay old Dehte!
•
An unexpected visit from an Irbabitat of the Forest……….01 Doctor squezzed considerably……….Paddy tria ta
"Locle Sara's Disipline, „W gu alias the Dev Ukimieli la voterfere with die priseter…„Shoots the intrader ›
du inthan's Fatent Frcation used, Starp Work f-ck: Eyrs.
Bosg.."The Trompet Scia da to Victory, 'is_sene………. Preparations to attack the Fortress. All hands to Quarters,
A BOLD STROKE' FOR LIBERTY!
SCENE LAST……….RAMPARTS OF ALI REG - PORTRESS……….ISMAFL BOUND TO THỂ STAKE.
Pirare Vessel at wester…….. Boste had Smier ved Bo Husen, ……. Total defeat of the Pirates,
Destrarbon of the Fortress and Toarps of Locle Sam……….. Fertress in Flames.
Pirate Vessel blown up-Tre- adoos Explosion-Ali Beg Fires Powder Magazine-
Blows up.. Jsmael draga Lum fer the Kors
To-morrow, First Night of
Mr. Forrest's Engagement.
J. VV. DELL, SUNŢER 11 ANNSTREET.
129
The American Dramatist
"Virginius", which Kean had rejected in favor of Knowles.
In no instance did Forrest dictate his subject-matter unless it
was in the case of "Metamora", where he wished for an
opportunity of putting into visible picture some of the char-
acter study he had made personally among his Indian friends
near New Orleans. When one looks over the range of the
plays done by the Philadelphia School - barring Boker, who
did not write for Forrest - it represents the cultural interest
of the men who wrote them. The friendship which existed
between Forrest and Bird most certainly colored the latter's
desire to meet the actor's requirements. They must have
talked over "The Broker of Bogata" and "Oralloosa",
when they travelled together in Mexico, and Forrest profited
much by Bird's knowledge of Spanish. "Oralloosa" was calcu-
lated to fit him in the volume of its passion, in the expansive-
ness of its picturesque situations. The great differences in
these dramas lay in their subject-matter, not in their form or
their sentiment. In each, the flights of passion are the same,
the sentiments are of like proportion. These men were be-
tween two extremes of the time: the drama of the theatre and
the closet-drama, which was to be read rather than spoken.
They were imitative, as John Howard Payne was imitative
in "Brutus; or, the Fall of Tarquin" (1818). The old Eng-
lish drama was the model, while Italy, Spain, or Germany
appeared to be the locality. In choice of subject alone, these
literary aspirants of the drama exhibited their preconceived
notions as to tragedy. The Southerners who wrote dramas
knew nothing outside of foreign realms. A. J. Requier
became author of "The Spanish Exile" (1842); George
Henry Miles wrote "Mohammed" (1850), "De Soto" (1853),
and "Señor Valiente" (1858); Caroline Lee Hentz published
her tragedy, "De Lara; or, The Moorish Bride" (1843);
Isaac Harby, within the classic tradition and Kotzebue influ-
ence, wrote "Alexander Severus" (1807) and "Alberti” (1819).
What Professor Matthews says of England may very well
be said of America: that its "literature is strewed with
wrecked tragedies, lofty enough in aspiration, but pitifully
lacking in imagination.'
وو
130

Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
NATHANIEL P. WILLIS
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
ANNA CORA MOWATT
KNICKERBOCKER CONTEMPORARIES

Schools of Playwrights

KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL OF PLAYWRIGHTS
Important plays indicated
Samuel Woodworth
(1785-1842)
Nathaniel P. Willis
(1806-1867)
Cornelius Mathews
(1817-1889)
Anna Cora Mowatt
(1819-1870)
a. The Deed of Gift.
Boston, March 25,
1822.
b. The Forest Rose;
or, American Farm-
ers. New York
Chatham Theatre,
October 6, 1825.
a. Bianca. New York
Park Theatre, Au-
gust 25, 1837.
b. Tortesa, the Usurer.
New York National,
April 8, 1839.
a. The Politicians.
New York, 1840.
b. Witchcraft; or, The
Martyrs of Salem.
New York Bowery
Theatre, May 17,
1847.
a. Fashion.
New
York Park Theatre,
March 24, 1845.
b. Armand; or, The
Peer and the Peas-
ant. New York
Park Theatre, Sep-
tember 27, 1847.
Epes Sargent (1814-
1880)
a. Velasco. Boston
Tremont Theatre,
November 20, 1837.
Consult O. S. Coad in
Sewanee Review,
June, 1919, 163–
175.
Consult biography by
H. A. Beers, Ameri-
can Men of Letters
Series; Moses' Rep-
resentative Plays,
Vol. II.
Consult Duyckinck;
American Art Jour-
nal, March 30, 1889;
Dramatic Mirror,
April 6, 1889. Fig-
ured in copyright
history.
Consult A. C. Mow-
att's Autobiog-
raphy of an Ac-
tress; bibliography
in Moses' Represen-
tative Plays, Vol. II.
Play revived dur-
ing season of 1923–
24, by the Province-
town Playhouse,
New York. See
Poe critiques.
Consult Poe's Lit-
erati; Duyckinck;
Allibone; also his-
tory of Mrs. Mow-
att's "Fashion."
131
The American Dramatist
The Knickerbocker, the New England, the Philadelphia,
and the Southern schools, therefore, held the same notions
regarding the drama as a readable and as an actable medium.
The literary man's attitude toward the theatre was that of
the dilettante; it was amateurish, though there was a sincere
desire on his part to excel in the art. But the littérateur had
a mistaken notion as to the province of the theatre, and
he was not willing to serve apprenticeship. Besides which,
in his choice of subject, he was prompted by the old-fashioned
broadness of acting, and he wrote romantic melodrama-
romantic in a sort of external psychology, but statuesque in
action. That notion of the heroic persisted for many years.
It is false, however, to separate literature and drama.
While it is legitimate to accept the closet-drama as a form
in itself, it is not legitimate to consider it as in any way neces-
sary to the theatre. It is a hybrid type which Professor
Matthews rightly notes appeared and appears only at times
when literature and the theatre are divorced. Every poet
who has written a play has intended it for the stage, but he has
approached his task wrongly. And so we begin to realize the
hopelessness of claiming the closet-drama as part of the
strength of the theatre, when we read H. A. Beers' opinion
of it:
[The closet-dramatist] need not sacrifice truth of character
and probability of plot to the need of highly accentuated sit-
uations. He does not have to consider whether a speech is
too long, too ornate in diction, too deeply thoughtful for
recitation by an actor. If the action lags at certain points,
let it lag. In short, as the aim of the closet-dramatist is other
than the playwright's, so his methods may be independent.
This statement gives a false impression of the relation
between literature and drama; one is a principle of thought
and expression; the other is a form of thought and expression.
To deny that drama cannot come within the category of
literature is to deny that drama may ever have a claim to
¹ See "The Legitimacy of the Closet-Drama." Brander Matthews. Scribner's,
February, 1908.
132
Schools of Playwrights
permanence. True literature is unconscious excellence.
Shakespeare wrote plays rather than poetry, yet the poetry
in them preserves them, and they live because, though the
action is generally conventional, the spiritual quality and the
mental value are there without hurting the movement of the
whole. Modern drama, alone, refutes the claim that closet-
plays are closet-plays simply because they aim to be literature.
Effective stage pieces, as a rule, have not been pleasing to read,
but that is the fault of the literary sense of the author who has
aimed for appreciation through outward theatrical effect.
وو
1
There are two sentences in Professor Matthews's "The
Literary Merit of Our Latter-day Drama" ¹ which point to
cardinal weaknesses in the closet-drama. He claims that
"a dramatist who fails to please the play-going public of
his own time will never have another chance", and again
he writes that "style is the great antiseptic, no doubt, but
style cannot bestow life on the still-born.' In both of these
respects, closet-dramas have failed, and, therefore, as a stage
consideration, they exert no influence. Managers lose when-
ever they mount such plays, for usually literature of this
kind cares nothing for the practical demands of technique
or of stage accessory. If it is not a drama of ideas, it is a
drama of imagery; it is discursive rather than concentrated;
it is slow-moving rather than active; it is poetic rather than
dramatic.
Longfellow, after seeing "The Vicar of Wakefield" in
dramatization, was convinced of the superiority of dramatic
representation over narrative. But, on the other hand, he
was never keenly alive to the actions and reactions of life,
which manifest themselves in active situations rather than in
pictures. This is distinctly apparent in his "John Endicott"
and "Giles Corey of the Salem Farms.' We find him, there-
fore, writing as early as 1845: "Felt more than ever to-day
the difference between my ideal home-world of Poetry, and
the outer, actual, tangible Prose-world. When I go out of the
precincts of my study, down the village street to college, how
the scaffolding about the Palace of Song comes rattling and
1 See "Inquiries and Opinions."
133
The American Dramatist
clattering down." "The Spanish Student" (1843) and the
"Tragedies" failed to find their way to the stage.
In other words, the closet-dramatist has suffered because
he has been too contemplative on one hand, and because,
on the other, he has placed too much attention upon orna-
mentation. W. D. Howells and Henry James reduced the
oratorical to terms of modern prose rhythm, and in their dia-
logues they came very near the requirements of the stage, but
their outlook upon life was a narrative one. James's dialogue
was too "fat" with matter.
Henry Arthur Jones has always been a great believer in the
literary value of modern drama, upholding the idea that, if a
play is truly alive, it must be literature. And his belief finds
full expression in the following:
If you have faithfully and searchingly studied your fellow-
citizens; if you have selected from amongst them those char-
acters that are interesting in themselves, and that also possess
an enduring human interest; if, in studying these interesting
personalities, you have severely selected, from the mass of
their sayings and doings and impulses, those words and deeds
and tendencies which mark them at once as individuals and as
types; if you have then recast and re-imagined all the
materials; if you have cunningly shaped them into a story
of progressive and accumulative action; if you have done all
this, though you may not have used a single word but what is
spoken in ordinary American intercourse to-day, I will venture
to say that you have written a piece of live American
literature.
In that respect the Philadelphia School of playwrights did
not attempt to create a live drama, for they courted plots and
phrases of a gone era; their imagery was cast in the Eliza-
bethan mold, and their ear caught the Elizabethan accent.
Such an excellent piece of stagecraft as Boker's "Francesca
da Rimini” is riddled with mere paraphrases from the drama-
tist he loved so well, - Shakespeare. These men all brought
the student's enthusiasm to their work. Look at the amount
of book atmosphere there is in all their plays. Payne was con-
134

UNIE
OF
FION
RICHARD PENN SMITH
ROBERT T. CONRAD
PHILADELPHIA PLAYWRIGHTS WHO WROTE UNDER THE SPELL OF EDWIN FORREST

·
Schools of Playwrights
tinually verifying his sources, and he knew his periods down
to the veriest detail. Note Conrad's long introduction to
'Jack Cade." One only has to read Boker's "Anne Boleyn
to see how his English history was at his finger tips. Their
effects were definitely laid on according to a model: they were
poets painting in words. But their colors all seem to be
second-hand.
The theatre used the literary men of the day in other ways.
They were awarded prizes for dedicatory poems, they were
invited to be poet laureates for occasions; and so Robert
Treat Paine (who was of Payne's family), Washington Irving,
Fitz-Greene Halleck, and Oliver Wendell Holmes are figured
on many programs. But somewhere they possessed a hidden
contempt for the theatre, and were not tempted to subject
themselves to its demands. They were enthusiastic theatre-
goers, and basked in the sunshine of celebrities of the stage.
But that is all. Even Irving hid his name as an aspirant.
IV
Philadelphia's honorable claim in the history of the Ameri-
can Theatre stands high; the same must be said for it in the
history of the American Drama. Thomas Godfrey, Francis
Hopkinson, John Leacock, and J. N. Barker were citizens of
the town. The Philadelphia School swells the list still more.
And to these may be added the name of David Paul Brown,
(1795-1875), author of "Sertorius." These men were not of
the theatre, nor did they devote their fullest and freshest
energies to the theatre; play writing was a transient occupa-
tion with them. Brown had a long legal career, and he did
not wish to have his professional position handicapped by
these side thrusts into art. He dashed off his "Sertorius
in two weeks, and his study was on horseback, as he rode to
and from Yellow Springs, the popular Pennsylvania spa of
the day. As a lawyer he could feel the manner of the actor
وو
the manner of Junius Brutus Booth, who played his piece.
It was a forensic ability which he himself possessed. He
wrote to a correspondent:
135
The American Dramatist

PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL OF PLAYWRIGHTS
With their chief plays noted
John Augustus Stone a. Metamora. Phila- Consult Rees, James.
(1801-1834)
Robert T. Conrad
(1810-1858)
delphia Arch Street
Theatre, January
22, 1830.
a. Jack Cade. New
York Park Theatre,
May 24, 1841.
The Dramatic Au-
thors of America.
Philadelphia, G. B.
Zieber & Co. 1845.
Allibone,
Consult
Brown, Duyckinck,
Wegelin, Rees'
"Forrest", Phelps'
Players of a Cen-
Robert Montgomery a. The
Bird (1806-1854)
Richard Penn Smith
(1799-1854)
Gladiator.
New York Park
Theatre, September
26, 1831.
b. The Broker of Bo-
gota. New York
Bowery Theatre,
February 12, 1834.
tury. See Moses'
Representative
Plays by American
Dramatists, Vol. II,
for text of play.
Consult Foust, Cle-
ment E., Life and
Dramatic Works of
Bird. 1919. Thesis,
University of Penn-
sylvania. Bibli-
ography, 161–167.
Manuscripts in the
University of Penn-
sylvania. See Old
Penn Weekly Re-
view, Philadelphia,
March 18, 1916.
a. The Eighth of Jan- | Consult American
uary. Philadelphia
Chestnut Street
Theatre, January 8,
1829.
b. The Triumph of
Plattsburg. Phila-
delphia Chestnut
Street Theatre,
January 8, 1830.
Quarterly Review,
1830, 8: 134, Sep-
tember. The Life
and Writings of
Smith, by Bruce
Walker McCul-
lough. University
of Pennsylvania
Thesis, 1917.
136
Schools of Playwrights

PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL OF PLAYWRIGHTS. Continued
Rees, James. The
Dramatic Authors
of America. Phila-
delphia: G. B.
Zieber & Co.
1845.
Some of Smith's
MSS. in Penn. His-
torical Society.
George H. Miles
(1824-1871)
a. Mohammed.
New
York, October 27,
1851.
b. De
Soto. Phila-
delphia Chestnut
Street Theatre,
April 19, 1852.
Dear Sir: I received your kind letter, dated the first of
this month, and hasten to reply. I am, perhaps, unlike most
dramatic writers of the present, or any other, day- for,
although neither of my dramas has met with much success,
I think both have met with more than they were entitled to.
This impression of mine may be ascribable to my utter indif-
ference to their fate. They were written rather as matters of
relief from the cares and toils of an arduous profession, than
with any view to their representation upon the stage. And if
I may speak frankly, I must say, they derived greater celeb-
rity from their author, than their author will ever derive from
them. In other words, it was not so remarkable that, with
vast professional engagements, I should have written two bad
plays, as that I should have been able to write any at all.
Sertorius" has been performed nine times, and, with the aid
of Mr. Booth, was well received. "The Prophet of St. Paul's"
has been thrice performed, and, by the aid of good luck, has
not yet been damned; but, for my own part, I should be
unwilling to run so narrow a chance. In the worst possible
result, however, I should have been totally unaffected, as I
confess to you; although I have much pleasure in the com-
position of such matters, I have no interest in their fate. I
am an advocate, not a dramatist.
•
137
The American Dramatist
He had upon him the fever of the closet-drama; versed in
the classics, yet, as James K. Paulding declared when he
reviewed "Sertorius", he did not have a correct understand-
ing of or a sensitive ear for the Elizabethan poetry he sought
to copy.
Forrest's attitude toward the dramas he fostered, how-
ever, was of a different nature. His response to material he
thought would fit him must have inspired the playwrights to
further effort. Writing to Bird at one time, he exclaimed,
"The Broker of Bogata' will live when our vile trunks are
rotten." But he little knew, when he passed from the scene,
and his disciples in the art of acting had been replaced, how
quickly those plays would fall into disuse. Bird (1806-1854)
was a physician, practising literature as a side issue. Conrad
(1810-1858) was in politics, and had been one-time mayor of
Philadelphia. I find Bird's biographer, Doctor Foust, extract-
ing from the Bird manuscripts in the University of Pennsyl-
vania this exposition of his technical ideas, which reveals
how well he had studied Forrest's requirements. He writes:
The true secret of effect consists in having everything, as
well in details as in the general structure, Epigrammatic or
Climactic; the story rising to rapidity and closing with
power; the chief characters increasing in passion and energy;
the events growing in interest, the scenes and acts each accu-
mulating power above their precursers; the strength of a
speech augmenting, at its close, and the important characters
dismissed at each exit with some sort of point and emphasis.
He will ascertain that interest cannot be preserved if it be dis-
tracted; and that to have his play truly dramatic (in opposi-
tion to epic) the interest and importance must be concentrated
in the hero and that every event, character, or speech which
does not serve to increase our interest in this personage, is
superfluous and therefore, detrimental.
But Bird fell away from the drama, and so did Conrad.
Stone was of the theatre and imitated the classic drama as
well as the French melodrama. The lives of these men do not
particularly bear upon their theatre work; their plays were
products of their reading and were regulated by the fashions
138
George Henry Boker
of the theatre. Richard Penn Smith (1799-1854), grandson
of the famous Provost of the College of Philadelphia, and win-
ner of a prize with "Caius Marius" (1831), was a rapid
worker, and his attempts in the closet-drama were not as tell-
ing as his historical dramas. That the Philadelphia style for
Forrest was being watched elsewhere is seen by the fact that
the winner of another prize, George H. Miles, author of
"Mohammed, the Arabian Prophet", was a Marylander.
V
The one outstanding figure of the group was George Henry
Boker (1823-1890), a man of leisure, a scholar, and one whose
culture was more exact and polished than his passion was
spontaneous. Hans Breitmann (C. G. Leland) speaks of
Boker's boyhood, when he manifested such remarkable poetic
talents that Forrest, in a flood of enthusiasm, exclaimed that
he was the best reader in America. At Princeton, Boker
gratified every artistic taste, and gathered in his room those
students whose interest was distinctly literary.
He then studied law, and travelled abroad until 1847. As
early as this, Bayard Taylor recognized in him a close and
sympathetic friend. The two of them, with Richard Henry
Stoddard, formed a sympathetic association, wherein they
sustained themselves in their struggles against the apathetic
interest America took in her literary progeny. Their rela-
tions recall the deep bond which existed between John Howard
Payne and Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving and
Samuel Woodworth. In the years following 1847, Boker
wrote assiduously; he was independent of financial depen-
dence and so could take, unperturbed, the slow measure of
reward meted out to him; though it will be found that he had
the same trouble with the finances of the theatre that Bird
had, the latter discovering in the end that Forrest, devoted
as he might be to the cause of a National Drama, was careful
to direct the bulk of the pecuniary gain in his direction.
When Stone committed suicide, it was Forrest who went to
the rescue with a flood of sentiment. But evidently “Meta-
139
The American Dramatist
GEORGE HENRY BOKER (1823-1890)
For full bibliography, see Moses' "Representative Plays", Vol. III.
Calaynos.
London, Sadler's Wells
Theatre, May 10,
Philadelphia: Wal-
nut Street The-
1849.
atre, January 20,
1850.
Anne Boleyn (1850).
The Betrothal.
Leonor de Guzman.
Francesca da Rimini.
Boker.
Cambridge History of
American Literature.
Reminiscences of
George Henry Bo-
ker.
Philadelphia: Walnut New York: Broad-
Street Theatre, Sep-
tember 25, 1850.
Philadelphia: Walnut
Street Theatre, Oc-
tober 3, 1853-
New York: Broadway
Theatre, September
26, 1855.
By J. W. Krutch.
New York: G. P. Put-
nam's Sons, 1917.
By Charles Godfrey
Leland.
way Theatre,
November 18,
1850.
New York: Broad-
way Theatre,
April 24, 1853.
Sewanee Review,
October, 1917,
25:457-468.
Bibliography,
The
I:
494.
American,
1890, March 1,
19:392-394.
zine, 1851, 8:
369-378.
George Henry Boker. By Charles Godfrey Sartain's Maga-
George Henry Boker.
Leland.
By George Parsons Authors at Home.
Lathrop.
xxvii. Critic, n.
s. Vol. 9, April
The Dramas of George By A. H. Quinn.
Henry Boker.
Recollections of George By Richard
Henry Boker.
|
Stoddard.
14, 1888.
Publication of Mod-
ern
Language
Association of
America, Vol. 32,
no. 2, n. s. Vol.
25, June, 1917,
233-266.
Henry Lippincott, June,
1890, 45: 856-
867.
140
George Henry Boker
mora", while it brought the actor fame, did not bring the
dramatist profit.
Boker's devotion to the Union cause during the Civil War
is seen in the numberless" Poems of the War" which came from
his pen. In 1871, he began his diplomatic service, being sent
by President Grant to Constantinople. He was transferred,
in 1875, to St. Petersburg, where he gained much popularity
during a two years' service.
All this time, his poetic talents were variously directed
toward the stage. He was the author of "Calaynos", a
tragedy given at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London, the year
after its publication in 1848. "Francesca da Rimini” (1853)
is his most famous piece, and is most deserving of considera-
tion in a theatrical sense. Boker's art temperament is well
measured in the following from the pen of Richard Henry
Stoddard:
There was no such word as fail in his bright lexicon, wherein
failure was hammered into success. I was not surprised to
learn therefore [March, 1853] . . . that he had a new tragedy
on the anvil. "You will laugh at this," he wrote, "but the
thing is so; Francesca da Rimini' is the title. Of course you
know the story-every one does; but you, nor any one else,
do not know it as I have treated it. I have great faith in the
successful issue of this new attempt. I think all day, and
write all night. This is one of my peculiarities, by the bye:
a subject seizes me, soul and body, which accounts for the
rapidity of my execution. My muse resembles a whirlwind :
she catches me up, hurries me along, and drops me all breath-
less at the end of her career. The great heat at which
"Lear" and "Julius Cæsar" were probably written, at which
we know "The Prisoner of Chillon" was written, at which
"A Blot in the 'Scutcheon" is said to have been written, were
inherent in the dramatic genius of Boker, from whom, at the
end of nineteen days, I received another letter, which I found
very interesting: "Now that 'Francesca da Rimini' is done, all
but the polishing, I have time to look around and see how I
have been neglecting my friends during my state of possession.
Of course you wish to know my opinion of the bantling: I shall
suppose you do, at all events. Well, then, I am better satis-
141
The American Dramatist
fied with 'Francesca da Rimini' than with any of my previous
plays. It is impossible for me to say what you, or the world,
will say of it; but if it do not please you both, I do not know
what I am about. The play is more dramatic than former
ones, fiercer in its displays of intense passions, and, so far
as mere poetry goes, not inferior, if not superior, to any of
them. In this play I have dared more, risked more, than I
ever had courage to do before. Ergo, if it be not a great
triumph, it will certainly be a great failure. I doubt whether
you in a hundred guesses could hit upon the manner in which I
have treated the story. I shall not attempt to prejudice you
regarding the play; I would rather have you judge for your-
self, even if your decision be adverse. Am I not the devil and
all for rapid composition? My speed frightens me, and makes
me fearful of the merits of my work. Yet, on coolly going over
my work, I find little to object to, either as to the main design
or its details; I touch up, here and there, but I do little more.
The reason for my rapid writing is that I never attempt put-
ting pen to paper before my design is perfectly matured. I
never start with one idea, trusting to the glow of poetical com-
position for the remainder. That will do in lyrical_poetry,
but it would be death and damnation to dramatic. But just
think of it! Twenty-eight hundred lines in about three
weeks! To look back upon such labor is appalling! Let me
give you the whole history of my manner of composition in a
few words. If it be not interesting to you, you differ from
me, and I mistake the kind of matters that interest you.
While I am writing, I eat little, I drink nothing, I meditate
my work, literally, all day. By the time night arrives, I
am in a highly nervous and excited state. About nine o'clock,
I begin writing and smoking, and I continue the two exercises,
pari passu, until about four o'clock in the morning. Then
I reel to bed, half-crazy with cigar-smoke and poesy, sleep
five hours, and begin the next day as the former. Ordinarily,
I sleep from seven to eight hours, but when I am writing, but
five, simply because I cannot sleep any longer at such times.
The consequence of this mode of life is, that at the end of a
long work I sink at once like a spent horse, and have not
energy enough to perform the ordinary duties of life. I feel
my health giving way under it, but really I do not care. I am
ambitious to be numbered among the martyrs.
142
George Henry Boker
Loyal as Stoddard was to his friend, we find him writing in
this critical vein :
The conception of his tragedies and comedies, their develop-
ment, their movement, and their catastrophes, are dramatic.
Poetical, they are not overweighted with poetry; emotional
and passionate, their language is naturally figurative, and the
blank verse rises and falls as the occasion demands. One
feels in reading them that the writer had studied the Eliza-
bethan and Jacobean dramatists, and that they harmed as well
as helped him. If he could have forgotten them and remem-
bered only his own genius, his work would have been more
original. A born dramatist, he was a genuine balladist, as I
could prove by comparing his ballads with those of Macaulay;
and a born sonneteer, as I could prove by comparing his son-
nets with those of Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, and Shakespeare.
دو
It is useless to call attention too specifically to the excel-
lences and faults in Boker's dramatic workmanship. His lines
are easy to read, imitative of Elizabethan blank verse. His
plays are not individualistic, though one might detect in the
speeches of Queen Anne, in “Anne Boleyn", certain personal
comment on the ways of the English. Reading "Calaynos
the difference between this and Bird's "The Broker of
Bogata" is one of degree rather than of kind. There is a
sameness to his plays: a repetition of motive, passion, and
simile that palls. Yet, were his plays strong enough to sur-
vive the change in taste, were his stories of sufficient interest.
and not merely a pale reflection of out-of-the-way legend and
history, - were actors to be found to brave the production
of them, they would be found to "work" well, in the mechani-
cal theatre sense. Of all the Francesca plays, the one of
Boker's seems to articulate most practically for stage produc-
tion, though the Italian passion of it is sadly wanting. Com-
pare the plot situations in "Calaynos", in "Anne Boleyn",
and in "Francesca da Rimini", and it will be detected that
Boker had his formal blue print of stage requirement. But
he never was of the theatre; his position in literature was
too firm, his occupations in other directions too scattered to
consider him as distinctly an American dramatist. He was
143
The American Dramatist
a later product of the Philadelphia school; and the war,
together with his diplomatic position, withdrew him eventu-
ally from the stage scene, save for later negotiations with.
Lawrence Barrett.
In my "Representative Plays by American Dramatists” I
have reprinted "Francesca da Rimini." There I have detailed
Boker's activity in my introduction. It illustrates how nearly
he was to being a closet-dramatist; it shows how earnest
he was as a poet. But it likewise suggests that there was
absent in Boker's mind what the theatre really meant as an
important institution. Writing was to him, as it was to the
entire Philadelphia group, a grace rather than an earnest ac-
complishment. Yet he too tried to determine to himself what
there was in dramatic technique that differed from other
forms. He wrote to Richard Henry Stoddard, on October 6,
1850:
Seriously, Dick, there is, to my mind, no English diction for
your purposes equal to Milton's in his minor poems. Of
course any man would be an intensified ass who should
attempt to reach the diction of the "Paradise Lost", or aspire
to the tremendous style of Shakespeare. You must not con-
found things, though. A Lyric diction is one thing.
Dramatic diction is another, requiring the utmost force and
conciseness of expression, and Epic diction is still another;
I conceive it to be something between the Lyric and Dramatic,
with all the luxuriance of the former and all the power of the
latter.
a
The awful thing to Boker was that the toil of literature was
not recompensed by the public; they regarded the occupation
as a fancy matter. Again he wrote to Stoddard:
Were poetry forged upon an anvil, cut out with the axe, or
spun in the mill, my heaven, how men would wonder at the
process! What power, what toil, what ingenuity!
He little stopped to think that maybe the writers were not
watchers of popular interest, were not themselves interested
in subjects of wide appeal. After he had finished "Leonor
de Guzman", Boker wrote Stoddard: "There are no such
144
George Henry Boker
subjects for historical tragedy on earth as are to be found in
the Spanish history of that period [meaning the reigns of
Alfonso XII, of Castile, and his son, Peter the Cruel]." There
was no theme in American history which, to those men who
had a fixed mind as to what should be the color of historical
tragedy, seemed important enough for their consideration.
That was one of the reasons which kept the drama of the
period so aloof from the sympathy of the masses. Rees seemed
to blame the decadent taste of theatregoers for the non-
acceptance of Conrad. But the attempt to put a play on, in
the hope that an actor like Booth or Forrest would overcome
its ineffective appeal, was often frustrated. Many of these
stage pieces rested quickly on the shelf in the closet.
The attitude toward the closet-drama was purely one of
culture. A pseudo-interest in the grandiloquent style resulted
in the separation of literature from the dramatic form. As
soon as one realizes that literature is inherent in the substance
and in the structure, so soon will ornamentation cease to be
strung in useless festoons upon the necessary dialogue. For in
all plays there is essential talk even as there are Sarcey's scènes
à faire. It was a false idea of culture that created a false idea
of closet-drama. For, though the theatre is based on imita-
tion, it cannot abide a misuse of its essential structure in order
to be called literature. More than any other critic, Professor
Brander Matthews has persisted, in his writings, that the
drama must comply with the practical demands of the play-
house in order to be drama. Pointing to the body of drama-
turgy which has come down to us, he has been firm in his
claim that "only literature is permanent." We will accept
drama in any form, just so it be drama first of all. The
managers, in accepting the French melodramas, were at least
assured of certain identifying marks of the theatre which
A part of their distrust of native material was
meant success.
merited.
145
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE PROLIFIC DION BOUCICAULT 1
I
"I GENERALLY have to start at the beginning of the alphabet,"
said Aubrey Boucicault, "when I attempt to recollect all the
plays my father wrote. Yet, though his plays number over
four hundred, only a few of them, of which "London Assur-
ance", "The Colleen Bawn", and "The Shaughraun" repre-
sent the special types, are at all familiar to the theatregoer
of the present. These are mentioned because they are indica-
tive of the " genres" of the Boucicault drama: the Irish
models destined to influence many future melodramas, and
the comedy of manners, itself a brusque imitation of all that is
sprightly and artificial in Goldsmith and Sheridan.
Because Boucicault was so intimately connected with
theatrical life, he was narrowed by that very knowledge of
stagecraft which made him strain character for situation.
Edgar Allan Poe, in his estimate of Mrs. Mowatt, the actress,
referred to "that despicable mass of inanity, 'London Assur-
ance.'”
However sweeping this opinion may be, it warns us
at the outset to approach the Boucicault drama from across
the footlights, and not at closer range.
The records of this dramatist's early life are contradictory.
He was born in Dublin, on December 26, 1822, and was
1 The fact that my “Famous Actor-Families in America" is now out of print has
prompted me to make my chapter on Boucicault in that book the basis for the present
interpretation. In condensed form, it has also been used to introduce "London
Assurance", the text of which is in my "Representative British Plays: Victorian
and Modern."
146
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
christened Dionysius Lardner Boucicault, after the great
philologist and pamphleteer, Doctor Lardner, who was satir-
ized by Thackeray in "The Yellowplush Papers."
Samuel S. Boucicault was the father of Dion, and there is
some indication that, being a Frenchman, his name was
spelled "Bosquet." This was further transformed into
"Boursiquot", and once more changed to "Bourcicault"
which was the spelling retained until circa 1856, when the
"r" was dropped.
Some say that the father by profession was a banker and a
brewer, while others would assert that he was a draper; not
content, another source would claim that, when young Dion
went to Paris, he adopted the title of "Viscount", and the
report at the time was circulated that he was of noble extrac-
tion.
On the mother's side, Boucicault received his greatest
heritage; she was a Miss Darley, an Irish lady, and sister of
the essayist and dramatist, George Darley, as well as of the
Rev. Charles Darley, who wrote "Plighted Troth", a play
which failed so signally at Drury Lane. Boucicault appears
to have shown some pleasure over this result, for his uncle
had regarded his nephew's first efforts as works of a schoolboy.
Dion was the youngest of four, his three brothers being
William (a banker), and George and Arthur, twins. Up to
the age of nineteen, when his first play was written, contradic-
tory statements are to be found regarding his education. One
says that he was placed by Doctor Lardner with Stephenson,
the famous engineer, where he studied for a while; and that he
showed remarkable technical skill in his plans for the water-
works of London. The same writer adds that Boucicault
"rode on the first engine of Stephenson's that ran between
Liverpool and Manchester." There are various records of his
having attended London University, where he counted among
his friends Charles Lamb Kenney, a namesake of Elia.
Pascoe gives Dublin as his school centre. Yet those who
knew Boucicault, notably Stephen Fiske, wondered at his
knowledge, and puzzled over how he secured his education.
In March, 1838, the first professional step was taken when
147
The American Dramatist
Dion joined a dramatic company at Cheltenham, England,
and was billed as Mr. Lee Moreton. His maiden rôle was
Norfolk, in "Richard III." Fourteen years after, he made his
London début. But before this, in 1848, he was a widower,
having been married since 1844 to a woman much his senior.
The alliance was not a happy one, and when she died in
Switzerland Boucicault returned to London, swathed in great
mystery. He possessed a small fortune, to which was added
the bounty of one of his relatives. Boucicault's silence about
his foreign life created considerable suspicion. Certain it is
that his wife's death did not deeply affect young Dion, who,
when he reached England, proceeded to live in an extravagant
manner.
The public eye was already upon him; at a surprisingly
youthful age he had met success with the first of his dramas,
"London Assurance", given its première at Covent Garden,
on March 4, 1841. The name it bore proved to be a hasty
substitution made just before the rise of the curtain, for origi-
nally it was called "Out of Town."
It will not bear analysis as a literary production [wrote
the author in a preface to the second edition of the printed
play]. In fact, my sole object is to throw together a few
scenes of a dramatic nature, and therefore I studied the stage
rather than the moral effect. I attempted to instil a pun-
gency into the dialogue, and to procure vivid tones by a strong
antithesis of character. The moral which I intended to
convey is expressed in the last speech of the comedy, but as I
wrote "currente calamo" I have doubtless through the play
strayed far wide of my original intent.
CC
"Barefaced assurance is the vulgar substitute for gentle-
manly ease," says Sir Harcourt Courtley.
The title
of gentleman is the only one out of any monarch's gift, yet
within the reach of every peasant. This is the substance of
that last speech.
""
As Boucicault said, the "motive" was not sufficiently
emphasized, but the stage pictures were effective and the
characters afforded ample scope for good acting. Boucicault
has written his own account of his début as a dramatist,
148
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
colored with a tinge of pleasant romance; he has told in a
minute way his feelings, as he took the first play to Charles.
Mathews, who read it as a one-act piece. Surprised on seeing
such a boy before him, Mathews encouraged him, though
handing back the manuscript. Boucicault at the time thought
that, had the drama been a five-act comedy, Mathews
might have taken it, so in a few days he remodelled it and
astonished Mathews by his quick reappearance. The play,
now a larger roll of manuscript, was read and accepted. But
when put in rehearsal :
Scene after scene [said Boucicault, in his pen-picture] was
rewritten at the prompt-table and handed wet to the com-
pany. Thus the last speech of the play, which is technically
termed "the tag", was composed and handed to Max Hark-
away. The next day, or on some subsequent day, Vestris
took the author aside and said: "Farren wants to speak the
tag. I suppose you don't mind ?" "Well," said the author,
looking up with his Irish smile, "will it not sound rather
strange in the mouth of Sir Harcourt Courtley?" [Originally
called Sir William Dazzle, the surname afterward used for
another character.] "Oh, never mind — I am sure the pub-
lic will not. Bartley does not object; in fact, he approves.
And so it stood.
The whole play was cut after a conventional model, of which
"The School for Scandal" is the most poignant example.
Boucicault was too young to do aught but reflect what he
either had heard or had read. One may forestall his dialogue
by the apparent directness with which the author works up to
a point or situation.
"London Assurance" was made to order on the shortest
possible notice [the dramatist continued]. I could have
wished that my first appearance before the public had not
been in this out-of-breath style; but I saw my opportunity
at hand. I knew how important it was not to neglect the
chance of production, the door was open, I had a run for it,
and here I am!
For such a young man the play exhibited a remarkable
proficiency and surety in dialogue, besides theatrical richness.
149
The American Dramatist
Once Boucicault spoke of wit as not possessing a soft and
genial quality of its being more admirable than endearing;
and he condemned its excessive application as heartless. For
this very reason he stigmatized "The School for Scandal" as
the most cold-blooded drama on the stage.
But, in writing "London Assurance", it cannot be denied
that Boucicault's eye was upon this more polished comedy of
the eighteenth century. Nor, after all, was there much origi-
nality in “London Assurance", for, in other forms, its plot had
been used before, and John Brougham himself came forward,
claiming his share, not only in conceiving the character of
Dazzle, but in supervising the construction of the whole piece.
A long dispute followed, and Lester Wallack gave his opinion
in favor of Brougham; but the latter was not overanxious to
receive his just deserts, whatever they might be; his friends
were the ones who persisted in pushing the case. Finally,
it is believed, the two authors went to an attorney's office in
London, and there Brougham prepared a statement as to his
exact share in the work, and forthwith signed away all further
claims on receipt of a substantial check from Boucicault. The
dispute left no marked ill-feeling, since Brougham afterward
appeared in many of the Boucicault dramas. Among them
he played O'Grady in "Arrah-na-Pogue."
Such a misunderstanding at the outset of the dramatist's
career is significant; it was to be repeated many times during
the years to come. In fact, Charles Reade's remark should
be borne in mind:
Like Shakespeare and Molière [he said], the beggar [mean-
ing Boucicault] steals everything he can lay his hands on;
but he does it so deftly, so cleverly, that I can't help con-
doning the theft. He picks up a pebble by the shore and
polishes it into a jewel. Occasionally, too, he writes divine
lines, and knows more about the grammar of the stage than
all the rest of them [the dramatists] put together.
Lester Wallack was at the theatre during the first produc-
tion of "London Assurance." The managers of Covent Gar-
den had done their utmost to mount the piece according to the
150
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
The audience saw before
latest improvements in stage art.
them rare examples of the boxed-in scene, where all the ap-
pointments were fitting and realistic. The stage manager was
wellnigh stunned when the young dramatist asked him to use
a real carpet in one of the settings. Herein may be noted
another of Boucicault's claims to influence; more than any
other playwright, he depended largely upon the accessory of
scenes to reach certain effects. He used fire in "The Octo-
roon", and water in "The Colleen Bawn" those external
elements affording many outlets for thrilling situations. The
Boucicault drama was essentially active. He studied his
audiences carefully to note in what way they responded to a
given climax - a surprise which he may have taken some time
to prepare for them. And he reached the conclusion, after
years of experience, that an actor's ability has its limited ex-
tent of power, of hold, of magnetism.
I have been able [he wrote] to compare results, and find that
when an audience exceeds a certain size, it is very difficult to
establish in it perfectly this fusion of minds. . . . Wherefore
I am led to believe that a group of more than two thousand
persons is not so susceptible to the psychic influences exerted
by artists, as a group of less than that number. There is
a limit to the genius of the actor as regards its reach over his
audience; and no auditorium should exceed in size that
limit.
II
Boucicault's first success was rapidly followed by other
plays. "The Irish Heiress" was presented in 1842 and “Old
Heads and Young Hearts" in 1844. Between these came
"Alma Mater; or, A Cure for a Coquette" (1842), which he
was accused of appropriating from an unacknowledged source;
and his attempt to write a sentimental comedy at the age of
twenty-one, bearing such a comprehensive title as "Woman",
failed utterly. The newspaper comments were not overcor-
dial. They did not ascribe to his second nor yet to his third
piece the merit they assigned to his first. "And yet," Bouci-
151
The American Dramatist
cault added, in a naïvely impersonal manner, "the character
of Jesse Rural, drawn from nature, seems to be a literary por-
trait of more merit than any of the heartless types of the older
and more shallow composition." Thus, in 1889, Boucicault
spoke with the confidence of a man who, having achieved, can
afford to criticise and to estimate himself.
The remarkable fact throughout his career, however, was
that no matter whether good or bad, original or otherwise,
the Boucicault drama was eagerly sought by the theatre be-
cause it was made for the theatre. Laurence Hutton, in his
"Plays and Players", writes of his most successful plays:
The number of times each is said to have been played we
noticed in a late newspaper paragraph, which seems to be
given upon authority, and which as one of the curiosities of
literature we transcribe here. "The Colleen Bawn" has
been played 3,100 times; "Arrah-na-pogue", 2,400 times;
"London Assurance", 2,900 times; Rip Van Winkle"
1,400 times; "Old Heads and Young Hearts", 1,250 times;
"The Octoroon", 1,800 times; "Formosa", 1,100 times;
"Jessie Brown", 820 times; "The Corsican Brothers", 2,200
times; "Don Cæsar de Bazan", 1,700 times; "Used Up"
1,350 times; "The Willow Copse", 1,110 times; "The Streets
of New York", 2,860 times; "Led Astray", 498 times.
The entire number of all these performances must have been
almost 50,000. Estimating that the receipts of each per-
formance averaged five hundred dollars, the public must have
paid the enormous sum of twenty-five millions of dollars to
witness the plays of this one man.
Hutton's book was issued in 1875, when the Boucicault
taste had not subsided.
As fast as the dramatist wrote, just so fast were his manu-
scripts given to companies for rehearsal. Boucicault himself
declared in the presence of Stephen Fiske that "he was a lucky
bag out of which some managers drew fortunes and some drew
blanks." Jefferson succeeded in putting his hand upon
"Rip" he did more than that, for it was he who put Bouci-
cault's hand in the way of doing it; Frank Mayo secured
"The Streets of New York"; Chanfrau reaped benefit from
152

2
2
கும்
THE PROLIFIC DION BOUCICAULT
DION BOUCICAULT AS Con, IN HIS PLAY,
"THE SHAUGHRAUN."
"Writing, adapting, and translating four hundred plays in about forty-nine years."
Reproductions from photographs in the collection of Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.

The Prolific Dion Boucicault
"The Octoroon"; and Robson and Crane were fortunate
with "Forbidden Fruit.'
At the London Princess Theatre, on the evening of June 14,
1852, Boucicault presented his own play, "The Vampire",
it being his first appearance as an actor in that city. During
this year he met Miss Agnes Robertson, who was supporting
Mrs. Charles Kean.
Let us stop for a moment and gather a few characteristics
around Dion Boucicault. One grows older with the years, but
it is typical of Boucicault that he blossomed all of a sudden,
that he slipped early into whatever intellectual maturity he
was to possess; and thereafter he became surer in his powers,
without greatly intensifying his insight into human nature.
Stephen Fiske called him an enigma, "a gay, semi-fashionable,
semi-Bohemian" fellow. He was impulsive, nervous, a quick
worker, and as ready to flare into a rage as he was to exhibit
his abundant Irish humor.
I knew [him] [writes Clement Scott] in the "Colleen Bawn'
days at the Adelphi, when he had a magnificent mansion and
grounds at Old Brompton. . . . I knew him in the days of
The Shaughraun", at the same theatre, and I met him con-
stantly at the tables of Edmund Yates [et als], and I was also
a frequent guest at his own table when he lived, as he ever did,
money or no money, credit or no credit, "en prince" at his
flat. . . . Dion was a born "viveur",
a gourmand" and
"gourmet", and certainly one of the most brilliant conversa-
tionalists it has ever been my happy fortune to meet.
66
When John Coleman used to see Boucicault at Charles
Reade's, in later years, the dramatist had become much older
looking, but his nature was unchanged. Therefore, the picture
given of him as one of the guests at Reade's table is not mis-
placed here, for he could sing his "The Wearing of the Green
with as much spirit at sixty as he could at any other time.
Coleman wrote:
This distinguished actor and author had (so he himself told
me) left England under a cloud, but had "cast his nighted
colour off" in America, and returned to triumph. When we
153
The American Dramatist
first met he was living "en grand seigneur" in the famous
mansion at Kensington Gore, which had formerly been the
home of the Countess of Blessington. He was then making a
fortune one moment and spending it the next. . .
His accomplishments were many and varied. He knew
something about everything, and what he didn't know about
the popular drama (which to some extent he incarnated in
himself) wasn't worth knowing. Although no longer young,
his mind was alert as a boy's, and I can well believe what
Charles Mathews, Walter Lacey, and John Brougham often
told me
that in his juvenalia he was the most fascinating
young scapegrace that ever baffled or bamboozled a bailiff.
He was still handsome. His head, though perfectly bald,
was shaped like the dome of a temple, and was superbly, I may
say, Shakespearianly beautiful. His face was a perfect oval,
his eyes brilliant, his figure elegant. Old stagers were wont to
say he was a mere replica of Tyrone Power - the famous
comedian who perished in the wreck of the ill-fated President.
Such is a sketch of the man who married Miss Robertson
and set sail with her for America in 1853. He was headstrong
and reckless, as is shown by every vital circumstance con-
nected with his life. He was gifted with a quick eye and a
ready expression. So it was that "on the spur of the mo-
ment", as he says in that preface to "London Assurance
which he addressed to Charles Kemble, "I completed this work
in thirty days. I had no time to revise or correct; the ink was
scarcely dry before it was in the theatre and accepted." Such
rapidity is an unwise and unsafe example to give any dramatist,
but it would seem that all theatrically successful plays have
been quickly constructed. This was the case with "The Lady
of Lyons", penned by Bulwer to cover a former failure, as it
was with "Camille", written because Dumas fils, as well as
Dumas père, disapproved of a scenario made from the for-
mer's novel by some unknown and melodramatic playwright.
Boucicault combined, therefore, the rapid inventive gift
with the aptness of the producer. He was strictly a writer
for the stage, and he had the foresight to study his wife's
capabilities as well as his own. He realized the limitations
of each, and he wrote parts accordingly. Being Irish, he
154
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
64
possessed the moonlight sentiment which, in such plays,
always shines upon a denied patrimony; because he was Irish,
he had the right to be picturesque in a mavourneen" way.
His whole dramatic idea never went beyond the confines of the
stage.
Even in acting - and he lectured many times upon the
art - he averred that it "could be taught only on the stage,
as swimming can only be taught in the water, and riding on
horseback. All chamber tuition is worthless. Elocution and
declamation are the last, not the first, lessons a young actress
or actor should learn. . . . I deny that [the art] . . . can be
taught and practised on a hearth-rug. I deny that Antony
can address an imaginary populace, that Romeo can make love
to an absent Juliet."
.
Wise at one moment and unwise at the next, Boucicault
could have been a greater man had he not been so successful
when he was successful. The very fact that he could defy
failure with immediate success
success made him obstinately
opinionated, and, though his advice was at most times practical
and of the very best, what he told one day at rehearsal might
the next day be reversed. There was a great instability in
the character of Dion Boucicault.
His first act when he reached America was accomplished
in the face of contrary advice from friends. He kept his
marriage a secret, appearing in public with his wife, who was
cast as Miss Agnes Robertson on the playbills. Soon he
recognized the error of his ways; he found that his wife did
not make any more popular impression than she would have
done had she not used her maiden name. So, one evening in
Boston, Mr. Boucicault came upon the stage and announced
that he was the husband of Miss Robertson, and idle talk was
set at rest.
III
Mrs. Dion Boucicault, of Scotch descent, was born in Edin-
burgh, December 25, 1833. She was only eleven years of age
when she began to sing in public, and during 1851 she joined
155
The American Dramatist
Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean's company, playing Nerissa, in
their production of "The Merchant of Venice"; so, too, she
filled many juvenile rôles. She was a ward of the Keans, and
her marriage with Boucicault was not approved by them;
indeed, so strenuously was it opposed, some think, that the
young couple went off and settled the question for themselves.
They came to New York, via Montreal, and, on October 22,
1853, Mrs. Boucicault appeared as Maria, in "The Young
Actress.' Mr. Boucicault's American début was made at
the New York Broadway Theatre, on November 10, 1854,
when he played Sir Charles Coldstream in "Used Up." The
same year, Joseph Jefferson was managing John T. Ford's
theatre in Richmond, Virginia, and he engaged Edwin Forrest
and Mr. and Mrs. Boucicault to come to him.
وو
Professionally, the success of these two was closely knitted.
Despite the fact that she was constantly appearing in
Philadelphia, and that she toured also throughout the United
States, it was in New York that Agnes Robertson won her
warmest favors. And if there had been any opposition on the
part of the Keans to her husband, it had subsided sufficiently
by 1855 for Boucicault to write a drama, "Louis XI", in
which Charles Kean made a success. Previously a similar
play had been conceived by W. R. Markwell, but the Bouci-
cault drama was the one afterward used by Edwin Booth and
Henry Irving; even the dramatist himself essayed to play the
part of the French monarch.
Boucicault, referring to Irving in 1883, spoke truly: "He
resembles absinthe. Some people make faces at his acting,
at first, but the taste grows upon you and at last becomes an
eager appetite." Irving had, when almost unknown, ap-
peared in Boucicault's "Hunted Down."
Critics were warm in their praise of Mrs. Boucicault's
Jessie Brown, when her husband's drama, "The Relief of
Lucknow", was given at Wallack's Theatre, on February 22,
1858; they applauded her Dot in a version of "The Cricket
on the Hearth", with Jefferson as Caleb Plummer. The
performance occurred at the Winter Garden, on September 4,
1859. It is a curious instance of the indirect way in which
156
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
Boucicault reached out and took his material, that he based
his play on a dramatization of the Dickens book, which had
been done by two Frenchmen, and called by them "Le Mar-
chand d'Enfants"; he was not aware of the story's existence
until afterward.
There seems at a certain period of stage history to have
been a perfect influx of Dickens dramatizations, even as
Scott, during an earlier era, was tumbled promiscuously on the
boards. The novelists were rich in their characterizations,
which were all human, and at the same time placed in situa-
tions that appealed to the dramatic instinct of Boucicault.
He soon had made a play from "Nicholas Nickleby", and, in
November, 1859, when Jefferson created so successfully the
rôle of Newman Noggs, Mrs. Boucicault's Smike was accounted
"terribly tearful", the audience becoming enthusiastic over
the pathos of the picture. With what the papers described
as the prettiest of ballad voices, which gave forth a serene
melody, unruffled by artificial trills, she again made an im-
pression as Jeanie Deans, in a dramatization of "The Heart
of Mid-Lothian", presented at Laura Keene's Theatre, on
January 9, 1860. She was also the original Zoë in "The
Octoroon" (December 5, 1859), and Eily O'Connor in “The
Colleen Bawn" (March 29, 1860).
This latter piece is theatric and devoid of true psychology,
yet it has the typical heart interest. The ideas of caste, the
disappointed but faithful lover, the villainous solicitor, the
suspicions and misrepresentations that are as a pebbly bed to
the course of true love these all lack intellectual consis-
tency, but to the eye they lend color, and to the illusion they
add excitement and stimulation. Though this play is re-
garded as a type of the famous Irish dramas written by Bouci-
cault, it was not original in plot; it was founded upon a novel
by Gerald Griffin, called "The Collegians." In The Spirit of
the Times, for May 31, 1879, Boucicault was frank in his
denial of that. "When I wrote 'The Colleen Bawn', I invented
the Irish Drama. It was original in form, in material, in
treatment, and in dialogue." In after years, Yeats and
Lady Gregory were to endeavor, in the Irish plays of the Abbey
157
The American Dramatist
Theatre, to undo some of the harm done to Irish character by
the Boucicault type.
"The Colleen Bawn" followed his "Vanity Fair", which,
produced by Laura Keene, proved to be a failure; the actress
had thereupon turned in distress to the dramatist. "What
have you to put in its place ?" she had queried. "Nothing",
came the reply. But that night Boucicault stopped at a
bookstore and purchased the above-mentioned volume, which
he read from cover to cover through the early morning. Then
he wrote in all haste to Miss Keene:
My dear Laura: I have it! I send you seven steel en-
gravings of scenes around Killarney. Get your scene-painter
to work on them at once. I also send a book of Irish melodies,
with those marked I desire Baker to score for the orchestra.
I shall read act one of my new Irish play on Friday; we re-
hearse that while I am writing the second, which will be ready
on Monday; and we rehearse the second while I am doing
the third. We can get the play out within a fortnight.
Yours,
D. B.
Writing, adapting, and translating four hundred plays in
about forty-nine years, Boucicault was of necessity a rapid
worker, and, since a large number of these pieces found quick
production, he and his wife did not have far to look in order to
procure a wide range of rôles. But his characters made
small demand upon subtlety. Active romance and feeling, cut
after the same pattern, may, under all external conditions, be
depicted by the same methods. Boucicault, despite his cos-
mopolitanism, was at the same time an Irishman, and his
sentiment of locality was always his strong stand-by. There
was a reminiscent touch to every phase of his work; both
his morality and his immorality were tinged with the senti-
ment and pathos of external influence. His characters had
little internal communings.
IV
From 1860 to 1872, Mr. and Mrs. Boucicault remained in
England, and on their return to America they repeated, at
158

SARIS
DION BOUCICAULT.
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
THE BOUCICAULT POSTER
Very rare and much coveted by collectors. Green border. 24 X 17 inches.
A
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
Booth's Theatre (September, 1872), some of their former suc-
cesses. In 1879, Mrs. Boucicault retired from the stage.
During this time the playwright was unceasing in his work,
and plays rolled from his pen in rapid succession. This was
not enough for an active temperament; Boucicault entered
the field of theatrical management. As early as 1859 he had
formed a partnership with William Stuart, and the two had
presented Jefferson at the Winter Garden in repertoire; then,
in 1862, Astley's Circus in London was renamed the West-
minster, and here Boucicault produced under his own business
direction "The Heart of Mid-Lothian" (January 26, 1863).
There is an interesting point connected with this experi-
ment. The theatre was situated in a part of the town not
frequented by the upper class; to reach the place, West-
minster Bridge had to be crossed. It is always the case that
when a house becomes associated in the public mind with a
certain "genre" of drama, and when it has created its own
class of audience, it is difficult to alter the impression by sub-
stituting another type of play and attracting a different class.
But this is what the Boucicault campaign attempted, and by
the time "Mazeppa" was announced on the bills, the fashion-
able world was crossing the bridge to see it.
Boucicault aimed to win the popular taste; he was often
heard to say that he preferred fifty-cent audiences to any
other, since they came for legitimate amusement, and did not
look upon the theatre as a kind of interlude an indispen-
sable accessory to dinner parties. Nor did he hesitate to pro-
claim, whenever opportunity presented itself, that the drama
was being kept decent only through the sincerity of this fifty-
cent body.
Under his own direction, Boucicault presented "The Col-
leen Bawn" at Drury Lane (circa 1862), after he had sev-
ered his connection with Benjamin Webster, who owned the
Adelphi. The misunderstanding which existed between these
two very nearly prevented the first production of “Rip
Van Winkle", which Jefferson was to give later. The version.
of the play had just been completed by Boucicault, and handed
over to the actor, who was under the management of Webster.
159
The American Dramatist
Boucicault and he, on account of their differences, were not
on speaking terms, and so, when Jefferson assembled his com-
pany to read them the manuscript of the play, neither the
author nor the manager was present. However, the time
arrived when the company was more than "letter perfect",
and Jefferson finally prevailed upon Boucicault to attend a
rehearsal. As soon as the playwright entered the theatre,
however, his old grievances against Webster welled up, and he
overflowed in abuse of the owner of the Adelphi. "Webster's
management cannot compare with mine," cried Boucicault,
tapping his cane on the floor. He was annoyed by some little
discrepancies in stage detail. As was natural, the company
became incensed at this breach of etiquette, and, from behind
the curtain of one of the boxes, where Webster lay concealed,
undefined sputterings of rage could be heard. The crusty old
manager left the house, and wrote Jefferson post-haste that
under no condition could he allow one of Boucicault's dramas
to be acted at his theatre; that only if Jefferson saw fit to
substitute one of the many other versions of the legend,
could "Rip Van Winkle" be mounted on the boards of
the Adelphi at the time stipulated. It is testimony to Jeffer-
son's good will and diplomacy that the matter was sufficiently
overlooked to allow the performance to proceed on the evening
originally set.
Covent Garden Theatre was once the scene of Boucicault's
extravagancies (1872). In partnership with Lord Londes-
borough, who rented the house, he prepared a spectacular,
"Babil and Bijou", into which money was thoughtlessly
poured. The production was not a great financial success,
though some regarded it with favor artistically. Special mu-
sical features were prepared, and the choruses outrivalled
anything of the kind ever heard before. Boucicault knew well
how to spend other people's money
and he was equally as
lavish with his own when he had it. In considering these
many plays, it must not be forgotten that two dates of pro-
duction should always be associated with each, since the dram-
atist was equally popular in America and Great Britain.
For that reason, his views upon the interrelation of English
160
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
and American dramas were regarded significantly and were
given close attention at the time they were uttered. He had
cause to think conditions fair!
While in England, during that period between 1860 and
1872, Boucicault was intimately associated with Charles
Reade, the novelist, who was as interested in the drama as
was Charles Dickens, his popular contemporary. But Reade
occupied a unique position in respect to his own books; he
was dramatizer as well as writer.
In collaboration with Boucicault, he prepared a drama, in
1867, from "Foul Play"; it was not only a failure, but it re-
sulted in another accusation of plagiarism which followed close
upon its presentation. This attack Reade wholly denounced,
and it is clearly seen that the public suspicion fell, not upon
the novelist, but upon the playwright. The matter is fully
considered in "Readiana", and excerpts produced from "Le
Porte-Feuille Rouge", which was the bone of contention -
the French model which was more than a “model.”
"model." After-
ward, Reade made another dramatic version under the title,
"The Scuttled Ship."
When that novelist was dramatizing "It's Never Too Late
to Mend", he let Boucicault have the manuscript; a short
while passed, and a letter arrived from Dublin :
MY DEAR READE: I have read your drama, "N. T. L. T.
M." There is in it a very effective piece, but, like the nut
within both husk and shell, it wants freedom.
Ist. It will act five hours as it stands.
2d. There are scenes which injure dramatically others
which follow.
3d. There are two characters you are fond of (I suppose),
but can never be played. I mean Jacky and the Jew.
4th. The dialogue wants weeding. It is more in weight
than actors as they breed them now can carry.
Total. If you want to make a success with this drama, you
must consent to a depleting process to which Shylock's single
pound of flesh must be a mild transaction. Have you the
courage to undergo the operation? I am afraid you have not.
DION BOUCICAULT.
Ever yours,
161
The American Dramatist
Here was a man who reached his dramatic theories through
practical experience. His character was such as to ignore
advice unless it was the kind he himself most desired; his
success inculcated within him an assurance which reacted
upon him and made him conceited. His productions were
hastily built, but they were examples of stage ingenuity, and
out of them he hewed those principles which it profits every
playwright to follow. Let us repeat: Boucicault grew in
his mechanism, but the limits of his intellect kept him from
becoming great. He wrote to please, he wrote for effect
two essential characteristics of the stagecraftsman. But he
denied the accusation that he was ignorant of the history of
the drama and its established rules of dramatic composition.
He understood his craft and the craft of his predecessors, and
his essay on "The Art of Dramatic Composition" is worthy of
minute analysis. As a reader of plays he was quick to grasp
the essential construction. He wrote:
The essence of a rule is its necessity: it must be reasonable
and always in the right. The unities of time and place do not
seem to be reasonable and have been violated with impunity,
therefore are not always in the right. The liberty of imagina-
tion should not be sacrificed to arbitrary restrictions and tradi-
tions that lead to dulness and formality. Art is not a church;
it is the philosophy of pleasure.
V
Once back in America, Boucicault dominated things
theatrical; his name filled dramatic records; his opinions
strongly influenced the theatregoing public. He lectured
on the art of acting a practical actor himself; he criti-
cised managerial systems - himself a practical manager. He
preached how plays should be written a practical play-
wright; and when one of his own pieces was put on, he saw to
it that each person in the cast was a part of the picture. He
wrote, adapted, translated - whatever word you care to
apply; up to the very day of his death he did not cease to
contrive and to produce.
162
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
Blinded by an unaccountable tide of feeling, and regardless,
as was his nature ever to be, of every one and everything, the
impulsive Boucicault, in 1883, married Louise Thorndyke, a
member of his company. His second wife was granted a
separation in 1888. Thereafter, though he continued to com-
pose persistently, the dramatist's powers waned. He became
director of A. M. Palmer's School of Acting (Madison Square
Theatre), and all the time he was made to feel that favor was
slipping from him. Public opinion weighed him down more.
than he had anticipated, and in consequence his health rapidly
failed. He died in New York, on September 18, 1890, with
only a few friends to render service to the dead.
The summary of Dion Boucicault's life is a peculiar one;
he was more impulsive than he was thoughtful, yet he was
thoughtful; he was quicker to see effect in others and to
assimilate it than he was original, yet no man could lay claim
to more practical originality; he was extravagant and head-
strong, yet he was kind of heart. He had a fund of knowledge
and his dramatic instinct made use of it.
He was
He was [said the loyal Agnes Robertson] excessively fond of
reading, and he was one of the best-informed men of his time.
He was very partial in his tastes to history. John Stuart
Mill was his favorite philosopher; Goldsmith he preferred to
all the poets, but he enjoyed Keats and Shelley also.
well versed in the Bible, and I have often heard him in dis-
cussion with his brother William regarding the interpretation
of texts which have been battled over by the theologians
through the ages.
Boucicault was quick to lay hold of the events of the mo-
ment and to incorporate them in his dramas; instance "The
Relief of Lucknow" and "The Octoroon." In its way the
latter was quite as effective, controversially, as "Uncle Tom's
Cabin." Yet Boucicault only made use of American topics
as stage accessories. Even as a manager tries to find out what
the public likes to see, as opposed to what the public likes to
think, and then employs a dramatist to make him a play along
the lines of least resistance, so Boucicault saw what was
wanted, and fitted his idea to the picture.
163
The American Dramatist
Though closely identified with the history of American
Drama, he was himself an Irishman, both in sentiment and in
appearance. His sense of humor shone genial in his plays,
and, as to the man personally, he was jovial in company and a
moving spirit. His banter was pleasant and not in the least
offensive, and he would say things with a broad brogue that
came naturally. He knew well how to use the blarney stone,
for he was ever ready to be agreeable.
As an Irishman, Boucicault was willing to stand by his
remarks. A play of his was once staged, called "Suil-a-Mor",
and it brought down upon him the wrath of the English
because of certain direct utterances expressed against the
home government. A hue and cry was quickly raised, and
Boucicault was asked to eliminate the passages. "No,"
said the dramatist, "I mean just exactly what the lines con-
Rather than sacrifice my opinion, I'll withdraw the
piece." This he did not have to do.
vey.
But, as an Irishman, Boucicault could not see his country in
perspective with the student's eye. Though he wrote papers
on the social conditions, on the class struggles that were
existing there, his opinions were based upon a personal feeling
rather than upon an actual realization of the social problem.
His arguments were often sweeping for a man to make, espe-
cially one who in the public eye was to be subjected to close
attention and close scrutiny by students. While his interest
in the welfare of Ireland resulted in public utterances and in
occasional pamphlets and references to be found in his plays,
Boucicault was too much absorbed in his theatrical interests.
to devote any definite time to the subject. It was once sug-
gested that he strongly desired a seat in Parliament; then
rumor actually said that an Irish constituency had been
offered him; but, if such was the case, the playwright was wise.
enough never to consider it. "By nature," he said, “I am
intended for the drama, and for nothing else." At the time
of his death Boucicault was at work upon a dramatization of
Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp."
His biographers will have a difficult task, tabulating his
activity, yet no account would be considered complete that
164
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
did not enumerate some of the best known of his plays.
"Arrah-na-Pogue", produced in London on March 22, 1865,
belongs to the "Shaughraun" class; it was translated into
French under the title of "Jean la Poste, ou Les Noces Irlan-
daises", and played in Paris (1866) for one hundred and forty
nights.
In his own play, "Kerry" (1871), Boucicault acted "as if
inspired by the genius of all that is great in Irish poetry, his-
tory, and romance." The following year he made a drama-
tization of Bulwer's "Night and Morning", and then came
"Led Astray" (1873).
""
Belasco gives us a glimpse of Boucicault writing “Led
Astray. The future playwright and manager was getting
first-hand the tricks of the trade as practised by a seasoned
writer. To the young secretary of Dion Boucicault — another
"D. B.", by the way the theatrical effectiveness of the
scene was impressive.
It was at Virginia City, and the Irishman was ill; his hands
were knotted with gout, and Belasco was to take down the
dialogue and forget what he had heard. He recounts the
experience in this manner:
So I sat at a table, took my coat off and began act one of
"Led Astray." Boucicault lay propped up with pillows, be-
fore a blazing fire, a glass of hot whisky beside him. It was
not long before I found out that he was the terror of the whole
house. If there was the slightest noise below stairs, he would
raise such a hubbub until it was stopped that I had never
heard the like of before. Whenever he came to a part of the
dialogue requiring Irish, I noticed how easily his dictation
flowed. When he reached a dramatic situation, he acted it
out as well as his crippled condition would allow. One thing
I noticed particularly: he always held a newspaper in his
hand, and gave furtive glances at something behind it I was
not supposed to see. I was determined, however, to know
just what he was concealing from me. The opportunity came
one morning when he was called out of the room. Before he
went I noted how careful he was to place a newspaper so that
it completely hid the thing under it. I went quickly to the
table and, turning over the pages, I found a French book,
165
The American Dramatist
"La Tentation" (by Feuillet), from which the entire plot of
"Led Astray" was taken.¹
"Robert Emmet" (1884) is still familiar. His plays all had
their runs, some failures, others successes
every one the-
atrical. There are few of us to-day who will have an oppor-
tunity of seeing "Belle Lamar", "Faust and Marguerite",
"Love in a Maze", "Hunted Down", or "Formosa"; occasion-
""
1 One unsigned commentator of Boucicault went painstakingly to work to note the
sources of the Boucicault dramas: "The Colleen Bawn" from Gerald Griffin's novel
"The Collegians", which the dramatist vehemently denied; "Kerry" from Mme. de
Girardin's play "La Joie fait Peur"; "Daddy O'Dowd" from Cormon's "Les
Crochets du Père Martin"; "The Rapparee" borrowed from Brougham's "Emerald
Ring", from Victor Léjour's "Madone des Roses" and from Watts Phillips' "Camilla's
Husbands." From the French Boucicault took without stint: "Mimi" from Henry
Mürger and Théodore Barrière's "Vie de Bohème"; "A Man of Honor" from "Fils
Natural" of Dumas fils; "Seraphine" from Sardou's play of same name; "Pau-
vrette" from Dennery's "Bergère des Alpes"; part of "Forbidden Fruit" from Bour-
geois and Brisetarre's "Un Coup de Canif"; "The Willow Copse" from Soulie's
"La Closerie des Genets. Boucicault made a version of Dennery's "Prière des
Naufragées", which he called "The Sea of Ice", and his "Louis XI" is Casimir Del-
avigne's play of the same name. "The Streets of New York" owes its existence to
Brisebarre and Nus' "Les Pauvres de Paris"; and "Jezebel" to Michel Masson's
Le Pendu." "After Dark" received incentive from Dennery's "Bohemiens de
Paris." "Don Cæsar de Bazan", "The Corsican Brothers" and "Faust and Mar-
guerite" are strictly French adaptations. For "Janet Pride" he looked to Dennery's
Marie Jeanne"; for "Foul Play" to Fournier and Meyer's "Porte-feuille Rouge."
Had it not been for Bayard's "Gamin de Paris" there might not have been an "Andy
Blake"; and were it not for Duvert's "Homme Blasé", there might have been no
'Genevieve" the
"Used Up." "Belphegor" suggests Dennery's "Paillasse";
"Chevalier de Maison Rouge" by the elder Dumas and Maquette. "Pauline",
renamed "Spell-bound", came from a dramatization of the elder Dumas' novel,
"Nuit de Terreur", dramatized as "Château de Beauval." "The Queen of Spades"
was lifted from Scribe's opera book of the same name.
In the realm of the English novel, Boucicault was equally as alert. He took from
Richardson in his "Clarissa Harlowe"; he turned to Dickens' "The Cricket on the
Hearth" and "Nicholas Nickleby." "The Trial of Effie Deans" was drawn from
Scott's "The Heart of Midlothian", and "The Long Strike" from Mrs. Gaskell's
"Mary Barton." "The Octoroon" owes much to Captain Mayne Reid's "Quad-
roon." And just as easily as he accepted plots, so did Boucicault use other authors'
titles.
The Boucicault drama was brought to France through the adaptation of Eugène
Nus, who turned "Arrah-na-Pogue" into "Jean-la-Poste", where it had a long run.
at the Gaieté Theatre, Paris. He also made a version of "The Long Strike", called
"La Depêche." 'Hunted Down" was turned into "Aux Abois" by de Majac.
The above is only an indication, not a complete record, of how Boucicault worked
in the interests of the theatre of the seventies. He was ungenerous in giving credit
where credit was due.
166
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
ally there are revivals of "London Assurance" and "The
Corsican Brothers." But when you have seen one, you have
found the key to them all. Boucicault never liked the criti-
cism of sameness which was so often applied to his work.
Still, the relationships are very close, for organically these
pieces move with the same rhythm, they flourish upon the
same humor and pathos, they commit the same ravishing
absurdities; one feels like exclaiming with George William
Curtis, "Ah, had the painter only taken more pains!"
The same writer said: "The charm and the defence of
the 'Shaughraun' are those of 'Rip Van Winkle' — they are
its humanizing character and influence. . . What is the
'Shaughraun' but a jocund Irish 'Rip', or 'Rip' but a 'Shaugh-
raun' of the Catskills?"
We are often able to judge of a man by the estimate he
makes of himself. Boucicault was not one to hide his talents.
beneath a bushel; he knew when to proclaim them from the
housetops. Perhaps he was thrust into his rapid gait of work
by the existing conditions of the dramatic copyright law
which, in America up to 1856, did nothing to protect the
author. It was in 1856 that Congress decided the author did
have the rights to his own brain efforts, the right of production
and the right to grant permission, without which it would be
a legal offence to produce his plays. In France, Boucicault
had seen the dramatists prospering with a royalty system; for
years he too fought for the same opportunity, and only suc-
ceeded finally by openly defying the Dramatic Authors'
Society in England, and the managers in the United States.
This he proceeded to do (circa 1860) by sending forth more
than one company in his own plays, and taking a proper com-
mission for himself from the proceeds of each performance.
Boucicault, indeed, by these travelling companies of his, was
instrumental in hastening the decline of the old stock system.
In 1866, he preached his ideas to the French, who greeted
them favorably, and by 1872 the United States had accepted
them.
The royalty system was insisted upon by Boucicault after
dire experience. Writing in 1879 he said:
167
The American Dramatist
To the commercial manager we owe the introduction of the
burlesque, opera-bouffe, and the reign of buffoonery. We
owe to him also the deluge of French plays that set in with
1842, and swamped the English drama of that period. For
example: the usual price received by Sheridan Knowles,
Bulwer, and Talfourd at the time for their plays was £500.
I was a beginner in 1841, and received for my comedy, "Lon-
don Assurance", £300. For that amount the manager
bought the privilege of playing the work for his season.
Three years later I offered a new play to a principal London
theatre. The manager offered me £100 for it. In reply to
my objection to the smallness of the sum, he remarked: “I
can go to Paris and select a first-class comedy; having seen it
performed, I feel certain of its effect. To get this comedy
translated will cost me £25. Why should I give you £300
or £500 for your comedy, the success of which I cannot feel so
assured?" The argument was unanswerable, and the result
inevitable. I sold a work for £100 that took me six months'
hard work to compose, and accepted a commission to trans-
late three French plays at £50 apiece. This work afforded
me child's play for a fortnight. Thus the English dramatist
was obliged either to relinquish the stage altogether or to be-
come a French copyist.
"The Shaughraun" was played in London, on November 6,
1875, having been first produced at Wallack's Theatre, on
November 14, 1874. The ease with which Boucicault could
shift his point of view is here exhibited. Lester Wallack had
commissioned him to write a play, but before it was completed
another drama, more suited to his talents, had been purchased.
So he went to Boucicault, who had advanced some way in the
mapping out of "Boyne Water", and laid the case before him.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," suggested the ever-ingenious
playwright, “I'll change the period of the piece, and, taking
certain scenes from the manuscript, I'll build up a wholly
different drama." The evolution resulted in the character of
Con, lovable, poetic, and picturesque.
Boucicault was never to be outdone, whatever the circum-
stances. So intent was he during the rehearsals of "The
Shaughraun" regarding the other characters in the cast that,
168
The Prolific Dion Boucicault
on the opening night,
when he reached the
theatre, he suddenly
realized that he had
wholly forgotton to
pick himself out
costume for Con.
Con. So
he rushed to the prop-
a
NEW YORK, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1874.
WALLACK'S.
Proprietor and Manager…….
DDORS OPEN at 7.80.
Mr. Lester W'allack
PERFORMANce Commences at EigHT.
TO-NIGHT AND EVERY NIGHT,
Appearance of the Irish Dramatlet and Comedian.
M 气象
​17
Mr. DION BOUCICAULT,
The Author of "The Colleen Bawn." · Aarrah-na-Pogue,' Kerry,
""London Assurance,
***Love in
'Daddy O'Dowd,” “Irish Heiress,
"
"
19 44
"
n
ก L
H *
TS *
>>
n
#7
a Maze, Rip Van Winkle," Mimi, ""Old Heads and Young
Hearts, "Woman,
"Octoroon,' Jessie Brown," "Love and
Money,' Formosa, "Jezebel, 'Lost at Sea, "Jeanie Deans,'
The Corsican Brothers, Hanted Down,” "After Dark," Bel-
"Janet Pride,
phegor,"
'Don Cæsar de Bazan," 'Napoleon's Old
"Sixtus the Fifth," 'Dot' "The Life of an Actress,
Used Up,
Smike,'
Vanity Fair,
Flying Scud, "Babil and
Bijou,' Elfie, Belle Lamar, 'Foul Play,' Мога,
The Knight
"1
Guard,'
and on
erty room, and
with an old coat that
had done service for
Tony Lumpkin, and
on with an old cap
belonging to that same
individual! Grabbing
an odd pair of boots
from a discarded chest
and he was ready!
But disasters came
thick and fast on this
occasion. The second
act called for a moon;
just as the scene was
about to begin, the
stage orb exploded,
and when the curtain.
rose the audience was
amazed to find a black
hole where the moon
should have been. A
burst of laughter
showed their further
appreciation of a slip
in stage management,
for silver ripples quiv-
ered on the water! In
retrospect Boucicault
once said:
17 04
14
93 44
AN
17 A
46
17
LI
DE LA
"Y
"
of Arva," "The Long Strike," The Willow Copse,"" Andy Blake,"
Genevieve, How She Loves Him," Louis XL," Pauvrette,
"
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唱​情
​44
9:
ท L
"
"Streets of New York," Man of Honor,' 'The Phantom,” “Fanst
and Marguerite," "Led Astray.'
"
In an entirely New and Original Play, in 3 Acts, illustrative of Irisb
Life and Character, entitled
THE SHAUGHRAUN.
The action of the play takes place in the County Sligo.
Time-The Present.
CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY.
CAPTAIN MOLINEUX, a young English Officer, command-
ing a detachment at Ballyraggel.....MR II. J. MONTAGUE
ROBERT FFOLLIOTT, a young Irish Gentleman,. under
sentence as a Fenian, in love with Arte O'Neale, MR. J. B. POLK
FATHER DOLAN, the Parish Priest of Sailabeg, his tutor
and guardian...
MR. JOHN GILBERT
CORRY KINCHELA, & Squireen.. MR EDWARD ARNOTT
HARVEY DUFF, a Police Agent, in disguise of a peasant
under the name of Keach……….
MR HARRY BECKETT
CONN, THE SHAUGHRAUN, the soul of every fair, the life
of every funeral, the first fiddle at all weddings and
patterns...
SERGEANT JONES of the 41st...
REILLY,.
MANGAN,
SULLIVAN,.
DOYLE...
DONOVAN,……
Peasants
·
MR. BOUCICAULT
MR LEONARD
MR JOSEPHS
MR E. M. HOLLAND
3R C. E EDWIN
MR. PECK
MR ATKIN
MISS ADA DYAS
.MADAME PONISI
ARTE O'NEALE, in love with Robert...MISS JFFFREYS LEWIS
CLAIRE FFOLLIOTT, a Sligo Lady.
MRS. O'KELLY, Conn's Mother…....
MOYA, Father Dolan's Niece, in love with Conn. MISS 1ONE BURKE
BRIDGET MADIGAN, a Keener.
NANCY MALONE, a Keeper..
MRS. SEFTON
.MISS BLAISDELL
Peasants, Soldiers, Constabulary.
THE ACTION OF THE PLAY,
ACT I.-SCENE 1-SUILABEO. Jeherwood.) The dome of two Irish gris—
the visit Molineux seeks a day's sport, and fade game he did not expect The
two goardiane. Father Dolna gives | Kinchela a pièce of his mind. The Polleo
Agent. The unexpected visitor.
Ocom 2—THE BLASKETS. (Morris)- Cown's Cupboard. The Fugitive. Two
lovers. A ring at the bell..
BOENE 3-THE EXTERIOR OF FATHER DOLAN'S (Clare.) The Shanghraun,
Conn goes hunting. Moya and her Sweetheart.
SCENE 8-THE HOME OF THE PARISH PRIEST. (Clare.) Conn makes a
clean breast of it. The Bugitive's Return The Priest's Fireside. Home again.
The knock at the door. The arre#L
ACT II.-SCENE 1—A ROOM IN BALLYRAGGETT HOUSE. The counter
plot. The murder planned.
8CUKE 2-FATHER DOLANS (Clare) Claire and Molineax and each other out
SCENE 3-THE BARRACK-ROOM (Morris) How Robert Ffolilott fell into
the trap and played into the hands of his foos.
SCENE 4-MRS Ở KELLY'S CABIN. (Isherwood.) Coon gets a letter and is
bothered; he breaks away from his mother's apron strings.
Sex-THE GATE TOWER. (Matt Morgan.) The amborb and the escape.
SCENE 6 THE DLASKETS. Conn and Robert busted How Conn played the far.
BUINE 7-RATHGARRON HEAD. How Claire Ffolltott played decoy-dock
and anared the Captain.
SCENE 8-THE RUINS OF ST. BRIDGETS ABBEY. (Matt. Morgan.) The
love tryet. Arte and Moya at the appointed spot The balt and the trap. Harvey
Duff makes a mistako and gives a signal. The Shaughrann takes a rise out of
him and gets a fall.
ACT IIL-SOEN 1—MRS. OKELLY'S CABIN. The amnesty. A light breaks
in upon Moline x. An unexpected interview.
SOINS --THE WAKE OF CONN, THE SHAUGHRAUN,

Great newa. Conn
fears a good deal of news about himself. A surprise. Two trwilling guides.
SCENE 8—THE SHANTY. Aite and Moya in prison.
BCENE THE COOT'S NEST. Harvey Dat gets into a warm corner. Kinchela
comes to a bad end. Father Dolan gives hle consent.
During the evening, the Band, under the direction of Mr. Tn08. BAKER,
will perform the following selections:
OVERTURE, "Shangbrann,”.
BAKER
Introducing Old and New Irish Aira: “Irish Wall," " Coleh la ma Chree,” “Yon
remember Ellen." "Wille Reilly," The Jolly Ploughboy," Arran More," Fole
而​愿
​Cornet, "The March,” Grana Ubile." "The Jog of Punch The Coulin,” Soll
Clarionet and Cello, * The Red Fox " Jig "St. Patrick was a GenUeman," &c.
FANTAISIE (new). "Komarite Koja,”. (on Kopack Melodies).
WALTZ (Dew), “Da Do.”.
GLINKA
4、བྷ………、.8EAp
169
The American Dramatist
When "The O'Dowd" was written ten years ago [1872],
I perceived that the character belonged rather to high comedy-
drama than to melodrama. It occurred to me also that the
Irish character had been associated with plays of a low sensa-
tional class, and that an effort to raise the whole edifice of
our national drama might be made. In this spirit, "Suil-
a-Mor" was written as a pure sentimental comedy, with a
strong emotion for a spinal column. As a literary work, it
therefore may rank more highly than the "Shaughraun" or
the "Colleen Bawn", because it does not depend on scenery or
on sensational, or we may say, physical effects, but rather
invites the attention and engages the emotion of the audience
by its human sufferings, and its development of character and
passion. I think so far as dialogue goes, the best writing to
be found in these plays is in "Arrah-na-Pogue."
Dion Boucicault presents a diversified picture - one to be
condemned and to be admired. He was too successful to
be professionally jealous, and we find him befriending Henry
Irving, Robertson, Byron, and Taylor. As a friend, he
became an ardent supporter of Oscar Wilde, when that
poet made his visit to America in 1882, and he was also
foremost in his encouragement of Sadie Martinot, bringing her
over to appear in his plays. So active was Boucicault in every
line connected with the stage that his activity became a joke
among his associates. He was the wonder of the hour, and
he posed as such.
Boucicault has left his impress upon the development of
drama, and his name is an important one in its history. But
few of his plays bear the permanent elements that will pre-
serve them for the next century. He was original, if by that
word we mean that he was entertaining; otherwise he was
clever a cleverness based upon his gift of dialogue, however
imitative, and his knowledge of stagecraft. Vance Thomp-
son's estimate is fair:
"He gave his age what it wanted.
turgical matador.
. . . He was a drama-
The Boucicault drama is dead; any
discussion of it is in the nature of an autopsy. Its most no-
table quality was its gayety - its fine animal spirits. It was
merry and clean."
170
CHAPTER NINE
WANTED SOME NATIVE DRAMATISTS IN THE SEVENTIES:
AN UNACCENTED PHASE OF AUGUSTIN DALY
I
WHAT was the exact status of the American Theatre in the
eighteen-seventies? It was dominated largely by the mana-
gerial personalities of Augustin Daly (1838-1899), Albert
M. Palmer, and Lester Wallack (1820-1888). Its most spec-
tacular playwright was Dion Boucicault, who was turning out
plays with surprising ease, and introducing to the stage scenic
efforts that appealed to theatregoers. The stock company
was in its last phases of development, and the peculiar fitness
of Agnes Ethel, Fanny Davenport, Clara Morris, and Kate
Claxton for certain rôles prompted the managers in their
search for material. At Wallack's, Lester and H. J. Montague
were the reigning male stars and Rose Coghlan the reigning
queen. Their efforts were along the line of the rising tide of
Robertsonian drama; "Diplomacy" and "A Scrap of Paper
were among their crowning successes. "The Shaughraun
was among their sensations. At the Union Square Theatre,
Sardou, Octave Feuillet, and the French melodramatists
reigned supreme, and "The Two Orphans" was the high
mark of public interest. Their production of "Camille"
linked history with the version first presented by Matilda
Heron under the managerial régime of Laura Keene (1856).
At Daly's first Fifth Avenue Theatre, the initial policy was
similar to that at Wallack's, the Robertson drama holding
sway, with revivals of the classics and of old English comedy.
171
The American Dramatist
Such adaptations as "Frou-Frou" and "Fernande"; coöp-
eration with Wilkie Collins; successes like "Article 47" would
indicate that his vision was not so very different from that
of Palmer.
Yet, in the midst of all this foreign policy, the eighteen-
seventies called into play the ingenuity of the American play-
wright, as well as some of his originality. Palmer kept A. R.
Cazauran busy with adaptations, and full credit has never
yet been given him for the deftness with which he filled
requirements. An editorial in one of the theatrical journals.
of 1879 or 1880 commented on him thus: "For a moderate sal-
ary and an occasional royalty, he has literally saved many a
plan from failure. In 'The Danicheffs', 'Miss Multon',
'Man of Success', 'Mother's Secret', 'Celebrated Case', etc.,
his work has been most important." He not only turned
foreign plays into their English dress, but also lent aid
to Bronson Howard in the final working out of “The Young
Mrs. Winthrop", - all the changes suggested by Palmer,
to which the dramatist acceded when he came to revising
what was first called "Lilian's Last Love." Mr. Howard's
problems of revision are set forth in his “Autobiography of a
Play", which at the same time suggests the working of the
"In
conventional mind of audiences in the "seventies."
England and America," wrote Howard, "the death of a pure
woman on the stage is not 'satisfactory', except when the
play rises to the dignity of tragedy. The death, in an ordi-
nary play, of a woman who is not pure, as in the case of 'Frou-
Frou', is perfectly satisfactory, for the reason that it is inevi-
table." Such conventional "rules of the game" Cazauran
taught him, and he soon learned that a play on the stage is,
in its finished state, far other than the one the author had in
his mind, or wished to write. Bartley Campbell did for
Palmer "Peril" and "My Partner." After Daly had
exploited the American scene, in Olive Logan's "Surf" (Janu-
ary 12, 1870), he turned to Bronson Howard, and, on Decem-
ber 21, 1870, presented "Saratoga", to be followed, in 1872,
by "Diamonds" and, in 1874, by "Moorcroft." It was in
1878 that the dramatist went over to Palmer with "The
172
The Augustin Daly Period
Banker's Daughter." The manner in which Howard fluctu-
ated between Daly's and the Union Square and the Madison
Square measures somewhat the intensity with which these
houses competed against each other. I do not suppose they
differed much in the demands they made upon the playwright.
Very significant were the conditions under which Belasco was
employed to write his "Valerie" for Lester Wallack, even in
1882. In Winter's "Belasco", the actor is reported as having
said: "I think I have one more study in me [this to Belasco],
and I should like you to try to make for me a play with good
parts for Mr. Bellew and Miss Robe, and with a character for
me similar to Henry Beauclerc, in 'Diplomacy.'
With no
original play in mind, it was decided between manager and
playwright that Sardou's "Fernande", which Daly had once
produced, should be the venture. It was a play of one strong
scene, of a woman's scorn. It was the old model. It was the
pattern used by Steele MacKaye, however much he might try
to breathe into "Paul Kauvar" sentiments of republican
interest, just as Judge Conrad infused into "Jack Cade" a
supposed American spirit.
The outward pictures of the drama of the day were melo-
dramatic, overemotional, sensational, sickeningly sentimental,
and written in a dialogue that is now hard to reconcile with
one's taste for consistency or truth. Such stage carpentry was
done with earnestness by the worker in the theatre; and so
much energy was expended in such second-hand writing that
it was hailed as original, however much its source might stare
one in the face. This source was generally common property:
the adaptation was fought for in the courts as inviolate.
Maintaining her rights to "Camille", in the face of competi-
tion, Miss Heron issued a "Card", mentioned by Laurence
Hutton, wherein she hurled anathema against a competitor.
Says Hutton: "Miss Heron . . . states
states. . . that in her own
case she had at that time given over seven hundred repre-
sentations of the part during the five years she had been play-
ing it; she had 'out of pure devotion to her art, given to
every detail of it the utmost of her power of body, heart, and
mind, to perfect each element of it, to prune its blemishes,
173
The American Dramatist
erase its defects, harmonize its beauties, elevate its tone'
(elevate its tone!) - 'sublimate its passion, to celebrate its
love; in a word, to bring it to that state of powerful fascina-
tion, poetic interest, and immortal life which, on its first
representation, the warm hearts and best pens of the country
predicted it was capable of, and which to-day the entire press
of New York pronounces accomplished.'
A strange study is that of the theatre-going taste of the
eighteen-seventies. It fed itself on romantic dreams, on love
of class distinction in a country where no class was supposed
to exist. It cared nothing for the craft of the theatre. The
playhouse was a stunt, not an organism; the emotional
quality of the actor was what counted. The relish was for
just the kind of melodrama the French dramatists were turn-
ing out. The heightened emotion of Dumas fils, the senti-
mentality of Robertson, the scenic efforts of Daly's "The
Streets of New York" or of "The Two Orphans" - lords
and ladies, bandits, wronged innocence this was the food
of fifty years ago. To it was brought the most superlative
acting of a certain type; the acting that threw emotion in the
face to blind one to the crudities of expression, of motive, of
story. Yet it is the expression, the motive, the story, the
structure we are asked to judge in print. It is hardly fair
to estimate the drama of this period outside the theatre which
gave it birth.
Among some old papers handed me by Professor Brander
Matthews, I find an uncorrected proof which I infer is part of
an article by him. I venture to quote one paragraph which
seems to be significant to our present purpose. It says
that our comedy has been remiss in noting the fine coynesses
of human nature, resting content to note merely certain float-
ing characteristics, mechanically caught, and with no free
exercise of art. We have had hitherto in comedy outline.
types, as it were, the equivalent of the conventional characters.
of the Italian commedie dell' arte. Mose is from New York
and Asa Trenchard is from Vermont, and Judge Bardwell Slote
is from the Cohosh district, just as Pantaloon was from Venice
and Punchinello from Naples.
""
174
The Augustin Daly Period
Why is that, this writer questions? He wisely quotes from a
contemporary issue of the New York Nation:
One great difficulty with the drama in the last hundred
years is, we believe, more the result of the great social
changes which have been introduced into life by the demo-
cratic movement than anything else. Everybody knows that
the first requisite for the stage is the strongly marked types,
which can be easily recognized. The soldier, the judge, the
gentleman, the nobleman, the courtier, and the king and queen
must all have well-defined characteristics which enable the
spectator (not the reader) to recognize them at once. Any
influence which tends to wipe out the visible distinctions
between such classes, and make one man like another, is bad
for the stage, just as distinctly as all progress toward uniform-
ity in costume is bad for painting. The democratic move-
ment during the last hundred years in England and in this
country has been constantly tending to produce this result
and to make all classes and conditions of men more and more
alike in manner, in dress, in intelligence, and in their code of
morality. All this may be very good for the people, but it is
very bad for the stage; and in this country it has reached such
a point that outside of low comedy and burlesque . . . it is
not easy to say where to look for types at all.
The dramatic time stands self-confessed. Eccentricity was
to take the place of human nature. What did Palmer say on
this score?
The prominent evil tendency of the American writer has
been to look for his types among his countrymen of the baser
sort, who never by any possibility pronounce English words
properly and who seem to take the greatest pains to speak
slang and utter vulgarisms, and to act as if good manners were
a reproach instead of an accomplishment.
The fact of the matter is that the manager of the eighteen-
seventies tried to stretch the term "American" to mean every-
thing but the native scene. He was not pleading the cause
of the national drama, but justifying his own managerial
policy. He wanted no striking out along roads that had not
been tried before. He said: "Boker might have idealized
the Kentucky tragedy instead of the Rimini drama, and Bird
175
The American Dramatist
}
might have made his Spartacus an Indian Chief — but our
national theatre has lost nothing by their omission. The
present masterpieces of the stage, in every tongue, are pictures
of the passions of mankind in general.'
وو
Yet the times were turning. Soon Ibsen was to be heard
from, and Zola with his violent reaction against sentimental-
ity; and Dion Boucicault feared, in the cry of naturalism and
realism, the knell of his own popularity. He deprecated the
pessimistic shifting of the tide, but he saw it was inevitable.
Tragedy and high comedy will always be held in respect on
the future American stage [he wrote], but it seems probable
that the drama of modern life, the reflex of the period, will
prevail over every other kind of entertainment. This drama
will present a character, or a group of characters, not a com-
plicated or sensational action, affording a physiological study
by way of illustration, not by way of description.
They begged the question, those men who dominated the
American Theatre in the eighteen-seventies. They sneeringly
referred to the sensational dramas of the Western frontier, yet
warmly exploited the lurid melodrama of any other country;
they could not see that their foreign policy was circumscribing
the native playwright and making him merely a tool. Daly
declared that there could be no better American play than
his "Leah, the Forsaken", and that this could easily be seen
by comparison with the original German," Deborah”, of Mosen-
thal. The infusion of the American serum was all that these
managers thought necessary. To a reporter, Daly once said :
I have been constantly confronted with the necessity of
finding American characters in nearly all the pieces I have
adapted from the German. This was the case in nearly every
instance in "The Big Bonanza", "Lemons", "Needles and
Pins", "7-20-8 "and
7-20-8 "and "Red Letter Nights." In the original
form of each of these plays, no matter how clever the charac-
terization or how effective the contrasts might be, it was indis-
pensable, in preparing them for the stage, with any hope of
pleasing my patrons, to do away entirely with one or more
German characters and fill the place with an American type
which my audience would all know and would applaud.
176

OF
AUGUSTIN DALY
ALBERT M. PALMER
CHARLES FROHMAN
AMERICAN MANAGERS WHO DICTATED TO THE AMERICAN DRAMATIST FOR OVER A HALF-CENTURY.
The reproductions of Daly and Frohman are from photographs in the collection of Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.


The Augustin Daly Period
This shows clearly that the drama of the period was handled
as a commodity, the standard parts coming from abroad and
fitted for home consumption. It was a method that lasted
well on into the nineties. To catch the spirit of the stage and
make the pieces actable was the ultimate ambition of the
dramatists of the day. Perhaps this was not a bad object in
view, considering the amateurishness of so much of the
workmanship. Daly's continual advice was: collaborate with
some one who knows the mechanics of the stage. Many
papers emphasized that this was the matter with Bret Harte's
"Two Men of Sandy Bar": it was choked with material
which fiction could handle but which cluttered the stage.
Daly also preached the avoidance of the American theme.
"As a matter of fact," he declared, "the dramatists of this
country seldom do choose American subjects, but nearly all
greatly prefer foreign material. They are entirely right in
this." But Daly's fear that “nationalism" was a restrictive
term was not the true issue. The American spirit to him.
was the motive which took out of certain foreign pieces
elements accounted "not moral" by the theatregoers of the
time.
Palmer's belief was that the American mind, as determined
by the manuscripts which were submitted to him, was lacking
in "the faculty of inventing dramatic situation and plot.
"One reason for it, I suppose," he declared on one occasion,
'is to be found in the fact that our American life is so fresh
and new that it does not afford good material for the subject-
matter of plays, except, perhaps, in one or two phases. These
phases are those seized upon and exhausted by Mr. Boucicault
in 'The Octoroon', and by Mr. Daly in his play ‘Horizon.
What Mr. Palmer really had in the back of his mind, but
dared not say, was that the flat and the insipid — in the
American society play of the time were due to the unwill-
ingness of the manager and the public to let the dramatist
speak in frank terms, unless he used a French model. So the
American Theatre fell into the habit of "making plays" rather
than of writing them - John Brougham had a formula, a
pattern for his dramatizations of novels; Boucicault was,
177
The American Dramatist
par excellence, the most adept cutter of French cloth. The
entirely original play was almost an unknown quantity.
In his moments of quick temper, Boucicault realized all this.
He looked upon Planché and Dance as a menace. He re-
garded Negro minstrelsy with suspicion. "Buffoonery," he
wailed, “has displaced comedy, and sensational drama has re-
placed tragedy. . . . Lord Dundreary," he declared, "is only
a Negro minstrel with a white face." He wanted, as he
asserted, to write dramas like "London Assurance", with the
flavor of old comedy, but managers were after him for melo-
drama with a sensation scene in it.
All of these men had an idea that there had been in the
past some sort of American drama. They had learned as
much through the pioneer history of American dramatists
by Rees; and they proudly hailed the number of titles given
in a check bibliography by Dunlap. They sneered at the
Such
attempts at historical drama for practical reasons.
plays as "Putnam; or The Iron Son of '76" and "Marion ;
or, The Swamp Angel" were favorites once. Writes Daly:
"A pecularity of this kind of national drama was that it
necessitated the keeping in stock, at all regular theatres, of an
actor who could make up as the 'Father of his Country'. . . .
But that sort of American Drama went out with the pit boys
and the volunteer fire department." What Daly found to
deplore, in the situation he faced in the years starting in 1870,
was the unwillingness of the American author of note to enter
the field, to subject himself to the demands of the theatre.
Collaboration would bring many a valuable man into the fold.
Both he and Palmer were insistent that by this method an
author would soon learn the limitations of the stage, which call
for a different handling of material from that he had been
accustomed to in the short story and the novel.
II
It has been the generally accepted notion that Daly's
interest in German adaptations (aided in later years by the
insistence of Heinrich Conried, who ran an author's agency
178
Daly and Bret Harte
before he began his distinctive work as manager of the German
Theatre in New York), particularly his gravitation toward
Mosenthal; and in his French melodramas, in the main Sar-
dou, precluded much interest in native dramatists. But,
reading carefully the valuable “Life of Daly", by his brother,
Judge Joseph F. Daly, one is justified in holding the impres-
sion that hardly a season passed that he did not reach out
for material from the pens of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, W. D.
Howells, and Henry James. He was closely in touch with
these authors, and, if they failed to come up to his expecta-
tions, the reason for such failure is clearly evident in their
letters. Bret Harte was continually in correspondence with
Daly, and always with a play up his sleeve. He writes:
Look for me then on Sunday at 10 A.M., at wh. hour the
curtain will rise promptly upon the performances of two young
men from whom posterity expects everything.
Confidentially yours,
BRET HARte.
In 1874, Harte and Boucicault were contemplating a
Western drama together; it was to be called "Kentuck
a title which Boucicault termed "Brethartish", and in the
working out of which the author of "The Colleen Bawn" de-
clared: "I must do the society dialogue and scenes . . . as I
think B. H.'s best work is rough character and male." The
collaboration did not progress easily, however, and there were
moments when Boucicault would have sidestepped. For
Harte, showing the defects of the purely literary man as soon as
he enters the theatre, was difficult to manage. In a letter to
Daly, marked private, Boucicault tells tales out of school.
"Harte is dilatory and erratic," he writes. "He is very anx-
ious to get the work done but thinks we can scurry over the
ground more rapidly than is consistent with safety. That
is all we hear of "Kentuck", but not all from Harte. In 1876,
he is writing to the manager for seats, in fact for a box.
-
Then we can sit in the back of the box, between the acts,
and discuss the other play wh. Shakespeare ought to have
written but wh. as he did not, I may possibly undertake. ...
179
The American Dramatist
Harte's success with Daly was accomplished in conjunction
with Mark Twain, the two of them writing "Ah Sin",
given at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, July 31, 1877. His
attempt with Boucicault was finished alone, and produced
under the name of "Two Men of Sandy Bar." It would
seem that the Chinese drama came very nearly obliterating
Harte from consideration. Only Mark Twain was at the
theatre on the opening night, his collaborator being in Wash-
ington. Harte was forgotten altogether in the excitement,
until he wrote Daly a wail to know whether or not the piece
had been well received. In later years, while Harte was Con-
sul at Glasgow, he wrote to Daly regarding his dramatization
of "The Luck of Roaring Camp", but nothing resulted.
Daly dramatized Mark Twain's "Roughing It." In 1873,
the manager approached the author for an original play, and
received the following reticent acknowledgment:
My Dear Daly :
Hartford, May 4.
One of these days, somewhere in the future, I may surprise
and grieve you by reminding you of that invitation, & propos-
ing to revive it; but I mean to have the modesty to serve a
decent apprenticeship before I make a lofty venture.
I never tried the stage before; but by re-writing Peter
Spyk, I managed to change the language & the character to
a degree that enabled me to talk the one & represent the other
after a fashion- but I am not equal to the Metropolitan
boards yet.
•
"
Immediately on top of this, he is writing to Daly, suggesting
that he stir up Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who,
he hears, is at work on a play. "I know Howells well," he
remarks, “but he has not confided anything of the kind to me.
The secrecy which usually attended the ceremony of "writing
a play" was broken when Howells acknowledged Daly's
invitation.
I have long had the notion of a play, which I have now
briefly exposed to Mr. Clemens, and which he thinks will do.
It's against it, I suppose, that it's rather tragical, but perhaps
180
Daly and Howells
- certainly if you've ever troubled yourself with my undra-
matic writings - you know that I can't deal exclusively in
tragedy, and I think I could make my play in some parts such
a light affair that many people would never know how deeply
they ought to have been moved by it.
I have also the idea of a farce or vaudeville of strictly
American circumstances.
Of course I'm a very busy man, and I must do these plays in
moments of leisure from my editorial work. I'm well aware
that I can't write a good play by inspiration, and when I've
sketched my plots and done some scenes I shall, with your
leave, send them for your criticism.
The next correspondence between Howells and Daly was in
reference to the former's comedietta, "The Parlor Car." The
author of it wrote:
It was meant to be printed in The Atlantic, and so the stage
direction, for the reader's intelligence, was made very full
[this was long before the time of Shaw!]; but I read it to
an actor the other day, and he said it would play. I myself
had fancied that a drawing-room car on the stage would be a
pretty novelty, and that some amusing effects could be pro-
duced by an imitation of the motion of a train, and the colli-
sion.
Howells's "A Counterfeit Presentment" was tried in Boston
by Barrett, and at this time Daly attempted to interest him
in the adaptation of a German comedy, but Howells was much
more intent on the Spanish drama and on Björnson's "Bank-
ruptcy." In an intellectual way he was trying, and failing
in his approach of the stage. During the year 1893, when
Daly was looking to Marion Crawford and Henry James for
manuscripts, he heard again from Howells - a confession and
a plea :
I have written a great many of them [comedies] since you
underlined the first so long ago, and they have had great ac-
ceptance all over the country among amateurs, without ever
getting upon the stage. I do not say that it is not their fault,
but "The Mousetrap" seems like something that might please
the larger and severer public that pays for its pleasure.
181
The American Dramatist
Judge Daly asserts that "Ah Sin" required more altering
than Bronson Howard's "Saratoga." Certainly these liter-
ary men could not distinguish between dialogue and narrative.
But Mark Twain never gave up trying. He offered Daly
his dramatization, "Bob Sawyer's Adventures", but it was
turned down. Another dramatic attempt with another mana-
ger was called "Colonel Sellers as a Materialist", but, as that
failed, Twain changed it into a novel, "The American Claim-
- a story which Daly immediately thought would make
a play! Twain, at Bad Nauheim, was not to be caught again.
He wrote to Daly:
ant”
You bang away and dramatize the book your way & that
will be my way.
These are mighty good baths, & if you
want to try them come here & I will treat to bath tickets.
They were closely associated Daly and Clemens; they
were together at the founding of The Players, and on the oc-
casions of many banquets. As manager and playwright,
they did not make a fortune together. Not despairing of the
Great American Drama, Daly next turned to Henry James for
a play suited to his company. But the manuscript from the
novelist was declined, and Daly received this letter, quoted
in part as illustrative of how strangely the story-writer goes
wrong in the theatre in the fundamental technique of a play:
I am far from satisfied myself [with it], but as the thing cost
me, originally, a good deal of labor & ingenuity, I was unable
to resist the desire to subject it to some sort of supreme pro-
bation. If it had a fault of which I was very conscious,
I thought it perhaps had other qualities which would make it a
pity that I shouldn't give it a chance since a chance so hap-
pily presented itself. To tell the truth, now that I have given
it this chance my conscience is more at rest, & I feel that my
responsibility to it were over. Its fault is probably funda-
mental & consists in the slenderness of the main motive-
which I have tried to prop up with details that don't really
support it; so that as I freely recognize there is a lack
of action vainly dissimulated by a superabundance (especially
in the last act) of movement. The movement cost me such
pains and I may add such pleasure! - to elaborate that I
182
Daly and Henry James
have probably exaggerated its dramatic effect exaggerated
it to myself, I mean. The thing has been my first attempt at
comedy, pure & simple, & as Ist attempts are, in general,
mainly useful as lessons, I am willing to let it go for that.
His analytical mind was much exercised over "Mrs. Jas-
per", which Daly, in 1892, was holding for his new theatre in
London. The manager was not satisfied with the piece, and
evidently suggested more revision and cutting. But James's
style was not of the kind to submit to external operation. He
wrote to Daly :
I have given very earnest consideration to the text of my
play, but with an utter failure to discover anything that can
come out without injury. It was in the extremity of my effort
at concision and rapidity during my writing of it as it now
stands that I took out & kept out everything that was not
intensely brief & this effort seems . to have left nothing
behind to sacrifice nothing that can be sacrificed without
detriment to elementary clearness to the rigid logic of the
action & the successive definite steps of the story.
Daly soon after lost faith in "Mrs. Jasper."
Of the authors mentioned, Bret Harte was probably the
greater lover of the theatre. He did not hold it in contempt,
he labored hard and was not disheartened by the defeat of
"Two Men of Sandy Bar", which Boucicault declared contained
sufficient matter for six plays. It was produced at the Union
Square Theatre, September 1, 1876, and William Winter's con-
temporary impression was that the author had moved his
puppets recklessly. "Mr. Harte's greatest mistake," so this
ever punctilious critic claimed, “supposing that he desired his
drama to be popular on the stage, is in rewarding vice. . . .
Even the Chatham Street Theatre in the old days would never
have tolerated it." Harte had a hasty temper: he had
started collaboration with Boucicault and had withdrawn.
His work with Mark Twain on "Ah Sin" resulted in coolness
between the two. And unfortunate for them that they were
brought together, for Brander Matthews asserts that it was
the halt leading the blind, since neither had served real ap-
183
The American Dramatist
prenticeship in the theatre. That was the fault with "The
Danites", which Joaquin Miller seems to have hastened after
Harte's "Two Men of Sandy Bar." And another play which,
in its Western flavor, seemed to have been called forth by Harte
was Bartley Campbell's "My Partner" a play "of mad
passion and horrible suffering", to use the words of the critic
in 1879.
T. Edgar Pemberton has written entertainingly of his
collaboration with Harte in London, of the latter's fascina-
tion for the stage. The literary man was always held in
thrall before the curtain; he always preached the lure
of the form. But somehow he always proved unwilling to
allow his individual creativeness to be curbed, governed,
directed by the demands of the stage, the requisites of the
actor. The unfortunate thing was that Harte's material
attracted theatre folk. Much to his indignation, both
"M'liss" and "Gabriel Conroy" were used without his con-
sent in America, and he smarted beneath the indignity of inad-
equate treatment. Most of his theatrical associations were
in London.
A pulling about of "Ah Sin" would have made it a great
success, claims the biographer of Mark Twain, and in the con-
fession lies the weakness of the literary man's attitude toward
the theatre. Playwriting is something more than a mere
manipulation. Twain saw the acting possibility of another
Chinaman rôle for the actor who had played a Chinaman in
"Two Men of Sandy Bar", and this seems to have been the
prompting desire of the two collaborators - to frame a vehicle
for the player. Twain had some sympathy with this point.
of view, for he was no mean amateur player himself, and often
appeared in family theatricals to much effect. His name
will always be associated with the theatre because of the fact
that he was among the charter members of The Players Club.
He realized the fascination of the stage, even though with
"The Gilded Age" and "Ah Sin" he had had no agreeable
experiences as a dramatist; but he thought the formula was a
hit-and-miss affair, a following up of some model tried and
found successful. The chief thing, he believed, was novelty,
184

M
UNIV
of
OM
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
JOHN T. RAYMOND AS Colonel Mulberry Sellers
IN MARK TWAIN'S "THE GILDED AGE"
"There's millions in it."
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
COLONEL SELLERS MEETS MARK TWAIN

Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James
and because Col. Mulberry Sellers had proven a novelty, he
set to work, with W. D. Howells, to write a sequel. The
enjoyment of these two in their work, the amusement they
themselves found in the scenes of their invention, blinded
them to its defects. Twain had had a misunderstanding with
the actor, John T. Raymond, about "The Gilded Age",
but he knew that Raymond, in the public eye, was Mulberry
Sellers, and so to Raymond the new piece went.
But it was
soon returned with suggestions which the authors refused
to heed. And at last, when the play was produced by an
elocutionist, they began to realize the wisdom of withdrawing
it. The faith of the unsuccessful dramatist dies hard, How-
ells wrote.
So the contents of the play went into the story of
"The American Claiment", and then, irony of the theatre,
Daly wrote for the dramatic rights of the story!
As spectators, Howells and James had a keen sense of the
theatre. Their various essays on acting, actors, and plays are
enlightening and suggestive. They brought to the stage a
strictly literary analysis of what they saw.
This is never a
guarantee that one understands fully the elements that make
a play in the theatre sense. James was very exacting; he
could not see the theatre in the making, the actor through his
faults. For that reason it was impossible for him to detect
any note of greatness either in Henry Irving or in Ellen Terry.
Howells wrote regularly on dramatic topics for the Harper
publications, and gave the American Drama its rightful claim
to serious consideration. It was he who recognized in Herne
the pioneer realist of the American stage; it was he who
lauded Harrigan for his vaudevilles of low life; it was he who
gave courage to Clyde Fitch when the theatre critics were hit-
ting him hard.
But clearly it is to Henry James we must turn for an
insight into the attitude of the literary man toward the theatre.
He learned much from his play writing, even though he
did not earn much; and it was the money incentive which
impelled him toward the theatre. He felt that he was des-
tined not to be an appreciated man of letters; therefore, he
must feather his nest for the coming years. What more
185
The American Dramatist
easy than to turn toward the theatre! James, however, soon
became deeply engrossed in the intricacies of the technique
of the drama. His mind was completely enthralled by the
form. He wrote to his brother, in 1891: "Now that I have
tasted blood, c'est un rage (of determination to do, and triumph
on my part) for I feel at last as if I had found my real form,
which I am capable of carrying far, and for which the pale
little art of fiction, as I have practised it, has been, for me,
but a limited and restricted substitute." He hailed drama
for its difficulties; to him its damnable difficulties "guarantee
one's intellectual self-respect." But soon he turned against
what became a trade; he shuddered over the odiousness of
a production. He smarted beneath the Philistine mob in
London that constituted the theatregoing public.
I have worked like a horse [he writes to his brother, in 1895],
far harder than anyone will ever know over the whole stiff
mystery of "technique" - I have run it to earth, and I don't
in the least hesitate to say that, for the comparatively poor
and meagre, the piteously simplified, purposes of the English
stage, I have made it absolutely my own, put it into my
pocket. The question of realizing how different is the atti-
tude of the theatregoer toward the quality of thing which
might be a story in a book from his attitude toward the
quality of thing that is given to him as a story in a play is
another matter altogether. That difficulty is portentous, for
any writer who doesn't approach it naïvely, as only a very
limited and simple-minded writer can. One has to make
oneself so limited and simple to conceive a subject, simply
enough, and that, in a nutshell, is where I have stumbled.
Indeed, that is where most literary folk stumble who have a
contempt for the smell of the theatre, for its painted scene
and its personality. The simplicity of which James speaks is
not a limitation but an asset- a dealing with motive in its.
essential threads, an expression direct and quick to heed by
the ear, that cannot "listen" back in the theatre but must for-
ever go on toward the final speech and the final curtain.
James's dialogue was literary, it was full of fine shading such as
fiction courts but the stage abhors. Lines that describe but do
186
The Augustin Daly Period
not act, details that enlighten the reader but confuse the spec-
tator, side motives that explain character but fail to move
forward the main lines of the story - it does not require
simple-mindedness so much as clear-mindedness to satisfy the
demands of the theatre. One of James's London friends de-
clared the novelist echoed George Moore's opinion that
"acting is the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all." He
witnessed everything eliminated from a play that means most
to a novelist; it angered him. He is reported to have spoken
of "the hard meagreness inherent in the theatrical form,
committed to think after all so much more of the clock than
of the subject the subject which runs so breathless, so
fearlessly flogged a race with the galloping dial-hands."
IV
The two pictures of the manager of Daly's era and the play-
wright of Mark Twain's era will emphasize the wide gap which
existed between the theatre and the literature of that time in
America. There is some little excuse for the literary man
taking the attitude he did toward the playhouse, for the
theatre was not regulated by the highest rules of the technical
game; it was dominated by set conventions, workable rules
that governed both actor and producer. Daly could hardly
expect the writer to throw away an art and become a stage
carpenter, piecing together for public consumption certain
shreds of emotion, certain well-worn situations, to be tricked
into life by clever acting. If Howells turned with enthusiasm
to Herne, and was one of the coterie that helped produce
"Margaret Fleming", he did so because he realized that Herne
was pointing a way for reconciliation between literature and
drama in America. The necessity for the bridging of the
chasm was recognized long before the renaissance of the English
drama and the arrival of the Continental drama made us
see the true value of the "new" theatre ahead of us.
Belasco claims that when he went to the Madison Square
Theatre, the safe was piled with manuscripts submitted by
most of the noted authors of the day. These scripts are in
187
The American Dramatist
dark oblivion; they may be so deservedly. For the theatre of
that period was not prompted by any literary fervor. But,
on the other hand, the scripts thus lost to posterity might not
have been prompted by any conception of real dramatic
technique. Daly wanted the literary worker in the theatre on
the terms the theatre then demanded. The literary man
wanted to use the theatre without any willingness to acknowl-
edge the necessity for training in workmanship. The theatre
terms at that time were not worth the sacrifices demanded,
except in hard dollars and cents. Aiming for the latter, James
lost both, the usual fate of any one who fails to love the theatre
with a passionate resolve to accept its limitations and discover
its latent possibilities.
188
CHAPTER TEN
BRONSON HOWARD: DEAN OF THE AMERICAN Drama
I
As Dean of the American Drama, Bronson Howard occupies
a most significant position. The theatre is a very sensitive
barometer, registering current ideas and local manners, and
if one should range Mrs. Mowatt's "Fashion" (1847), Mrs.
Bateman's "Self" (1856), and Mr. Howard's "Saratoga
(1870) side by side, the timely differences would be very
strikingly felt. The point of view held by Mr. Howard at the
close of his life had a broad sweep toward the future and a
very vital sweep along the past. For, in respect to the latter
position, he was able to estimate the value of that dramatic
soil and of those dramatic traditions from which he sprang;
he was so situated that he could step aside from the main
current, and note wherein the later drama had profited by its
inheritance.
It is unfortunate that in the years to come, the estimate
of Mr. Howard, based upon his numerous popular successes,
will not be a very high one, even though "The Banker's
Daughter" and "Aristocracy" are marked with a certain
valuable social quality. This stricture is partly due to the
fact that he wrote at a time when our American stage was
flooded with French imitations and importations; when, as
Mr. Howard himself declared, adaptations for the English
speaking stage not only meant a change to English life and
English characters, but meant also that, in the transference,
these characters continued "to express foreign ideas and to
act like foreigners."
189
The American Dramatist
4
But Mr. Howard's right to the title of Dean of the American
Drama can never be disputed, for, whatever is done in the
future to enrich our native dramaturgic literature, it will have
been through the efforts of Mr. Howard that the first impetus
toward that efflorescence was given. In the early seventies he
stood single-handed, with the Anglicism and classicism of
Daly, Palmer, and Wallack as his chiefest opposition, and
he forced the public gaze upon current thought and manners.
So as to accomplish this object, he was obliged to have
recourse to conventions more French than they were Ameri-
can. What is of most importance is that Mr. Howard by his
plays established the fact of the American Drama's existence
plays in a way far more native than the romantic pieces.
by George Boker and the Philadelphia group. It is an unfor-
tunate possibility, however, that unless our dramatic litera-
ture emphasizes the essential elements from which our na-
tional drama has come, Mr. Howard in the future will be little
more than a name to theatregoers, outside of the profession.
For his plays are hardly literary in the sense that they possess
reading style or grace. That is to be deplored, inasmuch as
Mr. Howard, intellectually, was of a high type of mind, while
as Dean he always supported that which aimed to be the best.
It were futile indeed to regard Mr. Howard as a producing
playwright from any other angle of vision than that of his
day. His technique, his observation, his locale, are of a gener-
ation that is gone; and, though the humanity of his characters
still retains acting possibilities, the American Drama of 1910
was subject to far different influences. We then began pass-
ing through the fires of scientific query and realistic han-
dling of the sex question. Dion Boucicault, as late as 1890,
only vaguely felt that there was something in Ibsen which
demanded what he called serious regard.
Yet he could not but see the far-reaching effect of Ibsen's
viewpoint and technique. He wrote:
The drama of the future will be prosaic and positive. Its
grandeur will be in its truth. Pathos will assume the place
of passion. The plot, a subject simple and perspicuous, will be
190
Bronson Howard: Dean of the American Drama
designed with one object, not to surprise the spectator with
startling incident. The incidents will be merely contrivances.
to exhibit the characters.
Long before this storm and stress period in stage history,
Mr. Howard's method was so far crystallized as to remain
unaffected by later technique. And, toward the latter part of
his life, it was curious to behold in him a man intellectually so
far in advance of his method of writing. For, despite Ibsen
and Zola and Tolstoi; despite Howells and James and Mere-
dith; despite Pinero and Jones and Shaw, Mr. Howard's last
comedy, "Kate", was untouched by current influences, however
much it strove to be modern. In this play his ideas of life
deepened, his technical grasp became firmer, his insight keener,
but his discussions were all clad in form typical of "The
Banker's Daughter", "One of Our Girls", and "The Henri-
etta.'
دو
When Mr. Howard began to write for the theatre, the
influence of Scribe, and his manner of unfolding plot and
counterplot, had not yet been succeeded by a more natural
method of development. Even Ibsen was under Scribe's
influence. Dumas fils, with "Camille", had injected into
the romantic play of intrigue and infidelity a species of emo-
tional analysis which was somehow mistaken for an ethical
purpose. Furthermore, Robertson and Taylor, borrowing
freely from the elder Dumas and Hugo on one hand, and from
the comedy of incident and manner on the other, simply
Anglicized the French form of drama for the English stage.
Mr. Howard found such to be the conditions when he began
his struggles.
He found that English managers realized it was less expen-
sive, and involved less risk, to employ Boucicault, for example,
to translate French plays, to adapt them, as they phrased it,
than to experiment with a new play that had never been
tried upon the public. He found that in America the situa-
tion was very much the same. Popular opinion was led to
value an importation, and to discount any serious treatment of
American character or of American life. He found, finally,
191
The American Dramatist
that there was only half-hearted interest in the American
Drama on the part of two of the leading managers of that era,
however much they might write optimistically on the subject.
in current reviews or in their reminiscences. Lester Wallack
in no way encouraged native talent, even though his excellence
as a stage manager helped to give the theatre an abundant
amount of English comedy and tragedy; even though he was
author of a local play called "Central Park." The same may
be claimed of Augustin Daly, who nevertheless aimed to be
American in "Under the Gaslight." But his was likewise a
foreign ambition, for he mounted adaptations of French and
German farces whenever he wished to depart from the Shake-
spearean or classical comedy repertoire of his New York
theatres; he catered distinctively to culture, and how well
he succeeded is measured by the atmosphere which for so long
a while after his death clung to his Broadway playhouse at
Thirtieth Street.
II
Such is the setting to aid us in claiming for Bronson How-
ard the full appropriateness of the title : Dean of the American
Drama. Mr. Howard was born in Detroit, October 7, 1842,
during a time when that city was considered the extreme West.
To undertake a journey there from the East was a notable
accomplishment, and, in one of James Fenimore Cooper's
numerous autobiographical references, we find him boasting
of the feat. In the "Leatherstocking" tales, moreover, one
of the characters was based on Mr. Howard's father — a man
of adventurous nature, of firm disposition and determination
- a man, in fine, of the pioneer type. The intense American
strain in this family reached back as far as 1759, when one of
the Howards came over from England with Wolfe's army, and,
strange to say, almost immediately began to realize that the
colonies were right in their attitude toward the mother coun-
try. This sympathy increased to such an extent that How-
ard enlisted with the "rebel" forces during the Revolution
an act that resulted in his death on the field at Monmouth,
New Jersey.
192
Bronson Howard: Dean of the American Drama
Mr. Howard's grandfather was quick to catch the west-
ward spirit, though loath to break from the East. He was a
roving farmer, who moved from Howard's Settlement, on
Lake Ontario, thence to a point in New York State, near
the St. Lawrence River, and he instilled into his own son that
same instinct to migrate which had prompted the Revolution-
ary sire to roam from place to place.
Mr. Howard's father was a commission merchant in Detroit,
at the time of his son's birth. He had been a captain of a
schooner in the days when sea-faring encouraged mutinous
crews composed mostly of a cursing, grog-beset, brutal
type of sailor. But Howard, Sr., was of a different calibre
from most sea commanders. He banished the freedom of
oaths from the deck; he cleared the lockers and holds of all
grog; he insisted upon discipline, which his friends told him
could never be maintained where grog was denied. His ac-
tions as commander hastened the establishment of liquor
regulations in the maritime service, and abolished from its
prominent position on deck the water-cooler which had up to
this time been filled with grog for any one who cared to turn
the spigot. His immediate reward was that he obtained dif-
ferential rates of insurance which other seamen coveted, but
were denied. Bronson Howard was proud of this bit of
family history.
Without giving up entire interest in the ship business, How-
ard, Sr., joined the firm of Alvin Bronson and Company, Bron-
son, after whom the young man was named, being at one time
State Senator at Albany, from Oswego County. In some of
the early playbills we find the full name of the dramatist
recorded as Bronson Crocker Howard, Mr. Crocker being
another partner of the firm. Many of his journalistic
friends used to address him as B. C. Howard, though
he preferred the shorter form as more distinctive and
individualistic.
From 1842 to 1858, therefore, young Howard remained in
Detroit, long enough to secure the rudiments of an education,
to see his father mayor of the city (1849), and to develop what
his father bequeathed him, an inventive taste which ex-
193
The American Dramatist
panded later and aided him, when ingenuity was required of
him behind the scenes at the theatre.
Howard, Sr., was accustomed to whittle rough vessels from
blocks of wood; this we may consider as symbol of the
mechanical side of dramatic construction. In fact, before
the Prismatic Club, of Detroit, Mr. Howard once claimed that
the mechanical engineer and the dramatist required essentially
the same technical training. He afterwards, before the stu-
dents of Harvard University, reasserted this, in connection.
with his play, "The Banker's Daughter."
Young Howard was now sent East to prepare for Yale,
the class of 1865; but, though General Russell's preparatory
school did its work successfully, nature went against the
scheme, and Howard's eyes failed him in 1860. Later, he was
granted the privilege of attending a few lectures with his
class, but he was never able to matriculate.
During this time, the written drama as a profession was
farthest from his thoughts. He had manufactured a few
skits for his school, and had become unswerving in his deter-
mination not to enter a trade. In fact, stimulated by the
books and by the lecturing of Bayard Taylor, Howard was
bent on becoming a writer. With this phase we must now
deal, for it will indicate how subtly and how surely natural
inclination asserts itself. Unknowingly, we are led whither
our tastes prompt us, and Howard's first literary effort, based
upon a purely literary enthusiasm for the then recently pub-
lished American translation of "Les Misérables", proved to be
a play.
With all the confidence of youth, he persuaded a manager
to let him attempt a drama called "Fantine", based on some
of the Hugo incidents. It was played by a local stock com-
pany, managed according to the custom of the day. The
'star" was the only one to travel, going from one city to an-
other, in each of which a stock company was ready to support
him. When written, this crude first attempt was found to be
unfit for the practical side of the theatre; with all the inex-
perience of the inexperienced amateur, Howard had expanded
the first act until it was sufficiently long to be a play in itself.
194
Bronson Howard: Dean of the American Drama
But, undaunted, he set about pruning and cutting. What
man can ever expect to become a playwright without that
energetic willingness to slave, labor, and hope? Mr. Howard
always possessed to a large degree the unfailing optimism of
the true craftsman, and he once said, after he had gone
through thirty-eight years of theatre service: "I never can
understand the doubts as to whether one can do a play, if he
really has it in him; he just goes and does it without ques-
tioning." This determination which Mr. Howard always
preached was an inspiration to his younger associates, and
to many of them he used to say, "When you find yourself
standing in the way of dramatic truth, clear the track!"
An interesting state of affairs existed in those days, excel-
lently illustrated by the fate of "Fantine." This play was
never published; in fact, for a long while Mr. Howard con-
sidered the manuscript as lost. The only trace of it to be had
was a "skeleton" copy which it was customary to give to the
prompter: that is, the play with all the leading parts omitted,
and only the cues as a guide. This "skeleton" precaution
was necessary because of the copyright weakness which al-
lowed all kinds of piracy to be committed in the profession.
There were slight means of protecting the author's property
in those days, a fact which added to Mr. Howard's interest in
the dramatic copyright debates. Under such conditions, it
would never do to allow the prompter to have in his possession
the entire manuscript. The "skeleton" was of small value
to Mr. Howard; but, fortunately, the "leads" being extant,
they turned up unexpectedly some years after, and were
dropped into the setting like missing stones in a mosaic.
The eventful year of 1864, therefore, found Bronson How-
ard making a start as playwright. Another interest was
drawing him to the stage, for he was serving a Detroit paper
as dramatic critic and, besides, was reading plays for his own
amusement, familiarizing himself with the historical develop-
ment of play writing, which is a necessary acquisition for
dignified theatre work.
These were war times, but young Howard does not seem to
have been drawn into the vortex, until it was rumored that an
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The American Dramatist
invasion of the Union was to be attempted by the English
from Canada. For several nights, in consequence, Howard
tramped the shores of the Lake, waiting in the darkness for
momentary attack, and experiencing all the excitement that
comes before a battle. There was no invasion, so he left
Detroit, in 1865, and landed in the Tribune office, New York,
where he was detailed as reporter to write up the novel open-
ing of the season at Coney Island. From 1867, intermittently
until 1872, Howard attended isolated lectures, but most of his
energies were expended on journalism, in a day when news-
papers were being quickly founded, and were as rapidly chang-
ing hands.
In the usual journalistic career, which, as we have said, is
so characteristic of many of our native playwrights, Mr.
Howard's history is exceptional. For he was trained in a
newspaper school that produced Whitelaw Reid, and, from
1868 to 1872, he was filling varied positions on many editorial
staffs. He received his first honorarium, as dramatic critic,
under Charles H. Sweetzer, who founded the Round Table, a
precursor of the Nation, and was next sent to report the Yale
commencement and the Yale-Harvard boat race, for the
Evening Gazette. It was while on the latter paper that one of
his associate reporters was assigned a notable task to
follow up and describe how the first bag of mail was brought
to New York from Philadelphia, an incident which was the
beginning of the post-office system on its present gigantic
scale.
Howard then followed Sweetzer to his new paper, the Mail,
assuming the nominal office of first president of the Mail
Association. But the paper was sold in 1870, and John Rus-
sell Young then employed Howard on the Tribune, making
him exchange editor. Toward the latter part of 1871, he
went over to the Post, continuing his journalistic career, de-
spite his intervening dramatic ventures, through 1876, during
which year he wrote Centennial articles for the London Pall
Mall Magazine, and for the Detroit Free Press. Before this,
however, his determination had been firmly settled to devote
all of his energies to the drama. It was probably about this
196
Bronson Howard: Dean of the American Drama
OC-
time that his intimacy with Mr. (afterward Sir) Charles Wynd-
ham began. The latter's first managerial venture.
curred in "Hurricanes", which, written by Mr. Howard,
was renamed "Truth" in James Albery's adaptation for
England. In 1880, Miss Wyndham became Mrs. Bronson
Howard.
III
Despite the lethargic state in which Mr. Howard found the
American dramatist, and despite the absolute inertia of the
American Drama itself, he entered the contest with great
energy. So thoroughly were foreign models dominant on the
boards that he later confessed how one of his earliest manu-
scripts contained speeches in which Newport people went
about exclaiming "Egad!" in real eighteenth-century style.
Mr. Howard was always fully aware of the historical changes
in drama, the shifting of social attitudes, of moral conven-
tions. Every dramatist, unless he be distinctly a re-
former, is loath to overstep such conventions. Mrs. Inch-
bald, in one of her dramatic prefaces, refers to playwrights of
her day as being far behind the period in method and in
subject matter; yet at the same time she was astounded to
find Mrs. Centlivre utilizing the clergy in one of her plays!
It took years for the stage minister to make his appearance in
society drama.
Mr. Howard once said that in Rachel Crothers' "The Three
of Us", such a heroine as is there portrayed one who enters
a man's room at midnight, to outface his threats and to out-
wit his claim that he will compromise her was thirty or
forty years in coming. Augustus Thomas has written that
he held "The Witching Hour" in his desk for several seasons,
waiting the psychological moment when public sentiment
would be alive to the truth of hypnotism. Ibsen trained us
all to an acceptance of heredity as a stage subject, and he con-
fessed in his correspondence that he was willing and anx-
ious to shock average conservatism, without waiting for the
opportune time to do things. He was always in advance of
his public; hence his isolation and loneliness; hence the
197
The American Dramatist
storms of protest raised against him. This only indicates the
public's sensitiveness to dramatic change.
Mr. Howard accepted theatrical convention as it existed
in 1870; his one and only fight was for the recognition of the
American dramatist. Just before Robertson held sway in the
early sixties on the English stage, the old-style drama was
in the ascendancy; nineteenth-century people were viewing
and were accepting manners of another era. But Robertson
gave a twist to such a state of affairs; the theatre pendulum
swung back to its normal balance, and, though he did not
entirely free himself of the foreign yoke and of the earlier
romantic influence, Robertson at least focussed the glass upon
contemporary condition. This accounts for such a play as
"Caste"; it explains many touches in the dramas by Bronson
Howard.
to
From "Saratoga" (1870) to "Kate" (1906), Mr. Howard
dealt with American character, largely in the midst of foreign
atmosphere. The advance from the same "Saratoga
his "Aristocracy" (1892) was only an advance in neatness and
closeness of dialogue. That feminine brightness which drew
down upon him the wrath of contemporary critics was
admirably adapted, as it was in the case of Clyde Fitch, to
the French treatment. But the Anglo-French background
detracts from the sincerity of American Drama. Yet, should
one look closer, and not judge by externals entirely, it will be
seen, in the case of Mr. Howard, that, in spite of the prejudice
against American dramatists and American themes, in spite of
the exotic character of his technique, of his construction, he
anticipated many of our present-day dramatic workers in the
selection of his themes.
"The Young Mrs. Winthrop" (1882), however stereotyped
in its adherence to the "aside", is a domestic play of strong
import, by the side of which Alfred Sutro's "The Walls of
Jericho" is no more powerful arraignment of society forces
drawing husband and wife apart. "Moorcroft", though it
failed, exhibited Mr. Howard as aware of the value of time-
liness in theatre work. He had witnessed the instantaneous
effect of "Uncle Tom's Cabin", and had noticed the melodra-
198

UNIV
OF
WIGH
HO
BRONSON HOWARD
STEELE MACKAYE
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
WILLIAM GILLETTE


Bronson Howard: Dean of the American Drama
matic success of Boucicault's "The Octoroon." It is natural,
therefore, that this "Moorcroft", based on a story by John
Hay, should have dealt with the slave trade in similar melo-
dramatic manner.
"Baron Rudolph" (1881) foreshadowed by many years the
stage treatment of the struggle between capital and labor,
so crudely handled by Charles Klein in "The Daughters of
Men." Then there was "The Henrietta" (1887), to my
mind one of Mr. Howard's most characteristically American
plays — barring a few out-of-date touches which might
very well be classed with "The Lion and the Mouse", Frank
Norris's "The Pit" (dramatized by Channing Pollock), and
"Business is Business" ("Les Affaires sont les Affaires "), in
which Crane acted. In claiming this distinction of previousness
for Mr. Howard, it must always be borne in mind that his
was pioneer treatment, which won its way in the face of man-
agerial prejudice and productive barrenness. "Shenandoah
later became the forerunner of such a superior drama as
William Gillette's "Secret Service."
Mr. Howard's progress toward the recognized position of
dean of his profession was by no means a rapid or an easy one.
I have before me accusations of diverse kinds registered
against the dramatist, for there were many critics who could
not see originality in any of his work. In 1874, when "Sara-
toga" (Anglicized "Brighton" by Frank Marshall) was pre-
sented in London, the Times loudly proclaimed that the play
was simply a recast of Scribe's "Les Eaux." Mr. Howard
protested vigorously in the newspaper columns, yet he was
dignifiedly silent when critics pointed to his "Diamonds"
(1872), and discovered in it distinct reflections of "Still
Waters Run Deep"; or claimed that the charming sentiment
in "Old Love Letters" was akin in form and feeling to Gil-
bert's "Sweethearts."
""
Despite the fact, for example, that a certain special reviewer
was proverbially harsh in his judgments of Mr. Howard, hint-
ing that "One of Our Girls" (1885) leaned upon "A Scrap of
Paper" in its third act, and upon "The School for Scandal"
in its fourth act, should one follow those reviews, there would
199
The American Dramatist
BRONSON HOWARD (1842-1908)
For complete list of plays, see Moses' "Representative Plays by
American Dramatists", Vol. III. A few important ones here given.
Saratoga.
The Banker's Daughter
(being a revision of
"Lilian's Last Love”).
Fifth Avenue Theatre,
New York, Decem-
ber 21, 1870.
Union Square Theatre,
New York, Septem-
ber 30, 1878.
The Young Mrs. Win- Madison Square Thea-
throp.
The Henrietta.
Shenandoah.
Aristocracy.
tre, New York, Oc-
tober 9, 1882.
Union Square Theatre,
New York, Septem-
ber 26, 1887.
Star
Theatre, New
York, September 9,
1889.
Palmer's Theatre, New
York, November 14,
1892.
The American Drama. | By Bronson Howard.
The Autobiography of By Bronson Howard.
a Play.
In Memoriam.
Addresses delivered
at Memorial Meet-
ing.
Sunday Magazine,
October 7, 1906.
Reproduced in
Moses' "Repre-
sentative Plays",
Vol. III.
Dramatic Museum
of Columbia Uni-
versity, New
York, 1914. "Pa-
pers on Play-
Making." No.
2, series I.
Issued by Ameri-
can Dramatists
Club.
200
Bronson Howard: Dean of the American Drama

BRONSON HOWARD (1842-1908) Continued
Bronson Howard.
By Brander Matthews. | North American Re-
view, 188: 504-
513, 1908. (This
essay is in Mat-
thews' "Gate-
Drama in War Time.
By Eleanor Eustace.
The Banker's Daughter. By James L. Ford.
Bronson Howard.
By J. Rankin Towse.
way to Litera-
ture.
دو
New
York: Charles
Scribner's Sons.
1912.)
Green Book Album,
4:776–785.
Munsey, 34: 122,
199.
Book Buyer, 16:
113-117, March,
1898.
Life on the Stage.
By Clara Morris.
Chapter on "Sar-
atoga."
New
York: McClure,
Phillips. 1902.
be detected that, with the appearance of each new play by
Mr. Howard, increasing credit and respect were bestowed
upon him. This was largely due to the maturing of the
dramatist's touch to the surety of his technique.
To his feminine interest, Mr. Howard added a repartee
which came from close observation of small detail. At
first, in such a piece as "Saratoga", and later, in “One of
Our Girls", the style bordered on the frivolous. It seemed
that there was but one way for him to picture the Ameri-
can girl by making her, amidst the conservatism of English
convention, a bold, frank, "natural" type, surprising every-
one with her freedom, her boisterousness. There was little
of the intensive life to be detected in her struggles, in her mari-
tal misunderstandings, unless we except "The Young Mrs.
Winthrop."
201
The American Dramatist
The formula of imported drama was used by Mr. Howard;
in order to win his battle, he was obliged to compromise some-
where. The formula prescribed duels and French indiscre-
tions; it necessitated the American characters being lavish
with money. A certain grace was bestowed upon the femi-
nine type, but otherwise the manner of depiction was the same
as that used by Taylor in his character portrayal of Asa
Trenchard.
The social amenities, the comedies and tragedies of smart
set life are to-day very much as they were yesterday. We
find as many of the nouveau riche, anxious to pepper conversa-
tion with French phrases, as many of the so-called aristocracy
boasting of association with titled folk; and there are still
to be seen the destitute foreign noblemen mere fortune-
hunters such as Mr. Howard introduced into "Aristocracy"
and "Kate." Snobbery has lost none of its rampant coarse-
Yet we have outgrown this cartoon, this farce element,
in depicting American condition on the stage; we seek for
less of the incongruous.
ness.
Wall Street is just as potent a factor in the shattering of
homes as it was when "The Henrietta" was first produced;
but the framework of social drama, of the problem play, is
now more solid, and less prone to be shaped by the caprice of
external incident. Mr. Howard, despite the transitory chat of
his dialogue, impressed one with the feeling that beneath the
surface incident there lay a very distinct idea — a much more
substantial view of life than his execution would lead us to
believe. His criticism of American condition was always
thorough and just, and his culture sense was so keen that it is
surprising to find how little his plays reflect the solid character
of his intellect. His dramas were mostly received with en-
thusiasm, netting him a comfortable fortune. Yet, regarding
their permanence there is doubt, for the very reason that they
are cast in a mold so easily discarded, a mold which held only
the froth of manners.
As a worker, Mr. Howard was always zealous and pains-
taking. His manuscripts indicated that labor and sacrifice are
the dramatist's watchwords. Let a doubt as to effective-
202
Bronson Howard: Dean of the American Drama
ness once possess him, and he went to any amount of trouble
to overcome the scenic difficulty. The well-thumbed volumes
on the Civil War in his library were evidence of his care in
detail while planning "Shenandoah", the first draft of which
was a network of emendations.
""
He wrote and rewrote a scene in "One of Our Girls six
times before he could prove to his own satisfaction that the
original way was the only way for his particular purpose.
The lecture he delivered at Harvard University, in 1886,
applied the general laws of drama to certain alterations made
in "The Banker's Daughter." His object was to show the
student that whatever changes of primary importance were
made by him affected other details in preceding and succeed-
ing situations. A drama is an organism, with relative spatial
values fluctuating according to dynamic principles. Mechan-
ical effectiveness has its constructive equation, and character
must develop consistently along lines of evolution and of
life.
But Mr. Howard, while illustrating these laws by means
of the changes in his piece, also too clearly revealed in that
lecture a distinct danger underlying the stagecraft of his day
a danger bequeathed us by the French, and engrafted by
Robertson and Taylor upon English drama and American
drama as well a danger counteracted by the Ibsen tech-
nique, with its vital ideas. The caprice of incident was more
thought of than the humanity of individuals; artifice there-
fore largely took the place of art. "One of the most impor-
tant laws of dramatic construction," said Mr. Howard, before
the Harvard audience, "might thus be formulated: If you
want a particular thing done, choose a character to do it that
an audience will naturally expect to do it. In 'The Banker's
Daughter' I wanted a man to fall in love with my heroine after
she was a married woman, and, of course, I chose a French
Count for the purpose."
We now ask again, in view of all this activity, by what
right was Mr. Howard called Dean of the American drama-
tists? He always had the interest of native playwrights at
heart; he fought for them unceasingly, even as ardently as
203
The American Dramatist
Mark Twain did for the author in the copyright agitations,
making appeal for proper protection of plays as early as 1879;
he founded for his craft a permanent organization, known as
the Dramatists Club (1891). But more than that, he estab-
lished the fact of the American Drama's existence, and stood
ready to render encouragement to the younger generation.
Unlike "The Master Builder", he hastened the newer school,
always gracious and always helpful.
We emphasize in our literary histories the importance of
such writers as Bret Harte, who preserved a native flavor in
the short story, dependent upon native life. The American
idea in literature has largely been subservient to local interest
and local need. Politically, socially, spiritually, and eco-
nomically, locality has governed our literary expression, and
has been externalized on the stage. Save in isolated instances,
idea in American literature has in no way equalled vivid-
ness of local condition. While Mr. Howard's local claim was
harmed by his manner of construction, he nevertheless, like
Robertson and Taylor, swung the pendulum across the dial
of contemporary life, and reflected the conventional phases of
contemporary society. He recognized that Boker in Phila-
delphia had done no ordinary work; that American Drama,
from the Revolution, was no insignificant quantity, however
varying the quality. What was needed seemed to be con-
fidence in native ability and in native discernment; what was
needed proved to be a local dramatic market for modern wares.
Mr. Howard was the founder of such a market. It was con-
fidence on his part that cleared the way for the present. And,
by right of this struggle, dramatic history should stamp him,
as others in his family have been stamped, as pioneer in his
particular field.
Shortly after Bronson Howard's death, at Avon-by-the-Sea,
New Jersey, on August 4, 1908, the American Dramatists.
Club appointed a committee, composed of personal and pro-
fessional friends of the dramatist, to arrange for a memorial
meeting. Such men as George Ade, David Belasco, William
De Mille, Harrison Grey Fiske, Daniel Frohman, William Gil-
lette, Augustus Pitou, Richard A. Purdy, John Philip Sousa,
204
Bronson Howard: Dean of the American Drama
and Augustus Thomas planned the occasion. As a result
of this public tribute, a volume, "In Memoriam", was shortly
afterwards issued, and in this one is able to measure Mr. How-
ard's value as a man of the theatre. It is unfortunate that
his letters are not included, for his correspondence was always
marked by the soundness and saneness of his thinking, his
earnest endeavor to reach the right, unprejudiced attitude.
He was an ideal American, as Augustus Thomas said of him,
despite the fact that he was so often accused by the press of
being British in his observations and his tastes. And, in the
true sense of the word, he was an American dramatist, because
he dealt with the details of American life. Brander Matthews
has pointed out that he wrote at a time when the theatre was
changing in its physical demands: when we were passing
from the platform stage to the picture-frame stage. Dion
Boucicault had been the exponent of the former, Howard was
now to be an adherent of the latter.
He was a practical worker in the then existent theatre, and he
knew his playhouse. He was only half right, I think, in liken-
ing the dramatist's craft to that of the mechanical engineer.
Construction is a large part of the job of writing a play, but
it is not the whole of drama. He could admire Ibsen's deft-
ness in handling plot, but he could not see the positive intel-
lectual worth of Ibsen, he could not justify the sombreness of
Ibsen, his own conception of the theatre being founded on
the belief that it is only through dealing with the noble side of
manhood and womanhood that a dramatist will inspire enno-
bling influences. Toward the close of his life he was inclined
to deprecate the increasing soberness of the realistic theatre.
But he was a respecter of dramatic construction, and came
by instinct to understand what others nowadays attempt to
draw from books of dramatic technique. He always had a
refreshing way of stating his beliefs. In his Harvard lecture,
he spoke of the necessity for submitting unconditionally to
the laws of dramatic truth. He said, "Keep in mind the
historical case of Stevenson. When a member of the British
Parliament asked him, concerning his new-fangled invention,
whether it would not be very awkward if a cow was on the
205
The American Dramatist
your genius
track when a train came along, he answered, 'Very ark'art,
indeed, for the cow.'
for the cow.' . . . Even if you feel sometimes that
that's always the word in the secret vocabulary
of our own minds - even if your genius seems to be hampered
by these dramatic laws, resign yourself to them at once, with
that simple form of Christian resignation so beautifully illus-
trated by the poor German woman on her deathbed. Her
husband being asked, afterward, if she were resigned to her
death, responded with that touching and earnest recognition.
of eternal law, 'Mein Gott, she had to be!'
Addressing the Lambs Club on the trash which deluged
the American stage, and on the so-called lost dramatists of
America, Mr. Howard took special care to stress his belief
that the hope of the future lay largely in the worker who
obeyed the dictates of the theatre rather than the dictates of
literature. All countries had to witness the large proportion
of inferior drama to the very few masterpieces. "If it were
not for dramatic trash," he declared, "neither theatres nor the
profession of acting would exist." The papers were full of
talk, he contended, about the lost dramatists who should have
come from the ranks of the novelists, poets, and short-story
writers of the country. But, analyzing Mrs. Inchbald's
collection of English plays, he could find no support from
England that the plays worth while out of one hundred and
twenty-five were those written by other than the professional
dramatist. And he ended by saying, "The American The-
atre must develop its own literature, through professional
dramatists, good, bad and indifferent, as the theatre of every
other country has done. In other words, in looking forward
to an American Dramatic Literature, we must look toward
the theatre, not away from it."
The sanity of Howard's attitude did more to impress the
manager of his time with the value of native work than any
other thing. He might succumb to the conventions of his
day - which were the conventions of the British and French
stage but his mind was on his own country. When he
took his "Drum-Taps" - later to be the inspiration for his
"Shenandoah' to one of these managers, it was returned
206
Bronson Howard: Dean of the American Drama
hastily because it dealt with the Civil War - an American
theme. "Now, if it were the Crimea," the manager sug-
gested, with rising inflection, as though it might easily be
rewritten as such, "there would be some hope for it." I have
heard this attitude variously attributed to A. M. Palmer and
to Lester Wallack, but either one would do, for they were
both typical managers of the time, and the rising tide of local
interest did not seem to dawn upon either of them until this
dramatist made a stand. Brander Matthews reports Wal-
lack's confusion, thus expressed:
I used to get along very well, with the latest London suc-
cess, and a new play now and then by Dion or by John [mean-
ing Boucicault and Brougham], and an old comedy or two.
But now I really don't know what they want!
The fact of the matter was: a new generation was coming,
and it was Howard who was knocking at the door. What he
wanted was a recognition of his presence as an American.
207
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JAMES A. HERNE AND THE REALISTIC DRAMA
I
WILLIAM WINTER, with his customary disrespect for the
modern drama, seemed to take a special delight in belittling
the work of James A. Herne. He could not countenance in
his plays that "prosy literalism" which was what simple
realism seemed to him. He accused Herne of tinkering with
other people's ideas, of giving the stage "transformed English
characters" rather than native Americans, of being hysterical
rather than true to simple emotion. So blind, indeed, was
Winter, that in unfounded generalization — which seemed to
have behind what he wrote a personal animosity - he accused
Herne of adding nothing to American Drama, but of remain-
ing a playwright of "respectable mediocrity.'
>>
It is difficult to dissuade those who believe in Winter's
judgment that not a word of this is true. For none of Herne's
plays are in print, and some of the best, from a realistic stand-
point, are destroyed forever. Furthermore, it is difficult to
recreate the atmosphere of the California period in which
Herne received his first impulses as a playwright, a stage
director, and an actor. If the fashions of those times could be
adequately impressed upon this generation of students in the
drama, Herne would loom up as one of the most command-
ing figures in the American Drama of the eighteen-nineties.
There was plenty of good acting out in San Francisco in the
days when Herne and Belasco were brought together in
management and play writing: all the stars of the golden
208
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
period of acting made their pilgrimages across the plains
and mountains to the West; and Salt Lake City, Virginia
City, and the City of the Golden Gate have a theatre history
which embraces many picturesque moments and many vital
incidents in the records of the American Drama. These two
men were steeped in the romanticism and flashy melodrama of
the time; they acted and saw others act, and had their own
standards. Winter raved at Belasco's tribute to Herne's
Rip; he lauded above it Jefferson's Rip as the complete
embodiment of Irving's hero. But there are other critics
as competent as Winter to claim that Jefferson fell far below
the graphic conception of James H. Hackett's Rip and of
Herne's.
Be that as it may, I wish here merely to warn the reader,
who meets with such blind statements, that Winter had no
understanding of those realistic elements Herne tried — and
others agree with me so successfully and so significantly, for
his era, to put into his plays. Read Winter on Ibsen, on
Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck, on the best of Pinero,
Shaw you will find sufficiently marked his limited vision,
his inability to adjust his sympathies to the changing times.
For what does he write in one place? "There is more true
drama in Wills's 'Olivia', Young's 'Jim the Penman', Thomas's
'The Witching Hour', and McLellan's 'Leah Kleschna'.
than there is in a round dozen of the works of Ibsen."
I am not making a statement against Mr. Winter for the
purpose of belittling his long service in the cause of worthy
drama for the American Theatre. His early beginnings as a
dramatic critic bring us very near the period which I have writ-
ten about in my chapter detailing the critical attitude of the
"Fabulous Forties "- before and after. That he failed to
see the significance of Mr. Herne at any moment, save when
he played in pieces remindful of "Olivia" and "Jim the Pen-
man", was his limitation; that he failed to see how abso-
lutely alone Herne was, in the bed-rock treatment of homely
situation, indicates merely that Winter preferred his drama
highly colored with violent emotion, or else in the form of
classic poetry which admitted of the classic type of acting.
209
The American Dramatist
II
The position W. D. Howells occupies in American literature.
is an original one. The Howells impulse in letters was some-
thing brand new in the days when James A. Herne went to
Boston. It was Howells who began drawing readers away
from stereotyped formulas of romanticism; and, while later
his practise served to create a realistic rut in fiction, he never-
theless enforced the growing belief in the richness of the land
which held the nation's common, average life; and he pro-
ceeded to show that truth was in the soil and much truer
perhaps than the artificial condition which never possesses any
intimate relation with the fibre of the community.
This point of view struck Herne with force, and he began
to put it into practise. Yet he has never been given full
credit for his pioneer efforts, with the examples before him
of Howells, whom he knew personally, and of Ibsen, whom
he knew by reading, to apply to American themes for
the stage, this realistic treatment, of which in this country
Howells was the arch-exponent in fiction. "Mr. Howells's
principle is truth," writes Mr. Firkins. "He believes in the
transference of life to the page with as little alteration as is.
compatible with the difference between being and discourse.
To any one who has read the scripts of "Margaret Flem-
ing", of "Griffith Davenport", of "Shore Acres", there are
moments in all these plays that fit this method, life sug-
gested with little show of art to blur the impression; life that
requires only a slight rhythm of discourse to reveal an infini-
tude of poignant struggle; and, since Mr. Herne himself
acted in all his plays, a method of interpretation which made
the difference between "being and discourse" almost nil.
In his book on "Criticism and Fiction", Mr. Howells, speak-
ing of the imitative instinct of the average American writer,
says truthfully that in general "he is instructed to idealize his
personages, that is, to take the lifelikeness out of them, and
put the booklikeness into them." And he adds furthermore,
as a hopeful sign, that "now we are beginning to see and to
say that no author is an authority, except in those moments
210
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
when he held his ear close to Nature's lips and caught her very
accents." In other words, is it not true that an author is real
who faithfully interprets the environment with which he is
most familiar; who sees clearly through a mystical belief in
the godhead of the human being? In this respect, no one can
lay claim to higher realization of the term than Mr. Herne
himself. I am sure that were his plays printed, even though
they might seem strange to the ear in their sentiments, their
melodramatic passions, the rhythms of life itself would grip at
moments with such force as to give us pause to think that they
were written between 1890 and 1899.
Thus considered, Mr. Herne represents the most original
strain in the American Drama of his day. Let us grant that
in his plots he invented conventional situations which almost
hid the fundamental sincerity of his simple characterization.
Let us acknowledge that his comedy sometimes bordered
on the "low" comedy of old, although, in the last analysis,
his humor was of the kindliest, and the depths from which
it arose the most human. Let us furthermore understand
fully that, having acted in the "old school", having assumed
rôles of diverse melodramatic range, his invention as author
was often prompted by the memory of those parts, and their
effective handling on the stage.
Yet, notwithstanding all this, Mr. Herne is entitled to the
highest consideration, because of the fact that, in the midst
of romantic, melodramatic, and old-fashioned tragic concep-
tions which then found favor in the eyes of the American
public, he put his ear close to the heart of the common life,
and drew from the most ordinary experiences and circum-
stances the stark poetry of a simple, fundamental existence.
What strikes one as most characteristic in Mr. Herne's
manuscript plays is the wonderful clarity of vision which,
through the medium of the most matter-of-fact details,
through the power of clear and direct expression, always
raised the common level of daily existence to a plane of the
most tragic drama on the one hand, and to the realm of the
most genial, warmhearted, and amusing rural comedy on the
other. It is not over-exaggeration to claim this distinction
211
The American Dramatist
for Herne, because these qualities accentuate themselves
amidst glaring faults of technique; but these faults only add
the more to the sincerity of certain scenes which are among the
high places in our American Drama.
His work is another illustration that the poignancy of our
soil, of our native character, the primal sweep of our
American life — is to be found between great cities, not in
them; that there are more native stamina, more distinctive folk
passion in the small community than in the large. In some
respects Herne's plays are folk dramas of the best kind. The
abnormal community, where a mixture of all nations makes
the civic body, does not encourage such interest as he showed
in simple people and their daily lives.
When Mr. Herne's attention was drawn away from the
melodrama with which he met favor, he seemed to have
sensed almost intuitively the modern movement in world
literature. He became suddenly an avaricious reader of the
modern authors. Some would say that the influences which
bore upon him at the time he wrote "Margaret Fleming'
and "Griffith Davenport" were imported from such men ast
Ibsen and Tolstoy. If this were true, I would rather relate the
Herne dramas, as Norman Hapgood suggested, to some of
the German dramas of the time, if only Mr. Herne had known
these German dramas. But his range of reading was limited.
He saw the inward light of this realism which was claiming
letters. He may be said to have been endowed with that
luminosity of spiritual vision which, even at an advanced age,
kept him thoroughly attuned to progressive movements in
art and politics. He was an ardent supporter of the economic
theories of Henry George.
III
Mr. Herne was born on February 1, 1839, at Cohoes, New
York, of Irish parentage, his father, Patrick Herne, being a
tradesman of the town. He received the bare rudiments of an
education, for he was obliged to earn a livelihood at an early
age.
He had the usual yearning of the average boy to go to
sea, and to the day of his death he possessed an insatiable love
212
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
of the water. That faint youthful dream of slipping to sea
in a merchantman became realized only in so far as to sit
aboard his yacht in later years, or else to write inimitable
letters to his daughter Dorothy - the "Captain Perry" of
his heart - and sign them "The Pirate."
Rebellion against conditions did result, however, in Mr.
Herne's running away, and joining a theatrical company, play-
ing at the Adelphi Theatre, in Troy, and here it was that,
during April, 1859, he appeared in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
On the authority of Clapp, however, it is said that his
first appearance was made in an amateur performance of
"Toodles", which took place a short while previous to
this at Schenectady. At the Adelphi he supported James B.
Roberts, assuming such characters as Horatio, Cassio, and
Bassanio. His uncle was the treasurer of the house.
That Herne was equal to any emergency may be inferred.
from the fact that one evening, when Roberts appeared as
Richard III, the young actor was cast for the three rôles of
Tressel, Oxford, and Buckingham. He was indefatigable in
his ambition, although at the time he must have been sorely
pressed for the necessary income which would supply him with
a theatrical wardrobe. For, during one summer, he returned
to a brush factory in the neighborhood of Cohoes, working
away to eke out his small salary, at the same time, with the
artful enthusiasm of a young man, keeping his father in
ignorance of his true profession.
CC
His next engagement was at the Gaiety Theatre, in Albany;
and from there he went to the Holliday Street Theatre, in
Baltimore, which was under the management of Ford. There
he remained until 1864. 'As a matter of historic interest,
wrote Mr. Herne, "it may be well to mention that I spoke the
first line ever delivered on the stage of Ford's Tenth Street
Theatre, Washington, the theatre in which Abraham Lincoln
was shot." In 1869, he was for a period manager of the New
York Grand Opera House; and thereafter he toured with
Susan Denning along the Pacific slope. Then followed several
seasons as leading man with Lucille Western, during which
engagement he assumed such parts as Bill Sykes and Sir
213
The American Dramatist
Francis Levison, succeeding E. L. Davenport in the repertoire
rôles. Mr. Herne's first wife was Miss Helen Western, whom
he married on July 17, 1866.
When the actor finally went to Baldwin's Theatre, in San
Francisco, it was under the management of Thomas Maguire.
He served as stage director, and as well assumed an infinite
number of rôles, among those to be remembered because of
their human value being his Dickens characterizations of
Daniel Peggotty and Captain Cuttle. It was while there, that
he met David Belasco, a much younger man than Herne.
The two influenced each other and profitted by their differing
abilities. The experienced actor in Herne reacted upon the
youthful impetuosity of Belasco; while it was the latter who
suggested to Herne his own powers as a writer of plays. It
was in those days that the two collaborated. Herne once con-
fessed in a lecture that the stereotyped drama of this period
did not appeal to him. It was the play of plot, of hero, hero-
ine, and villain, of virtue triumphant, of artificial situations
and endings. The heroic drama fell upon unsympathetic ears,
even though Mr. Herne played the Romeos, Claude Melnottes,
Armand Duvals, and the Benedicks, Cliffords, and Petruchios
of the "Standard Dramas." It was the domestic play, the
simpler plot that caught his fancy. "The more direct the
talk," he confessed, "the more earnest I became.'
Here was
the author of "Shore Acres" long before he began to write.
From now on the career of James A. Herne may
be con-
sidered entirely in its literary development and from the angle
of his personal expansion. For, peculiarly, vigorous as he was
in his profession as an actor, theatre events in his life were
not so significant as his intimate association with a very few
persons who had much to do with his artistic beliefs and his
intellectual predilections. He was married, for the second
time, to Miss Katherine Corcoran, on April 3, 1878. The
impress of her inspiration was soon seen upon him. She it was
who definitely started him on his career as a dramatist;
she it was who gave him courage to go on in those dark hours
when, having written "Margaret Fleming" and "Griffith
Davenport", he found managers looking askance at him
""
214
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
because of the kind of realistic play he wrote. He was paying
the penalty for cutting himself aloof from melodrama and
seeking the truth in the commonplace.
To the very end, Mr. Herne acted and produced plays; he
loved to talk of his inspirations in the theatre, Forrest and
Davenport being his ideals of the past. He wrote pleasantly
of "Old Stock Days in the Theatre", but, being an evolution-
ist at heart, his own technique as an actor would indicate that
his devotion to the "palmy" times did not hinder him from
developing a method far removed from the work of his idols.
From his career thus barely sketched, there are a few sig-
nificant factors to be stressed. While at Baldwin's Theatre,
in San Francisco, Mr. Herne came under the influence of the
Boucicault drama and of that type of melodrama which was
represented by such a success as "The Danicheffs." So that
it is not surprising to find "Hearts of Oak", "The Minute
Men", and "Drifting Apart" tinged with those flamboyant
emotions which were lacking in subtlety. In "Shore Acres",
during the scene in which Uncle Nat struggles with Martin,
in his effort to light the signal lamp, the sensational is very
much in evidence; but the unerring art of Mr. Herne saved
him from the intense glare of melodrama. He understood
thoroughly the balance between tension and quietude, and
there is no bit of stage writing more natural, more cheerful,
and more real than the act which succeeded this violent one in
"Shore Acres", Uncle Nat preparing the Christmas stockings.
Those who are fortunate enough to recollect the wonderful
naturalness of Mr. Herne's acting, will always refer to the
final curtain of this play, where Uncle Nat, left alone on the
stage, by the very flexibility of his facial expression, depicted
the full beauty of his character, as he closed up the room for
the night, put out the lamps, and, lighted only by the glow
from the fire in the stove, slowly left the room as the cuckoo
clock struck twelve. Such work, of which Mr. Herne as an
actor was capable, is close to Maeterlinck's conception of
what static drama should be, the drama of little action and
immense interaction of the forces of destiny.
After seeing "Shore Acres" in 1893, Henry George wrote:
215
The American Dramatist
Hearts of Oak
JAMES A. HERNE (1839-1901)
of Oak (first Baldwin's Theatre, San
produced under the
name of “Chums”).
Minute Men.
Drifting Apart (first
called "Mary, the
Fisherman's Child").
Margaret Fleming.
Shore Acres (formerly
called "The Haw-
thornes").
Griffith Davenport.
Sag Harbor.
Francisco, Cal., Sep-
tember 9, 1879.
Chestnut Street Thea-
tre, Philadelphia,
Pa., April 5, 1886.
People's Theatre, New
York, May 7, 1888.
Lynn Theatre, Lynn,
Mass., July 4, 1890.
Revived, Chicago,
Ill., January 29,
1907.
McVicker's
Theatre,
Chicago, Ill., May
23, 1892.
Lafayette Square The-
atre, Washington,
D. C., January 16,
1899.
Park Theatre, Boston,
Mass., October 23,
1899.
Mr. and Mrs. Herne.
By Hamlin Garland.
Arena,
October,
1891, 543-560.
Old Stock Days in the By James A. Herne.
Theatre.
Arena,
6:401,
September, 1892.
Mask or Mirror.
By B. O. Flower.
Arena,
8:304,
1893.
Truth for Truth's Sake.* By James A. Herne.
Arena,
17:361-
370, February,
1897.
[*This was used as a lecture before the Home Congress at Cotillion
Hall, Boston, October 27, 1896. On January 31, 1897, Mr. Herne
appeared in the pulpit of the First Congregational Church, Kansas
City, and delivered a lecture on "The Theatre as It Is."]
216
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama

JAMES A. HERNE (1839-1901) Continued
James A. Herne: Actor,
Dramatist, and Man.
James A. Herne in
"Griffith Davenport."
Appreciations by Ham-
lin Garland, J. J. En-
neking, and B. O.
Flower.
By Marco Tiempo.
Rev. Griffith Daven- By John Corbin.
port.
""
Arena, 26: 282-
292, September,
1901.
Arena, 22:375,
September, 1899.
Harper's Weekly,
43: 139, 213.
Literary
World,
Boston, 30:57.
Literature, 4:265-
By John D. Barry.
By W. D. Howells.
266.
Margaret Fleming.
By W. D. Howells.
Harper's
zine,
Maga-
Editor's
Herne and his New By F. Wayne.
Play, "Sag Harbor.”
The American Stage By William Archer.
(3d article).
Players of the Present. By John Bouvé Clapp
and Edwin Francis
Edgett.
Study, 83: 478,
August, 1891.
National Maga-
zine, Boston, II:
393.
Pall Mall Maga-
zine (London),
20:23-37.
Dunlap Society,
pt. I, 1899, 148.
The Stage in America. By Norman Hapgood. Chapter III.
"Our Two Ab-
James A. Herne.
By Lewis C. Strang.
lest
tists."
Drama-
New
York: The Mac-
millan Co., 1901.
In "Famous Ac-
tors of To-day
in America",
Chap. II. Bos-
ton: L. C. Page,
1900.
*
217
The American Dramatist
I cannot too much congratulate you upon your success.
You have done what you have sought to do - made a play
pure and noble, that people will come to hear. You have
taken the strength of realism and added to it the strength that
comes from the wider truth that realism fails to see; and, in
the simple portrayal of homely life, touched a universal chord.
Who, save you, can bring out the character you have
created a character which to others, as to me, must have
recalled the tender memory of some sweet saint of God.
Having made a comfortable fortune with the success of
"Hearts of Oak", Mr. Herne's progress, up to the time of
"Shore Acres", was marked by persistent opposition and
lack of financial success. This initial play of his, which,
when first produced at Baldwin's Theatre, on September
9, 1879, was known as "Chums", was, in many of its details,
based on "The Mariner's Compass", by Henry Leslie. Its
main plot was used again in "Sag Harbor"; and, despite the
fact that it contained many stereotyped romantic speeches,
it displayed a gift which Mr. Herne possessed to a marked
degree the gift of simplicity, which never deserted him,
no matter how old-fashioned and unoriginal some of his scenes
might be.
There are countless plays and stories like "Hearts of Oak”,
dealing with a marriage between a girl and her guardian,
which at first is overclouded by the fact that the girl loves
another, but which finally ripens into a full happiness and a
satisfactory ending. One cannot quite accept those heroes of
fiction or drama, however mature and settled, who would give
up their wives because of a conscience. Such touches often
occur in Mr. Herne's plays, in accord with the fashion of the
time.
But these incongruities were more than overbalanced by
Mr. Herne's inimitable handling of the commonplace in life.
He was able to breathe into his dialogue those small, playful
expressions that lighten up the whole character. At one
moment serious, he never allowed himself except in the
case of "Margaret Fleming -to subject his audiences to
unrelieved strain. The papers, commenting on his so-called
وو
*
218

JAMES A. HERNE.
"One of the most commanding figures in the American Drama of the eighteen-
nineties."
NIV
OF
WIGH
1
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
domestic dramas, showed surprise over his effective use of the
commonplace. They were not accustomed to see on the
stage the little happenings of home life, the glorification of
those situations which abound in comradeship, and those quiet
scenes with a baby which are successful only when the actor
possesses that great art which alone knows how to deal with
quiet detail.
"Hearts of Oak" exhibited the influence of Dickens in its
character portrayal. Judged by the standards that we now
have in these times of ultra-realism, the sentiment was old-
fashioned, certain speeches pointed a moral rather than
adorned the tale. No one, however, could ever accuse Mr.
Herne of being a blindly prejudiced pleader. He had an
evenly balanced sense of fairness, and he looked on all sides of
a question with compassion and sympathy. He took sides;
a dramatist should not remain unmoved by the validity of
his case; if he does as Galsworthy in a sense did when
writing "Justice" - he suggests an emotional coldness which
has a chilling effect on his audience. When he wrote "The
Rev. Griffith Davenport", he showed his sanity in a high
degree; the story dealing with a circuit rider of the South
during the storm and stress period of slavery and war, he
could have fallen into the error of an average dramatist, and
handled the subject by falsifying historic truth and thrusting
forward personal prejudices. He did nothing of the kind:
he gave us sympathy for both sides the preacher pitted
against his own family, the spirit of Lincoln against the moral
weakness of a losing economic system, a national panorama
amidst a domestic drama. This, one of the very greatest,
if not the greatest, of our war plays, was among the Herne
manuscripts destroyed by fire.
"Drifting Apart" was regarded as one of the most powerful
temperance sermons ever put on the stage, unless we except
the successful melodrama, "Drink." Yet there is little of
distinction in the actual script of the piece, save the suggested
possibilities in the acting that were so marked on its first
presentation at the People's Theatre, in New York, on May 7,
1888. Mrs. Herne assumed the rôle of Mary Miller, and
219
The American Dramatist
infused it with a subtle interpretation of art for truth's
sake.
1
Hamlin Garland spoke of it in these terms: "It was so
utterly opposed to the tragedy of the legitimate. Here was
tragedy that appalled and fascinated like the great fact of
living... The fourth act was like one of Millet's paintings.'
Mr. Herne's lines of life were so cast that he was denied the
advantages of the student, although he possessed the avid
mind of the scholar. Without any apparent effort on his
part, he absorbed the best literature, and it was an easy
matter for him to reach the heart of any subject which
attracted his attention. Although he set himself down to
write a melodrama when he began "The Minute Men", and
although, because of this very self-consciousness on his part,
he failed in his attempt, he was nevertheless successful in
attaining a certain atmosphere of historical reality, akin to
the true Revolutionary spirit. This was more solidly and
more artistically accomplished in "The Rev. Griffith Daven-
port", ¹ Mr. Herne's best contribution to dramatic literature,
however much we might claim that "Sag Harbor" contained
his most finished writing; it had a balance of truth and art,
which is lacking in "Shenandoah" and "The Heart of Mary-
land." The point of view is one which might be said to be as
much Southern as Northern. The principle of slavery was an-
tagonistic to Mr. Herne's social philosophy; and, should a
bias be found at all in this play, it would lie in his interpreta-
tion of duty as confronting Griffith Davenport. Davenport's
struggle was not so much that of a Southerner who was torn
between his duty to State and his duty to country, as it was
the conception of Mr. Herne, whose idea of duty was wholly
from the standpoint of country, and not from that of State.
The atmosphere of the drama was very successfully obtained
through the handling of the simple details of Southern life.
Perhaps there was an over-accentuation of the darky charac-
teristics, but they were not the customary antics of the stage.
minstrel or of the conventional Southern "hand." As a play-
wright, Mr. Herne infused into his darkies that same strain of
1 Based on Helen H. Gardner's novel, "The Unofficial Patriot."
T
220
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
humanity which he is said to have put into a Negro character
part he once played in the early days, with such determined
and realistic villainy.
""
IV
In the Spring of 1899, William Archer saw "Griffith Daven-
port. What he felt then was described later in the London
Tribune (May 26, 1906). He said:
The curtain rose on a quiet domestic scene on a Virginia
plantation, and I was instantly struck by the skill with which
the old-fashioned dignity of the environment was brought
home to us, along with the atmosphere and aroma of the
South. Character after character appeared, and as each
one began to develop in action, I asked, "Who is this
actor?" "I never heard of him," was the invariable reply.
Except Herne himself and his wife, all the actors were quite
unknown people; yet such was his skill as a "scene-instruc-
tor" that I took each new figure for a personage who must
surely have made his or her mark on the stage. The second
act was what we should call melodramatic in character, deal-
ing with the pursuit and rescue of a runaway slave; but even
here everything was done simply and without exaggeration.
The third act, which passed in a sitting-room in Washington,
was placed on the stage with a perfection that would have
done credit to the Comédie Française, and acted with a quiet
naturalness from which the Comédie Française might have
learnt a lesson. I felt throughout that here I was in the pres-
ence of what I had come to seek, and had not found elsewhere
-original American art. And America, to its indelible dis-
credit, failed to recognize it.
V
It is significant to obtain Mr. Herne's own estimate of his
different plays. We find him analyzing the cause for this
success and for that failure; we hear him making a confession
that although "Hearts of Oak", in its dealing with Marble-
head folk, was a new departure, since it had neither hero nor
villain, it was crude in construction. With a simple naïveté,
221
The American Dramatist
he recognized in "The Minute Men", with its Paul Revere's
ride and its Battle of Lexington, a step nearer the truth;
while in its character of Dorothy Foxglove it afforded a “glori-
ous" rôle for Mrs. Herne. He was frank enough to confess
that in "Drifting Apart", his story of Gloucester fishermen,
based on "Mary, the Fisherman's Child", there was displayed
a weak comedy element in the introduction of the stage sou-
brette and the funny man. Even in "Margaret Fleming"
he evidently felt that there were didactic spots in the dialogue.
So that, by this self-criticism of the artist, we are able, to a
certain extent, to catch glimpses of the whole-souled sincerity
of the man, who sought truth externally, simply because he
saw clearly its spirit. As he has written: "Art is a personal
expression of life. The finer the form and color and the larger
the truth, the higher the art. . . . Art is universal; it can
be claimed by no man, creed, race, or time, and all art is good."
The change that came over Mr. Herne after having pro-
duced "Drifting Apart" was coincident with an intellectual
and spiritual change affecting both himself and his wife.
They were mentally receptive of new ideas. They were
following, in Huxley, in Spencer, in Howells, in Tolstoy, those
tendencies which, attracting one to higher conceptions of
ethical duty and of social justice, brought one's viewpoint
nearer to the common life. Mrs. Herne was mentally keen.
Hamlin Garland writes of her: "To see her radiant with in-
tellectual enthusiasm, one has but to start a discussion of
the nebular hypothesis, or to touch upon the atomic theory,
or doubt the inconceivability of matter. She is perfectly
oblivious to space and time if she can get some one to discuss
Flammarion's supersensuous world of force, Mr. George's
theory of land-holding, or Spencer's law of progress.
The next artistic effort that Mr. Herne put his hand to was
by no means fraught with elements of popularity. It was
truth laid bare, with no gloss of romanticism about it, however
much it might be saturated with feeling; souls stark naked
in their sin, and in their vigorous dealing with sin. One
marvels, after having read "Margaret Fleming", what there
is of tangible literary value in such a story, for one
222
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
undoubtedly feels its value. It proves nothing, it has no
direct intent; it is a segment of life painted with no idea of
gaining art effects, but showing how very close to life one's
vision may be. The realism is almost pitiless in its conse-
quences; it is almost photographic in its detail. It is the
commonplace story of the man who goes wrong, and whose
illegitimate child is nurtured by his wife after she has dis-
covered his transgressions. It is the close tragedy of a
woman's struggle to estimate at its full worth the animal
instinct in man.
For the student of American Drama, Mr. Herne's activity
as a writer falls easily into two classes. We may narrow our
consideration down, so as to include "Margaret Fleming"
and "The Rev. Griffith Davenport" on the one hand, with
"Shore Acres" and "Sag Harbor" on the other; the former
representing his realism, and the latter representing - if
we must designate him by a term-his rural characteristics,
which were more vital than those of Denman Thompson, as
seen in “The Old Homestead." When "Margaret Fleming"
was ready for presentation, the dramatist found himself in a
peculiar position, for no manager dared risk capital on a piece
so freed from what the public was usually accustomed to, and
so devoid of a happy ending. Likewise, there were certain
situations which appeared to shock the conventional taste.
It was at this time that Hamlin Garland began to take that
interest in the Herne family which rapidly ripened into the
deepest friendship. He and Mr. Howells seemed to recog-
nize the rare originality which lay in the simple style of Mr.
Herne's work. Even in "Drifting Apart", melodramatic
though it was, there were certain direct, incisive, and simple
passages of writing that partook of the very highest and best
qualities in realism.
2
So that, naturally, "Margaret Fleming" appealed to these
two literary men, who became so far interested as not only to
1 Mr. Thompson (1833-1911) was not prolific. "The Old Homestead" was
originally called "Joshua Whitcomb."
2 "Shore Acres" was really being evolved by Mr. Herne before the writing of
"Margaret Fleming."
223
The American Dramatist
suggest the idea, but to further the scheme of leasing Chicker-
ing Hall, in Boston, and of presenting the play to an intel-
lectual assemblage which was very difficult to gather for a
theatre performance. The piece ran for several weeks, but
it was a financial failure, although the press recognized a cer-
tain subtle force, a certain plain and vital power which were
rarely seen upon the stage. This was in the year 1890, when
Ibsen was practically unknown to the American theatregoing
public, when the slightest deviation from the accepted con-
ventions of morality was regarded as bold. It was this atti-
tude of mind more than anything which the play itself chal-
lenged, that involved it in such disastrous consequences.
Howells wrote:
Mr.
The power of this story, as presented in Mr. Herne's every-
day phrase, and in the naked simplicity of Mrs. Herne's act-
ing of the wife's part, was terrific. It clutched the heart. It
was common; it was pitilessly plain; it was ugly, but it was
true, and it was irresistible. At times, the wife preached, and
that was bad; there were passages of the grossest romanti-
cism in the piece, and yet it was a piece of great realism in
its whole effect. This effect, in Boston, where it was produced,
was most extraordinary. Probably, no other new play ever
drew such audiences there, in the concert hall where it took
refuge after being denied a chance at all the theatres. Liter-
ature, fashion, religion delegated their representatives to
see it, and none saw it without profound impression, so that
it became the talk of the whole city wherever cultivated
people met.
When the piece was revived at the Art Theatre, in Chicago,
during 1907, all of the critics recognized its forcefulness and
its serious simplicity, deploring the fact that it had remained
in obscurity for so long a time, when in every respect one was
justified in regarding it as a high specimen of American dra-
matic art.
Mr. Herne's next piece, "The Rev. Griffith Davenport",1
met with the same cold reception, and it is natural to find
him becoming somewhat discouraged as to the possibilities of
1 It was begun in the summer of 1894, and not produced until 1899.
224
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
carrying the American public with him along the lines which
meant most to him, and which he was best fitted to follow.
So he determined thereafter to add popular qualities to his
stark realism. Not for a moment could he have discarded
his innate ability to deal with simple things; but he drew
upon the stock subterfuges of the old school, at times becom-
ing a little over-sentimental, whereas one of the beauties of
"Margaret Fleming" was the depth of its tragic sentiment,
which overcame its flaws.
The interstices between the completion of his several pieces
were filled up by Mr. Herne's acting, and likewise by his
excellent stage management, which was always in demand for
large productions. There are some who believe that as a
stage manager Mr. Herne's influence upon the eighteen-nine-
ties was more marked than as a dramatist. Through kindly
guidance and illuminating interpretation, he impressed his
methods upon all of the actors who were under his care; and
many on the stage to-day regard Mr. Herne as the one force
which meant most to them in their careers. But, in the future,
Mr. Herne's position will be dependent entirely upon his value
as a dramatist.
was
There are a few facts, leading up to the close of Mr. Herne's
life, which have to be noted. After going to Boston, around
1890, he lived in a modest little home at Ashmont, in the
suburbs. The failure of "Margaret Fleming" was coincident
with a rather unsettled period in the history of literary Boston,
a period which to use Mr. Garland's expression
marked by a discovery of the fact that to meet success every
one had to go to New York. So, about the same time he,
Mr. Howells, and Mr. Herne all went to that city. It was not
until 1894 that Mr. Herne moved with his family to his estate
in Southampton, Long Island, where the dramatist did much
of his final writing, and where he was able to satisfy his love
of the sea and his thorough enjoyment of home life. At this
time one would be sure to note his fondness for the fields and
his enthusiasm for tennis and bicycling. Simple of heart and
boyish in action, there was nothing so important that he would
not spare the time to mend a broken doll for his daughter
225
The American Dramatist
Dorothy. Here also he was drawn more and more into in-
terests other than those dealing with drama. His reading
became broader, his political opinions became pronounced, in
fact so pronounced as to demand his time for public speaking
in the interests of Henry George. So ardent was he in his
acceptance of the doctrine of free access to the soil, that his
theatrical manager at one time advised him to be more careful,
inasmuch as his theatre audiences might resent his political
views. But Mr. Herne was not a man to fear consequences of
this kind. To the day of his death, June 2, 1901, he was an
ardent supporter of Bryan.
VI
There are some men born to see clearly, to be zealous for the
vital principles of life, the unchangeable, constant truth of the
ages; the thoughts and ideas which elevate in the effort to
live our highest and best. These are the thoughts which were
usually upon the lips of Mr. Herne. He was a man of the
present, drawing from the moment what was truest from his
standpoint. He loved the theatre, but he was always careful,
even in the midst of his stage directions, to call attention to
those realistic bits of acting which one identifies with life
rather than with the simulation of life.
He took his art seriously;¹ he recognized in it a social force
and a civilizing factor. He believed that truth in art was
as much within the grasp of the stage as of the pulpit, that
the theatre was as much to be upheld in the light of a temple
for the work of the dramatist, as a museum was to be con-
sidered a civilizing factor in its capacity as temple for the
art of the painter. The theatre to him was a place for the
upholding of good. He once said: "We must not condemn
an art or an institution because a corrupt civilization has
affected it." He further said that "the province of the thea-
tre is not to preach objectively, but to teach subjectively.
He recognized that an art was vicious only because of the
existence of lovers of vicious art. He was broad in his ideas;
و,
1 Mr. Herne was one of the first actors to make a stand against the binding influence
of the Theatrical Syndicate.
226
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
his voice was always heard in the cause of liberty — whether
political or artistic. He was to a certain extent an individu-
alist, recognizing that the Kingdom of God is within us; yet
according to his own words: "No individual can emancipate
the race; he cannot even emancipate his own calling. The
race must be taught to emancipate itself."
We do not find Mr. Herne afraid to state his own position,
to formulate his own belief. What was he spiritually but a
firm upholder of the force of deed, over and above creed?
As though it were his own declaration of faith, he wrote:
“I believe that every human being has a certain amount of
divinity that is, of God within him; just as much of God
as he is capable of holding. And he gives out just as much of
that divinity as he is capable of expressing. And I believe.
that if he were not bound down by unjust social laws, that
if he were free, the divinity would grow and develop and prop-
agate its species. In other words, I believe that when we
free men, when we free labor, we will free art, we will free
the Church, and elevate the theatre, and not until then."
This conviction, this recognition of the spiritual in the ma-
terial, this connection of the facts of life with the unknown
forces in the world, were not confined to theoretical dis-
cussions. Mr. Herne's political convictions were likewise
founded upon convictions within himself. During the Henry
George campaign, when he took the stump in the cause of
single tax, we find him connecting art with the civic life of the
people, we find him realizing, as only a man can who believes
that art is an expression of life, that the producers and the
nonproducers of the world may be regarded from the stand-
point of dealing in spirit as well as of dealing in wheat and
hemp and tobacco. Art, whether it be the shaping of a statue,
the writing of a sonnet, or the growing of a prize ear of corn,
has a common point of contact. And so again we hear him.
saying: "The pen, the easel, the chisel, the harp, the sock and
buskin, are in reality tools of labor; and the men who wield
them are laborers, and their interests are swayed by the wel-
fare and prosperity of those who till the soil, shear the sheep,
and weave the cloth."
227
The American Dramatist
man.
There are two characteristic notes throughout Mr. Herne's
plays, which stand as a fair indication of the measure of the
We find his love of the beautiful in the sense that truth
alone is beautiful. That he approved of Enneking's belief
that "the ideal is the choicest expression of the real", is
sufficient measure of his high moral outlook upon life. We
note his realization of the human qualities which underlie
all nature; and it may be further added that he had that
pride of race, that instinct of the parental which were so well
exhibited in "Margaret Fleming", and in such comments.
as these: "Maternity I consider the noblest theme of human
kind; and I have no patience with that false prudery which
would keep from young people truths they ought to know
about in their purest and holiest sense." Old-fashioned this
may seem, but in its day it represented an advanced position.
Mr. Herne is little known, outside of a limited number of
people in this country. Now that he is dead, it is hard to
secure actors who can fill rôles that he usually assumed with
such fulness of interpretation. William Archer from time to
time called the English public's attention to the plays of
America's most distinctive dramatist. But unfortunately,
the English public only saw the rural pieces, amended to ac-
cord with English understanding. Even we in America have
not been fully awakened to what Mr. Herne means in the
general dramatic and literary development. He was a writer
of direct and simple prose; his images were not involved, his
characters were not obscured by symbolism. In his narrative,
in his descriptions, when he was at his best, one is reminded of
the vigorous prose of Lincoln; a direct speech based not on
any effort for effect, but prompted by desire to say something,
or to tell something in the clearest manner possible. In
closing, let me quote one paragraph from a speech of Mr.
Herne's, which stands out above all others because it repre-
sents the simplicity, the depth, and the whole-souled sincerity
of the man. Moreover, it stands as a beautiful bit of prose.
The quotation relates to his turning from the writing of "Mar-
garet Fleming" to a consideration of "The Hawthornes" —
which later became "Shore Acres":
228
James A. Herne and the Realistic Drama
"Mrs. Herne had gone with two of our daughters to spend
a few weeks of the summer at Lemoyne, on Frenchman's
Bay, in Maine, and insisted that I should come there and
work on the play, and get the benefit of true color and Maine
atmosphere; and I went. What an exalted idea of God one
gets, down in that old Pine State. One must recognize the
sublimity which constantly manifests itself there. It is
worth something to live for two whole months on French-
man's Bay, that beautiful inconstant bay, one minute white
with rage, the next all smiles and gently lapping the foothills
of old Mount Desert; with the purple mist on the Blue Hills
in the distance on the one hand, the Schoodic range on the
other; the perfume of the pine trees in every breath you
inhale, the roar of the ocean eight miles away, and the bluest of
blue skies overarching all. In such a spot as that a man
must realize, if he has never realized it before, that he and
this planet are one, and part of the universal whole."
229
CHAPTER TWELVE
DAVID BELASCO AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE
SWITCHBOARD
T
THE story is told of an artist who, in the cramped quarters
of his room, was wont to paint the most exquisite pictures,
marked by finesse and delicacy; but no sooner had he accu-
mulated enough to afford a larger studio than the deftness
of his art deserted him. It is one of the unexplainable points
about all professions that there is a limit to expression; that
there is a line where effect has its greatest scope, beyond which
the appeal goes to waste. The story points a dramatic moral.
For Dion Boucicault, in the course of his vast experience as
playwright, actor, and manager, discovered that beyond a
certain number, it was difficult for him to fuse the minds of an
audience; to grip their attention and to hold it.
Such was the snag against which the stockholders of the
New Theatre, in New York, first struck. They wished to
build an art playhouse of certain proportions, with a stage far
exceeding in amplitude the proscenium width of any or-
dinary theatre, and suitable for light opera, spectacular and
drawing-room drama. This was well-nigh impossible; for, to
illustrate the point in exaggeration, it would be artistic suicide
to spread the boxed-in delicacy of Pinero's "Trelawny of the
'Wells'" over an area of the Hippodrome stage.
And so, the art of the drama is the art of all arts where
proportion, perspective, and color accumulate for a given
230
David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
effect. No one has studied this fact to greater purpose than
David Belasco, in whom the instinct of the painter before his
canvas is the dominant characteristic, an instinct which
must assuredly prompt the mechanism of any art theatre we
may ever hope to have. When the story of scenic realism is
told, he will occupy a distinctive position. Such a survey
will narrate how Mrs. John Drew, once playing in "London
Assurance", created a sensation by having a real carpet and
mirror among the properties for one act.
properties for one act. Not only in this,
but in all of Boucicault's productions, some marvel of stage
mechanism indicated to what extent the scenic art could be
carried; and David Belasco has continued the tradition.
In our effort to estimate a man, even though what he next
does may upset our theories, there are two phases to be con-
sidered, one of which includes the other. Our view depends
primarily on what he has done; it is tempered by the direct
influence which has been brought to bear upon him by others.
No matter what claims to originality an artist may have, no
matter how strong the impress of his personality, those subtle
workings of environment and of unconscious imitation are
perforce obliged to develop within the man a certain inclina-
tion, a certain leaning, which will shape his angle of vision.
To say that Mr. Belasco was for a time private secretary to
Boucicault; to understand that he acknowledges the influence
upon him of such pieces as "The Robbers", "Pizarro", and
'Fazio"; to follow the status of the theatre when he first
reached New York in 1882- a status measured by the suc-
cess of such French melodramas as "The Two Orphans",
"The Celebrated Case", and "Rose Michel" - these factors.
will, if examined in extenso, explain something about Mr.
Belasco's impetus as a playwright.
The man behind his ascetic dress is a combination of con-
flicting elements. It is easy to say this of any one; but, in
the case of Mr. Belasco, facts and conditions make it evident.
His manner betrays the artistic temperament; his steady
look has two qualities, one which explains how he reaches
the estimate of an actor's limitations, and the other in what
manner he withstood the enmity of the Theatrical Trust.
231
The American Dramatist
It is not always essential for a dramatist to penetrate deeply
into life, but one cannot deny that Mr. Belasco's glance has
taken in the details thoroughly. He has had the experience
which should come to all writers of plays; he has been thrown
against the strong contrasts of living which are usually to be
found in a mining camp; he has lurked in the highways and
byways of existence, unconsciously gathering those elemental
stuffs which are the essential ingredients in all passion. These
he has in most cases toned down, but the brutal elements in
“Du Barry” and in "Adrea" indicate to what uses experi-
ence of this kind is brought.
There is the ascetic streak in David Belasco, colored by
pronounced spiritual and contrasting sentimental verve; there
is the tinge of morbidity which is always attendant upon a
clinical analysis of psychological phenomena. None but Mr.
Belasco himself can realize the satisfaction he gained many
years ago through watching the heart of a woman as it lay
upon a plate before him. Yet such was the actual occurrence,
all the while his imagination playing havoc with the physical
object. In like manner has the manager studied the effects
of poisons upon the body, reasoning out the physical contor-
tions as they differed under varying conditions. This prepa-
ration for the drama is not essential to all playwrights; it
suited Mr. Belasco's temperament that he seek impressions
in this manner.
Yet, side by side with this curiosity that digs into the
physical causes and effects, there is the other phase character-
istic of the ascetic nature the love of solitude. For five
years, during the formative period of his life, Mr. Belasco
was under the guidance of the priesthood at Vancouver. The
eight-year-old boy was impressionable, and Father McGuire,
if he could not educate his tastes away from the
stage, at least set a mark of ecclesiasticism upon his dress,
to which he has always adhered. In contrast with the little
fellow, asleep in his cheerless cell of the monastery, may be
set the picture of the nervous playwright as he is to-day,
closeted in his studio with his books and curios, totally alone
in a roaring city.
232
David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
Here it is that he plans in secret, the slightest suggestions
meaning much to him; he is a lover of the twilight; in
the thunder and the lightning are hidden possible electrical
impressions. His is the quick grasp of the picturesque, the
striking, the impressionable. In every respect does he prac-
tise the technique of the painter before his canvas.
II
Mr. Belasco is the second present-day dramatist of note to
draw upon Iberian traits, for his family, like the Pineros,
were of ancient Portuguese extraction, and were forced to
flee to England before the wrath of the Moors. But, while
the Pineros remained as British subjects, the Belascos of
David's immediate stock proceeded still further to Victoria
(in Vancouver), where the father of the present playwright
became rich and was elected mayor, then became poor again
and made another move to San Francisco, drawn there by
optimistic accounts which were called forth by the gold fever
of 1849.¹
دو
>
In that city it was that the present holder of the Belasco
name was born, on July 25, 1853. There is little to record of
these early days. It must have been before his departure to
Vancouver with Father McGuire that he assumed juvenile
rôles in "Pizarro" with Charles Kean; in "Metamora" with
Edwin Forrest; in "East Lynne" with Julia Dean. Before
then, also, he received some slight school training, as well as
gained some reputation as a reciter of "The Madman
"The Vagabonds", and Mrs. Hemans' "Bernado del Carpio.'
When he returned from his priest friends, he was thirteen,
and not yet quite through his education, for he was placed
at Lincoln College, from which he was graduated in 1875.
When he was scarcely fourteen, he could boast authorship
of "Jim Black; or, The Regulator's Revenge." All through
these years, forces in him and around him were pointing
toward the stage. It does not take much to fan a liking into
¹ In crossing the Isthmus of Panama, his mother gained distinction as the first
woman traveler to do so.
233
The American Dramatist
a passion, and it is recorded how, having once gone to see
"Hamlet", the boy had rushed home to the garret and there
played through the drama, even essaying, at this early age,
to rewrite the dialogue from memory!
Then followed the months of a struggling actor. He began
by supporting Mary Welles in "The Lion of Nubia", and soon,
throwing his whole future into the dramatic scales, Mr.
Belasco experienced the vicissitudes of the exhibitor of Egyp-
tian mysteries, of the melodramatic "super", even for a while
playing Hamlet and Richard III himself in the mountain
towns and backwoods settlements of the West. He was for-
tunate, during this period, in being brought into direct con-
tact with the golden era of American acting. Edwin Booth,
John McCullough, E. A. Sothern, William Florence, Edwin
Adams, and Adelaide Neilson were the stars in the San Fran-
cisco of those days. He even joined Sothern's "Dundreary'
company, appearing as the valet. "Why did these players
begin in the West?" asks Belasco, in his colorful "Life's
Story." "Why did they feel that they had to come to San
Francisco to build reputations which were presently to culmin-
ate in the East? I think the reason is not far to seek. It was
because the West was throbbing with the pioneer spirit; its
very atmosphere encouraged individuality; everything was
done on a big one might almost say a colossal - scale, and
the purse of San Francisco was heavy-weighted with gold."
Thereafter began the training of David Belasco as assistant
stage manager of a theatre in Virginia City, where the stock
company was prepared for any emergency, from farce to
tragedy, and where Belasco was supposed, much as Ibsen
had been expected at Bergen, to fit dramas for production.
"There were more reckless women and desperadoes to the
square foot in Virginia City," writes Belasco, “than any-
where else in the world, I believe. Every other place was a
gambling-hell or an ill-famed resort, while its streets were
crowded with the fakirs of the universe."
While
He was required to act as well as to manage.
serving in this capacity, Dion Boucicault and his company
arrived to fill an engagement. The Irish wizard, in the writ-
234

DAVID BELASCO
"There is no man in the theatre with a better perspective of the history of American
Drama."
David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
ing of plays, could juggle with three plots at a time; he had,
with Laura Keene, produced a play within an abnormally
short period by rehearsing one act while in the midst of writing
another. He was alert to activity of all kinds, and he found
energy to his liking in the assistant stage manager.
"Boucicault was more than an adapter," Belasco declares,
"he was a brilliant and indefatigable slave, resting neither
night nor day. There is no doubt that even though he
adapted — in accordance with the custom of the time — he
added to the original source, making everything he touched
distinctly his own. He left everything better than he found
وو
it."
Belasco recalls Boucicault's rehearsals of "Led Astray",
and his work with Charles Thorne, the actor, brought up in
the overemotional style of acting. The play needed quiet
scenes at moments repressed emotion. "Now, Charlie,
old man, play it down, play it down," would be the constant
admonition of Boucicault. "And Charlie did play it down,'
writes Belasco. "The consequence was, when Boucicault
got through with him, he read the line, 'God, oh, my God!'
so perfectly that his method soon became the talk of the town.
I am sure this repressed style was one of the reasons why
'Led Astray' succeeded. Thus did a school of acting begin in
Virginia City, while Boucicault and I were working together."
When he left Virginia City, Boucicault carried Belasco
with him as private secretary, and, to his young associate,
"Led Astray" was dictated, besides the scenes for many other
productions. It is not likely that the effectiveness which
marked the Boucicault drama would escape the future wizard
of American stagecraft. "Arrah-na-Pogue", when it reached
San Francisco, became the one strong outside influence to
affect theatrical conditions on the Pacific slope. The
secretary might have gone to New York soon after, had his
mother not intervened; and it was just as well, since the
experience which he was now to gain, as manager and stock
dramatist of Baldwin's Theatre, matured his managerial
powers, and at the same time brought him into association
with James A. Herne, who, for a while, was at the same
theatre. The playgoer of the present generation needs must
235
The American Dramatist
weigh the value of such repertoires as old-time actors used to
carry — dramas that called for the varying shades of classic
comedies, and the historical scope of different styled trage-
dies. But, though there was a conventional way of regulat-
ing all stock companies, Belasco, even at that early date, be-
gan to introduce original methods, and Charles Thorne, Frank
Mayo, and Edwin Adams - all men of longer experience—
soon came to regard his advice as authoritative.
Belasco was the youngest manager along the Pacific slope.
The theatre was run on a somewhat crude, though very ar-
tistic, scale. Audiences of all classes had to be catered to,
and a motley, picturesque crowd gathered together on Satur-
days - the melodrama evenings. - to thrill over "The Idiot
of the Mountains" and "The Robber of the Pyrenees.'
Thus the years passed at Baldwin's Theatre, the Grand
Opera House, and the Metropolitan.
ence.
III
When finally Belasco decided, in 1882, to go to New York,
his confidence in himself was backed by an enviable experi-
No schooling is better for a playwright than just this
intimate contact which Mr. Belasco had had with the hun-
dreds of plays that came under his supervision. Already his
hand had been turned to dramatizations, adaptations, and
even original work.
But when the Mallorys engaged him as stage director and
stock dramatist of the Madison Square Theatre, they prob-
ably placed more store by his general usefulness as a producer,
as a manipulator of other people's crude material, than as an
author of any formidable proportions.
New York was then going through its final decade of old-
time managerial policies; the Theatrical Trust was still to
come; the American playwright, in the face of foreign impor-
tations, was finding it difficult to gain recognition; Mr. How-
ard was battling hard and receiving rough handling by the
critics for his "Saratoga. A. M. Palmer was meeting suc-
cess with French melodramas; Wallack, atune to English
وو
236
David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
melodrama, was soon listening to Belasco's tempting offer of
"La Belle Russe"; Daly, at the most disastrous period of his
career, was tottering through an opera craze. The latter
manager had begun with marked success; such pieces as
"Under the Gas Light", "Article 47" (for Clara Morris)
and "Pique" (for Fanny Davenport) had obtained instant
favor. He had been drawing from France, when he adapted
"Frou-Frou" for Agnes Ethel, and he had turned to the Ger-
man of Mosenthal for "Leah, the Forsaken." It was after
this that he found a mine in the German farce.
In the midst of all this conglomerate emotional material,
Mr. Belasco found the Madison Square Theatre devoted
to the quiet domestic play, so quiet that it had drawn down
upon itself the derisive title of "milk and water" drama. The
smallness of the house encouraged an intimate drama; quick
changes of scene, due to an ingenious double stage invented
by Steele MacKaye, made it possible for a continuous plot to
approach much nearer to reality. Stage declamation began
to disappear, even though Belasco and his associates were
laughed to scorn. They were the extremists of their time, but
their extreme methods began to prevail. In the old drama,
there had been fixed scenes written and directed for applause,
and "the action," declares Belasco, "stopped until the ap-
plause came." All this was discarded at the Madison Square
Theatre. Naturally the distorted methods of acting would
not suit this style of management. Those were the days of
over-emphasis, big periods, measured intervals, and rounded
gesture. Mr. Belasco proceeded to sacrifice all of this bom-
bast, much to the surprise and doubt of his co-workers. The
comedian no longer was allowed to wait for a laugh; it had
either to come through the pure unctuousness of the character
acting, or not at all. Such a régime as the young manager
instituted gained the confidence of everyone.
The little playhouse on Twenty-fourth Street was in the
heyday of its existence; A. M. Palmer soon became interested
in its success; the stock company which bore its name was
winning public favor; a school of acting was to involve the
labors of Henry C. De Mille and Boucicault, who turned to
237
The American Dramatist
it, broken in health and sorely disturbed in mind. Mr. De
Mille was play reader for the theatre, which meant, for ex-
ample, that in three months he examined two hundred manu-
scripts submitted by would-be American playwrights!
When, however, a drama was accepted, it was soon turned
over to Mr. Belasco for final shaping. This is what happened
to Mr. Howard's "The Young Mrs. Winthrop"; suggested
changes were made on all sides, and the final recasting was
accomplished with Belasco's assistance. The result was that
by the production Mr. Howard gained warm commendation
from the press, and Mr. Belasco immediately found himself
in possession of considerable prestige.
What followed, up to the time the latter joined forces
with Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum, in 1885,¹ constitutes the
history of the New York theatre rather than the development
of the American dramatist. It is only necessary to say that,
under such conditions, and together with Mr. Belasco's
temperament, there grew into dominant proportions a mana-
gerial grasp, an analytical keenness for large effect, a marvel-
ous readiness to assimilate according to his needs, an instinc-
tive and unerring eye for the romantic.
وو
So far, little of his actual stage writing had brought
him any unusual distinction. Between his arrival in the
East and his collaborating with De Mille, "La Belle Russe
(Wallack's, 1882), "The Stranglers of Paris" (1883), "Hearts
of Oak" [with Mr. Herne] (1884), and "May Blossom
(1884) had met with success. But there were also to his
credit titles which are not even familiar in name to the
present
generation of theatregoers. In this category are included
'Valerie", "Miss Helyett", "Pawn Ticket 210", "The
Moonlight Marriage", "The Doll Master", "A Christmas
Night", "Within an Inch of His Life", "The Lone Pine”,
"American Born", "Not Guilty", "The Haunted House"
"Cherry and Fair Star", "Sylvia's Loves", "Paul Arniff",
"The Curse of Cain", "The Millionaire's Daughter", "The
Ace of Spades", and "The Roll of the Drum."
One is not far wrong in inferring that, however effective
1 See "Memories of a Manager." Daniel Frohman. 1911,
238
David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
these may have been, there was more melodramatic situation
in them than definite intent, nor did they have sufficient dis-
tinctiveness in themselves to survive the immediate atmos-
phere and demand which encouraged them. Had it not been
that Mr. Belasco's art instinct as a constructive manager was
uppermost at the time, he might have been contributing at
this moment to the broad melodrama which thrives on the
morbid, however it may seek to glorify virtue. But, so char-
acteristic did this art side become, that one cannot separate
the manager from the author.
By the deftness of his stage manipulation, which had made
him so sought after that the Mallorys on occasions were
forced to lend him to others, public attention was now cen-
tered upon the Lyceum. The association of Mr. De Mille
with Mr. Belasco resulted in four plays, all marked with cer-
tain conventions that characterized Mr. Howard at his best-
stock situations that balance three sets of opposite characters:
the ingénue rôle, the romantic hero and heroine, and the
middle-aged couple around whom comedy scenes, bordering
nigh on to farce, were woven. We see this in "The Charity
Ball" (1889), as well as in "Men and Women" (1890). Then
there was "The Wife", a drama which, in 1887, was brought
into the courts, where an unsuccessful suit was tried, with
Frances Aymar Mathews as the plaintiff. But the greatest
coup which the two made together was the preparation of a
rôle in "Lord Chumley" (1888), for E. H. Sothern, which
marked the son with some of the excellent comedy capabilities
belonging to his father, whose "Lord Dundreary was un-
doubtedly the source of inspiration. It must be said that the
collaborators succeeded in developing a certain human sym-
pathy for the fop, which was not unlike the loveableness so
pronounced in the earlier rôle.¹
دو
Their writing was strictly in accord with the demands made
upon them by a stock company. Their plays were "vehicles
to fit certain players. Belasco, in his "Life's Story", is
¹ In 1889, Mr. Belasco and Mr. Franklin Sargent produced the "Electra" of
Sophocles; while on the Pacific Coast Mr. Belasco mounted a version of the Passion
Play.
239
The American Dramatist
frank about the mechanical way in which De Mille and he
constructed their Lyceum plays, - to suit Georgia Cayvan,
to fit the rising personality of E. H. Sothern. In their plays
the Lyceum Stock Company found its being. "The Wife”
was produced November 1, 1887. It reached its 239th per-
formance, June 16, 1888. The Lyceum stability was
founded upon it.
Of "Chumley", Belasco writes naïvely: "We decided on
the spot to make our hero a young English lord. At this
period of the American Drama, the young English lord was
invariably an ass. . . . We decided that certain Dundreary
traits would be excellent in such a character. Then came a
question of a name, and we decided to select a simple-sound-
ing name spelled in elaborate English fashion. Cholmon-
deley' was the name settled upon, which we abbreviated to
Chumley.... Putting the plot together was an easy matter;
we had only to get a series of eccentric situations, with love
scenes and bright lines. Our real task was to exploit a
comedian."
Indeed, the De Mille-Belasco combination was a clever
exploitation of their talents for the sake of a stock company.
"The Charity Ball" was cut after the demands of the day.
Dramatists were forced to have a very strong third act;
they had to introduce comic relief with "young lovers.'
"Nowadays," writes Belasco, "these ideas are obsolete, and
have gone the way of the 'aside' and the 'soliloquy.""
And what was the result of all Belasco's ingenuity? Here is
what he says:
Our productions at the Lyceum were marked by great
simplicity of treatment. There was no attempt to be theatri-
cal. We used to depict life as the men and women who came
to see us experienced it. There was no cut and dried staginess.
We on Fourth Avenue gave an allegiance to the so-
called 'society' drama. In this line we surpassed all other
theaters in the city.
240
David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
IV
Between 1890 and 1895, which last date marks the inception
of the Theatrical Syndicate, perhaps one might say until
after “Zaza” (1899) and “Naughty Anthony" (1900), which
ended his association with any members of the organized
managerial system, Mr. Belasco must be regarded only as a
successful stage manager and a skilful playwright and adapter.
"The Girl I Left Behind Me" (1893),¹ written in conjunction
with Franklyn Fyles, was one of the initial successes of the
Empire Theatre; "The Heart of Maryland" (1895) was one
of the first of his dramas to employ a sensational piece of
stage technique, such as the swinging bell, with the heroine
holding to the clapper; "Zaza" (1899) indicated the deftness.
with which his translation quite eclipsed the real author of the
French original, and his training of Mrs. Carter in the title
rôle exemplified the wonderful illuminative power with which
he can, in his instruction, carry an actress to the heart of a
character and bring out, as a photographer does on a negative,
those fine lines which are never evident in the first moments.
From this time on, however, his progress was marked by two
dominant notes: he fought against odds, and by his
attitude, brought public attention to bear upon both sides
of the Trust problem; he likewise incited public curios-
ity through the lavishness of his stagecraft, so thoroughly
taking hold of popular appeal as well-nigh to hypnotize by
what is peculiarly, yet legitimately, termed "the Belasco
atmosphere.
""
There are always two sides to a given question, and it is
never wise to discuss one without laying as much emphasis.
upon the other. Suffice it to say, whatever move Mr. Belasco
made against the Trust was planned quite as much in the
cause of independent art as to further his personal interest.
He never once gainsaid the advantage of systematizing
theatrical finance so as to bring the money question down to a
thorough banking basis; but he questioned the ethical side.
1 Other plays during this time were "The Senator's Wife" (1892), and “The
Younger Son" (1893).
241
The American Dramatist

DAVID BELASCO (1853-
)
For full bibliographies, see Moses' "Representative American
Dramas: National and Local" and Moses' "Representative Plays",
Vol. III.
The Wife.
With Henry DeMille.
Lyceum Theatre,
Lord Chumley.
With Henry DeMille.
New York, No-
vember 1, 1887.
Lyceum Theatre,
New York, Au-
gust 21, 1888.
The Charity Ball.
With Henry DeMille. Lyceum Theatre,
New York, No-
vember 19, 1889.
Men and Women.
With Henry DeMille.
Proctor's
23d
Street Theatre,
New York, Oc-
tober 21, 1890.
The Heart of Mary-
Herald Square The-
land.
atre, New York,
October 22, 1895.
Madame Butterfly.
With John
John Luther Herald Square
Long.
Theatre, New
York, March 5,
The Auctioneer.
With Charles Klein.
The Music Master.
With Charles Klein.
Du Barry.
The Darling of the
Gods.
The Girl of the Golden
West.
1900.
New Haven, Conn.,
September
1901.
9,
New York, Sep-
tember 26, 1904.
Criterion Theatre,
New York, De-
cember 25, 1901.
Belasco Theatre,
now The Repub-
lic, New York, De-
cember 3, 1902.
Belasco Theatre,
New York, No-
vember 14, 1905.
The Rose of the Ran- With Richard Walton Belasco Theatre
cho.
Tully.
(Republic), New
York, Novem-
ber 27, 1906.
242
David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard

DAVID BELASCO (1853- ) Continued
The Return of Peter Belasco Theatre (for-
Grimm.
merly The Stuyve-
sant), New York,
January 2, 1911.
The Theatre Through
Its Stage Door.
By David Belasco.
Edited by Louis De-
per
New York: Har-
Brothers.
Foe.
1919.
The Life of David Be- By William Winter.
New York: Moffat,
lasco.
David Belasco.
Yard &
Co.
By James Huneker.
Plays Produced Under Edited.
the Management of
David Belasco.
1918. 2 vols.
Theatre Arts Mag-
azine, October,
1921.
Privately Printed.
New York, 1925.
The David Belasco Edited by David Be- Privately Printed.
Arrangement of lasco.
Shakespeare's "The
Merchant of Ven-
ice."
New York, 1922.
of the booking problem. This placed in control of a few hands
the portioning of time engagements along theatrical circuits,
and involved the playhouses stretched, chainlike, across the
continent.
It is a matter of stage history how certain actors made
bold to stand against the dictatorship of the Trust, and how,
one by one, they succumbed.¹ Not so Mr. Belasco, and be-
cause in his theatre he was determined to practice his own
policy, and not be dictated to, he soon realized that along
that chain of theatres he was irretrievably debarred; which
1 For a few articles on the Syndicate, see: International, 1:99–122, Jan., 1900,
Norman Hapgood; Fortn. Rev., 79: 1010-1016, June, 1903, Charles Hawtrey;
Leslie's Monthly, Oct., 1904, 581-592; Nov., 1904, 31-42; Dec., 1904, 202–210;
Jan., 1905, 331-334; Cosmopolitan, 38: 193–201, Dec., 1904.
243
The American Dramatist
meant that he must either play in halls or be kept out of cer-
tain towns. This necessitated his planning for his own
theatres, in New York, in Washington, in Philadelphia, and
in Boston. One by one the difficulties constituting his exile
were overcome. But to add to the condition of theatrical mo-
nopoly, Mr. Belasco had, likewise, to face a personal antag-
onism, which is hardly a matter for theatre discussion, how-
ever much it may have been enlarged because of Mr. Belasco's
theatre success.
Since the opening of his Belasco playhouse, in New York,
the manager has presented a long list of remarkable successes,
from the standpoint of scenic artistry and drawing qualities.
He has engaged the efforts of John Luther Long, of Charles
Klein, of Richard Walton Tully, of the Misses Phelps and
Short, and others as collaborators; and under his undoubted
genius as a painstaking instructor there have come to the fore
such names as Mrs. Carter, Miss Bates, Mr. Warfield, Mr.
Frank Keenan, Miss Starr, Miss Walker, Miss O'Neil, and
Miss Ulrich. Furthermore, as material for his success, he
has depended upon "Madame Butterfly" (1900 Long),
"Du Barry" (1900), "The Darling of the Gods" (1902
Long), "Sweet Kitty Bellairs" (1903 - dramatization),
"Adrea" (1905- Long), "The Girl of the Golden West”
(1905), "The Rose of the Rancho" (1906 - Tully), "The
Grand Army Man" (1907- Phelps-Short). To this list
may be added his assistance as manager in the success of
"The Auctioneer" and "The Music Master", by Charles
Klein, and of "The Warrens of Virginia", by William C. De
Mille, the son of his old collaborator.2
1
What are the elements that have marked Mr. Belasco, or, it
would be more in order to ask, on what special elements has
Mr. Belasco placed the stamp of his own temperament and
1 Made into an opera by Puccini, and sung at the Metropolitan Opera House during
the season of 1910-1911.
2 Among Mr. Belasco's other successes may be mentioned "The Lily" (1910), by
himself, and "The Concert", adapted from the German by Leo Ditrichstein.
Walter's "The Easiest Way" (1909) created great discussion in New York, but was
debarred, by act of the mayor, from Boston. During the Spring of 1911, he pre-
sented William De Mille's "The Woman."
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David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
genius? I have been fortunate in having before me the stage
copies of his important dramas, and I cannot but marvel at the
strokes which are made by his unerring eye, unerring in the
sense that they seem always to fulfil the special requirement
which he at the moment needs. The intricate movement in
the first act of “Zaza", the filmy threads of broken dialogue,
the minute directions of the dressing-room scene, where,
not for a moment, even in the reading, is the imagina-
tion left in doubt as to the details of business here is the
painter, in his most impressionistic manner, flinging splashes of
humanity against a canvas, splashes which draw together the
moment they are brought in continuous and active relation
one with the other.
"The Darling of the Gods", overweighty as it was in its
mounting, would be difficult to follow in the manuscript, were
Mr. Belasco's infinite care of small matters not conscientiously
set down. Even so, the demand this play makes on the
imagination, in addition to the amount of imagination it
shows in itself, are indication of the visual insight which he
and his collaborator have brought to bear.
I do not contend that light plots, and property plots, and
calcium plots entitle a man to the distinction of playwright;
but the power to conjure up the effective contrasts of high
light and shadow is as much to Mr. Belasco's credit as it
is to the artist who paints upon a large canvas. The stage
settings, sometimes overrich in detail, are nevertheless almost
always unfailing in their atmospheric effects. The courtesan,
Du Barry, was given a setting which balanced the savage
abandon of her nature with the licentious terrorism of the
period. "Adrea", barbaric throughout, did not fail to create
a disgust which was too strong to be counteracted by the moment
of sacrifice in the end. These were not characteristics which
were new to Mr. Belasco; they were evident in him long before,
even though they were not fully developed. Some may think
that Sardou was the influence behind this, but the young
dramatist had written "La Belle Russe" before Fanny Daven-
port began with "Fedora" in a list which ended with "Gis-
monda." It was simply the innate genius of the stage
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The American Dramatist
manager who may not write for literature, but who, while he
remains active, is a constant source of pleasure.
There is nothing so disillusionizing as an empty theatre
in daylight; the gaping orchestra chairs show the absence
of a responsive crowd; the space from pit to dome, from
centre stage to family circle, is like an empty shell waiting
for sound and light. But, if you possess even the slightest
sense of the theatre, the scenery with its daub of paint, the
switchboard with its banks of levers, the stage hands in their
shirt-sleeves, will represent the elements of a great art, whose
spirit gilds the mechanics of the play.
Take for granted that the scene is naught but a house of
cards, that the back-drop on close view is no more nor less.
than a splash of color, behind it all is the instinct that
creates perspective and atmosphere from the flat. The
mechanics of the stage have been brought to such perfection
that their misuse instantly reveals the lack of the artist.
The stage is an organism, a whole of many parts; the
idea set in dialogue and action must be clothed in speech,
light, and scene. This is the supreme work of the stage
manager, to draw these things together in their truest
relationship.
One has a right to speak of the psychology of the switch-
board, to humanize the mechanics of the theatre. The elec-
trician holds Nature in his hands; he has thought out the
elements of a prairie sun, and he measures its intensity by
the number of switches in use. At rehearsals he has diffused
the scene with many moonlights, until the Italian glamor
appealed to his feeling. The stage has changed since the
time Mary Anderson's Juliet faced the headlight of a loco-
motive, held aloft as the inconstant moon by a Negro boy.
Psychology is essentially a fluid state, and the progress of
electricity has made it possible for stage lighting to be fluid,
to be subject to imperceptible shades, to absorb the individual
rays in a general suffusion.
Not one of our present-day managers has so profited by the
response of the electric switchboard to human psychology
as Mr. Belasco; even the most ardent disciples of the "new
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David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
art" have not shown any more feeling in their mixture of light
and color. In his hands it is the very essence of atmosphere,
the very indicator of the scene's tone. Whether it be the
enervating blaze of sunlight in the opening act of "The Rose
of the Rancho", or the cold gray dawn after the night's
anguish in "Madame Butterfly", the result represents no
mechanical accident. Once, not so long ago, effect used to
be entirely artificial; the villain's entrance was heralded by
dark, restless music from a few violins, and by the roll of a
kettledrum. A green spot-light rested on his face. To-day,
Mr. Belasco has driven incidental sentimentality from his
orchestra by his dependence upon the switchboard.
V
What do we mean by the psychology of stage lighting?
Simply that every emotional effect of large import results
in a corresponding direction being given to the electrician.
To take an external example, suppose the stage in semi-
darkness; a character enters with a lighted candle. One
naturally expects an increase in light, but the intensity must
move across the stage with the movement of the candle.
It is here that the electrician, from his platform, plays upon
his switchboard. By a system of interlocking, and of dim-
ming the flow of current, he can send across the "foots" or
their substitute the suffused light without “foots” — a
flare of lights to follow the candle flame; one bulb is made
to glow as the other fades.
Such is the ease of gaining an elementary effect, but the
principle is the same, however complicated the requirement.
In his studio, Mr. Belasco first imagines his canvas; he then
places his "light plots" in the hands of his electrician for
fulfilment. At rehearsal he adds to, modifies, rejects, fusing
the whole as a painter does with his brush. His stage direc-
tions at first become mere skeleton notes of transitory feeling.
His assistant stands near, pencil in hand, watching the restless
move of the manager, searching among the lights for what he
wants. The switchboard is taxed to its uttermost, mixing
247
The American Dramatist
color to accord with a certain quality of shadow in Mr. Be-
lasco's mind.
If a drama is big, if an actor's art is expressive, a story may
often be ably suggested by pantomime; its emotional color,
range, and variation in the same way may be sketched in light.
Having rehearsed his company beyond the "letter perfect
point, Mr. Belasco assembles them for light effects. His
experiments are as much with you as on you. Not only must.
the actors harmonize among themselves, but also with the
lights. To their own emotional interpretation of a rôle, they
must add the atmospheric effect of the stage light. For six
minutes the curtain was up before a word was spoken in
"The Rose of the Rancho." It was a somnolent scene; those
who saw it felt the drowsy vapor of the glow, the still air, and
the enervating heat. Let us discount the statement of the
press-agent that "so realistic was the scene, it made the stage
carpenters drowsy", and be satisfied with the plausible fact
that the imagination of the actor caused the switchboard to
react upon himself.
Undoubtedly, a stage manager should make his people
feel the lights; if the scene is cold, the actor should find it
easy to shiver within the bleak, steely rays devoid of all warm
color. In this way imitation approaches reality; the actor
responds by absorbing every element, condition, or circum-
stance, in order to make his body warm or cold, as the case.
may be.
Every electrician is in possession of his cue, knows the
story of the play, and is made to calculate the emotional
requirements in terms of his switchboard. He is no machine,
no mere feeder of the stage with light. The human tempo of
the situation pulses in his veins; he lowers or raises his levers
until every blemish is removed. There must be no blotch,
no streaks, for the lights should glide; sharp edges should be
made to blend.
In that rehearsal for lights, the manager must consider the
balance of white surface and shadow. A glint is thrown on
a ribbon, a bit of lace, a bare arm or neck; this must be
balanced by the absence of light somewhere else. The
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David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
switchboard must have a tempo regulated to accord with the
beat of emotion. Not only that, but the light is guided by
the color of a costume, toned to contrast with other dresses
possibly; even the hair limits the intensity of light, and if
the features of an actor are strong, a strong current upon
the face would only serve to reveal a "war map" of lines.
A white light brings disillusionment in its path.
Rehearsal is a matter of constant shifting; a thousand and
one directions are given which never find their way on the
prompter's script of the play. "I think I'll make that so and
so," says the Stage Manager, and the Carpenter looks askance
at the Electrician, while the Scene Painter goes back to his
pots and brushes, to try again some perspective cliff or shore.
"I not only want a moon, but a Japanese moon," cried Mr.
Belasco, during a rehearsal of "The Darling of the Gods."
In the matter of the switchboard, Mr. Belasco stands in
a new light. He is not the conventional stage manager; he
is a lover of Nature, having felt the close of day on the plains,
and seen the first streak of dawn in Italy. He has been an
investigator of all phases of the physical as well as of the
emotional. He is not merely satisfied with reaching the eye,
but he must strike the heart; his lights are always accessories;
they are made to reinforce or to counteract; they must serve
purpose, otherwise be discarded. At times he places too much
dependence upon such effect; we feel it in the way he "plays
up" a brunette or blonde, working his lights to show her to
the best advantage. But in the majority of cases, his results
are artistic rather than theatrical.
From one of the iron bridges in the flies, flung far above the
proscenium arch on the side, the stage presents to view every
point of vantage. The five sets of border lights, consisting of
two hundred and seventy lamps as an average, the three banks
of bulbs in the "foots",1 the light strips ready to be placed in
any wing, the baby lenses to counteract any false reflection of
the "foots" when shadow is thrown on the face at inopportune
moments, the large lenses on the bridges, the lamps centred
on particular stage accessories, the stereopticon for cloud
¹ Mr. Belasco was among the first in America to do away with the "foots."
249
The American Dramatist
effects during a storm or sun or moonlight, with these the
electrician, at the final rehearsal, has "fixed" his diagram,
which he has by him for the first few regular performances.
Amber, blue, red, and white are the general colors in use
on the stage, besides the direct flow of limelight. But not
always will the standard color do; then the electrician mixes
his own stain and dips the incandescent bulbs therein. The
hard problem for him to consider is not how to reach the
proper light out of darkness; it were easy thus to obtain a
realistic sun.
But the difficult matter is to have the sun come
after the appearance of a gray dawn; in other words, to ob-
tain light effects out of light.
The psychology of the switchboard is largely the problem of
counteracting shadows, of bringing emotion into high light.
That is why the old idea that tragedy must be given the tragic
tone is an exploded theory, since contrast, rather than agree-
ment, is the electrician's asset. Death lurks in the sunlight
as well as in the shadow. Was it not in Forbes-Robertson's
"Hamlet" that Ophelia came, broken-minded, into an
orchard pink with the touch of Spring?
There is not an inch of surface on the stage that cannot be
subjected to a flood of light, which may be softened or intensi-
fied slowly by means of simplicity dimmers, devices even
more responsive than the cock of a gas-jet. So important a
matter is the switchboard, that a portable one, in no way as
extensive as the stationary one, is carried on the road as an
important part of the play's emotional effect.
In "The Rose of the Rancho", during the course of the
first scene, with the sun beating down on the Mission garden,
with the Padre asleep on his vine-covered porch, the elec-
trician is busy at the switch. Some lenses are focussed for
light, others for shadow, amber is thrown upon the gate,
straw medium paints the orange tree. A rose bush must
have a special ray upon it, while the arbor, and certain roses,
must catch the glint of sunlight. One lens strikes the foun-
tain, centered on the stage, coloring the stone seat upon which
Juanita flirts with Kearney. All the while the baby lens is
kept busy spotting the chief actors on the stage.
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David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
The significant part of psychology as applied to stage
lighting is that, in the highest perfection of its handling, it is
never fixed, particularly in plays dependent upon special
atmosphere. If the sunlight strikes the broad front of the
Mission steeple at the top, the same intensity hardly suffices
to flood the entire building. As the play progresses, the day
progresses, and the lights vary; these changes occur in accord-
ance with the electrician's cues. The siesta hour of the first
act approaches the eventide, and Juanita falls deeper in love
with the "Gringo" Kearney, as the shadows grow more and
more. Thus the "light plot" reads:
"At cue: 'Meet me at my posada', change lenses Nos. 7,
5, 3, on lower bridge to light amber, also lens on upper bridge
R., and lenses on stage R. 3E.; also lens back stage on bridge
L., and the four open boxes in 3. Put on Ist border blue to
and 2d, 3d, and 4th borders red to full; take down whites
to 1."
It may read a little differently now, for Mr. Belasco is not
behindhand in giving place to "new." His theatre may not
have an horizant, but the "wizard" of the switchboard reaches
the same effects in different ways.
55
This shorthand notation was, and still is, indicative of
mechanical response; levers are handled like the shift key of
a typewriter, banks of lights are interlocked, so as to respond
to one force at the same time. Then comes Kearney's caress-
ing words: "Let me hold your little brown hand in mine.
Many the lovers who have strayed in a garden of roses during
the gathering twilight which creeps upon them! But here on
the stage there must be a "change of all lenses on bridges and
open boxes to red, except the two on bridge left, which go to
salmon; take down foots to, and amber borders to ; also
dim the tubular lamps on window and arbor R."
All the time the scene grows darker; the lamp on the rose
bush is blinded, the fountain is cast in shadow, the belfry is
made misty, while the blues begin to mingle with the reds for
evening.
Finally, there is uttered Juanita's cry of love as Kearney
leaves her, determined on saving her property from the land-
251
The American Dramatist
I
grabbers, looting California. Hence, at cue, "Oh, Gringo,
why did you come ?"-"Slowly pass amber color over baby
lens in 1 R. (This lamp is on Juanita at the time; the color
is just passed over the lamp and taken off again while the
line is spoken.) At same cue, take off both lamps in flies,
L. 1E. This light stands till end of act."
Here one has suggested only a fractional part of the
mechanics behind the stage - the psychology of the switch-
board, which is only effective when employed with reticence,
with reason, with intelligent understanding, with feeling.
There is the cartoon use of light, as seen in the spotter lime-
streak following the clown in the circus; there is a melo-
dramatic use of light, noted in the splotch of green thrown
upon the face of Mansfield while he changed from Jekyll to
Hyde.
But the artist at the switchboard is a believer in the
minor notes as the best notes, and, as regards Mr. Belasco's
management, it might be truly claimed he does not act with-
out reason. He has often said he does not believe in dragging
in sound simply for the sake of sound; a wise principle to
uphold, even if it is not always followed.
"The Rose of the Rancho" serves our purpose for illustrat-
ing the psychology of the switchboard, because its atmosphere
involved constantly shifting light; any one of Mr. Belasco's
plays largely depends upon accessory of this character, and
upon the mechanics demanding continual attention. In the
third act of his California romance, we are given a dark stage
creeping to full light: reds and blues which succumb to early
dawn ambers. The scene is on the roof, Kearney waiting
for the day. From the main switch the electrician is working
his "dimmers" slowly; some clusters of blue for instance
must take a generous ten minutes to gain full intensity.
Here and there on the stage "boards", at places known as
pockets, which are merely indicated spots where light plugs
may be inserted, a connecting link is to be had between a lamp
and the main current. The electrician can only manage the
general circuit of "foots" and "borders" and house lights;
he has assistants who are drilled by him to work the separate
lanterns from the wings and the bridges. Every movement
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David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
of the persons on that supposed roof is attended by a cor-
responding balance of incandescence.
The ordinary dress-suit, drawing-room comedy has a
fixed light which does not concern itself greatly with the
switchboard. But, whenever the latter is used, when the light
values are supposed to move for the sake of theatrical effects,
so broad as to hide physiological consistency, then the lack
of taste is felt as well as seen. There is certain to be incon-
gruity of color; there are streaks of light, ill-concealed, if
concealed at all, by the lanterns which, in the hands of the
thinking mechanic, usually absorb and blend when necessary.
We once had a production of “A Midsummer Night's Dream",
more Edison than Shakespeare, more mechanical device than
Puck, more accessory than art. On the other hand, Forbes-
Robertson's desert scene in Shaw's "chronicle" play, where
Cæsar first glimpses Cleopatra in the arms of the Sphinx, was
made spacious merely through the varying of blue shadows on
an almost empty stage, with a back drop of endless sky.
We have been on the road to a great revolution in the
pyschology of the switchboard. Ever since Garrick brought
with him from France the footlight which replaced the ancient
chandelier, we have been studying how to rid ourselves of it,
and we have done so; we have a right to discard anything, to
introduce any device which will suit our purpose, and still
retain the object of illusion while enriching the picture.
Many of Mr. Belasco's plays, as plays, are lacking in the
qualities which his scenic artistry for the moment supplies.
"The Girl of the Golden West" is an excellent example of
such. The moving scene down the mountainside to the door
of the saloon did succeed marvelously in taking one out of
the street and away from the city.
But that Mr. Belasco, with his scenery and with his stage
business, is inventive, becomes evident in any of his plays.
Take "The Rose of the Rancho", where Juanita and Kearney
are seated by the well; the lover moves nearer and nearer,
whereupon she seizes the gourd and throws water on the seat
between them a stroke of business worth a page of dialogue.
Take "The Warrens of Virginia" after the war, the South-
253
The American Dramatist
ern General is dozing in his garden; for the space of a second,
one hears the sigh of the wind, the spectral roll of drums, the
spirit breathing of the bugles and he wakens all done
with the deft modulation which might have been turned into
bathos by the slightest over-accentuation. The manager is
thus painting for others.
These were the qualities marking David Belasco, which
represented his place in American Drama during the nineties.
He was the creative manager who wrote his plays by acting
them; who, faced by two stenographers, evolved his char-
acters and situations in actual movement, now thinking of a
speech which he pinned up somewhere for his last act, again
jotting down some business, some note about this scene or that,
but always moving surely toward the completion of the first
draft, so as to begin rehearsals. Were some of his plays, like
"The Darling of the Gods", published just as they were
typewritten for the stage, they would be invaluable texts for
the amateur playwright; they would point to the platitudi-
nous but none the less absolute fact that the theatre, taken as
a whole, demands that the playwright must be master of
more than one set of tools.
VI
Since those days of early experiment with the switchboard,
that Belasco carried on so unremittingly, a great change has
come upon the American Theatre. The artist with his brush
has driven away the cobwebs of a past scenic art, and has
illustrated a philosophy of decoration that adds much to the
inner value of the play. Belasco has not paused at his switch-
board and let the innovators catch him napping. He has done
what he deemed best for his stage, and has not given thought
to trouble or cost. Of course, in his reception of the art
theories of Gordon Craig and Max Reinhardt, he has been.
careful to emphasize that they have not after all been such
innovators. And he has repeatedly called attention to the
fact that, in his long experience, he has himself done without
"foots" before they were obliterated altogether as harmful
creators of unnecessary shadows; that he has used a fore-
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David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
stage in accord with the traditions of the Elizabethans; that,
though his stage shows no horizant, he has through his
switchboard gained the same atmospheric effects.
In other words, the "new" movement to Belasco is largely
the exploitation of eccentricity; it is largely an illustration
that a man is never a prophet in his own country. He listens
to the exponents of "unity of production" and smiles: for,
if there is one thing about Belasco and his numerous attrac-
tions, it is that unity is stamped all over them. He has been
a director, with absolute say, for so long a while, that the
producing artist does not seem to be a "new" phenomenon to
him. He has been attacked as though the enemy of such
advances in stagecraft, and he has remained quiet. But now
there seems to be an inclination on his part to claim his own.
He sees the theatre moving nearer to Nature: and he resents
any one claiming that he has not been true to this Nature he
has worshipped from his first entrance into the theatre.
Strange the conflicting elements in the man's artistic
makeup. He must give each phase of himself its true value.
He will not believe that the theatre's salvation is entirely cen-
tred in the producer's hand- the producer who is only one
of three in the life of a drama. For, having been an actor, he
can see the importance of the actor's position, and being, by
instinct, a dramatist, he claims that the play is after all of
some importance. His long experience in the theatre, where
he has seen movements come and go, has served to make him
reticent as to innovation. He regards experiment as healthy,
but as subject to further test, and as dependent on acceptance
by theatregoers. True to his nature, he scouts impression-
ism, as he has scouted symbolism for itself alone. He
writes:
It is the claim of the radical impressionsts that to repro-
duce the effects of Nature faithfully in the theatre is to stifle
imagination and to distract attention from the beauty of the
spoken word of the play. It is argued that a few violent
splotches of green upon a drapery can better express to an
audience the idea of a forest than the actual reproduction in
painting, and in light effects, of that forest. Or that a few
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The American Dramatist
vivid, solid colors spread over an unstable back-cloth can
suggest to the mind the brilliant glories of a summer sunset.
I confess that I cannot follow the theories of theoretical im-
pressionism to such lengths.
To a man used to copying Nature - going to every extreme
to gain his effects - simplicity of suggestion is therefore diffi-
cult to compass, to understand. There is something for Be-
lasco's side of the argument when he says that the eccentric
is as disconcerting as the naturalism of his endeavor. That he
cannot see the value of simplicity is a condition that can only
be explained by examining into the matter of his taste: the
æsthetics of the Belasco theatre might at times be challenged,
however much his effort be subject to praise.
Belasco's conservatism, however, does not leave him quies-
cent in his feeling for stage effect. He loves the problems of
stagecraft, and, though he watches the innovations of others,
and often profits by their suggestion
even as they have
profited by what he has done in his own workshop-he
continues, with the new facilities of the switchboard, to arrive
at what he wants. What he wants is not what the younger
generation are seeking. And there the gap between them
widens. With no real cause, however. For Belasco is work-
ing for the good of the theatre as he sees it. He has always.
had an unceasing enthusiasm for his work; he has always been
eager to make discoveries; he is never away from his studio.
He has clearly in mind what he wants to do for fifteen years
ahead. It is that ceaseless endeavor of his which makes him
the most distinctive figure we have to-day in the American
Theatre. There may be groups who hold in their hands
equally as virile a contribution to be made. They are open-
ing vistas which Belasco cannot see. But he has already
opened vistas which they are not generous enough to recog-
nize. His decoration as Chevalier de l'Ordre National de la
Legion d'Honneur was not a misplaced one. His influence has
been a distinctly worthy one. He was in advance of the new
movement, and prepared some of the way for it.
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David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
VII
I have before me a small booklet, "Plays Produced under
the Stage Direction of David Belasco", issued in 1925. It
contains nearly fifty pages of human endeavor on the part of
David Belasco, as actor, author, producer, collaborator, and
adapter. It reveals plainly the various stages through which
he has passed to his present position. There is no man in the
theatre with a better perspective of the history of American
Drama, and what it has had to contend with since the gold
fever frenzy of California days. Before him has passed the
country's best acting: all the better is he able to fathom the
artistic abilities and limitations of our present-day players.
He has been a worker in the theatre when stage effects were of
the crudest, and he has aided in raising the stage from those
crudities. He has worked in the stock period, when, as a
stock dramatist, he learned the mere carpentry of stage
technique. From arrant melodrama he has passed along.
successive experiments through which playwriting had to go
before it reached its present state of literary renaissance.
He has combatted the many reactionary fashions which kept
the American Drama from gaining strength, and winning the
confidence of the theatregoer. He passed through an era
when French plays, not protected by copyright, became any
manager's property; and he has seen different versions of the
same play produced on rival stages a grab-bag method of
competition, before which the native dramatist had to suc-
cumb. He worked under the driving personality of Dion
Boucicault, and probably learned from him the easy method
by which new plays could be made from old ones.
But a reading of his life, whether it be his own sketchy story
or William Winter's verbose record, will illustrate how far-
reaching his associations have been, how helpful his personal
initiative. His collaboration with Herne, with Gillette, with
Howard, with Thomas is not to be ignored; his fight for inde-
pendence in the face of theatre monopoly forms an excellent
page in his record; his discovery and making of players
measure his genuine forcefulness as a director. While we
257
The American Dramatist
must regard him here as a playwright, his final value will be on
the side of the American Theatre. His productions of other
men's work have swallowed up his own efforts as a dramatist.
But each play given by him has displayed his own creative
touch a touch often which would have been better expended
on material of better quality. In his capacity as a producer,
he has probably been more conservative, more out of the pale
of the "new" movement, than in any other direction. I have
already described his love of the switchboard in the early nine-
teen-hundreds: that switchboard has changed only in its
accessories; in its spirit it is the same. Belasco is still inter-
ested in the picture-frame drama. Since he finished "The
Return of Peter Grimm", he himself has had little time to
write. He has adapted well: "The Secret" is a bit of technical
expertness no one need discount. But, in the long list of plays
seen on his stage, none within recent years has moved the
imagination deeply or stirred the intellect with any sense of
permanent value. He has in all of his attractions whether
Mack's "Tiger Rose", Hopwood's "The Gold-Diggers",
Guitry's "Deburau" or "The Grand Duke", Ervine's "Mary,
Mary, Quite Contrary' -shown his deftness, his care and
love of detail. To all of these plays he has drawn the best of
dramatic talent. But so many plays in the "new" era he has
let pass! He has not seen them for his theatre. And they
have gone to the "new" theatre, where they have strength-
ened a theatre era out of which Belasco seems to want
to remain.
He quotes in the little bibliography, privately printed, two
lines which are descriptive of him. Goethe says, "Without
pause and without haste." That has been characteristic of
David Belasco. He has followed his own gait: he has not
been pushed into competition. To himself he is sufficient,
and his loyal playgoers applaud him. Shakespeare says,
"I am not weary, and 'tis long to night!" The indefatigable
energy of the producer, the love of the theatre that is in
him, make of Belasco a veritable boy of the playhouse. He
still is in love with his bag of tricks. He produced Mack's
"The Dove" with relish, declaring to his first-night audience
258
David Belasco and Psychology of the Switchboard
that he knew it would be good to them, as it was to him, to
have a veritable "piece of the theatre", a true theatrical
concoction. He presented David Warfield, in "The Merchant
of Venice", with his mind's eye on the days of the golden acting
of Booth and McCullough, and in the best traditions of
Charles Kean and Henry Irving. When one considers how
much that was bad in the theatrical past David Belasco has
escaped; when one realizes that in the present he is watched by
the
younger generation, even though they scorn him; when one
hears with what eagerness players seek his direction, one must
place David Belasco on the side of the living theatre, rather
than account him a rank reactionary, as the radicals are prone
to call him.
259
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Forms of American DramA: COMEDY AND THE AMERICAN
DRAMATIST EDWARD HARRIGAN AND CHARLES HOYT,
GEORGE ADE AND GEORGE M. COHAN IN PARTICULAR
THE American Theatre has created no special form of
drama; it has not been original heretofore, in its rhythm of
expression. It has modified types, it has infused much pic-
turesque detail into local condition, it has expressed rather
crudely all that is meant by American "uplift", but it has
done so in form imitative of English and Continental examples.
But, at the present time, the American theatregoer is be-
coming conscious of form, inasmuch as ideas are in the air
which cannot be satisfied with the old molds. If Augustus
Thomas had had any spark of mysticism about him, he would
have expressed his belief in telepathy through other channels
than direct narrative; if the comic opera librettist had been
brought up in the school of W. S. Gilbert, his "book" would
have been more than a transitory vehicle; if the dramatist,
who turned novels into plays, had only realized that even a
dramatization has a technique and a unity apart from the
novel itself, there would have been fewer failures in that
direction.
The time is ripe for new form, and the only way in which
we can determine what that shall be is to determine the real,
true meaning of fundamental principles underlying the art.
In our day we have seen changes and modifications in several
forms; we have even witnessed the creation of special molds
for special amusements. Melodrama rose to a certain pitch.
260
Forms of American Drama
of violence, then waned; musical comedy developed to a cer-
tain point, and remained there; ragtime music shaped a lyric
as ungainly as the cakewalk dance; vaudeville, through the
efforts of Tony Pastor, and later of Proctor and Keith, was
evolved from the variety. Yet, as regards the latter, we have
seen it persist, not only in vaudeville, but in comic opera as
well. And now jazz and expressionism point the way.
It is only in the minor forms of theatrical art that we retro-
graded. In this very problem of comic opera, we reverted
far from such a type of musical entertainment as Gilbert and
Sullivan used to give. Music, song, and dance were welded
together in a "show" that depended more on its topical "hit"
than on any meaning the piece as a whole might have. Musi-
cal comedy has been nothing more nor less than the means of
exploiting vaudeville reputation and variety glitter.
In fact, modern musical comedy is a hybrid type, of which
the original was John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" (1728),
and it allows one to introduce any feature into the entertain-
ment without disturbing the plot. In days gone by Harry
B. Smith, author of "Rob Roy", "Robin Hood", "The
Fortune Teller", and "The Wizard of the Nile"; Henry
Blossom, who wrote the "books" for "The Yankee Consul",
"Mlle. Modiste", and "The Red Mill"; Frank Pixley, who
did "The Burgomaster", "King Dodo", and "The Prince
of Pilsen" they would have told you that the chief difficulty
was in "boosting" a "book" after it was written, in securing
the proper interpolated lyrics. George V. Hobart not only
turned out scores of these flimsy "books", but he was regarded
as a general renovator. Musical comedy was in constant
need of a steady stream of oxygen.
Fortunes have been made in the musical comedy field. The
coöperation of Edgar Smith with Weber and Fields; of
John McNally with the Rogers Brothers; the individual
coups of Glen Macdonough's "The Wizard of Oz” and “Babes
in Toyland", of Owen Hall's "Florodora", of Hugh Morton's
"The Belle of New York" these are sufficient evidences of
the popularity of the form, apart from its permanence or its
quality. The facts are these. George Ade's "The Sultan of
261
The American Dramatist
Sulu" was only a moderate success, yet it brought him a large
income. George M. Cohan, librettist, composer, and actor,
whose songs sell in the music stores, netting him a fortune, has
been known to draw over three thousand dollars weekly as
a librettist alone. That is what "Little Johnny Jones",
'Forty-five Minutes from Broadway”, and “Yankee Doodle"
did for him, in days gone by.
But there is not one of these librettists or of these composers
whose work has withstood more than a decade. There is
no “book” that has had the vitality of Gilbert's "Patience",
or "H. M. S. Pinafore", or "The Mikado." Not one of these
names will outlast more than two generations, whereas
Meilhac and Halévy are unmistakably identified with Bizet
and Prosper Mérimée in "Carmen." Even such a trans-
planted and effective piece as Lehar's "The Merry Widow"
was imitated, until the imitations dimmed its freshness. For
the "book" was poor.
Experience shows that musical comedy abhorred consis-
tency; it was a loose type, even as vaudeville is a loose type.
It still is a loose type. These forms are full of tricks. Vaude-
ville, it is true, has become legitimitized by the introduction of
the high-class artist, who gives a form of play in which our
American dramatist would do well to indulge; I mean, the
playlet. And the custom has now become so fixed that the
best actor, no matter what his winter's work may be, does not
disdain the comfortable fortune awaiting him in a few weeks'
vaudeville. In this way Henry Miller has utilized Clyde
Fitch's "Frédéric Lemaître." Vaudeville, however, has the
pernicious effect of moving pictures; the audience is not held
by any
unified or consecutive interest; it is, in fact, one of the
most casual of entertainments. Out from vaudeville has
come excellent material, not of the variety type, but of the art
type. Chevalier and Lauder and Genée have danced and
sung, Mrs. Campbell has acted, and historians like to call to
mind the days when even Edwin Booth did not disdain to
blacken his face, or Edwin Forrest to dance a jig.
The chief characteristics of vaudeville will remain, however
much its good points are abused by the variety inheritance.
262

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EARLY MINSTRELS, FORERUNNERS OF THE AGE OF JAZZ
"Music, song, and dance were welded together in a 'show.""
Reproductions from the originals in the Houdini Collection.

Forms of American Drama
It is a form dependent on one's like for disassociation of ideas;
it is amusement cultivating nervous strain rather than result-
ing in permanent effect. It has a "time clock" value.
The dramatization of novels cannot be called a new form,
for Shakespeare looms in the past, an inimitable adapter of
the conte. Professor Matthews, in his "Pen and Ink", has a
suggestive chapter on this process, and we note that it has
become a custom in every country to benefit by the inventive
faculty of the novelist. For, while I have never been able to
agree with Paul M. Potter, adapter of "Trilby", that the
passionate story is all an audience seeks, I do believe that an
interesting story, in novel form, might be very well utilized
by the dramatist, but, mind you, in the dramatist's way.
In other words, the latter must take liberties with the former,
in so far as the technique of the latter differs from that of the
former.
Mr. Potter was rash when he claimed that the drama was
not dependent upon the intellectual element. But it is easy
to fall into platitudes, and Mr. Potter's belief that "if the
feelings of the audience are rightly moved, the play suc-
ceeds," proved nothing. For audiences are moved intellectu-
ally as well as passionately, and, what is more, they have a
common spirit which passion only indirectly appeals to.
When one looks back on "The Eternal City", "The Only
Way", "The Prisoner of Zenda", "When Knighthood was
in Flower", "Janice Meredith", and countless other drama-
tizations, when one reviews the work of Potter, of Rose, of
Kester, and of an increasing host, one is tempted to believe
that dramatization has become a form a manufactured
form readily manipulated, but built only to last a season.
We have seen how often the American dramatist has either
dramatized or adapted. Boucicault lived upon the process;
it even dulled his originality, though it did not paralyze his
inventive resources.
But the ease with which novels have been turned into plays.
has created a mistaken idea in the novelist regarding the
stage. The process has been detrimental to the drama as well
as to the novel. There is no reason, however, why lasting plays
263
The American Dramatist
should not be taken from books, save that where there is a
slavish dependence upon the story as told, there is a conse-
quent lack of intensity and of close technique. The reading
public scares the dramatizer, for, when a book is popular
and only popular books are dramatized - the dramatist has
to keep faith with what the public already knows. Besides
which, the public has shifted its loyalty somewhat. I am suspi-
cious that they would much prefer to have a novel screened
than dramatized. They are sure of getting more of the novel.
II
I do not think that it is so necessary for the student of
American Drama to trace minutely the varying forms in which
drama expresses itself. It is enough that we are imitative
in farce, in comedy, in social drama, in the problem play, in
every form imported from abroad. What should concern us,
however, is a subject that narrows itself down to two points:
comedy on one hand, and tragedy on the other. How fare
these with us, not as form, but as spirit; not as convention,
but as attitude, as national outlook?
If our American humor is what we claim it to be, then
our comedy should be rich. And no one may complain of
this, remembering Mark Twain, George Ade, and Peter F.
Dunne (Mr. Dooley). If our American sanity is a fact, then
our recognition of the Tragic Spirit, as opposed to any special
form of tragedy, should be pronounced. Our American
dramatists of the closet-drama employed the old classic form
of catastrophe, but that has passed out of date with the com-
ing of modern technique. Our early American humorists
gave types caricatured as we have seen in Sellers, in Solon
Shingle, and in others, but the human view, which lies at the
basis of realism, has modified every form of comedy and trag-
edy, and there is only left the deep and abiding spirit of each
with which to cope.
264
Forms of American Drama: The Tragic Spirit
III
There is no business more speculative than that of defining
things; lexicographers are not given the prophetic vision, and
only one, so far - Doctor Johnson has possessed the liter-
ary sense. No matter what limitation we place upon the
meaning of a word, time overrides it and creates a periodic
point of view.
Since Aristotle framed his classic definition of tragedy, we
have been called upon to reckon with drama in terms of
Shakespeare on one hand, and in terms of Ibsen and Maeter-
linck on the other. Literary history has taught us to be
wary of declaring old formulæ useless. Hence, there has
become evolved a type of criticism which is more interesting
because of its angle of vision than because it throws any
deep and abiding light upon the fundamental starting point.
Professor Ashley Thorndike wrote a volume for a series
called "The Types of English Literature", and he gave it the
inclusive title of "Tragedy." What the reader finds to be
the case is that, beginning with certain general premises,
he discusses the modifications attendant upon all practice, and
in this case subject to national characteristics. And, after
reading through the chapters, a truth is impressed upon us:
tragedy, as a mere form, is not constant, but is a convention
of art, subject to conventional social ideas and ideals. The
Tragic Spirit behind the sequence of things, or rather within
and coincident with the evolution of humanity, is more eter-
nal and more universal.
We have not yet had a treatise on the Tragic Spirit that
has not paid greater attention to the comparative estimate of
dramatists, in the university or academic manner, than to the
psychological reasons for the existence of the spirit itself.
Gummere considered the vocero, or tribal songs of grief; here
is a primitive basis, unhindered by any cumbersome body of
literature, — a basis upon which to reach some physical recog-
nition of tragedy. Perhaps, in a small and not wholly satis-
factory manner, W. L. Courtney has suggested quite as much
of the historical perspective, in a survey of "The Idea of
265
The American Dramatist
Tragedy", as one would need, in order to arrive at some con-
ception of the tragic, not as a form but as a principle.
Now, what has happened in this wild and seemingly in-
effectual groping for the defining marks of tragedy? Aris-
totle, in true greatness of the Greek spirit, attempting to
reduce the problem to its simplest points, yet including all its
essential connections with life, as the Greek philosophers saw
life, used general rather than specific terms: "Tragedy is an
imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a cer-
tain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of
artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate
parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative;
through pity and fear effecting the proper katharsis, or purga-
tion, of these emotions."
The danger of literary study is that, too often, we are
side-tracked by minor interesting problems. Not only are.
there students working in the oppressive style so well exem-
plified in Dr. Schelling's "Elizabethan Drama", where
streams of fact measure a certain orderliness of mind, without
expressing the breadth of spiritual view - forgetful of the
life and of the personality in the fractional difference of the
fact but a literature has grown up around the interpreta-
tion of a word. In Butcher's translation of Aristotle, he
analyzes the Greek conception of “the function of tragedy",
and deals with those critics, including Lessing and Goethe,
who have debated and challenged the translation of the word
katharsis, or purgation. You see how subtly one may be
drawn into a profound discussion of the ethics of an art, losing
sight of the essentials under consideration.
The subject is a big one and a human one; on one hand, you
have the conventions of the stage in different ages, affecting
the form of tragedy; on the other, there are the moral and
social standards which have moved the individual along the
scale of increasing importance. We have had considered for
us Greek tragedy, Roman tragedy, and, in modern times, trag-
edy reacted upon by English, French, German, Spanish, and
Italian temperament. But the basic reasons for the support
and development of the Tragic Spirit, whatever the environ-
266
Forms of American Drama: The Tragic Spirit
ment, have not been given a popular exposition. That
Americans, for example, do not care for tragedy as a form of
drama, and blind themselves to the Tragic Spirit, is not due
to a predominating cry in the illogical vein of the Dr. Fell
couplet. Nor may we go so deep as ethnology for an explana-
tion. But a perspective view of our human response to social
and economic fact will give us cause to believe that comedy,
in its richest sense, measures our dramatic taste.
In Greek tragedy, we consider the abstract will struggling
against a religious attitude toward Fate. In Shakespeare,
there is the human will centered upon personality, struggling,
not against Fate, but against time and circumstance. In
Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the stage contracts, becomes centered
in personality affected by all the currents of time. I have
elsewhere said that Ibsen unfailingly approached optimism,
save in the case of "Hedda Gabler" and "The Wild Duck".
through pessimistic channels; that his indignation was health
giving and counteracted the bitter realism of his temporal
contemplation. Maeterlinck, in the tracks of Emerson, has
taken all the abstract ideas of the Greeks
the concepts
of destiny, righteousness, truth moving in an outside
sphere, and has compressed them within and around the
individual.
Tragedy at one time maintained the idea that only the highly
bred, the kings, the princes of the universe, were subject to
the cataclysmic reversals of Nature. But the modern note
accentuates a democratic level, and, as we have "The
Treasure of the Humble", so we, perforce, come to consider
"the tragical in daily life."
"I have grown to believe," writes Maeterlinck, "that an
old man, seated in his arm-chair, waiting patiently, with
his lamp beside him; giving unconscious ear to all the eternal
laws that reign about his house; interpreting, without com-
prehending, the silence of doors and windows, and the quiver-
ing voice of the light; submitting with bent head to the
presence of his soul and his destiny, motionless as he is,
does yet live in reality a deeper, more human, and more uni-
versal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the cap-
•
•
•
267
The American Dramatist
tain who conquers in battle, or 'the husband who avenges his
honor.'
Here, then, the modern concept of tragedy, even in its
formal state, takes on a new aspect; the heightened swing of
blank verse has had to contend with the commonplace vitality
of Ibsen prose. But the essence of the form, which is the
Tragic Spirit, has become almost personal in its source.
In most cases, literary history has shown that dramaturgic
conventions may generally be defied. The comic idea has
spread in such directions as to approach the tragic. Some one
refused lately to write a book on comedy because the subject
was so inclusive in its reach, under modern theatrical nomen-
clature. No longer does a tragedy necessarily imply death;
no longer does death have to occur off the stage. Dramatic
technique has thrown into temporary disuse the solilo-
quy, which largely expressed narratively what Ibsen could
place into seemingly trite dialogue, what Maeterlinck, in
such a perfect piece of psychology and clinical observation as
"The Blind", treats through the atmospheric quality of his
Ollendorfian talk - which is only Ollendorfian, by the way,
when it is badly read.
Maeterlinck has given us "The Life of the Bee"; neither
has science refuted his observation nor economics his social
statement; yet primarily his essay is no text-book on apicul-
ture, no discussion of the social unit. My contention is that
scholarship only half sees, or, more aptly, sees only half of the
subject it considers. Tragedy needs yet to be viewed in the
Maeterlinckian fulness.
This does not mean that one should try to sense instinc-
tively the Tragic Spirit, though the true artist assuredly be-
comes freer as he divines his substance and its essential form,
rather than bases it upon studied or remembered models.
One writes tragedy only when the Tragic Spirit moves him
forcefully, only when it emanates from the material which is
his choice. I quote Maeterlinck: "None but yourself shall
you meet on the highway of Fate. If Judas go forth to-night
it is toward Judas his steps will tend."
Life is so closely knit with the tragic and the comic, that
268
Forms of American Drama: The Tragic Spirit
defining will not account for all the forms that arise there-
from. Abstractly stated, we see the Tragic Spirit as one
unchangeable principle wherein agony, despair, grief, pain,
tend toward the dissolution of the human will. Comedy
may yield to the darker balance of life, becoming serious,
grave, even destructive, yet still we would keep from desig-
nating it as tragedy.
وو
Therefore, even though "A Doll's House" and "Ghosts'
be painful in their outcome, though "Hannele" wrench the
heart with its pathetic child symbol, though Pinero's "Iris"
be the tragic dragging of a woman into the gutter, we theatre-
goers are at a want for the phrase by which to call them.
Ibsen wrote no tragedies during his later life, in the accepted
sense of the word; yet in no modern playwright is the Tragic
Spirit so clearly realizable - which in no way detracts from
his positive influence.
Somehow, form has crept into the popular conception of the
outward expression by which the Tragic Spirit is recognized.
Is it necessary to have the lofty style, the exaggerated speech,
the melancholy event, the florid diction, the stately action?
Then truly the cottage and cabin are no scenes for tragedy, and
the commonplace contains no essence of the same. It is the
great flow of circumstance, of time, of infinitude around the
lowly, that must be reconciled with the accustomed height
and swing of the art form.
Verily, the student's perspective is needed by the writer
on tragedy, but it is his imagination and his constructive
ability that will aid him most. For the Tragic Spirit in man
is that which gives life to tragedy, and the product may only
be a faint reflex of the principle. That is where Greek art
overreached the limits of its time; it was conceived clearly
in the spirit of highest Greek endeavor; it was based upon the
concepts of eternal principles. Thinking was not imitative;
it was pristine. Men spoke like oracles, stating law as above
fact.
Tragedy, as a form of art, is at the present furthest removed
from the American spirit from the democratic spirit. I,
nevertheless, take the attitude that we must not blind our-
269
The American Dramatist
selves to the existence of the Tragic Spirit, even though
we do not accept tragedy, per se, on our boards. Ibsen's
voice proclaims its presence underlying the ills of our
social organism; Maeterlinck's philosophy shows the lowliest
soul confronted by the problems of eternity. We respond in
terms of the comic, but the American people cannot be blind
to the tragic in their lives.
We meet misfortune in the comedy spirit of youth. Take
the ravages of the Civil War and the epic response afterward
among Southerners, who faced the future with supernal faith.
Take the San Francisco earthquake and the reaction that re-
sulted in the rebuilding of a city. No one will deny the pres-
ence there of the tragic element. Perhaps we are prone to
lose sight of it in the reaction of the American spirit itself,
after the tragic event.
Undoubtedly, the old dramatic terms, though rigidly de-
fined by lexicographers, are becoming too narrow to hold the
varying forms. And, no doubt, beginning with the principle
of Ibsen on one hand, and with that of Maeterlinck on the
other, we are tending toward a new form of drama. But, at
present, we need some treatise on tragedy which will esti-
mate its essential spirit as well as its human expression.
We speak frankly in our magazines and on our stage of con-
ditions involving sexual relations and struggles in environ-
ment. Yet, though we see souls dragged to the depths of
despair in Walter's "The Easiest Way", though Jones's
"Mrs. Dane's Defence" gives us another form of social
evil, and Nirdlinger, in "The World and His Wife", rep-
resents the grave consequences of social gossip, still we
find staring us in the face on our program the word
comedy." And our attitude becomes that of comedy to-
ward the vital problems of life, simply because we will not
countenance on our stage, or in our ordinary pursuits, the
form of tragedy, and we have failed to identify in our
national life the presence of a Tragic Spirit.
270
Forms of American Drama: The Comic Spirit
IV
The Comic Spirit is an illusive factor in literary history;
it is a deep and subtle principle in life. Raised from its
Bacchic origin, it has become the very core of sanity, it has
become the true moral corrective of tragedy. Perhaps we
are losing sight of this in our demand that a name cover
many species, until at last the pure type is confounded with
the hybrid. But, nevertheless, for richness of humanity, for
breadth of view, for deep understanding, the Comic Spirit
has a range that embraces a large sweep of life.
To him who views the world aright, there are always the
action and reaction, the tension and relief. In tragedy, the
emotions are so powerfully involved that one is no longer
able to measure the deviation from the normal view; but
a real value of the Comic Spirit depends almost wholly
upon our realization of how far we have deflected from the
truth. We can only reach the latter state when we have
adequately become informed of the former. We arrive at
the pure comic when we have sounded the depths of full
existence.
Now, this view of comedy has been lost to the present-day
playgoer; most of our writers either avoid the subject as
being too abstract for journalistic purposes, or else discuss new
forms herded together under an old name. If we look into the
philosophy of the matter, we find the psychologist too intent
upon the physiological reasons as to why we laugh, and the
metaphysician too loath to handle the subject in the concrete.
Yet, in the scattered cases where writing has been done on the
Comic Spirit, the humanistic aspect has been surely persisting,
and its right to be regarded as the sane view seems justified in
the light of accomplishment.
Within past years, we have had evidences of an existing
sense of the Comic Spirit among our dramatists and players.
J. M. Barrie would approach very near to it, if his piquancy of
outlook was not limited by an agreeable mannerism of narra-
tive style. After a fashion, he defined the true comedy posi-
tion when, in "What Every Woman Knows", Maggie Wylie
271
The American Dramatist
declared that no one could love her who couldn't laugh at her
a little.
When Percy MacKaye wrote "Mater", his intention was
to imbue American conditions with the essence of comedy,
illustrating by way of political satire the fundamental note
in life, that "the test of love and the best of love is
laughter." But his spiritual desire was more defined than his
understanding of the body politic, and Mr. MacKaye's Comic
Spirit, as expressed, came in flashes rather than in even flow.
Paul Kester, essaying to make a drama from “Don Quix-
ote", conceived his knight-errant in terms of situation, rather
than in terms of the rich defects of the character. In this
latter respect, Mr. Sothern was the only one who approached
Cervantes' original conception — to picture the weakness of
over-romantic chivalry, at the same time fully realizing
the innate perfectness of the true gentleman. His acting
raised Mr. Kester's play, by enforcing the personal dignity
of the character.
Take what comedy you will, in which there flows any of
the red blood of life, and, after analysis, you will find that
the Comic Spirit is not haphazard, is not shallow, is not easy
to grasp. One must be very near to life in order to feel it,
and must have asked one's self questions regarding the eter-
nal verities.
I have chosen to confine myself entirely to the Comic
Spirit as affecting drama, realizing at the outset that we
must not identify it exclusively with the stage, inasmuch as
we have Thackeray, Balzac, La Fontaine, Cervantes, Rabe-
lais, and Chaucer richly entitled to consideration in the larger
field. But I am taking the stage, for I am aware that, curi-
ously, it is there that the fullest meaning of the Comic Spirit
is in greatest danger of being submerged. There have been
audiences so regaled by the fun-making of Eddie Foy and
James T. Powers thoroughly clever as far as they went
that those same audiences could not see anywhere in the the-
atre the sweet human defects that bring one to the verge of
tears. Why not, they argued, call "Op o' My Thumb" a
tragedy, and be done with it?
272
Forms of American Drama: The Comic Spirit
All is not gold that glisters, saith the proverb; which means,
theatrically, that our stage is too filled with song and dance
to comprehend the Comic Spirit. Richard Mansfield never
once builded upon our reaching the human and interpretative
importance of Molière's "Misanthrope." He planned simply
to satisfy his own desire to add to the honor of the stage; he
was not disappointed, for Molière was not a popular success.
Yet it is the duty of our critics to point the way to what the
Comic Spirit means in the affairs of life. Our stage revivals
are often received with too much willingness to understand the
archæological shroud, and with no cultural perspective to note
wherein the unctuousness and live quality rest. The "new"
art has done much to make alive a spirit which has too long
been overburdened with scholasticism. It is part of the
university's province to quicken this spirit.
I believe it is given the audience to sense the essence of the
comic without knowing why or how. This is seen in that
instantaneous response of the reading public, for example, to
Aldrich, to Mark Twain, to Holmes; and in the merry laugh
over "Uncle Remus." I see the Comic Spirit swell the meaty
substance of Henry James's sentences. It is not that the
Comic Spirit is wanting, but that our vision of it has been
warped by other forms which are, in comparison, even as
paste jewels. It is surprising that we have so much of the
richness of the comic, in the face of newspaper supplements
and musical comedies. We will have greater plays of the
Comic Spirit just as soon as we are everywhere alive to its
whole value. It were well for us, indeed, when we reach that
stage of culture where we can grasp the humor of our faith,
without in the least relinquishing its sanctity. In deep
reverence, I have heard portions of the Book of Mark read for
the purpose of illustrating the rich essence of Christ's humor.
Comedy and right living are closely related ideas.
At the beginning of a chapter on "Greek and Roman
Comedy", in Professor Matthews' "The Development of the
Drama", the author attempts to indicate a terse distinction
between tragedy, serious drama, and comedy, basing the
whole upon Brunetière's law which, after all, is only Brune-
273
The American Dramatist
tière's restatement of the law of drama from time immemorial
that all drama deals with the exercise of the human will.
"If," so writes Professor Matthews, "the obstacle against
which the will of the hero finally breaks itself is absolutely
insurmountable, the Greek idea of Fate, for example, the
Christian decree of Providence, or the modern scientific
doctrine of heredity, then we have tragedy, pure and simple.
If the obstacle is not absolutely insurmountable, being no
more than the social law, something of man's own making,
and therefore not finally inexorable, then we have the serious
drama. If the obstacle is only the desire of another human
being, then the result of the contention of these two characters
is likely to give us a comedy. And if the obstacle is merely
one of the minor conventions of society, then we may have.
farce."
These are merely perfunctory demarcations, with only one
phase of the matter indicated; for, in no way do the several
definitions clearly denote the measurement of the comic or
tragic clash with the norm. The ethical, moral value of
laughter lies in the fact that it makes us more sane, by bring-
ing more truly into relief, through some slight incongruity of
motive or situation, the benefits of the normal life. Through-
out his discussion of Aristotle, Butcher is continually em-
phasizing the humanistic, philosophical view of comedy, which
distinguishes the modern from the ancient. He lays stress
upon Hobbes's claim that "the passion of laughter is nothing
else but a sudden glory, arising from a sudden conception of
some eminency in ourselves, by comparison of the infirmity
of others, or with our own formerly." The high comic poet
must taste of life healthily, and see that it is good, before he
formulates a table of contrasts. Knowing life, as it is given
the big man to know it, he allows himself to throw relations
out of harmony to the point where he is in danger of losing all
hold upon the sane view.
The Comic Spirit, therefore, represents one of the highest
factors, if not the highest, in life. From the modern stand-
point, it approaches closer to the ethical demand, since it rep-
resents optimism rather than pessimism. "Comic emotion,'
""
274
Forms of American Drama: The Comic Spirit
وو
Doctor W. N. Guthrie claims, "originates from the co-existence
of a perception of incongruity and a persistent conviction, not
probably more than half conscious and in all likelihood quite
inexplicit, that in despite of such incongruity things are right.
The Greeks did not conceive the Comic Spirit in as pure a
state as they did the Tragic Spirit; they could not wholly
separate it from the Bacchic on one hand, or from the satiric
on the other. "The ludicrous," as defined by Aristotle,
"consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or
destructive." The Greeks denied tears to laughter; they
well-nigh sacrificed sympathy. There was some malice in
their enjoyment of "discomfiture", as Butcher so well ana-
lyzes. They did not look to the comic for a criticism of life
in general; they narrowed to the individual, sacrificing the
type; they satirized with no regard for sane restraint. To
them the Comic Spirit dwelt within the lower types.
Turning attention next to comedy in Shakespeare, we meet
with a rich humanistic view of character, devoid of buffoon-
ery; one finds its full value in the portraits of Viola and of
Malvolio. Life is warm, replete in sunshine here, with no
poisoned shafts, but ripe in sympathy with human foibles,
with kindliness. "Twelfth Night" is Shakespeare's mid-
summer in comedy, declares Professor Dowden.
In a broad sense, Molière is more nearly representative of
the Comic Spirit than Shakespeare, although in a few in-
stances the latter attained the pinnacle of preeminence. The
former, however, clearly illustrates that perfection with which
the comedy of manners, exquisitely representing its age, may
likewise embrace a universal consideration. Scribe is Molière
perverted.
"I can never care for seeing Things that force me to enter-
tain low Thoughts of my Nature," wrote Congreve, in a letter
concerning "Humor in Comedy." Take this statement in
consideration with the moral status of his theatre, and we be-
gin to realize that it was only through his grasp of the Comic
Spirit that Congreve was preserved out of the general licen-
tiousness of the time. He had the faults of his social environ-
ment; his genius rose above them, however identified with
275
The American Dramatist
4
them, however shaped by them. Congreve means brilliancy
of dialogue, and a sense of comic values, as soon as you are
able to realize that he represents also a certain phase of English
dramatic evolution.
This is no simple subject that we are examining so cursorily.
Its proper consideration involves racial and national limita-
tions and differences. What you smile over, I may not.
What the English critic defines as comedy, the German critic
may deny; the one believes in a permanent effect of comedy,
the other in a transitory effect. To enforce this view,
Doctor Paul Hamelius quotes Kant's "Kritik of Judgment",
which defines "laughter as an emotion occasioned by the
sudden resolution of a roused expectation into nothing.'
Therefore, generally speaking, the German conception of
comedy, as represented in Schlegel, is wild and lawless; and,
in true German manner, the philosophers, in especial Hegel,
interpret the effect this "ignorance of self-restraint" has upon
individuality and its vital relations to life, to cause and
effect.
The book has yet to be written which will define the Comic
Spirit in terms here suggested; the subject is so broad as to
make the university worker hesitate. We want a vital dis-
cussion, in which tendencies, racial and social, are indicated;
it is not enough that individual plays be defined in the
scholar's manner. For the average reader is not familiar
with plays of much wide diversity of range. That is why
George Meredith is perhaps so little known to the general
public as an analyzer of "comedy" in a special essay; it is
full of learning, of great familiarity with stage history from
the closet standpoint. He views his subject with the eye of
the novelist. Yet his humanistic approach toward his dis-
cursive point of view is replete with unerring appreciation
of the true value. "To be an exalted variety," he writes, "is
to come under the calm, curious eye of the Comic Spirit, and
be probed for what you are." Again he proclaims that
'Comedy is the fountain of sound sense", all expressions of
which are deeply conceived, and which, in themselves, refine
even to pain.
66
276
Forms of American Drama: American Humor
V
In analyzing the essence of American humor, Charles
Johnston' once made an excellent distinction between humor
and wit, in both of which there must be the element of
laughter. He writes:
If there is a play of mind about difference of race, using
this as the laughter-rousing contrast which is common to both
wit and humor, and if this play of thought and feeling accentu-
ates and heightens the race difference, and tries to show, or
assume, as is often the case, that the race of the joker is end-
lessly superior to the other, then we are dealing with wit, an
amusing thing enough in its way, but a false thing, one which
leads us away from the true end of man. If, on the other
hand, we have an accentuation of the common life, bridging
the chasm of race, and the overplus of power is felt to be
shared in by the two races, and to unite them, then we have
genuine humor, something as vital to our true humanity as is
the Tragedy of Greece, as is the Evangel of Galilee, yet some-
thing more joyful and buoyant than either; uniting us, not
through comparison or the sense of common danger, but
through the sense of common power, a prophecy of the golden
age, of the ultimate triumph of the soul.
Consider these differences carefully, and it will be seen
how reversed are the essential spirits of comedy and farce.
These are not alone two forms of drama; they are also two
outlooks upon life. The great fault with the American
dramatist is that often he hides the richness of his humor
beneath the incongruity of witty situation; he spoils the
good-natured satire of his intention by using cartoon actions.
This was the weakness of Charles Hoyt (1860-1900), author
of "A Parlor Match", "A Rag Baby", "Old Sport", "A
Trip to Chinatown", "A Texas Steer", "A Temperance
Town", "A Contented Woman" (1895), and "A Milk
White Flag." His satire was spontaneous, but he became
self-conscious whenever he attempted to cross the border
into farce. In Hoyt's plays there was an admixture of in-
sight and shallowness.
1 Atlantic, 87; 195-202, 1901.
277
The American Dramatist
I should say, therefore, that his farce-comedies were marked
by humor, but were spoiled by the form of farce. As for
Edward Harrigan (1845-1911), he must be characterized as a
delineator of a special type, and, with his partner, Tony Hart,
he built up the reputation which won him support. For the
two were funmakers, as Weber and Fields and the Rogers
Brothers were funmakers. In 1871, Harrigan and Hart
began their careers in "The Mulcaney Twins.'
""
In his very delightful book, "The Seven Lively Arts",
Gilbert Seldes makes an eloquent plea for the lighter forms of
entertainment in this age of the "new" art and the "new"
drama. "I feel moderately certain," he writes, “that the
slapstick comedy is a good thing for America to have; yet,
being neither an apostle of pagan joy nor a reformer, I have to
put my plea for slap-stick on personal grounds. It has given
me immeasurable entertainment and I would like to see it
saved; I would like to see a bit more of its impromptus, its
unpremeditated laughter; I would like to do something to
banish the bleak refinement which is setting in upon it."
In this book, Mr. Seldes is talking about the work of Charlie
Chaplin, he is interpreting the ragtime and jazz of Irving
Berlin and George Gershwin, he is lauding the modern news-
paper funny strip. He can see no distinct source for these;
they are emanations of a nervous age, the true rhythms of the
time. But there are sources for them, and had Mr. Seldes
examined into the lively arts of the seventies and eighties,
he might have found them. The theatre in America is very
forgetful of its past; it turns quickly to new inventions, and
allows others with vitality in them to pass away. Minstrelsy,
vaudeville, burlesque have all had their big day in the Ameri-
can Theatre, and then either disappeared or else become
absorbed in other forms. The minstrel show is no longer the
craze, but the blackened faces of Al Jolson and Frank Tinney
suggest that there is a relationship. Much of the burlesque
quality and extravaganza color of the seventies went into
the musical comedy, and the slapstick of Hoyt's farces went
over into the modern broad farce-comedy. When I think of
the various popular songs which have shrieked from the grama-
278
Forms of American Drama: American Humor
phone, the sentimental coon songs that have graced the stages
of vaudeville and moving picture, my mind reverts to the Har-
rigan era, when the music of Dave Braham, and the subject
matter of the Harrigan lyrics, set the town singing and the veri-
est newsboy whistling. There were lively arts as surely then as
now. I have had letters from friends of Mr. Hoyt, speaking in
eloquent terms of the refreshment his roaring comments on
local and timely matters gave to audiences of those days.
Were it possible to make a clinical chart of the laughter of
audiences, one might reach the conclusion that the response
to Harrigan and Hoyt and Weber and Fields was as great as
that to Chaplin, though not of so wide a range, since the film
has an international horizon. They were truly representative
of their time. They brought to the theatre ironical comments
on imminent questions of public interest. They unearthed
the lowly character, pictured special phases of city life and of
country life that were not usually dealt with in literature or
art. Hoyt's wide experience as a cattle ranger, a reporter,
a politician, a theatre man, gave him ample opportunity to
create types that would appeal to the man on the street.
In those days whole regiments of soldiers used to crowd the
theatres to see a Hoyt farce or a Harrigan spectacle. They
used to bring with them floral emblems and give them to the
actors between acts. There was no half-hearted response to
the wholesome, clean fun of such drama. The papers could
not gainsay its appeal. Characters in the Harrigan dramas
passed from one piece to another; they were acted with a
verisimilitude that gave them actuality. Fads and fancies
were seized upon, public issues were treated broadly and with
some effect. One has only to read what Brander Matthews
has to say of such entertainment in "These Many Years",
and James L. Ford's tribute in "Forty-Odd Years in the
Literary Shop", to measure the importance of such lively art.
Those who gave thought to the American Drama of the
time hailed such entertainment as utilizing the very sinew of
American life; the materials were native, racy, first-hand.
W. D. Howells called Harrigan the Goldoni of America;
the papers - with less insight spoke of him as our Ameri-
279
The American Dramatist
can Dickens. Professor Brander Matthews referred to the
teamwork of Weber and Fields as Aristophanic. Every one
realized that Hoyt raised the farce to commercial value.
Sometimes, as I read the "expressionistic" plays of the pres-
ent, I wonder if, in fairness to Harrigan and Hoyt, one should
not say that they were equally as expressionistic. Soon after
witnessing "Processional", the jazz drama by John Howard
Lawson, I read through most of Harrigan's plays poor
reading from a literary standpoint, but, for any one with a
sense of the theatre, palpitant stuff which must have been
raised to a high level by the character of acting Harrigan and
his company gave. Lawson's dramatis persona were types.
similar to the types selected by Harrigan; the Negro, the
soldier, the old-clothes dealer, the wealthy man, the side-
show barker, the dance hall. But Lawson assembled these
isolated elements self-consciously: his characters became al-
most types of a morality play. His was not an effort to depict
lowly types for themselves alone, for their local atmosphere,
but his was an endeavor to suggest, through the medium of
incongruous elements, the jazz rhythms of American life.
He has come nearer a great thing than he realizes. But his
effects are no different from the effects of the "Mulligan
Guards" series, which helped to bring fame and fortune to
Harrigan.
Here were plays that still live in the memory of those who
witnessed them. Not such can be said of most of the plays
created to-day. "Come to New Hampshire," writes one of
Mr. Hoyt's friends, “and I will show you where Mink lived,
and 'The Temperance Town' will become real to you.
"Shall we ever forget the mule in Harrigan's 'Pete'?" asked
one newspaper. "It came on in the third act, bearing a
white Baptist minister, who happened on a colored Baptist
camp-meeting by an old Florida mill, just in time to marry a
couple who were wild for a parson." There can be no study
of ward politics in the city of New York without some familiar-
ity with Harrigan's multi-colored plays. He could write of
the glories of Shanty Town, he revelled in the small humors
of contrasted types in the barber shop, the saloon, on "our
280
Forms of American Drama: Edward Harrigan
street", and on "our stoop."
our stoop." The ironies of journalism were
his special delight, and he could make the most of those simple
happenings, which, like the girl who learned her trade in
Cherry Street opening a shop on Fifth Avenue, gave the very
substance of a city life, now almost unknown to the average
theatregoer. Insistently as Harrigan dwelt upon such as-
pects, and insistently as he was hailed by audiences who kept
his plays on long runs and return engagements, his method
did not take deep root, and created no "school."
"school." But now
that the system of politics with which Harrigan was familiar
has changed, there is an historical value to his dramas which
cannot be discounted. The student must be familiar with the
general tenor of his work. Writes Mr. Howells:
Our one original contribution and addition to histrionic art
was Negro minstrelsy, which, primitive, simple, elemental, was
out of our own soil, and had the characteristics that distin-
guish autochthonic conceptions. But that is a thing almost
of the past [Mr. Howells is writing in Harper's Magazine, The
Editor's Study, in the eighties], and we have now to do with a
novel contribution to the drama, and not to the art of the
drama. It is peculiarly interesting, because it is morally,
though not materially, the contribution most possible under
our peculiar circumstances, for it is the work of a man in
whom the instincts of the author combat the theatre's tradi-
tions, and the actor's experience censures the author's literary
vanity. . . . Mr. Harrigan accurately realizes in his scenes
what he realizes in his persons; that is, the actual life of this
city. He cannot give it all; he can only give phases of it;
and he has preferred to give its Irish-American phases in their
rich and amusing variety, and some of its African and Teu-
tonic phases. It is what we call low life, though whether it is
essentially lower than fashionable life is another question.
But what it is, it is; and it remains for others, if they can, to
present other sides of our manifold life with equal perfection;
Mr. Harrigan leaves a vast part of the vast field open. In his
own province we think he cannot be surpassed. The art that
sets before us all sorts and conditions of New York Irishmen,
from the laborers in the street to the most powerful of the
ward politicians and the genteelest of the ladies of that inter-
281
The American Dramatist
esting race, is the art of Goldoni the joyous yet conscien-
tious art of the true dramatist in all times who loves the life
he observes.
It is not my intention to continue that thought here, but it
is a thought worth remembering. For, strange to say, it is
to those fundamental points of the American Drama that the
student has failed to give due importance. The theatre
critics were aware of Harrigan's value at the time; the un-
broken laughter of the audience was as much a part of the
play as the actors on the stage; they gave pause for it; their
songs lilted the popular sentimental angle. Scenes grotesque
were warm with humanity: new fads, like massage treatment,
the lady doctor, tobogganing, suggested certain satire to
Hoyt. Harrigan was a student of all this life which marked
New York of the eighties; he did not cut himself aloof, but
wandered along the streets where the lower life disported
itself. He frequented political clubs, white and colored;
a cakewalk drew him after the theatre. In a Bowery restau-
rant, they say, he found his colored chaplain of the Skidmore
Guards waiting on the table; in a butcher shop he found the
model for Lochmüller, of the Mulligan series. Realist that
he was, he would spend infinite pains in costuming his plays.
It took him a long, weary search before he was able to locate
a coat which would be appropriate for a certain Irish peda-
gogue. "I consider," he once said, "that the staging and
management are half the battle." From his mother, who
was a Southerner, he learned the real Negro dialect. He
never treated character on hearsay. The Southern scenes
in "Pete", the young Florida Negress, the aldermanic couple
from New York, the white trash, the circuit rider, the "gentle-
man of the old school", were painted by him with the sitter
ever before his eye.
One can easily brush aside the ingenuity of Harrigan's
plots, which were loosely hung together, or else old-fashioned
in their melodramatic excitement. There is nothing more
painful to read to-day than “Old Lavender", which drips with
the sentiment of a stereotyped kind. In cold print, the ab-
282

MULLIG
HUSSEY
GUARD
CA
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
EDWARD HARRIGAN AND TONY HART IN "THE MULLIGAN GUARDS."
"Harrigan's art," said W. D. Howells, "was the art of Goldoni."
UNIV
OF
WION
Forms of American Drama: Edward Harrigan
Old Lavender.
EDWARD HARRIGAN (1845-1911)
The Lorgaire; or, The Murder
of the Black Rock.
The Mulligan Guard Picnic.
The Mulligan Guard Ball.
The Mulligan Guard Chowder.
The Mulligan Guard Christmas.
The Mulligan Guard Surprise.
The Mulligan Guard Nominee.
Mulligan's Silver Wedding.
Squatter Sovereignty.
The Blackbird.
Mordecai Lyons.
McSorley's Inflation.
Cordelia's Aspirations.
Dan's Tribulations.
The Leather Patch.
The O'Reagans.
Reilly and the Four Hundred.
The Last of the Hogans.
Theatre Comique, New York,
September 3, 1877.
Theatre Comique, New York,
February 8, 1878.
Theatre Comique, New York,
September 23, 1878.
Theatre Comique, New York,
January 13, 1879.
Theatre Comique, New York,
August 11, 1879.
Theatre Comique, New York,
November 17, 1879.
Theatre Comique, New York,
February 16, 1880.
Theatre Comique, New York,
November 22, 1880.
Theatre Comique, New York,
February 21, 1881.
Theatre Comique, New York,
January 9, 1882.
Theatre Comique, New York,
August 28, 1882.
Theatre Comique, New York,
October 30, 1882.
Theatre Comique, New York,
November 27, 1882.
Theatre Comique, New York,
November 5, 1883.
Theatre Comique, New York,
April 7, 1884.
Park Theatre, New York, Feb-
ruary 15, 1886.
Park Theatre, New York, October
II, 1886.
Harrigan's Theatre, New York,
December 29, 1890.
Harrigan's Theatre, New York,
December 21, 1891.
For current criticisms, see such a periodical as the Spirit of the
Times, New York. Howells is quoted on Harrigan in the Dramatic
Mirror for 1896.
283
The American Dramatist
surdities of the Mulligan series are not stirring; but the eye
imagines the possibilities of the scenes on the stage. "Squat-
ter Sovereignty" the papers hailed as a triumph for our only
distinctive drama. Never was Tony Hart funnier than as
the Widow Nolan, wearing clothes such as only Ireland could
produce. Comedy was uppermost in such drama. The
characters were not surrounded with the tragic poetry of
their own tradition; but we had here the Irishman reacted
upon by New York and "ward" politics.
The art was typically expressionistic in the hands of the
actors; not in the written play. The manuscript was created
afresh nightly by the players who made mountains out of
molehills. And people of all classes flocked into the Harrigan
theatres, which were treats in themselves, -institutions
rather than playhouses. Each season the Coney Island boats
were melodious with the songs of the current Harrigan success.
Sheet music and portfolios were issued, remindful of a later
day when George Cohan contributed to popular song. It
was as natural to hear these tunes at the Lotos Club as on the
Third Avenue cars. To-day, in the summer, as one walks the
streets of lower New York, one sees banners stretched from
pole to pole, proclaiming an outing of some social club. Har-
rigan kept his eye on the Mystic Shriners, and the Knights
of the Mystic Star. There were many smaller clubs like them.
I cull from my note-book the names of some of the song suc-
cesses: "The Little Widow Dunn", "The Skids Are Out
To-day", "Johnny Reilly's Always Dry", "The Babies on
our Block", "My Little Side Door", "The Last of the Ho-
gans", "Down in Gossipy Row." "All hail," cried the papers
in accord, "to New York's Molière and Offenbach"; thus did
they regard Harrigan and Dave Braham.
Useless indeed would it be to give an idea of Harrigan's
method. There was a certain madness in it, just as there was
a certain method in the madness. But the isolated humors.
were studies in themselves of large town feuds and sociableness
in unfrequented quarters. Fourteenth Street still has sug-
gestion of the life. The melodramas of Owen Davis and Theo-
dore Kremer made use of it. The dialogue is difficult to
284
Forms of American Drama: Edward Harrigan
quote, just as Weber and Fields' fun is difficult to suggest.
For the jokes, while of the joke-book kind when read, were
characteristic of vivid character when acted. In a Judge's
office the Negroes and Irish crowd are fighting among them-
selves for chairs. Esau, the parson, exhorts his people:
"Git up, Ladies and Gentlemen, de Parlor's no different
from a horse car wid dese people [meaning the Irish]." Angie,
the girl of all work, complains: "I'm a femme de chambre. I
sweep tapestry, dust velvet and polish de ivories of de piano.
I scrub nuffin." On Bleeker Street, so Esau complains, the
Italians are imminent. "Yes, ma'am," he says, "it's razor
against stiletto," and he further comments: "De walking
delegates of de Committe of Shooting Stars report 2000 Italian
bootblack stands and 33 Stars from de Battery to Union
Square.' There is a gorgeous initiation scene among the
Shooting Stars, a colored secret society. Esau says to the
Lodge: "Brudders, I hope dat you'll be a little lenient wid
de candidate, as de last sister dat took dis degree am now in
Bellevue, wrapped up in rubber blankets." All these bits
are from "The Last of the Hogans." The humor is well
knit to the character; the rough and tumble of action some-
how evolves an atmosphere redolent with life.
Harrigan often wrote about his work as a dramatist, and he
wrote well about it; speak to his son, William Harrigan, who
is on the stage, of his father as an actor, and he will quote
certain succinct comments remembered by him which are at
the basis of the finest realistic acting; like Herne, Mr. Harri-
gan brought to his art the keenest perceptions. In fact, in the
history of the American Drama there are no better examples
of unremitting vitality and exuberance than are to be found
in his many plays. To the theatre belong the association of
Harrigan and Hart as players. But to the drama, Harrigan
alone remains as one of the distinct figures of the eighteen-
eighties and nineties.
The satire which characterized the Hoyt farces was stronger
than that to be found in the Harrigan dramas; he inquired
humorously into the aspects of many national questions ;
he ridiculed Congressmen in "A Texas Steer"; he played up
285
The American Dramatist
the suffrage movement in "A Contented Woman." One
remembers his famous toast: "Here's to woman, once our
superior, now our equal." The unfortunate thing is that
Hoyt nearly always hid his true intention beneath a mass of
inconsequent frivolity which dulled the points of his situations.
The temperance movement produced the excellent "Temper-
ance Town", which might even now hit audiences with some
potency. His characters were symbols of their main defects,
and their names played upon their weaknesses. This was a
mannerism of Hoyt's, as was the superstition that no play
of his would be a success, unless it began with the article "A.
I note the following: I. McCorker, a literary man; Lotta
Howlin, a deaf lady, in "A Parlor Match." Harry Young-
husband, a new father, and Christian Berriel, an undertaker,
in A Rag Baby." Wright Handy, a carpenter, and Trip
Walker, a mail carrier, are in "A Tin Soldier." In order to
show the variety of his types, I give a few more of these
dramatis persona play on words: Brooklyn Bridge, a gentle-
man of high position, and Mrs. Fulton Ferry, his mother-in-
law, in "A Tin Soldier"; Doolittle Work, a young man who
has greatness thrust upon him; Dodge Work, a revengeful
man, and Savage Hogg, a man who wants his rights, all in
"A Brass Monkey." In "A Trip to Chinatown" we have the
famous Welland Strong, a man with one foot in the grave.
The prefatory note to "A Brass Monkey" suggests the
casualness of the Hoyt farce. He writes:
"A Brass Monkey" is a somewhat desultory reference to
a variety of subjects having no particular relevancy to what
little plot there may be in the play. There is an endeavor to
make a little mild fun on the 1001 petty superstitions of the
day which everybody derides and secretly believes in, more
or less.
There is an attempt to illustrate the sincerity of
obtrusive grief and to show the difficulties that may
beset an inexperienced man in running an auction room.
Birdie, the correspondent of the Society Gazette, the author
has attempted to satirize the guerillas of journalism, who,
by their outrages upon truth and decency, have managed to
create more or less prejudice against an honorable profession
In
286
Forms of American Drama: Charles Hoyt
CHARLES HOYT (1860-1900)
For bibliography and list of plays, see Moses' "Representative
American Dramas: National and Local.”
A Rag Baby.
Haverly's
Theatre,
A Brass Monkey.
A Texas Steer; or,
'Money Makes the
Mare Go.'
A Trip to Chinatown.
A Musical Trifle.
A Milk White Flag.
A Temperance Town.
A Contented Woman:
A Sketch of the Fair
Sex in Politics.
Hoyt.
Hoyt.
Hoyt.
Chicago, Ill., August
16, 1884.
Bijou Theatre, New
York, October 15,
1888.
Hoyt's Madison Square
Theatre, New York,
January 8, 1894.
Hoyt's Madison Square
Theatre, New York,
November 9, 1891.
Hoyt's Madison Square
Theatre, New York,
October 8, 1894.
Hoyt's Madison Square
Theatre, New York,
September 18, 1894.
Hoyt's Madison Square
Theatre, New York,
February, 1897.
By Atherton Brownell. Bostonian, 3:386,
January, 1896.
Harper's Weekly,
44: 1145, De-
cember 1, 1900.
Dramatic Mirror,
December I,
1900, p. 8.
(in which they only occupy the place of miserable hangers-on)
and have made the approach of the interviewer more terrible
than the coming of a pestilence.
So contemporaneous were these two dramatists, Harrigan.
and Hoyt; so dependent were Weber and Fields on the cur-
287
The American Dramatist
rent play of their day to burlesque, that the content of their
drama — interesting as it is to the student has little in it for
newer generations to ponder, except it be the method, and the
strata of humanity dealt with. The American dramatist
seems to have dropped these strata unless there be a problem
to solve. O'Neill, in "All God's Chillun Got Wings", is the
tragic approach toward Harrigan's territory. Kaufman and
Connelly, in "Dulcy" and "To the Ladies", suggest a possible
Hoyt, far better in technique than he, far less given to fall
into the song-and-dance habit. Hoyt punctuated his per-
formances with vaudeville stunts. Now, Harrigan was also
a vaudevillian in many ways, but his characters were genre
portraits. The peculiar type of acting called forth by both
playwrights must have been of a vital kind. And both of
them wrote the species of play that reached across the foot-
lights and got a spectator under the fifth rib. Even the old
newspapers, now that they are read in their mustiness, hold
some of the flavor of that laughter. In both the Comic
Spirit was always bubbling.
VI
In the street sense, George M. Cohan represents the popular
conception of American wit, and his ability should not be
overlooked. The colloquial rhythm has always characterized
him. His reminiscences, "Twenty Years on Broadway",
are full of it, both in the temper of its speech and the “aver-
ageness" of its humor. Cohan is an astute genius; he knows
the popular mind. He is an acute stage manager; he grasps
the essentials of humor and of suspense. He has learned his
craft from a hard school of experience. This experience he
now takes gayly in his "Twenty Years on Broadway." If
Harrigan made the Twelfth Ward famous, "Good-by, Broad-
way" has made that avenue famous the world around. And
the curious thing is that "Broadway Jones" has not created
for itself the loyalites that "The Mulligan Guards" did in
the eighties. And the excellent "Seven Keys to Baldpate",
so deserving of praise as a mystery farce of the suspensive
288
Forms of American Drama: Ade and Cohan
melodramatic kind, seems to have served its day in 1913-
1914, and been put away. But, with all his local appeal, and
all his comprehension of the humor that is relished by the
Willies of New York and the Aubrey Pipers of West Phila-
delphia, I cannot rank Cohan's feel for individual character
as high as Harrigan's, nor his humor as native and racy as
Ade's or Mr. Dooley's. Yet, as the forerunner of Irving
Berlin, as the composer of "Tipperary", as a dramatist of
"average" America, he belongs with them all among Amer-
ica's "lively arts." But he does not in any way approach
the true humor of George Ade, whose style, even before he
became a playwright, was sufficiently conversational in his
books to point the way to the stage. That road, however,
came into being by the merest chance in 1902.
Ade was born in Kentland, Indiana, on February 9, 1866,
his father being a prominent banker of the town. In his
youth, the boy tasted of all that country life upon which he
was to look back with gentle banter and kindly laughter.
In 1887, he graduated from Purdue University, and thereupon
began his profession of journalism, which was to lead him to
authorship.
In
By 1890, he was on the Chicago Daily News, associating
with Harry B. Smith, the librettist of "Robin Hood" and
"Rob Roy"; Peter F. Dunne, alias "Mr. Dooley"; and
Charles B. Dillingham, who, once the personal representative
of Miss Julia Marlowe, is now one of the prominent managers
of the time. Ade's strides were determined and rapid.
1894, he became a member of the staff of the Chicago Record,
remaining there seven years, and occupying the desk made
vacant through the death of Eugene Field. His "Artie"
book and his "Fables in Slang" were written during these
years. In 1900, he sailed for China, Japan, and the Philip-
pines. Thus far the reporter was seeing life in various hues.
Then, on his return, a young Chicago composer, Mr. Wat-
hall, asked Ade to write the "book" for a musical score he was
preparing for an amateur club. But the actual work had not
progressed far when Henry W. Savage appeared upon the
scene, and Ade entered as a factor in the American Drama,
289
The American Dramatist
with "The Sultan of Sulu.” Then followed in quick succes-
sion, "Peggy from Paris", "The County Chairman", "The
Sho-Gun", "The College Widow", "The Bad Samaritan",
"Just Out of College", and "Father and the Boys."
All of these plays applied poignantly to American conditions
of their day; they made use of a fresh way of forcing the in-
congruous elements of "news" to act themselves visibly before
an audience. They were loaded down with a humor which
was that of the man on the street perfectly legitimate
humor, even though viewing life from a lower level of values.
Take, for instance, the predominant object of "The Sho-
Gun", which was a Korean opera. "It is meant," explained
Mr. Ade himself, "to be an indirect treatise on the worship
of titles, the formation of trusts, the potency of the American
'pull', Yankee commercial invasion, legal manoeuvring, adver-
tising enterprise, and other subjects of timely interest.
In
The saving grace of our strenuous existence is our apprecia-
tion of our own vagaries; that is why Mr. Ade's comic operas
were as stimulating as good cartoons. Besides supplying the
sinuous lines of color, they had ideas behind the detail.
this respect, Mr. Ade was not so very far removed from W. S.
Gilbert, though lacking in facility and in grace. He once
defined American Drama as one in which American characters
are dealt with "in such manner as to increase our self-respect
and to give us a new insight into our characteristics as a
people.'
وو
Mr. Ade's humor had all the essence of good comedy, but
its form was unsteady and was too imitative of the conven-
tional musical comedy and of farce. I do not believe I am far
wrong in the contention that our stage has yet to understand
the true meaning of comedy, and especially so when it starts
out to create comedy in a spirit which is really farce.
However incomplete our discussion, we have at least come
to comprehend the justice of accusing our stage of misinter-
preting the true, permanent function of comedy. We need a
new nomenclature in order to divest the pure type of its con-
fusing deviations. Because we have lost the rich meaning of
comedy, we find it difficult, save in "An Enemy of the
290
Forms of American Drama: Ade and Cohan
People", to understand the Comic Spirit in Ibsen, and it is
only by this realization that we will grasp the full signifi-
cance of Ibsen's optimism. Humor is innate; it is dependent
as much upon a quick fancy as upon a quick response to the
actual. Though we are not self-conscious, our efforts toward
culture ignore the strength that comes from a general under-
standing of the Comic Spirit. Our American dramatists
mostly reflect their humor as an external thing, though there
is a difference of excellence between Mark Twain and George
Ade; between George Ade and George M. Cohan, Raise the
taste for the true Comic Spirit, which saturates humanity
first, and creates situation secondarily, and the American dram-
atist will become more vital in his whole effect. The Comic
Spirit exists in our literature, but not so in our drama; be-
cause, in bulk, our plays do not stand the test of literature.
And yet, the theatregoer, who thinks at all on these ques-
tions as to the essence of drama, will feel that something big
should eventually come from American humor on the one
hand, and from our national sanity on the other. Certainly,
when the accomplishment reaches us, it will be fraught in
large measure with the Comic Spirit.
291
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CONCERNING A CERTAIN TYPE OF MELODRAMA:
THE IO. 20. 30.
I
THE use of the term melodrama has undergone many
changes, and it is a question whether at the present moment it
is not being subjected to another modification or crucial shift-
ing of the point of view. Such a bastard form of art has it
been regarded by the majority of theatregoers that one has
lost sight of its origin in the sixteenth century, and of the
romantic stock from which it sprang. The term melodrama
or melodramatic, as applied to a play, has always been popu-
larly looked upon as a sign of condemnation, yet, if we consider
the essential ingredients for a moment, we will see that the
melodrama itself is not the thing to be condemned, but rather
the special form in which it was expressed.
The historical side of the subject has received scant atten-
tion from the scholar. While in general we are told that
Ottavio Rinuccini toward the end of the sixteenth century
invented the term melodrama, from the Greek words meaning
melody and action, and while we are given to understand that
in its application it related entirely to opera — Jean Jaques
Rousseau having written his "Pygmalion" for instrumental
music still a scholar has yet to unravel its development
from the intricacies of the romantic period, which swept
through Italy and France and thence to England. It is
hardly conceivable that the music written by Beethoven for
"Egmont", or by Massenet for "Phèdre", should be classed
292
Concerning a Certain Type of Melodrama
1
in the same category with "Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak
Model" and "Convict 999" ;¹ yet such is the case, and from
such a loose application of the term there has arisen a mis-
understanding as to the true elements of melodrama.
Analyzing the relation between music and drama, we note
the point from which melodrama might be said to start.
Always the highest moments in an opera, the most brilliant
moments, are those which involve the characteristic elements.
of a glaring play. The characters sing longest when they
are dying; they boast loudest in the most pronounced arias
of the score; their actions are broad and lack subtlety, a
subtlety which is dependent more upon the music than upon
the play. Possibly it is because the musician has instinctively
realized that the moments of greatest music are the moments
of greatest human suffering; and undoubtedly the melodram-
atist of the eighteen-nineties grasped this fact, and worked it
for all it was worth. Take away from our operas the orches-
tration, and the plots will be little more than out and out
melodrama.
The student of the theatre will some day, in dealing with
melodrama, be forced, therefore, to disentangle its begin-
nings from the most heightened creations of the romantic
period. He will not disdain to connect this genre of play writ-
ing with that struggle which went on between the classic
spirit and the romantic spirit, and which finally resulted in the
victory of the latter, when Victor Hugo, in 1830, published
"Hernani." It was the same struggle which had commenced
in France when the Academicians, Boileau and Charles
Perrault, became so deeply involved in a quarrel resulting
in petty innuendoes and personal thrusts.
Practically the same result was accomplished in England
as Dutton Cook claims was effected in France. For, to
quote the latter, "Schlegel, writing early in the century, notes
1 The methods of advertising melodrama in the days when it flourished at its
height on Eighth Avenue, New York, were unique. When "Convict 999" was first
produced, three men in stripes, and chained together, tramped the streets of New
York. The managers of "Tony, the Bootblack" sent three boys through certain
sections of the city, giving free shines to all holders of tickets for "the show."
293
The American Dramatist
that dramatic poetry in Paris possessed a certain point of
contact with the police, and that the restrictions placed upon
the leading theatres banished to the minor stages all new and
mixed attempts at histrionic entertainment."
The history of melodrama in England began in 1802, when
Holcroft adapted a French manuscript which he called "A
Tale of Mystery." And at this early period it is interesting
to note the popular conception of the origin of the term melo-
drama, as conceived by the son of Harris, the manager of
Covent Garden. He wrote to Frederick Reynolds from Paris
regarding the peculiar type of plays which were classed under
a name derived from the two words mêler and drame.¹
Up to the time of the advent of the Dion Boucicault sen-
sationalism, for he may be regarded as one of the first to
combine the excess of situation with the excess of stage mech-
anism, melodrama might be said to have become almost
conventional in its adherence to a species of foreign brigand
literature. There was not very much desire to accentuate the
events of everyday life, but, adhering to the stereotyped
romantic passions and situations of the Radcliffe school of
novels, the melodramatist of this earlier period wrote more in
the tone of the opera librettist than of the dramatist. The
history of melodrama in this country, to within recent years,
is practically the same as that of England, and the two may
be said to have been dependent upon French sources. 2
¹ Gr. melos, song, + drama(t-), < draō, perform.
2 From a French source, the following is quoted: Le poignard, le poison, l'incendie
jouaient ou jouent encore le premier rôle dans les mélodrames, avec complications
d'enfants volés et retrouvés, machinations ténébreuses d'un traitre, etc. Une des
lois du genre était aussi de mêler toujours ou des scènes gaies ou un personnage fran-
chement comique à l'action.
Les auteurs contemporains ont compliqué ces procédés trop simples de l'ancien
mélodrame. Ils ont profité des progrès de la mis en scène. Le fond, pourtant, est
resté ce qu'il était au temps où la foule se pressait dans les salles de spectacle de l'an-
cien boulevard du Temple, le fameux “boulevard du crime”, comme l'appelait la
chronique à l'étrange, nombreuses sont les pièces anglaises, allemandes, slaves, où
la predilection de l'horrible, le retour aux moyens violents des romanciers et drama-
turges continuent, sous une etiquette differente, la simple et vieille tradition du
mélodrame.
Il y eu des maîtres spéciaux, en cette forme spéciale du théâtre, depuis Guilbert de
Pixérécourt, Caignez, Cuvelierde Trye, V. Ducange et Bouchardy, le dernier des
294

AUGUSTIN DALY'S
THE
UNDERSE
GREAT PLAY UNDER GASLIGI
AIND
OF
MICH
#
Collection New York Public Library
POSTER FOR AUGUSTIN DALY'S "UNDER THE GASLIGHT.
Concerning a Certain Type of Melodrama
In 1860, America was inundated with a type of "dime novel"
story, which spread from ocean to ocean, affecting literature
for growing boys, and likewise affording a new impetus to
melodrama. For, about this time, David Belasco was enjoy-
ing such a glaring piece as "The Idiot Boy of the Rocky
Mountains"; and when he reached the East, he found that
Augustin Daly had made a success with a melodrama of New
York life, entitled "Under the Gaslight." The type of play,
like "The Two Orphans", which is in its essentials nothing
but a melodrama, could not long survive the reaction which
in drama was now to take place. There is no doubt that,
even as Pinero and Jones were to break from Robertson and
Taylor, and realism was to usurp the boards, so melodrama
would likewise be affected by this very realism. The ingredi-
ents have always been the same, but the objective point of
view was obliged to undergo material alteration with the
change of conditions. The melodrama of the eighteen-
nineties, which was better named sensational drama, was
materially altered by those forces which have been detected.
behind yellow journalism.
Let us get clearly in mind the characteristics that marked
this melodrama. The dominant feature was situation: the
broadest results of the very broadest and most elemental
emotions. Mr. Walkley once expressed it by saying that there
are two sides of a criminal, the outside and the inside, melo-
drama usually dealing with the former, whereas the novelist
would search for the conditions resulting in the existence of the
criminal. These two sides in substance marked the dis-
tinctive difference between melodrama and fiction.
The old English and French miracle plays had in them all
the essentials of this glaring stage type. The manner in which
'ogres romantiques", jusqu'à Anicet-Bourgeois et Dennery. On peut citer les
titres souivants: "Victor ou l'Enfant de la forêt" (1798); “Coelina ou l'Enfant du
mystère" (1801); "Le Chien de Montargis" (1814): "Fualdès, l'Orpheline de
Genève" (1820); "Gaspardo le pêcheur" (1837); "Le Sonneur de Saint-Paul"
(1838).
•
In this class one places "Les Deux Orphelines." An interesting study would be
the concentration of melodrama within the realm of the intensely morbid and hor-
rible, as seen in the species of play written for Le Grand Guignol, in Paris.
295
The American Dramatist
the miracle of "St. Nicholas and the Thieves" was presented,
the careful delineation of Hellmouth, with the Devil and his
demons rushing up and down the aisles of the church, appealed
to the same instincts in the mass of mediæval people, that the
broad glorification of good and the meting of punishment did
to the people who were fed upon what was called the "Al
Woods" type of melodrama. Fitzball, who was considered
one of the most productive melodramatists of the early nine-
teenth century in England, heard Sheridan Knowles exclaim
that he considered "Macbeth" one of the finest melodramas
he had ever seen; and there is undoubted truth in what he
said. Did not Charlotte Cushman say that "Macbeth" was
the King of the Bowery boys? Perhaps Knowles asserted
this in defence of his own play, "The Hunchback" - which
itself belongs to this class of drama. But even at that early
day the term had been so misused and the species had so
broadened, freed from the narrow restrictions of the patent
theatres of London, that Douglas Jerrold, in his report before
the Parliamentary Commission of 1832, appointed to examine
into the status of the London theatres, inadvertently invented
a new term, which is familiar to us to-day as the legitimate
drama, and which he pitted against this other form. Not
only did he deplore the overaccentuation of the physical
result to the detriment of the mental cause in melodrama,
but Macready likewise regarded the sensational with such dis-
favor that his contracts stipulated he should be given no
part partaking of a melodramatic character.
II
Melodrama, in New York of the eighteen-nineties, which
was not only a legitimate type, but also a dominant character-
istic of our American life, ran wild. The writer of melodrama
misinterpreted his license, and the lovers of the melodramatic
were sated with a succession of situations and a minimum of
plot. One of the most successful playwrights of this type
of piece was Owen Davis, the author of "The Confessions
of a Wife", which was distinctive from his other melo-
296
Concerning a Certain Type of Melodrama
دو
dramas by the fact that it called for no "guns", to use a
professional term, "Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model"
and "Convict 999." He then declared that a certain reaction
was about to take place in this indiscriminate use of situation
for situation's sake; that his audiences were beginning to see
the improbability of so many hairbreadth escapes occurring
in the life of any human being within the three hours' traffic
of the stage. The public libraries were accused of improving
the taste of the public. So that from excess we were forced
to return to consistency.
But before then came the unquestioned acceptance of all
violences and incongruities. The gallery god ate these plays
served hot; he dreamt of the sinuous lady in black standing
in the lime-light, he vowed he too would be a detective, trained
to be the rescuer of innocent girls thrown overboard from a
yacht laden with champagne, or buried alive in some iniqui-
tous opium den. Unlike the b'hoy of the Bowery, who gloried
in Forrest's Spartacus, or Charlotte Cushman's Meg Merriles,
the gallery god of Eighth Avenue wanted nothing but the
wan innocence of the wronged, and the devilment of the bad
to make him forget his daily "trade." From an Al Woods
press sheet of 1907, I quote an impression of melodrama from
this "god's" viewpoint.
Gee, Cull, [he exclaims] you ain't never seen a drammer?
I am telling you, beau, them's the shows that's got these here
Mansfield bloats beat a mile. What's dat what you're givin'
us? You don't never have no shows in the burg you come
from? You pack your duds and trot along wid me and see the
real goods. In de first act, de dame in de red dress, that's
the willainous, and the guy what she's stuck on, dey plans to
put the kibosh on the leadin' lady and her steady. Well,
dey trails along most everywhere, and dey kidnaps de goil,
and tries to hand her sparring partner de knock-out drops, but
it ain't no go, 'cause I'm tellin' ye, pal, when you're on the
level, there ain't nobody going to hand you de frozen mit.
These here shootin' operas learn you more about this here
Sunday School lingos and the square deal stunt, dan all them
preachin' gazabos. You take my tip, pal—if you want to learn
how to get along and do right, you see dese here drammers.
297
The American Dramatist
Thus, in spirit, spoke all the disciples of the Al Woods era
of melodrama, which flourished at the American Theatre on
Eighth Avenue and at the Thalia Theatre on the Bowery.
Only a hair line separated the emotion of Broadway from
that of the Bowery. William Gillette's "Sherlock Holmes"
was nothing more than a "thriller", acted with a certain
refinement and a certain reserve; which characteristics were
usually avoided by the manager of Broadway melodrama.
Not only did the sensational play take unto itself a certain
formula by which virtue and villainy were expressed, but
it likewise required a diction which was excessive in its
accentuation.
When all was told, therefore, the difference between the
legitimate theatre and melodrama was in this matter of ac-
centuation. Bartley Campbell's "My Partner",
Partner", Lester
Wallack's "Rosedale", "The White Heather", Jones's "The
Silver King", "The Ticket-of-Leave Man", C. M. S. McLel-
lan's "Leah Kleschna", and "The Great Ruby" were ac-
counted melodramas of the old school, containing all the dis-
torted actions and passions of the type, but differing from the
type, inasmuch as the stories were consistent and the char-
acterizations human. Despite the sensationalism in Dion
Boucicault, the genial Irish atmosphere was dominant, and
the heart interest was so romantic as to cover the daring
ventures with the gloss of possibility. In the eighteen-nine-
ties, however, such writers of melodrama as Owen Davis and
Theodore Kremer discarded the intermediate development
between the glaring situations, and dealt wholly with the situa-
tions themselves, one after the other, irrespective of their
possibility in life, and with the sole intention of deadening the
logical sense of the spectator with sensationalism.
Mr. Davis, a Harvard graduate, was drawn into writing
such plays as "Tony, the Bootblack" and "Nellie, the Beauti-
ful Cloak Model" by his association with "The Great Ruby"
company. He thought he could write just as clever a story
for the stage, and so he began then and there, acting mean-
while, until he gained a foothold as one of the principal
manufacturers of the sensational play. He recognized the
298
Concerning a Certain Type of Melodrama
ཙཱ་བ་
legitimate side of melodrama, he deplored the piling up of
catastrophe upon catastrophe, he saw the bathos in the for-
mula which states that the play ends only when every pos-
sible calamity has been exhausted. Mr. Davis was what one
might call a student of his particular field. He understood
his public, which in matter of taste was of the Laura Jean
Libbey class. He knew wherein this public was credulous,
the point of appeal in its sentimental make-up. His au-
diences would not countenance the regeneration of a stage
bad man; they must have the victory of virtue and the happy
ending; the good must be rewarded suddenly, the bad must
be punished lingeringly.
Mr. Davis deserted the realm of the sensational for that
of the legitimate just at the time the "Al Woods" type of
melodrama was on the wane, just when the melodramatic
situation disappeared gradually from the stage, and was
squeezed into the nickelodeon slot machine, on its way to a
larger development on the moving-picture screen. But in
doing so he did not forget the measure of that public to which
he once made appeal. In an interview, he at one time
epitomized the characteristics of melodrama in this manner:
On Third Avenue the treatment was different. Instead of
avoiding the obvious you insisted upon it first, last and all
the time. You moved up the ascending scale of emotions.
with directness. Your hero was labeled at his first entrance.
Nothing was left to inference. It was almost indispensable
that he knock down the villain in the first two minutes follow-
ing his entrance. In the same easy way your comedian had to
get a laugh as he came on. Instead of having your heroine
pursued by some abstract thing such as fate, you had her pur-
sued by a tangible villain bent upon cutting her throat. You
piled catastrophe upon catastrophe. By the time the hero
threw his protecting arms around her in the last act, she must
have narrowly escaped scalping by Indians, been almost
drowned in a mill-race, missed death in a train wreck, and
been shot at and stabbed by the villain, to say nothing of
having passed unscathed through several conflagrations, an
earthquake or two, a mine cave-in, or a magazine explosion.
The play only ended when you had exhausted every possible
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The American Dramatist
calamity, but it ended happily: it had to end happily. And
the hero remained the hero, and the villain died as black
as when he first came on. I know, because I tried. The
public had no faith in the regeneration of the stage bad man.
He was there as the symbol of everything that was bad, and
by the fourth act he had committed every crime possible. The
audience did not want him to repent and get away free. He
had to be killed lingeringly, if possible. Right must triumph
and wrong must be punished. That was one of the funda-
mental principles of the so-called cheap drama.
In that particular the cheap drama was a power for good
and a moralizing force of no little value. Our heroics were
mock heroics, perhaps, but they had a salutary effect never-
theless. The lowly laborer who lived a life of squalor in the
back room of a tenement, when he heard the hero declare
that he would rather die than steal, might come to think
that, after all, this was the sort of morality that suited him
too.
Speaking only of my own plays, I dare say that I addressed
each season an audience numbering upward of seven million
people. I had eighteen plays on the road at a time, and about
ninety in stock. In every one of my pieces there was some
wholesome truth, some good moral precept advanced, and
yet almost invariably the attitude maintained by the press
toward these plays was one of gentle derision. Serious criti-
cism of them was never attempted. The one reason why
newspaper men were sent to cover them was to poke fun at
them the next day. They furnished the basis for funny
stories, nothing else. Personally, I couldn't see any fairness
in this. Certain papers made special effort to catch the pro-
letariat by writing down their editorials to the mental level
and understanding of the illiterate, prosaic, unlettered, un-
cultured classes, and then turned right about to another col-
umn and assumed the superior and high-art tone in discussing
the plays which these same people went to see.
Mr. Davis in those days declared that his particular type of
audience never took things for granted. You had to empha-
size for them that a certain event was going to happen, that
it was happening, and that it had happened; three times each
point had to be driven home. Humanity being the keynote,
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Concerning a Certain Type of Melodrama
the ten- and twenty- and thirty-cent theatregoer had to have
action laid on in large sweeps. The emotions were not subtle;
they ascended toward the climax, not in flowing consistency,
but with intermittent thumps. The formula exacted that the
heroine must be as young and fresh after twenty hairbreadth
escapes as though she were attending a garden party. Yet,
from the technical side, Mr. Davis's ingenuity was effective.
He wrote the dialogue for and planned the staging of "The
Siege of Port Arthur" for the Hippodrome, and certain strik-
ing elements therein he transferred to his own melodrama,
"Convict 999." 1 He wrote so many melodramas of the con-
ventional type, he studied the situation so thoroughly, that
he was able to tell exactly in what direction the next change
in the tastes of his audiences would "jump." Although his
"Gambler of the West", his "Broadway after Dark", his
"Chinatown Charlie", and his "Creole Slave's Revenge"
were sure of a hearing from his particular following, he recog-
nized that this following was becoming sated, that their
acceptance was being turned into incredulity, that they were
being educated away from the old order and nearer the legiti-
mate realm of melodrama.
In this respect, it may be noted that A. H. Woods, at the
time one of the largest managers of melodrama in America,
was himself being involved in this change. For, while he was
the means of encouraging the thriller, he likewise, as a mana-
ger, was being drawn nearer to the legitimate drama; and a
reaction soon occurred in his own attitude toward this particu-
lar theatre which made him a fortune. The countless writers.
upon whom he depended for his yearly supply of melodramas,
like Davis and Kremer and John Oliver, in the early days,
would have been turned down flat had they suggested using
any semblance of subtlety of emotion, any apparent consis-
tency, any logical cause and effect. But, as melodrama began
to wane, Al Woods became critical of the sensationalism he had
nurtured. He deserted melodrama for the legitimate by way
1 Other melodramas by Mr. Davis were: "On Trial for his Life", "The Crooked
Path", "The Prince of Spendthrifts", "The Millionaire and the Circus Rider",
"Jack Sheppard, the Bandit King”, and “The King and Queen of Gamblers."
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The American Dramatist
of "The Girl and the Taxi", wherein "sex" was flaunted in a
way that would have put melodrama to the blush. One of
the surprising things was that when Mr. Davis finally deserted
the melodrama of Eighth Avenue, he proceeded to forget it.
One would have thought his sense of proportion would have
been dulled, if not wholly destroyed. A strange contrast,
"Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model", with "The Detour”
and "Ice-bound."
III
Theodore Kremer likewise showed the same dissatis-
faction over being forced to produce such dramas as "Bertha,
the Sewing Machine Girl", "Fast Life in New York", "The
Fatal Wedding", and "The King of Bigamists." He out-
lined the melodramatic formula in this
way:
My audiences are all from Missouri: they want to be
shown: unless you show them first they will not believe. In
the play now being acted by Miss Ethel Barrymore [“ Her
Sister", it is made clear during the conversation that the
fortune-teller and the young man to whom she is engaged
first met in a train. Now it is all right for the Broadway au-
diences to hear that the two met in a train, but the Eighth
Avenue audiences have to be shown the train and the meet-
ing. Instead of beginning the acquaintance by having him
hand her a paper, he would to please my theatregoers
have to fling the paper in her face. She would be insulted
and address him, Sir!' Then he would apologize, the ac-
quaintance would begin, and it could then ripen into love,
but not before. And in the first act of the play the fortune-
teller would have to be shot on to the stage out of a trap-door.
Mr. Kremer was once regarded as the Clyde Fitch of melo-
drama, even as Owen Davis usurped the title of Augustus
Thomas; and should one examine the early manuscripts of
each, this distinction might be readily seen, for Mr. Davis's
sensationalism was fraught with the vigor of the masculine,
whereas Mr. Kremer usually dealt with the feminine.¹ Yet
1 Other writers of melodrama were John Oliver, Hal Reid, Lem B. Parker, William
L. Roberts, Joseph B. Totten, Joseph Le Brandt, and Langdon McCormack. Al
Woods was the typical producer of melodramas; there were others.
302
Concerning a Certain Type of Melodrama
despite this sex viewpoint, their plays were worked absolutely
upon the same lines; their heroes, their heroines, their villains,
their inconsistencies, their colloquial humor, their virtues,
which obtruded to such a degree as to lack virtue, their seri-
ousness which was so pronounced as to be humorous, were all
of the same color. They wrote their plays according to a
formula decided upon between themselves and their manager.
The billboard posters were drawn a long while before pen was
even put to paper. The trap-doors, the bridges which were to be
blown up, the walls which were to be scaled, the instruments
of torture for the persecuted heroines, the freight elevators
which were to crush out the lives of deserving characters,
the elevated trains which were to rush upon the prostrate.
forms of gagged and insensible girls, all these melodramatic
accessories were determined upon before the manuscript took
definite shape. In fact, there was little shaping done after
the situations were decided upon. The only thing left for
the dramatist was to fill up the gaps with conversations
which led, however irrelevantly, to the situations themselves.
Herein were to be found those elements of melodrama which
were finally the cause of its own undoing. For the masses
were gradually becoming better educated, were because of
the general interest in drama - coming under influences
which raised their standards of living and softened their ideals.
One cannot fool the public all the time at the theatre, even
though it be on Eighth Avenue or on the Bowery.
-
It is hard to analyze any of the plays representing this
peculiar type. The newspaper accidents, murders, intrigues,
the electrical and mechanical marvels of the age, were all
used. I note the following bit of "news" sent out to the
papers in those days. It said:
"Captain Kelly, whose Zouaves are to be a feature of
'Convict 999', will introduce into that play a novel wall-
scaling effect. The scaling of one wall by a body of men has
become quite common. This season, however, there are three
walls representing the enclosure of a prison, and the Captain's
men will be compelled to mount each of them in rapid succes-
sion."
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The American Dramatist
One looked for a succession of such stunts in Al Woods's
melodramas. There was the conventional drunkard who mal-
treated the conventional cripple; there was the one charac-
ter from whom all humor flowed, a convention which marked
the Yiddish stage as well. The hero, in the course of his
progress along the path of love, disguised himself a thou-
sand and one times; and the grand finale usually came with.
the arrival of a man-of-war, or the rushing on of soldiers.
You cannot outline the plot; you can only enumerate the
situations. In Davis's "A Marked Woman", the S. S.
Alabama and the American Consulate were among its nine
scenes, and supposed Chinese "devils" threw off their dresses,
beneath which were uniforms of U. S. soldiers. The spot-
light rested on the flag, and the orchestra played "The Star-
spangled Banner. In "The Queen of the White Slaves",
told in fifteen scenes, the Indiana arrived in the nick of time.
The dialogue of these melodramas of the Al Woods era was
not much different in sentiment, in display of manly character
and womanly virtue, from the many early romantic plays we
have already referred to. The dramas of the eighteen-thirties
and forties were equally as full of incongruities; their plot
sequences were just as violent and rapid in change; their use
of humor and the confining of humor to particular moments
and particular characters were just as conventional and "set."
Melodrama underlies a great part of our theatre entertainment.
وو
The plays that Al Woods used to present may be covered
with dust. I have not seen them in print, save typed copies.
But they sound, in their manner and their sentiment, if not in
the violence of their accentuation, much like the older plays
I have read in print. An American girl is in the power of the
Chinese one Prince Tuan would have her for his wife. The
Dowager Empress rubs it in. Lucille, who happens to be a
daughter of the American consul, is equal to the occasion.
She says to the Prince:
When the time comes that our lives are in danger here in
China we will not look to your friendship for safety, but to the
guns of the American battleships.
304
Concerning a Certain Type of Melodrama
And later, to the Empress she turns:
His wife..
Honor to be his wife! Honor! It would
be a shame so much greater than death, that I would welcome
death before I would live one hour in his presence. .
Women of my country are not slaves; you may have the
power to keep me prisoner here, but my life is mine, and I
will end it before he puts one hand upon me.
Such is the rhythm of a special type of melodrama.
It is said that yellow journalism is dependent not so much
upon the manner in which a leading article is written, as on
the style in which the type is set and the manner in which the
pictures are drawn.
This perhaps might likewise be claimed for melodrama.
Its differences are a matter of emphasis. Once win a bad
name, and it is hard to escape it. In Mr. Belasco's "The
Girl of the Golden West", the wounded hero is hidden by the
girl from the pursuing Sheriff, and from where he lies above
the rafters of the room, blood drips upon the floor beneath.
Had Mr. Kremer been the author of this piece, one would have
smiled at it. But the two-dollar audiences accepted it be-
cause it was Mr. Belasco. However, the difference between
"The Girl of the Golden West", softened by some attempt at
subdued acting, and "The Girl of the Golden West" as it
might have been given on the Bowery or Eighth Avenue,
would lie wholly in accentuation.
IV
Did this melodrama, which we have termed the Al Woods
type, disappear, or was it transferred to some other form of
art? For the melodrama which we have analyzed as de-
scending from French models is still existent on the stage.
The violent scene, which characterized "Chinatown Charlie'
and "Convict 999" and "The Queen of the Opium Den",
found a ready outlet in the moving pictures which began to
develop just when melodrama began to wane on Eighth Ave-
It has flourished on the screen because one of its chief
nue.
305
The American Dramatist
characteristics was a dependence on variety of background,
quick shifting from one place to another, water and land
effects, three-dimensional situations which called into play all
the athletic powers of the players. These demands could be
met and even amplified on the screen.
But the day of rash incongruity was over with the writers
of this type of play. Realism taught them that a consistency
must be adhered to; the screen, aiming for a certain contin-
uity of plot, discarded the impossible, except where avowedly
the camera was tricked for the purpose of creating startling re-
sults. The perspective of plays was panoramic, not confined
to fifteen crudely painted scenes, but with the whole country as
a background. The camera could be taken to the four cor-
ners of the globe with a company of actors. Every mechani-
cal facility could be called into play as accessory: railway sys-
tems, steamship companies, private houses, palaces, govern-
mental equipments could be used. The streets of Paris and
London, the highest peaks of the Andes, the wastes of Sahara,
were there for the asking. In this respect the limitless possi-
bilities of background are at the command of the camera.
So, the old melodrama has prospered, though its relation is
nearer fiction than drama.
In fact, if I do not discuss the technique of the moving pic-
ture in this survey, it is because I believe its dramatic content
is more nearly the externalizing of a dramatic story than the
mounting of a play. For it is difficult to recognize the neat
structure of a play in a three- or five-reel moving picture; the
narrative is expanded into a series of dramatic incidents made
active: the eye is able, because of what is actually seen, to
supply the interstices of descriptive matter. The more one
analyzes the moving picture the more nearly does it approach
fiction than drama.
Of course the story is told by means of actors: they appear in
successive illustrations - pictures whose continuity reveals
the progress of a plot. There is a technique in this which
differs both from the art of fiction and the art of drama. The
ease with which the screen may take from both the stage and
the book shows that it is a law unto itself: that what it is after
306
Concerning a Certain Type of Melodrama
is a story to picture forth in a series of scenes and actions.
While there is a selective process, the means of selection are
almost as expansive as the novelist's. There is none of the
dramatist's compression, suggestion, adherence to laws of time,
place, or manner. The screen writer, like the story writer,
may overleap many chasms by a cut-back or a close-up, or a
succession of coincident occurrences. This is more nearly the
novelist's power.
how it took over the
The history of the moving picture
old melodrama, how it claimed actors and managers who were
at first antagonistic toward it, how it tempted the playwright
to cut his dramatic cloth for the sake of the screen, how it
prompted most of the novelists to write their stories with an
eye to the screen,-is a story which needs to be told but which
should not detain our survey. Sometimes, to the credit of
the studio, let it be said, the camera has justified itself,
the camera together with a director of imagination. The
beauty of Barrie's "Peter Pan", the adequacy of treatment
accorded Joseph Hergesheimer's "Java Head", the improve-
ment of "The Great Divide" over the inconsistences of the
Moody drama on the stage, the imaginative scope of Douglas
Fairbank's "The Thief of Bagdad", are to its credit. In its
wide appeal, over an area not touched by the regular theatre,
its influence is enormous. But at basis there should be no
conflict between the theatre and the moving picture. The
screen has its limitation; the human quality is wanting, its
spiritual content is confined to a small range, because it is
after all a pictorial art. But these pictures may be made more
artistic, the technique of telling a story may be made more
effective, the acting may, with the improvement of the camera,
be recorded more perfectly, and the actor may develop a
mimetic power which at present he has only to a small degree.
Yet even then, the theatre is of a different realm, because on
the stage the presence of the actor is demanded, and person-
ality is warm because of that presence.
The moving picture is a temptation to the playwright and
the novelist; but, if both are artists in their craft, they need
not be limited by the demands of the moving picture. They
307
The American Dramatist
stand just as much chance of striking success on the screen
by keeping their own particular art to its highest point of
effectiveness. Yet, I have detected in much of our drama and
fiction a tendency to keep an eye on pictorial effect as though
the writer had said to himself, "I will make my story melo-
dramatic, that it may more easily find its way upon the screen.
screen."
And many dramatists have gone to Hollywood to turn to im-
mediate account a technical ability which has not found imme-
diate acceptance on the stage. Thus the theatre lost Thomp-
son Buchanan, Charles Kenyon, A. E. Thomas, and others
who should have done much for native dramatic authorship.
308
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CONCERNING CLYDE FITCH AND THE LOCAL SENSE
I
CLYDE FITCH wrote for the theatre of his day. He came
under the persuasive personality of Charles Frohman, who
seems to have had a charm, an irresistibility about him, which
none could withstand. The whole record of the Little Napo-
leon of the Theatre consists in loyalties to and from his actors
and dramatists. They loved him; he watched after their
interests, and nothing was too great a task for him, when he
wanted to bring some one to success. He interpreted the
theatre in his own way; and this interpretation became at
once the standard and the limitation of all American theatrical
managers of the time. For Frohman was a leader, against
whom it was difficult to compete.
I find a confession in Barrie's charming foreword to the
Frohman "Life." He said: "I had only one quarrel with
him, but it lasted all the sixteen years I knew him. He
wanted me to be a playwright and I wanted to be a novelist.
All those years I fought him on that. He always won, but
not because of his doggedness; only because he was so lovable
that one had to do as he wanted." The statement here given
is worthy of consideration as showing the impelling power of
the American manager through something in him that was
greater than his intellectual breadth.
In a period when the American Drama was possibly at its
lowest ebb, Charles and Daniel Frohman occupied command-
ing, almost dictatorial positions. In their enthusiasm for the
309
The American Dramatist
English play of the period, they unconsciously helped to keep
the American Drama at its low point, though Daniel did now
and again produce a native comedy at his memorable Lyceum
Theatre. I do not wish in any way to detract from my reali-
zation of the intrinsic worth of these two men of the theatre:
the quality of the acting they fostered was good, with a remi-
niscent dexterity of the old-time stock; but their growing
belief in the "star" system had a disastrous effect on the plays
of the period, and, in the case of Clyde Fitch, served to limit
his invention and to direct his construction. He thought too
persistently in terms of "stars." The business character of
organization encouraged a business attitude toward the plays
produced, and the conditions under which they were produced.
The speculative phase of any theatrical undertaking made it
necessary to use means outside the play itself to insure success,
or at least to decrease loss to a minimum.
Not that Charles Frohman was commercial; he died poor,
and everything he earned went back into the theatre which
gave it to him. He was a child in the pleasure he took in
theatre management. But, in order to play, he must have
money to play with, and so he trimmed his sails to the box-
office gale; public approval was the wind by which he steered.
If he foundered, he took to another vessel and did not bemoan
his loss, except in so far as it might limit his plans for further
adventure. Hence this policy of his ruled him, shaped his
belief in the theatre. He gave the public what they wanted,
and what they wanted, so he argued in the main, was what
they, in the largest numbers, would buy. It would not be
just to say that he did not take under his management any-
thing that was not so judged. I doubt whether "Everyman
or his London Repertory venture were regarded as "safe"
enterprises. He did them because he wanted to, because there
was something about this little man that brought strange
loves to his heart, stranger dreams to his head.
In the Frohman "Life", the authors have gathered some
excerpts from his varied correspondence, as showing his wit,
as revealing his solicitude and interest, as indicating his per-
spicacity. These quotations do more than that. They sug-
310
Concerning Clyde Fitch and the Local Sense
gest the limitations of the American Theatre of the eighteen-
nineties, due to the criteria of one man in the theatre, who was
followed almost blindly, always devotedly.
At random, let us note the earmarks of the time. These
managers were after plays that "got" their audiences through
novelty, through "clean" character; the entertainment must
be wholesome and with big human scenes; it must last an
evening to full measure. The "real thing" was a changeable
product. To Alfred Sutro, Frohman confessed as much:
'These American plays with thieves, burglars, detectives,
and pistols seem to be the real things over here just now.
None of them has failed." But what does he write the same
author later? "I do believe that throughout the United States
a play really requires a star artist, man or woman woman
for choice.. A good theatrical play to him was a good
play. He writes to another: "When one talks to an English
author about 'Diplomacy', he says, 'Oh, that's a theatrical
play!' I wish I could get another like it." In 1913, he
wrote: "At present the taste is 'down with light plays, down
with literary plays.' They want plays with dramatic situa-
tions, intrigue, sex conflict. There is no use giving the public
what it does not want and what they ought to have."
وو
Thus Frohman only looked for the limited use of the play-
wright. There was a pattern to follow; when it was outworn
and new fashions were being bought, then Frohman was look-
ing for the "fad." He was a naïve showman, upright, honest
to the point of giving himself and his era away completely.
The unfortunate thing is that he lost quite as much by his
"safe" policy as he would have done by an experimental one.
He was conservative, and so the theatre he directed had to be
conservative. He was in control of the market and so was in
position to impose his limitations upon others, since an author
always seeks production. He once made a proposal to Fitch—
generous in its financial scope - but corralling the dramatist's
"futures.' "As Frohman has nearly all the theatres, and
nearly all the actors, why not?" asks the dramatist. Sub-
tlety of personality and dominance of business control: this
is the Charles Frohman, who "never broke his word"
an
311
The American Dramatist
interesting study, a man whom Elia, so Barrie asserts, would
have relished picturing in words; a man whom Barrie always
found so gentle and yet so roughly educated.
II
This point of view of the possible influence of Charles
Frohman on Clyde Fitch I have suggested in an introduction
to his play, "The City." I have done so with no intention of
claiming that Fitch himself did not have limitations as a
playwright, but rather to show one of the forces that kept his
dramas representative of his time. They were more than
representative; they constituted the high watermark of
dramatic endeavor in the American Theatre, so deluged with
amateurishness and imitation. At the time of Fitch's death,
the Boston Transcript, writing editorially, had this to say:
In Mr. Fitch's earlier days managers, actors, and even audi-
ences mistrusted the ability of American playwrights and the
interest of plays of American life. Most of all they were sus-
picious of the comedy of American manners and incidents of
the hour. It was such pieces that Mr. Fitch wished to write,
that he wrote best, and he had almost single-handed to prove
by his own skill and example that they could be written inter-
estingly, amusingly, even significantly; that players of repu-
tation could venture themselves safely in them; that a secure
public would quickly recognize and like them. The comedy of
American manners was indeed neglected, frail and struggling
when Mr. Fitch began to write. He has left it firm in its place
on the stage, assured of an intelligent public, a significant,
capable and promising part of our rising drama. He died
almost young; but with the comedy of American manners he
was already an example and incentive to a new generation.
This, to my mind, was the positive contribution that Clyde
Fitch made, entitling him to serious consideration. A little
more than fifteen years after his death, I assisted in editing
his "Letters", a sheaf of correspondence revealing a personal-
ity vital and attractive; showing all his nervous quality, the
rapidity of his workmanship, the sapping strain of the theatre
312
Concerning Clyde Fitch and the Local Sense
upon him, his great demand. The letters, I believe, did what
they were intended to do: they pictured a lovable man, gener-
ous in his responses, decorative in his tastes, keenly alive to
beauty, quickly responsive to environment, loyal and asking
for loyalty. The book did not reveal much of his intellectual
sensitiveness because it consisted mostly of notes quick upon
the moment of events; that side of Fitch needed to be caught
by a Boswell, as Professor William Lyon Phelps has pointed
out. "Clyde Fitch was one of the most brilliant talkers I ever
knew," he wrote. "His conversation was filled with shrewd
observations, penetrating criticisms, and sparkled with wit
and humor. His marvellous flow of good talk seemed to come
in an effortless manner from an inexhaustible source. Un-
fortunate indeed that the playwright did not put on paper
more of what he thought about the theatre and his craft; for
he thought constantly of both.
But he was a man of his time and a playwright of the theatre
of his time; he played the game to the fullest bent of his
powers, and he brought to the playhouse much grace, much
wit, much variety, with now and again depth of characteriza-
tion unusual in the days of our "hardened" theatre, as he
once called it. It was a conventional theatre with conven-
tional rules for success; and Fitch played these rules, since
there was no other way for an American dramatist to do. He
played them with skill, adroitness, and honesty, and they
brought him much in the way of the world's goods. This did
not turn his head; he was always simple (however decorative),
never conceited and overconfident, always strenuous, ever
desiring that calm and peace out of which come deep con-
viction and sound reasoning. His personality caught the
surface, but in the glimpse he always went beneath. Mr.
Robert Herrick marvelled at the sufficiency of Fitch's "first
glance. "It was not merely for rest and recuperation that
he went so often to Europe," writes the novelist; "it was for
the unconscious exhilaration to his mind that he felt while
there, dashing from country to country, from gallery and
Antichita to church and view. Italy especially drew him.
There was something colorful and expressive in his nature,
313
The American Dramatist
quite un-American, that demanded the warmth and spontane-
ity of Italy for its satisfaction. Fitch could speak little
Italian, and never stayed long in any one place, but he knew
Italy in a swift, unerring, instinctive way.
Fitch's plays are growing into disuse; their contempo-
raneousness is their undoing; their manners are thin, their
intellectual content is also thin. His realism was never deep,
like Herne's, his conviction never as strong as it was in his
daily intercourse with friends. Not believing in what he
feared might be preachment, he often committed the error of
getting what he had to say done in a speech or two, and
devoting the rest of his play to familiar foibles. Yet he did all
this with deftness, with enthusiasm, with speed. He spared
no effort to improve himself in his technique: each play
absorbed him, even though at times the weariness of adapta-
tion appalled his spirit and brought him discouragement.
He wanted every one to believe him earnest, and a large part
of his sensitiveness to criticism was due to the fact that the
newspaper writers never would believe him either sincere or
earnest. They always slurred him in ways that hurt. He
once wrote to me about his successes abroad, where they ac-
cepted him for his truth and his technique, - so different from
the usual way in which he was treated at home. "How do
you account for this?" he asked. "Isn't it that uncon-
sciously we are all more or less influenced by our environ-
ment, and the environment about the criticism of my work, or
those who don't know me, is still the echo of fifteen years ago,
when I was said to be superficial, writing too fast, etc., etc.,
an attitude at first struck by the press, because they didn't
like the cut of my coat, nor my sensitive shyness which
looked like a lack of good-fellowship, or conceit ?!"
These foibles became a tradition; and they have persisted
among critics who did not know him. To them Fitch was a
gaily apparelled person, surrounded by an infinite number of
gold-laced lackeys. They thought he never had any consider-
ation of man and his destiny, but only cared for gentlemen's
waistcoats and ladies' lipsticks. They avoided considering
his "The Truth", and overemphasized the steam-radiator
314
Concerning Clyde Fitch and the Local Sense
familiarity of "Girls." He wrote many comedies of seemingly
light texture, yet Howells saw in one of them, “Glad Of It",
a technique, a truthful observation which brought forth his
saying so in print, and Fitch's grateful acknowledgment.
To which Howells replied, "The more I thought of that gay,
brilliant, honest, living play of yours, the more I have liked it,
and the more I have deplored its removal from the theatre.
I do not think it was built on the great lines, and that its
astonishing inconclusiveness was not greater proof of your
grasp than its easy and natural successiveness was of your
knowledge of how and when to let things go of themselves."
Such workmanship represented Fitch's own quality — a liter-
ary quality — and his contribution to the theatre of his day.
That was a distinctive contribution when one reviews what
the other contemporary native dramas were. If this ability
had been subject to a different theatrical condition, in some
ways Fitch would have himself been different. It is true
Shaw and Ibsen were both bringing to the English theatre
and its colonial dependent of the time, America a body of
thought, of social criticism, of individual psychology. Ibsen
had blazed his way on the Continent, and was not dependent.
on Anglo-Saxon acceptance: as it is he had a hard struggle to
win out in London and in New York, as far as the regular
theatre was concerned. Shaw met with equal opposition.
In no sense was Fitch a militant. No dramatist in the Ameri-
can Theatre thought of being one. Pinero and Jones were
fighting for the freedom of the English stage, and the latter had
done much with his book, "The Renascence of the English
Stage." But, granted that there was a narrow parochialism
in the theatre which would have barred Eugene O'Neill
and a revival of the Restoration Drama, both of which we
accept to-day there was no place for vigorous ideas, there
was little outlet for classic drama or acting of the quality
soon to pass away with Henry Irving and Richard Mansfield.
How Fitch felt about it, how circumscribed he was, is clearly
seen in a letter to Miss Marguerite Merington, from Lucerne,
dated July 25, 1897, about a play just sent to Charles
Frohman. He wrote:
315
The American Dramatist
1
O! M. M., fellow scribe and fellow sufferer, what a state it
is, when there is only one man to whom one can offer a play
and expect to have it in any adequate way presented - I
mean of course a play, not a star's piece. I tell you there will
never be good American dramatists till there are good American
producers! And without these last mentioned gentlemen the
good American dramatists that there are YOU and ME, par
example, cannot begin to do ourselves justice.
Miss Merington was author of "Captain Letterblair", in
which E. H. Sothern had appeared at the outset of his career.
III
Fitch had about him certain qualities of the novelist. In
that respect he was not unlike Pinero, though the latter was
sounder in his invention, much more solid in his plot construc-
tion. The man who has the ability to tell a story, and to tell
it in an easy, interesting manner, possesses the art of the
narrator. But if, in addition, he sees the story in action, he is
somehow forced to tell it in accordance with the form action
demands. In other words, whenever a novelist introduces
into his story an active interchange of personality with per-
sonality, he is compelled to use the very form that dis-
tinguishes drama: dialogue. The playwright translates life
wholly in terms of action, in terms of speech, in terms of
situation. His fundamental idea must invariably rely for
understanding on the effects of that idea upon the characters
of his play, and every step in the development of his story
must be advanced by this means, — and this alone. Strange
that dialogue by itself does not make drama; many novel-
ists, turned playwrights, have found to their destruction that
this is so; many adapters, changing novels into plays for
the stage, have discovered that the scissors and paste, how-
ever dexterously used, did not take from the narrative any
embedded drama. The essential structure of each is differ-
And because the instinct of the dramatist was upper-
most both in Pinero and Fitch, they were both dramatists
rather than novelists.
ent.
316
Concerning Clyde Fitch and the Local Sense
In the case of Clyde Fitch, that instinct became a dangerous
asset. He was endowed with a prolific inventive talent, and
this he worked rapidly. He couldn't help it.
He couldn't help it. His pen, as
sketchy as a painter's brush, caught the passing show, and
the form his impressions took was drama. From his early
Amherst days he was writing.
Fitch was a realist, if by realism we mean the handling
of everyday occurrences and of the familiar natural problems
of existence; but his realistic data was usually subjected to a
high light of what at one moment was romanticism and at
another moment sentimentalism. Much as quite a few of his
plays have been discussed from the standpoint of their femi-
nine suggestiveness and from the standpoint of their feminine
sensuous interests, in point of morality Fitch was wholly
conventional. His cleverness in overcoming this conventional
tendency rested on his theatrical employment of the unusual.
In other words, in point of visual sense, Fitch's observation of
little things was about as sane as that of any other living
dramatist of his time, his fault being that he failed to bring his
minute observation into relation with any large, vital, or
sustained idea.
وو
In 1897, Fitch published a little volume, entitled "The
Smart Set: Correspondence & Conversations. It is another
example of the insistent dramatist who dominates above the
story-teller in the writing of a book. It contained the attitude
of the dialogue, and so we may claim that Fitch was a born
playwright, in the double sense that in expressing himself he
perforce had to use dialogue, and in viewing life he invariably
felt compelled to estimate it in terms of situation. His undo-
ing was that he lacked the consuming idea.
As far as dramatic faith is concerned, Fitch was thoroughly
sincere. He lived up to his convictions as to what drama
should be in general, and he expressed his convictions in the
following terms:
I feel myself very strongly the particular value — a value
which, rightly or wrongly, I can't help feeling inestimable
in a modern play, of reflecting absolutely and truthfully the
life and environment about us; every class, every kind, every
317
The American Dramatist
emotion, every motive, every occupation, every business,
every idleness! Never was life so varied, so complex.
Take what strikes you most, in the hope it will interest others,
take what suits you most to do what perhaps you can do
best, and then do it better. Be truthful, and then nothing
can be too big, nothing should be too small, so long as it is here
and there. . . . If you inculcate an idea in your play, so
much the better for your play and for you and for your audi-
ence. In fact, there is small hope for your play as a play, if
you have not some idea in it, somewhere and somehow, even
if it is hidden. It is sometimes better for you if it is hidden,
but it must of course be integral. . . One should write
what one sees, but observe under the surface. It is a mistake.
to look at the reflection of the sky in the water of theatrical
convention; instead, look up and into the sky of real life
itself.
This quotation contains the essence of Fitch's attitude
toward life. It shows him prone to place idea throughout
his work in a secondary position, and he thus unconsciously
became a very true critic of himself. For he was given to
infuse into his picturesque entertainments some small sem-
blance of ideas, which, while not seemingly vital, were so
commonplace as to have intimate connection with the human
side of his audiences. "The Climbers", "The Girl with the
Green Eyes", "The Girl and the Judge", "Her Own Way",
each of these contains an element of live meaning, apart
from the mere interest of story or attractiveness of scene;
and this very presence of a suggestion of the vital spark in
drama is what made one most regretful regarding Fitch as a
dramatist. For he had that within him out of which the
highest dramatic literature might have been evolved.
The general impression was that he did not make good,
for the very reason that his ideas never seemed to arrive.
That he was consciously aware of foreign drama was indicated
by the way he welcomed in it just those large and significant
characteristics which, had he possessed them, would have
placed him in the front ranks of the progressive dramatic
movement. He once said: "No one at the present moment
is getting the essence of his environment in thought, word, and
318
Concerning Clyde Fitch and the Local Sense
deed, as Hervieu, Lavedan, Donnay, Capus: Capus with the
idea for the basic principle, the idea serious; Lavedan and
Donnay, the idea social; Capus all sorts of ideas together, any
old idea so long as it is always life - especially the life super-
ficial, with the undercurrent really kept under."
Our American dramatist has, during the past two decades,
developed within himself a sense of locality. This is very
natural, considering his keenness of observation. But he has
not yet sufficiently balanced this observation with an intel-
lectual understanding of those characteristics which go to
make the nation. We could more readily describe Fitch by
saying that he was a typical New York dramatist, than a
typical American dramatist; for the conventions running
through his plays are those of a society which was common
to New York City in the eighteen-nineties. Even in his scenic
indications, he preferred to appeal to the local sense of New
Yorkers. His "Major André", played at the Savoy Theatre,
was supposed to have taken place in an old colonial residence,
situated exactly on the spot occupied by the Savoy Theatre
itself. His "Glad of It" had one act behind the scenes of the
Savoy Theatre. His "Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines"
opened on the docks of the Cunard Steamship Company.
The last two acts of "The Truth" were laid in a Harlem flat.
"Girls" was filled with allusions to apartment life in New
York, which only New Yorkers could fully appreciate.
This local sense was encouraged in those dramatists who
had gained experience through newspaper reporting. Mr.
Thomas once confessed that, when he began to write for the
stage, he mentally divided the country into various sections
for his own purposes. He did this by centering his attention
upon the social position women occupied in the North, South,
East, and West, and he stated his case thus: "In the South
the unwritten law and the spotlessness of a woman's reputa-
tion are the first items, as they are the last. In the middle
West they are not so punctilious; and in the far West, where
the scarcity of the article raises its price, a woman's position
is not prohibitive, if, after accepting a man's name and his
protection, she runs straight and is true. In the North we
319
The American Dramatist
have commenced to accept the English idea of compensation
and consideration for services to the husband where a wife has
been seduced." Whether Mr. Thomas actually did regard
the country from this standpoint must be proven by careful
examination of his plays, but we believe that this statement.
of his is more closely applicable to Fitch's own consideration
of the sex problem. His plays were avowedly romantic, their
psychology mostly commonplace and healthy. It was dis-
tinctively the psychology of the story-teller, and in instances
was not only cleverly, but realistically portrayed. For ex-
ample, "The Girl with the Green Eyes" is a close, persistent
analysis of jealousy.
Fitch attempted nearly every form of drama. His charac-
ter studies, as typified by "Beau Brummel”, - written in
conjunction with Richard Mansfield - "Frédéric Lemaître",
and "His Grace de Grammont", reveal a delicacy and deft-
ness which, although lacking in virility, constitute, none the
less, miniatures of a notable order. He attempted war drama
in his "Nathan Hale" and "Barbara Frietchie", but they
may be described as war dramas with the war left out. He
wrote straight comedies as well as farces; and, in the realm
of melodrama, such a piece as "The Woman in the Case"
might be taken as a typical and striking example.
The interest of Fitch usually centred upon the feminine
side of his play. No writer for the stage had a keener sense
of changing styles and foibles than he. Oftentimes his weak-
ness lay in his too great dependence upon novelty or familiar-
ity of detail. He wrote so many pieces with these charac-
teristics uppermost, that we were never startled by Fitch's
inventive powers. In a new drama by him, we were almost sure
of finding certain familiar features which belonged to no one
else but him. Our curiosity was piqued, and so distinctly did
we imagine that we knew the flavor of the Fitch atmosphere,
that, unless he gave us the flavor we were expecting, we left
the theatre disappointed. We can say of "The Climbers",
for example, that, through the customary method Fitch
employed, his public was willing to find amusement in the
first act of a play which opened in a house of mourning a short
320

OF
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
FAY DAVIS AND CLYDE FITCH AT REHEARSALS OF
MRS. EDITH WHARTON'S "THE HOUSE OF MIRTH."
Collection Albert Davis, Brooklyn, N. Y.
JOHN MASON AND AUGUSTUS THOMAS
Mr. Mason appeared in Thomas's psychic dramas.
Concerning Clyde Fitch and the Local Sense
while after the burial service had been held. In "The Stub-
bornness of Geraldine", the clever representing of the deck
of one of our large ocean liners was legitimately entertaining,
even though an accessory.
But the Fitch flavor, which was so familiar to theatregoers,
and which might almost be said to have become crystallized,
created in the forty or fifty plays which are to his credit a
level of cleverness above which very few of the pieces stand
out. Nearly all of his plays bore a close relationship, one
with the other. His heroines were mostly of the same roman-
tic type, his heroes had the same polished daring. It is a
mistaken idea that there are but few ways in drama of creating
humor. We may no doubt reduce an analysis of humor to a
certain number of elements, but the combinations of those
elements are infinite. The fault with Fitch's humor rested in
the fact that he was prone to use the same combinations over
and over again. I would say of him that his grasp of the life
and manners of New York, from earliest times, was more inti-
mate than that possessed by any other dramatist or writer of
his day. Because of this grasp, he was able to play with de-
tails, to contrast the past with the present, to create his humor
by means of this balance of the past with the present. Take,
for example, "Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines." The
references to Hoboken made by Madame Trentoni are put from
the standpoint of those early times, rather than from the
standpoint of to-day. Should one read the diaries of Tyrone
Power, the grandfather of the present actor of that name,
one would find the same characteristic innuendoes that sound
humorous to us to-day, simply because they while not
wholly true of the Hoboken of the present — have, neverthe-
less, an element of truth in them. They persist, as tradition
is prone to exist.
Fitch created humor, likewise, by a method of comparing
material advance. When Madame Trentoni comes down the
gangplank and meets the New York newspaper reporters,
she is enthusiastic about the quickness of the trip over-
something like fourteen days and the reporters boast that
in time to come they will even be able to make it in ten days.
321
The American Dramatist
CLYDE FITCH (1865-1909)
For complete list of plays see "Clyde Fitch and His Letters"; also
Moses' "Representative Plays", Vol. III.
Beau Brummel.
Nathan Hale.
Barbara Frietchie.
The Climbers.
Madison Square Thea-
tre, New York,
May 17, 1890.
Knickerbocker Thea-
tre, New York, Jan-
uary 2, 1899.
Criterion Theatre, New
York, October 24,
1899.
Bijou Theatre, New
York, January 21,
1901.
Captain Jinks of the Garrick Theatre, New
Horse Marines.
York, February 4,
1901.
The Girl with the Green Savoy Theatre, New
Eyes.
The Truth.
York, December 25,
1902.
Criterion Theatre, New
York, January 7,
1907.
The City.
Lyric Theatre, New
York, December 21,
1909.
Clyde Fitch and His By Montrose J. Moses
Letters.
and Virginia Gerson.
The Case of Clyde By Walter P. Eaton.
Fitch.
Boston:
Little,
Brown, and Com-
pany, 1924.
'At the New Thea-
tre." Boston:
Small, Maynard
& Co., 1910.
Also in Scrib-
ner's, 46: 490-
497.
Critical Appreciation. By Martin Birnbaum. Independent, 67:
123-131.
322
Concerning Clyde Fitch and the Local Sense

CLYDE FITCH (1865-1909) Continued
A Study of the Modern By Barrett Clark.
Drama.
New
York:
D.
Appleton & Co.,
1925. See p. 375.
"Memorial Edition" of
the Plays of Clyde
Edited by Montrose J.
Moses and Virginia
Boston: Little,
Brown,
and
Fitch.
Gerson.
Company, 1915.
4 vols.
Note: Clyde
Fitch
wrote 62 plays; 36 of
these were original,
21 adaptations, and
5 were dramatiza-
tions of novels.
In view of the modern ocean liner, one cannot help but smile!
And this was the deftness of Fitch at full play. Take away
from him those characteristics that were known as the Fitch
qualities, and that might be termed superficial qualities if
they were not truthful reproductions however much they
are dramatically superficial- and the remaining charac-
teristics would indicate his limitations.
The comedy of manners is not only a legitimate form of
dramatic art, but it is also one of the hardest forms to
make vital. Fitch practised it with success; his plays mostly
reflected comedy and manner, but never quite approached the
form, as Langdon Mitchell's "The New York Idea" did.
For the latter suggested, in satiric quality, the school of Sheri-
dan. "The School for Scandal" has persisted from generation
to generation, not because of its story, not because of its
reflection of eighteenth century habits and customs, not be-
cause of its idea, which is hardly noteworthy, but because of
its humanity underlying the superficial, a humanity which is
eternal, whether in powder and patches, in hoopskirts, or in
the fashions of the present. There is a spontaneous flow of
humor in this drama, dependent upon character, rather than
323
The American Dramatist
胃
​upon situation or local reference. In fact, an overabundance
of local reference would take the sympathetic appeal away
from a comedy after the age had passed.
وو
In addition, an overemphasis of the local is detrimental to
the understanding of a piece, outside its particular locality.
Local characteristics, even national characteristics are only
useful, in so far as they help to round out the character value
of the play. The Americanism in "The Lion and the Mouse
was its ruination in England. The Western allusions in
George Ade's "The College Widow", which was presented in
London, hastened its return home. It is to be remarked that
Fitch successfully produced abroad only those plays of his
that were more universal in manner than American. "The
Cowboy and the Lady" was only fairly received. But "The
Truth" not only brought success to Marie Tempest; because
of its psychology, which surmounts the local sense and is much
more important, it won its way throughout the Continent.
Americans have never quite realized how much of a reputation
Fitch had abroad. His last trip to Europe was a veritable
sweep of the theatrical field. London had just received
favorably "The Woman in the Case", which was an excel-
lent melodrama, and other managers were clamoring for his
pieces, no matter how old they were. Sir Charles Wyndham
was watching "The Blue Mouse", Belasco was seeking a con-
tract with him, and every one was envious of the Shuberts, who
had secured the rights to "The City", that play which was to
prove the last forceful flash suggestive of the maturing Fitch.
A list of Fitch's plays will show that in point of variety,
if not in point of solidity, he was closely akin to Pinero, with-
out that deep interest in the psychology of character which
marks the English playwright. The majority of his plays
were but variations of the same theme. His technique was
sometimes skilful, at other times it was hasty and crude; at
its best it was more polished than vigorous. In the matter of
dramatization, one can well imagine why Fitch was unsuccess-
ful in turning Alfred Henry Lewis's "Wolfville Stories" into
a Western play. But it is less evident, except in the inherent
defects that beset the dramatization of any novel, why it was
324
Concerning Clyde Fitch and the Local Sense
that "The House of Mirth", a distinctively New York story
of the smart set, written by Edith Wharton, should have
missed the mark.
One final characteristic of Fitch needs to be noted, and it
becomes distinctive, if the reader is at all familiar with the
personalities involved. Nearly always he wrote his plays
with a definite actress in view. The consequence is his char-
acters almost invariably partook of the personality of their
model. In "The Truth" and in "The Girl with the Green
Eyes", the heroines are markedly like the late Clara Blood-
good. In "The Stubbornness of Geraldine", the heroine
was closely related to Mary Mannering. It is hard to find a
better portrait of Ethel Barrymore than in "Captain Jinks.
"Her Own Way" is identified with Maxine Elliott, and “Bar-
bara Frietchie" is synonymous with Julia Marlowe. He
chose his actors from the best the stage could then afford;
and often his plays made these players, and his acute eye as
producer discovered new ones.
"J
Any consideration of his plays would undoubtedly show that
what Fitch needed most was the accentuation of the element
of idea, of vital idea. By the cultivating of this, he would
perforce have been obliged to work less rapidly. But Fitch
was never careless, even in his rapidity. Quick workmanship
was part of his nature; he was quick to observe and quick to
appreciate. His humor was ever present, and, as we have said,
he dramatized everything that came within his vision. To his
sense of character, his sense of situation, and his sense of dia-
logue, Fitch added a fourth sense distinctively his own — that
of New York locality. His position in American Drama is one
which has afforded a large amount of healthy enjoyment; and
to have given this is to have done a great deal. In the matter
of construction, his plays that have been published will serve
the student of drama as excellent examples of external stage-
craft. They will illustrate in what manner the observation of
familiar detail may be made most effective use of, theatri-
cally; they will illustrate by what means the interest of an
audience may be held through an ordinary, though none the
less picturesque, story.
325
The American Dramatist
Clyde Fitch has been dead over fifteen years. Had he
lived much beyond forty-five, we should have seen a certain
transformation of his technique, and a more pronounced
purpose in his plots; for he was becoming deeply conscious
of the fundamental truths of life, and he was eager to put
strength into his dialogue in order to offset the delicacy and
feminine flashes which the public always considered purely
Fitchean. "The City" was his first, as it proved to be his
last, effort in that direction.
Fitch claimed that he was always measured in the public
press by stereotyped phrases. His letters to Mr. John Corbin.
and to me are full of this complaint. He deplored the fact that
the newspapers failed to give him credit for his close study of
character, such as one finds in "The Girl with the Green
Eyes" and in "The Truth." Only after he was dead did the
critics begin to realize the incommunicable flavor permeating
his dramas. This flavor came partly from a close understand-
ing of New York life, whether of the past or of the present in
"Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines" or in "Girls." But it
was in larger degree the flavor of personality. No amount of
profundity could ever have limited Clyde Fitch's enthusiasm
while writing or rehearsing; he was quick in mind and in
execution, and sometimes his very deftness and easy brilliancy
were his undoing. He realized this; he tried his best to push
back the numberless contracts and offers which claimed his
time.
He took his success as naïvely as a boy, but he was planning
to place more attention upon the message than he had hereto-
fore done. This might later have handicapped him, for pas-
sages of a self-conscious ethical nature in "A Happy Mar-
riage" retarded the action of the piece.
After all, the sum total of Fitch's work cannot be rejected
from the body of our dramatic literature; his very style is dis-
tinctive and is a measure of the man's outlook upon life.
He told his story simply, directly, tenderly, and humorously.
One cannot call "The Stubbornness of Geraldine" a great
drama, but it has a certain lively charm that no other play-
wright then seemed able to embody in a play. The tempta-
326
Concerning Clyde Fitch and the Local Sense
tion is to call such sentiment commonplace. "Granny" was
full of it; so was "The Girl Who Has Everything." Seeing
these plays in succession, the theatregoer would criticise their
apparent resemblance. But an analysis would inevitably
lead to the conclusion that the resemblance lay in the same.
personality behind them, and not in any monotony of detail.
Clyde Fitch was extravagant in his invention; he was
careless in throwing a whole problem away in a line of dialogue.
Such extravagance was indicative of his natural interest in
all things bearing on human relationships. He brought the
whole of life within the compass of home, and he gained his
audiences by a seeming comradeship which made them feel
that his windows overlooked the very housetops with which
they themselves were familiar. He knew how to use the re-
porter's method; one could see this in "The Woman in the
Case" and in "The City." But his usual style was literary,
not journalistic; it was narrative in direct fashion, and not
impressionistic. If he was cynical, it was friendly banter;
he was never bitter. Yet, looking deeper into the printed page
of his published plays, it is apparent that he had had quite
enough of society at the time of his death; that the city had
made such demands upon his physical strength as to turn his
desire toward the quietness of country life. There, he might
have started the larger work of a different kind had death not
put an end to his plans. Whether he would have succeeded
is a matter of futile speculation.
He has been dead over fifteen years, and still there is no one
to take his place. A remark was once made by Thomas A.
Edison to the effect that he hoped some day to have the time
at his disposal for making a real contribution to science. But
it is not easy to believe that anything he may do will ever
surpass his actual genius in hitching his wagon to a star;
in other words, in attaching a high imagination to practical
conditions. So was it with Clyde Fitch.
IV
Clyde Fitch died in 1909, at the age of forty-four. He left a
large fortune as a measure of his popularity. For a period he
327
The American Dramatist
was the dominant figure in the American Theatre. Broad-
way knew him to have two openings in a night; sometimes.
three of his plays would meet again in New York, as old friends
would meet upon the street; there would be a friendly race in
the box-office to see which one drew most in popular favor.
He wore himself out in the theatre; he spent his time between
his town house and country house, giving all he had to give
to his plans and rehearsals. He felt he owed a duty to the
theatre; therefore he lectured before colleges on his craft.
He was conscious all the time of pressure, but it was pressure
from within as well as from without. People warned him that
he was going too great a pace; he knew it but could not stop.
This was not because of any avaricious ambition; it was be-
cause there was the creative urge always upon him. It was
in 1902, I think, that he wrote to Mr. Herrick: "I may be
writing myself out—perhaps I am not to live long—but I have
all these ideas, all these plays in my head, and it seems better
for me to do them while they are in me, than to lay them aside.
until they become cold or dead."
Fitch could not have lived in any other atmosphere; he
thrived on activity, even if it were only a rapid walk down a
country road, or his daily drive which took him away from
scenery and actors. He lived in an atmosphere of art, and
spent many hours hunting for objets d'art. He could not
escape his class, even though he saw through it. Maude
Adams sensed his limitation, when she wrote him: "I wish
you could do some things that you'd hate to do. I wish you
could give over for a while your beloved Italy and your ad-
mired France and go to some place where the art is dead and
life is uppermost
common life. We live so much among
people of morbid tendencies, neuresthenics (I can't spell it),
and the like that we begin to think they are real of their
kind but it isn't a red blood kind." It is this limitation which
held Fitch from that larger universal sympathy, which would
have done much to assure his plays a more significant place
in the live theatre of to-day.
328
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE CASE OF PERCY MACKAYE AND HIS FATHER
I
IN the Theatre Arts Magazine for April, 1923, Percy Mac-
Kaye described fully his father's dream for a Spectatorium
which was to house a new musico-dramatic art. It was under
construction as a feature of the Chicago World's Fair, in 1893,
when a financial panic turned the bonds for the undertaking
into so much worthless paper. The failure of the enterprise
added to the strain which killed Steele MacKaye only a few
months after. But the significance of the undertaking placed
his name high among the innovators of the theatre, even
though that fact is only now being just discovered.
Long before the foreign experiments which have served to
convert both the stage and auditorium of the theatre into
something beyond the confines of a proscenium arch --- - in the
eighteen-eighties -Steele MacKaye, at the little Madison
Square Theatre, carried on experiments in indirect lighting,
in double stages; and, in the eighteen-nineties, in connection
with his Spectatorium, he conceived a curtain of light (Luxau-
leator), sliding and telescopic stages and proscenium adjusters :
besides having in his mind a theatre of the Ten Thousand,
outdoing the boldness of Reinhardt. We are interested
to-day in the transformation which is likely to give us a new
stage and a new relationship between the actor and the audi-
ence. Reinhardt's Circus Theatre, Norman Bel-Geddes's
designs for his "Divine Comedy", the schemes of Herman
Rosse, whereby we may escape the limitations of the picture-
329
The American Dramatist
frame playhouse, have been hailed as novel and revolutionary.
Steele MacKaye hinted at these things over thirty years be-
fore. What did he say? "In dramatic art, there is work to
be done in this country, of extraordinary importance. The
influence of the art is so powerful that the use made of it is a
question of great significance to the community. My work
has really been to try to secure a finer form of art, and a better
use of it, than has been made hitherto." It was such motive
which prompted him as an inventor. He was a reformer
ahead of his time; he worked with a vast vision, and in the
midst of his labors, Percy, the son, watched and caught the
fervor of the father. The MacKayes, both of them, have
been the two figures in the American Theatre who have
reached out for new vistas, new roads, new expansions of
theatre art. Both of them have been pioneers, have preached
the gospel, seen their endeavors laid aside for the moment,
only to be developed later. The man with vision in the theatre
always has a hard road to travel, because he is ahead of popu-
lar acceptance, and what practical folk consider chimerical
rarely receives the financial support necessary for its achieve-
ment. In the case of Steele MacKaye this was not the case.
His enterprise was on the eve of being financed. Only a panic
changed the current. Percy MacKaye, through the sheer force
of his conviction, and the steadiness of his vision, has "put
across a series of civic pageants which no one else has been
able thus far to do; he has at times awakened civic conscious-
ness to the value of art in the community, and municipal gov-
ernments have opened their purses, while thousands have
combined to share in his belief that art is necessary to the
welfare of the social group. Like his father, Percy MacKaye
has thrown himself whole-heartedly into gigantic enterprises,
making his art serve the common good, and he has come out
of it all richer in experience, though hardly ever profiting
financially. His devotion has been unique. No other Ameri-
can dramatist has ever sacrificed as much, has ever been as
prophetic, has ever entered as whole-heartedly into far-reach-
ing movements as he.
دو
Two young men started their careers under the inspiration
330
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
of their fathers. Henry De Mille's son, William, came to the
theatre in a way much like that of MacKaye. Sentiment,
which marks so much the progress of the theatre, hurried
William De Mille along the road toward success. Belasco was
glad to aid one of Henry's boys: he did even more than
that; he credited another one Cecil - with a fundamental
suggestion which led to the writing of "The Return of Peter
Grimm." But the difference between the two sons of two
theatre fathers was that whereas Percy maintained his dreams,
William listened to the dictates of a "hardened" theatre and
catered to it. His "Strongheart" which he once told me
دو
he wanted to make a Negro study instead of an Indian ro-
mance, "The Warrens of Virginia", "The Woman"—these
were his distinctive contributions to the theatre "as it was.
Cecil De Mille, too, became playwright and director. But,
when the final record is made of their activity, it will be found
that their contribution is greatest on the side of the moving
picture. Their names have ceased to figure in the theatre.
William De Mille came to the theatre from Columbia, Percy
MacKaye from Harvard. It was then that the Universities
were first boasting that they had their contribution to make
to the American Drama. Professor Baker was starting his
courses in play writing; ¹ Professor Matthews was giving his
lectures on the interrelation of play with playhouse. Other
colleges were noting the gradual encroachment of the living
drama in directions where it had so long been kept out by
educational distrust of things contemporaneous. There was
nothing pioneer about the De Milles; they were bent toward
the practical theatre. William allowed his plays to be sub-
jected to the demands of the box-office; he rewrote his dramas
at the director's table during rehearsal: they were better con-
structed than Charles Klein's plays. But "The Woman" was
in the tradition of the older generation, the tradition of
Thomas.
1
Percy MacKaye came to the theatre as a poet: he possessed
his father's seriousness, his father's philosophical bent, his
¹ Percy MacKaye was not a product of Professor Baker and Workshop 47, as
is popularly believed.
331
The American Dramatist
father's tendency to shape generalizations into concrete forms.
Like the poet that he was, his attention was at first drawn
to purely literary subjects. Stephen Phillips might write on
"Francesca da Rimini"; Percy MacKaye selected “Jeanne
d'Arc"; Phillips might turn to Goethe's "Faust"; MacKaye
turned to Chaucer's "Canterbury Pilgrims." Phillips found
inspiration in "Ulysses", MacKaye in "Sappho and Phaon."
Being poets, this Englishman and this American used the thea-
tre at first as a means of poetic communication. They both
possessed a more distinct dramatic gift than Josephine Pres-
ton Peabody; but they conceived the theatre as a place
where poetry should come into its own again. Later Mac-
Kaye was to turn to prose, but always his point of view, his
handling of situation and character, his scene have borne a
relation to poetry; his plays always are of a heightened char-
acter which is beyond literalism. His ear and heart have
always caught the broader strains of human speech than mere
realistic meaning. He catches "murmurs and scents of the
infinite sea"; ; he has broad social visions. His impulses have
always had some social foundation-a foundation not always
secure, not always clearly planned, not always understood,
because only half expressed. But, nevertheless, he has been
moved by a desire to be of service. To his task he has brought
unflagging endeavor, high imagination, oftentimes beauty of
lyric expression, a sedate irony, and an appreciation of deeper
meanings and motives than mere surfaces might suggest.
Had he been content to do surface work, he might have had
greater popular recognition. Both De Mille and MacKaye
were far in advance of their fathers in the technique of the
theatre. The older men wrote at a time when their contem-
poraries were Bronson Howard, Bartley Campbell, George
Jessop, Fred Marsden, A. C. Gunter, Fred Maeder, J. J.
McClosky, A. R. Cazauran, Edward Harrigan, and Henry Guy
Carlton. In the days when the Madison Square Theatre, in
West Twenty-fourth Street, New York, was the centre of
theatrical interest, managed by the Mallory brothers, who
combined this business with that of issuing the Churchman,
which still survives as a religious weekly, theatre managers
332
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
were reading their own plays. Daly always gave personal
attention to the manuscripts sent him. Palmer announced
openly that he was not favorable to the native playwright.
But, to judge by the personal note-book of Henry De Mille,
who read plays with the assistance of Daniel Frohman, Frank-
lin Sargent, and David Belasco, the manuscripts continued to
flow into the office of the little playhouse. In three months,
during 1883, some two hundred dramas by Americans were
read, and the possible subjects were never accepted without
material alteration. When Bronson Howard's “Young Mrs.
Winthrop" was in preparation, it was rewritten in accordance
with a multitude of suggestions, and was then handed over to
Belasco, who had already evinced his remarkable gift for cer-
tain phases of stage management. The theatre of that day
knew what it wanted, and the playwright was whipped into
shape. The current papers were then as persistent in their
attack upon the insipidity of the Madison Square drama, ast
critics are to-day upon the pornographic literature which
passes for virile thinking.
The sons of De Mille and MacKaye could never have been
content with the fashion of "The Charity Ball" or "Paul
Kauvar" and "Hazel Kirke." But young De Mille was satis-
fied at the start to adhere to the newspaper fetish, with which
the stage of his period was dominated: the play of effective
incident, of one big moment a play having nothing to do
with problems of a speculative nature. That was William
De Mille. Not so Percy MacKaye. From the start, the poetic
quality was uppermost. This quality was partly a direct
inheritance from his father.
II
James Steele MacKaye was born in Buffalo, June 6, 1842,
and at the age of seven moved to New York. His father was
a man of some means, who had a home just outside of Buffalo,
known as Castle MacKaye; while his grandfather, a Scotch-
man of sturdy build, was leader of a Scotch "colony ", at
Argyle, New York, which, so I am informed, was socialistic
in character, and analogous to that at "New Harmony",
333
The American Dramatist
led by Robert Owen, a friend of his. An earlier ancestor,
James Morrison, was a minister and Covenanter, who lived
to the ripe age of one hundred and twenty-one years.
The move to New York was due to legal connections of
MacKaye's father, who likewise, as a man of affairs, once
held the position of president of the Western Union Telegraph.
Company. It was not until he went to Paris, at the age of
sixteen, that Steele turned his attention to the stage, and
even then there was no opportunity to gratify his interest
practically. At eighteen he came back to America, where
for sixteen months he served in the army as a member of the
Seventh Regiment. He was an ardent believer in anti-Slavery
and claimed friendship with Garrison, Webster, Emerson, and
Lincoln. One of his early friends was William James, who
described him "at about his twentieth year: effervescing with
incoördinated romantic ideas of every description." Reach-
ing the age of twenty-two, and still intent on the stage, he
procured a small engagement at the Old Bowery Theatre, in
New York, but soon after was sent abroad as an agent for
buying pictures. Once more in Paris, he haunted the studios
and the theatres, and chance took him in the path of François
Delsarte, who recognized in him a startling likeness to his
dead son, and who took him under his tutelage.
From now on, and for many years to come, MacKaye was
to be an exponent of principles in acting which subdued the
old-time ranting, and aimed at the reproduction of natural
movement, and of what the papers of the time called "emo-
tionally gentle manner." So closely did the youthful actor
identify himself with the methods of his teacher, that he was
known in the papers as "Delsarte MacKaye”; but no amount
of ridicule could deter him from his set purpose. Later in
life, MacKaye wrote:
A man to be a true actor must not only possess the power
to portray vividly the emotions which in any given situation
would be natural to himself, but he must study the character
of the man whom he impersonates, and then act as that man
would act in a like situation. This is what Delsarte taught
and what Rachel, Sontag, and Calvalho studied with him.
334
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
During 1874, MacKaye lectured extensively on the Delsarte
system, speaking of the occult nature of emotion; of the
science of expression, illustrated by pantomime; of the
necessity for æsthetic gymnastics, illustrated by chromatic
scales of emotion in the face and figure.
At that time there was something more or less theoretical
in such a method; people were regarded as poseurs who
adopted it. Hence it was that MacKaye was spoken of as a
speculative dreamer. It is true that throughout life people
said of him that his crude idealism was due to defects in his
education; his fancies forced him into many experiments.
which could not possibly find practical fulfilment. But, never-
theless, he was of a serious turn of mind, and of an experi-
mental nature, and these characteristics combined to give
him a distinct streak of philosophical speculation, which is
detected in his utterances upon æsthetics.
When Delsarte found himself in the midst of the Franco-
Prussian war, MacKaye was travelling in Switzerland (July,
1870); and, on his return to America, hearing that his old
friend was in a destitute condition, he immediately arranged
for a lecture at Harvard University, the proceeds from which
amounting to ten thousand francs were sent to Delsarte.
The latter died in 1871, bequeathing to his pupil many un-
published manuscripts. There is no discounting MacKaye's
enthusiasm over the Delsarte principles; his interest was not
only deep, but his execution vivid, so much so that Forrest,
listening to him, jumped up, in that impetuous manner of his,
and exclaimed, "By G-d, my noble boy, you have let in a
flood of light!" Not only did he establish a school of acting
which should uphold French naturalism, but his first venture
in the theatrical field, the St. James Theatre, which opened
in January, 1872, was popularly spoken of as the Delsarte
house.
At the very outset it is well to emphasize the theatrical
rashness of MacKaye and the philosophic severity of his
criticism; it is well to note that his theory of acting affected
his work, making it self-conscious; while his tendency to
experiment made him limit or expand his ideas in mathe-
335
The American Dramatist
matical ratio. A man of many failures, he was yet the fore-
runner of diverse excellent theatrical innovations. His double
stage for the Madison Square Theatre was not as perfect as
the revolving platform at the New Theatre, but the principle
of usefulness was practically the same. His Spectatorium
may have fallen into ruins, carrying with it a fortune and the
health of its conceiver, but it foreshadowed the modern Hippo-
drome. He never profited by failure, and his enthusiasm
always made him forgetful of the fact that finance requires
practical guarantee. Yet no man of the time, unless it was
Henry De Mille, had better opportunity than he to know the
physical features of the theatre.
His career as actor began in 1872, when he appeared in
"Monaldi", a Venetian story of the seventeenth century,
based on Washington Allston's novel. His pale, classic fea-
tures, his aquiline nose, his sensitive mouth, his intellectual
and quiet expression, all tended to mark this tall, slender, and
graceful man with distinction. I have before me a clipping
which conveys an impression of MacKaye's nature beneath
the practice of his Delsarte methods: "If he were paralyzed
from the neck down, he could express more with his face than
nine-tenths of justly celebrated actors could with all the appli-
ances which nature and art have given them. His speechless-
ness is as crammed with expression as a thunder-cloud with
electricity." There were stirring within him many conflicting
interests; the author, actor, and lecturer did not meet on
common ground. During part of 1872, MacKaye was in
Paris, studying with Regnier, while, in the winter of that
year, he remained in England, meeting Charles Reade, Wilkie
Collins, and Tom Taylor. With the latter he was led into
further experiment, collaborating in the writing of such plays
as "A Radical Fool", "Clancarty", and "Arkwright's Wife."
At this time, also, he was prompted to dramatize George
Eliot's "Silas Marner"; the matter went as far as his meeting
the novelist, but, at the crucial point, Lewes, "the dragon",
stepped in and put a stop to further negotiations. It was in
the Spring of this year that Tom Taylor successfully urged
MacKaye to appear as Hamlet, bringing to his interpretation
336
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
all the originality of the Delsarte method (May 5, 1872).
An edition of the play was issued, with notes, and with indica-
tions of new stage business.
Evidently MacKaye was encouraged by his start, for I
have the record of a booklet, printed in 1872, while he was in
Paris, presenting "Extracts from the Press in Reference to
the Three Months' Dramatic Season of James Steele MacKaye
in New York City, from January 8 to April 1, 1872." During
that period, Nym Crinkle appears to have come to his
rescue, while he was being attacked for his persistency in
the Delsarte method. This was the season of the St. James
Theatre, where, on February 1, 1872, MacKaye's "Mar-
riage", an adaptation of Octave Feuillet's "Julie", was given
a hearing.
MacKaye's novitiate in the art of play writing was spent
in collaboration and in adaptation, two of the dominant
methods of the day. Not only this, but the men associated
with the Madison Square Theatre reinforced the ideas pre-
sented by others. Being actors as well as writers, they knew
wherein weak situations might be bettered. So that Mac-
Kaye's list of plays, while pointing to technical activity, does
not impress one with any striking originality. Here again we
find the man meeting with success, yet not sufficiently con-
centrated to be more than of temporary influence. As an
author, he is to be credited with the following:
"Marriage" (1872); "Arkwright's Wife" (1873); “Clan-
carty" (1874, with Taylor); "Rose Michel" (1875, collabo-
ration); "Queen and Woman” (1876, adaptation from Victor
Hugo, with G. V. Pritchard); "Won at Last" (1877);
"Through the Dark" (1878); "An Iron Will" (1879, later
"Hazel Kirke", 1880); "A Fool's Errand" (1881, adapta-
tion); “Dakolar" (1884); "In Spite of All" (1885); “Ri-
enzi" (1886, rewritten for Barrett); "Anarchy" (1887);
“A Noble Rogue" (1888; also "Money Mad", modelled on
the style of Hugo's "Jean Valjean"); "Paul Kauvar" (known
as "Anarchy", 1887).
The majority of these plays contained melodrama common
to that period. It was a period when the physical outlines
337
The American Dramatist

STEELE MACKAYE (1842-1894)
For full bibliography see Moses' "Representative Plays", Vol. III.
Rose Michel.
Hazel Kirke.
Dakolar (based on Oh-
net's "Le Maître de
Forges").
Union Square Theatre,
New York, Novem-
ber 23, 1875.
Madison Square Thea-
tre, New York,
February 4, 1880.
Lyceum Theatre, New
York, April 6, 1885.
Paul Kauvar; or, An- Standard Theatre, New
archy.
York, December 24,
1887.
1893, World's Fair.
The World Finder: a Chicago: Spectatorium,
spectatorio.
Steele Mackaye: Dy- By Percy MacKaye.
namic Artist of the
American Theatre.
The Theatre of Ten By Percy MacKaye.
Thousand.
Note: Percy MacKaye
has in preparation a
Life of his father.
The Drama, 138–
161, November,
1911; 153-173,
February, 1912.
Theatre Arts Mag-
azine, 7:116–
126, 1923.
1
of the theatre were materially changing; when the old gas
jets, laboriously turned on at each performance, were now on
the eve of being simultaneously ignited by an electric spark;
when Ogden Doremus ¹ was experimenting with asbestos cur-
tains, to give fireproof protection to the theatre; when Mac-
Kaye himself was designing orchestra chairs. It was the later
day of the Boucicault drama, which had made demands upon
1 Percy MacKaye claims that his father's interest in fireproofing theatre scenery
antedated this.
>
338
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
the scenic pictures, introducing physical details that were
regarded as marvellous. It was the time of Kate Claxton,
Ida Vernon, Clara Morris, Montague, Gilbert, Holland, and
Ponisi.
MacKaye fell readily into the atmosphere; he imbibed
much of the Boucicault technique, without its flexibility,
without its humor, without its easy grace and cheerfulness.
And yet he was not considered a conservative; on the con-
trary, the papers regarded him very much as a defier of tradi-
tion, especially in comparison with Wallack and Daly. He
was only rash, however, in the outward scope of the theatre;
for his plays are constructed along conventional lines, with an
emotionalism either akin to Boucicault or to Dumas'
"Camille."
"
>
The five acts of "Won at Last" are epitomized graphically
in the program as: "Act I, Ashes; Act II, Embers; Act III,
Fire; Act IV, Flame; Act V, Fireside.' "Hazel Kirke
which was first presented in 1879 under the title of "The
Iron Will", bears all the characteristics of the romantic and
melodramatic school of Boucicault. Indeed, critics never let
MacKaye alone about the reminiscent touches to be found
in dramas. Earnest though he always was, and however high
his ideals, he could not escape the sensationalism of Charles
Reade's "Dora", of "Amy Robsart", and of "Rose Michel",
which he helped to adapt.
→
MacKaye and De Mille were a great part of the force of
the little Madison Square Theatre a theatre whose great-
est thorns seem to have been the Rev. Dr. G. S. Mallory and
Marshall Mallory. They were astute business men. When
MacKaye went to them, the understanding was that he was
to relinquish all patents and copyrights for the period of
ten years, and that he was to have five thousand dollars and
profits under certain conditions. But the contract was not
definite enough. It was not fair to MacKaye. "Hazel
Kirke", hailed as a melodrama without a villain, ran for
nearly five hundred nights, with MacKaye every now and
then assuming the rôle of Dunstan. But whenever the
Mallorys had the suspicion that they were losing money, it
339
The American Dramatist
was a signal for them to try to dispute their contract. In
fact, the theatre of that day was not so sound as the theatre.
of the present. Boucicault was continually involved in lit-
igation regarding his plays, and it was the fashion for all
dramatists to have their successes pirated on every occasion.
In 1881, according to one authority, four companies were
enjoined for playing distorted versions of "Hazel Kirke."
However much MacKaye may have had the correct idea
regarding the close treatment of drama, it was only in the
expansiveness of outward detail that he dared depart from
the conventional structure. No man realized more philo-
sophically than he that a good play must contain some deep
knowledge of human nature, some wide experience of life,
and some surety in dealing with the craft of the stage. And
he drew from himself and his own ambition, when he stated
the requisites of a dramatist to be:
Mechanical instinct, poetic fancy, sensitive sympathies,
passionate fervor and vivid imagination, thoroughness in
preparation, industry in elaboration, conscience in revision,
courage in excision, and dominating all this, that breadth
of mind which breeds humility, and that depth of heart whose
understanding love goes out in charity to all mankind.
But though he would have had the process so, plays of the
Daly period were not evolved; they were not intensive.
Realism was just beginning to modify the romantic glow of
"The Two Orphans" and "The Lady of Lyons", while it
could hardly be claimed that violent action had been suc-
ceeded by rational themes. What MacKaye called "the
focal purpose" of a play had not departed from French models
or from French emotionalism. Howard, Belasco, De Mille,
and MacKaye all came under its spell, the latter speculating
upon a way of escape. "The master playwright," so he
said, "combines the constructive faculty of the mechanic,
and the analytical mind of a philosopher, with the æsthetic
instinct of a poet, and the ethical ardor of an apostle." In
this statement he was beyond his time and generation.
There is no doubting the truth that MacKaye was serious-
340
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
minded; in fact, he was continually active, a peculiar com-
bination of a Swedenborgian, a theatrical Edison, and an
undisciplined reader of Tyndall, Huxley, and Spencer. His
interests lay between religion and civil engineering; he was
diversely equipped, and a specialist only in what actual
experience taught him. But he never heeded experience
for long, preferring to follow his imagination and his inventive-
ness. Like all dramatists, he was alive to the moment, and
when, in 1887, his "Paul Kauvar" was presented, containing
all the earmarks of its kind in flimsy sentiment, verboseness,
and theatrical effect, he nevertheless claimed himself to be
deeply concerned in the problem of “anarchy", under which
name the play was first known.
Notwithstanding the fact that the papers called "Paul
Kauvar" "tumultuous and declamatory", and critics saw in
it imitations of Bulwer, the play attracted wide attention,
since there was beneath it a slight tinge of contemporaneous-
ness, despite its Red Terror atmosphere. For MacKaye,
being convinced that demagogues were spreading a spirit of
anarchy among the masses, determined to show wherein
tyranny was unjust, in the hopes of counteracting a revolu-
tionary spirit which he felt existed among the people. To
do this, he demanded a large spectacle, which drew from Nym
Crinkle the remarks: "Mr. Steele MacKaye, whatever else
he may be, is not a 'lisping hawthorn bud.' He doesn't
embroider such napkins as the 'Abbé Constantin', and he
can't arrange such waxworks as 'Elaine.' He can't stereo-
scope an emotion, but he can incarnate it if you give him
people enough." Percy calls attention to the mass effects
in "Paul Kauvar" — the mass spirit of the revolution being
the dominant movement of the drama.
The play was doubtless the outcome of certain ideas which
were in the air. It was the old cry which was raised in regard
to the influx of emigrants whose excessive poverty, together
with the yoke of political oppression, drove them to the new
country. But with them MacKaye felt that they brought
certain foreign ideas which were inimical to the welfare of the
American laborer. So it was that "Anarchy", besides being
341
The American Dramatist
a melodramatic spectacular, was also a purpose play in the
newspaper sense. In 1888, he wrote:
In the struggle between capital and labor in this country,
the grasping spirit of corporations and the demoralizing in-
fluence of political corruption are constantly affording the
demagogue or the dreamer, who has nothing to lose and every-
thing to gain by the destruction of civil order, an opportunity
to preach anarchic doctrines with great plausibility. When
I first discovered the large extent to which the passions of the
working classes were being played upon by the fine phrases
of these insidious foes of the American Republic, I deter-
mined to investigate, as carefully as circumstances would
permit, the means by which these foreign influences were
seeking to achieve their diabolic results in this country.
After his dispute with the Mallorys, Mr. MacKaye acted
for several years, and he helped plan the future policy of the
Lyceum Theatre, launching it with his "Dakolar." Here it
was that he began a School of Expression, assisted by David
Belasco and Franklin H. Sargent; and it was this School
that afterwards became the American Academy of Dramatic
Arts. Then he went over to the Lyceum Theatre, on
Fourth Avenue, which playhouse soon began to gain
prestige under Daniel Frohman, and where E. H. Sothern
was on the eve of large recognition. MacKaye's enthusiasm,
his charm of manner and his grace, made him well liked,
and he was much more at ease in private talk than in
acting. He was
He was a charming conversationalist, and pos-
sessed what critics called a mind "ratiocinative, not
poetic." Interested in painting, sculpture, teaching, manag-
ing, play writing, and inventing, he lacked system; he was
devoid of concentration. Philosophically, he was under the
influence of the transcendentalists, and even the mystic
touches in Delsarte bore evidence of Catholic symbolism. His
language, outside his plays, was marked by metaphysical
distinctions, seen, for instance, in an excellent letter sent to
his son from Chicago, on December 15, 1893, in answer to
Percy's objections to changes made in some chorals he had
written. The statements show first of all a serious attitude
342
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
toward all creative work, as well as a modesty which was no
small part of his charm; they are likewise evidences of a
speculative mind which delighted in analyzing the absolute,
the relative, and the conscious in terms of art. This is what
he wished to do in his big Columbian spectacle prepared for
his Spectatorium; every detail of it was to have philosophical
value; even the choruses were to be representative of fine
distinctions.
He felt that Percy, at an early age, should have grasped
this in the writing of the poetic tasks set before him. At
sixteen, the boy had been locked in a room and told to write
a storm choral for the great occasion.
Everything in the Cosmic order [wrote the father] is per-
fect or complete. When I speak of the Time Chorus, I mean
that which voices the accomplishment of the past. . ..
The
Past Time Chorus, philosophically, represents the real world,
and the Future Time Chorus represents the ideal world, while
the Eternity Chorus represents the essential world the world
of principle or spirit. . The spirit of the whole is the
perfect spirit-universal spirit-the divine spirit. The
spirit of the past is the imperfect spirit and the demoniac
spirit.
His distinctions of mortal and immortal consciousness
clearly mark his scattered reading in metaphysical fields.
We now reach the culmination of Steele MacKaye's life, at
the time of the Chicago Exposition of 1893. All his theatrical
extravagance overflowed and ran riot in the Columbian Cele-
bration Company, organized to exploit his Spectatorium, a
building devised for his entertainment, which was called
"Spectatorio." This was a combination of grand scenic dis-
play with Oratorio, in which stage realism was to be carried
to its highest perfection. It was to be a Hippodrome in size,
with appliances of every conceivable power, so arranged as to
create illusions of the noblest order. The stage, called a
"Scenitorium", was to contain an immense reservoir for water
effects, and around this were to be grouped MacKaye's re-
markable inventions. What was the aim of this new art
343
The American Dramatist
which Steele MacKaye schemed to near fruition? He wrote
at the time:
Since . . . the realistic is that element in art most
thoroughly comprehensible to the common people, I have
labored, first, to increase and improve the element of realism
in stage art, and then so to combine that with the spiritual
and poetic as to make the fascinating force of realism a means
of popularizing idealism. . . . I also devised a new order of
theatric art, the aim of which was to unite the mystic with
the realistic for the moving presentation of the themes of hu-
man history, in such wise as to illumine the philosophy of
historic fact, and to awaken even the most ordinary minds to
the ideal value of the ideal.
It is not necessary to go into details regarding this mam-
moth shell. In it were to be erected automatic combination
stages, allowing of any variety of motions; wave-current
makers, for the creation of currents of water which were to
be regulated as to velocity and height; wind-current makers,
so conceived as to create cyclone velocity from the gentlest
breeze; weather-makers, for atmospheric effects, such as
large rainbows; illuminoscopes, "by means of which the scope
and character of the illumination of the scene can be instantly
determined"; colorators, for tints according to the changing
hours; nebulators, for cloud effects; and a luxauleator, which
was to be a dazzling sheet of light to take the place of a curtain.
Examining the large scope of MacKaye's idea, it is surprising
how near he came to the conception of a Hippodrome. He
aimed at mechanical duplication of Nature; mechanical accel-
eration of mystery. The production in such a huge machinery
was to be called a "Spectatorio", which was "a species of
performance celebrating a theme which may be either historic,
fabulous, or fanciful. It illustrates its subjects by great pic-
tures whose stories are told in pantomime, and whose senti-
mental, ethical, or ideal meaning is celebrated or interpreted
by music." On one hand he had in mind the most extrava-
gant display of Barnum; on the other he accepted as a model
Cody's Wild West Show. Undoubtedly the educational
vastness of such an enterprise met with some enthusiasm and
344
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
support; preparations actually began for the mounting of
"The Great Discovery", which was to epitomize the life of
Columbus. The financial figures of returns were chimerical,
with the seating capacity of over ten thousand people, and the
other sources of income to cover the initial expenditure of
nearly a million dollars. The structure was to have occupied
the northeastern corner of Jackson Park.
Any one in the theatre will understand that the very magni-
tude of the undertaking was enough to handicap the business.
and to kill the man in control. MacKaye's whole nervous
system went to pieces as he saw the money slipping from his
hands. The Spectatorium was only a skeleton when the
company went into the hands of a receiver because of de-
pression in Wall Street. His brain teeming with projects,
MacKaye was able, ordinarily, through a natural gift of per-
suasiveness, to carry any amount of enthusiasm. But now he
was broken in health. He was given a benefit which enabled
him to start on a trip to California, but, on his way, while
passing through Timpas, Colorado, he died aboard the train,
on February 25, 1894. Percy MacKaye believes that had
the Spectatorium been a success, it "might have laid [in
1893] the beginnings in America of an art related and compar-
able, on the one hand, to that of Wagner; on the other, to
the unrevived spectacles of the days of Inigo Jones.'
III
Percy MacKaye was born in New York, March 16, 1875.
He took a Bachelor of Arts degree at Harvard, in 1897. He
was the author at that time of "A Garland to Silvia", written
while he was in Europe. He matriculated at the University
of Leipzig, and his studies there partly resulted in his writing
"Fenris the Wolf" (1905). That he was critical of himself is
seen by the illuminating autobiographical analysis that pre-
ceded the printed text of "A Garland to Silvia." This is
dated Rome, March, 1899, and there are comments added by
Percy MacKaye - not any longer Percy Wallace MacKaye
the poet of more experience viewing his own immaturity.
345
The American Dramatist
"In 1896," writes the older Percy, "leadership in the drama as
a native expression or technical craft could hardly have been
said to have commenced in our country. A young American,
planning to adopt the profession of play writing strictly as
an art, must have sought far and probably in vain through
theatre, press, university, society in general, for any adequate
modern standards critical or creative.
In the universities
to-day, then, the dramatic apprentice finds himself definitely
related to the beginnings of a renascence in his art, in a way
impossible to the author of 'Sylvia'." What the young play-
wright has to contend with, what is his relation to the thing
he creates, these are the problems MacKaye wove into a
"Dramatic Reverie": the poetic text-book of a dramatic
apprentice, and hence important in determining the starting
point of MacKaye himself, the Felix of his play.
66
The result of this play was that it drew the attention of
E. H. Sothern, who gave MacKaye professional encourage-
ment to write "The Canterbury Pilgrims", although it was
'Jeanne d'Arc" (1906) that Sothern-Marlowe actually pro-
duced. Then followed the long list of dramas, most of which
took their place for limited periods in the theatre, and showed
the dominant characteristics of the poet-dramatist: poetic
imagery, a scholastic fervor, a technical distinction in the
handling of poetic lines, which were often handicapped in
their fervor by the effort of a thought not always clear. His
themes were widely divergent, his localities attractively unu-
sual. His civic conscience became the centre of his "Mater",
where he seems to have had a certain humorous attitude to-
ward his own seriousness. In such of his dramas as "Anti-
Matrimony" and "To-morrow", a satirical point of view was
the moving power. His national vision found expression in
such plays as "Yankee Fantasies" and "Washington, the
Man Who Made Us." He showed, in "A Thousand Years
Ago" which was inspired by the eighteenth-century Italian
comedy, "Turandotte", by Carlo Gozzi - that he could
effectively make use of a decorative romance which harked
back in some of its effects to the Commedia dell'arte. "More
subtly," claims Clayton Hamilton, "this play may be con-
346
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
PERCY MACKAYE (1875-
For complete bibliography, see Moses' "Representative Amer-
ican Dramas: National and Local."
The Canterbury Pil- The Coburn Players,
grims.
Jeanne D'Arc.
Mater.
The Scarecrow;
or,
The Glass of Truth.
Savannah, Ga., April
30, 1909.
Lyric Theatre, Phila-
delphia, Pa., October
15, 1906.
Savoy Theatre, New
York, September 25,
1908.
Garrick Theatre, New
York, January 17,
1911.
A Thousand Years Ago. Shubert Theatre, New
York, December 1,
1913.
Saint Louis: A Civic Forest Park, Art Hill,
Masque.
Caliban, By the Yellow
Sands: A Commu-
nity Masque.
Percy MacKaye: A
Sketch of his Life.
St. Louis, Mo., May
28–June 1, 1914.
New York City College
Stadium, May 25-
June 5, 1916.
With Bibliography of Reprinted from the
his life.
The Playhouse and the By Percy MacKaye.
Play.
The Civic Theatre.
By Percy MacKaye.
Community Drama.
By Percy MacKaye.
Twenty-fifth An-
niversary Report
of the Class of
1897. Harvard:
1922.
New York: The
Macmillan
1909.
Co.
New York: Mit-
chell Kennerley.
1912.
Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co. 1917.
Playwrights of the New By Thomas H. Dick- New York: The
American Theatre.
inson.
Macmillan Co.
1925.
347
The American Dramatist
ceived as a parabolic comment on a problem of the theatre
at the present time (1914)." Gozzi fought against Goldoni,
the realist, and lost. MacKaye and "A Thousand Years
Ago"; Hazleton and Benrimo and "The Yellow Jacket",
fought against Broadway realism. It was a hard fight, long
before the "new" art and the "new" theatre significance
began to gain substantial effect. Thus MacKaye, close upon
Reinhardt's "Sumûrun", became an American pioneer.
This pioneer character, which we have suggested in the ca-
reer of his father, has marked the son in all he has done. Be-
lieving firmly in the theatre as a social institution, he has pled
consistently and steadily for civic participation in the life
of the theatre. He has never been a pessimist where the
playhouse is concerned; he has been lighted too insistently
by his own faith in what it can do, to be deterred by what to
others have seemed insurmountable obstacles. In his ad-
dresses and in his prose works, he has raised questions dealing
with the theatre that have challenged thought, even though
people have smiled at the chimerical character of the plans he
has outlined. He has attacked the theatre at its weakest
points, and always with his criticisms have come suggestions
that show how clearly he has seen his own vision, even though
he may not have put it forward in as sharp a picture. He has
worked for theatre endowment and shown its beneficent
results. The quality which is uppermost in him even now,
after years of seemingly ineffectual preaching, is enthusiasm.
He has sought to draw all social activity into the magic circle
of the theatre. Once a fellow at a University, where the poet
in him was given time to follow his own bent, he approached
the problem of the relation of the university to the theatre.
In his volumes, "The Playhouse and the Play" (1909) and
"The Civic Theatre" (1912), constructive leisure is the centre
of his argument; and this leisure can only be enriched by
calling into play the highest expressions of art, the highest art
instincts of the crowd. Civic functions, American pageants,
appealed to his imagination, as they did to no other poet of
the day. He created for these communal activities on a huge
scale; he coöperated with artists like John W. Alexander, with
348
The Case of Percy MacKaye and his Father
musicians like Damrosch and Converse, with scenic artists
like Urban and Robert Edmond Jones. He conceived civic
rituals and masques. Two thousand five hundred citizens
of New York participated in his "Caliban By the Yellow
Sands"; five thousand in Boston gave the same masque.
He revelled in the scope of the Stadium of the College of the
City of New York and the Harvard University Stadium, call-
ing into play all the huge lighting effects known to the theatre.
In other words, an examination into the untiring activity
of Percy MacKaye will indicate that he has always seen the
theatre as a large creation, a synthesis of all the arts; outdoors
or indoors, the drama must be a fitting vehicle for the ideals
of democracy. He has himself stated that to all of his activ-
ities, which have involved plays, poems, communal dramas,
operas, essays, lectures, traveling, organizing, directing, etc.,
"varied though they have been, my own approach has been
primarily that of the poet (in its ancient sense of maker, or
builder), seeking manifold yet exact forms of technique for the
expression of the poet's individual vision in its relation to
human society."
He is continually looking for new fields to conquer, but to
conquer for the same cause. His interest in the Kentucky
mountains, which resulted in his play, "This Fine-Pretty
World", dealing with the so-called "untamed America
amply illustrates his reactions to life and condition; his eye
sees instantly the beauty of everything; he is not daunted
by squalor; lonely backgrounds are filled with song for him.
Between the Untamed and the Tamed he sees a bond of
brotherhood; in the lean civilization of the mountains he
detects something better than a machine-made world. "The
pioneer," he says, "is twin-brother to the poet." If we can
offer the mountaineer a new civilization, he can offer us an
ancient one. This reciprocity is typical of Percy MacKaye's
approach to all subjects. In the natural instinct for dance,
in the tribal urge for song, he sees an infinitude of possible
developments. And he has used his pen generously in devel-
oping the ideas he draws from every situation which catches
his interest. This impulse will be his to the end of his days.
349
The American Dramatist
"So the vistas glimmer and change," he declares, “but
through all their diversities one aim has been the goal of my
endeavors to attain through varied arts a practical synthesis
for the poetry of life."
>
He has created much, and on the whole well. "The Scare-
crow," which I have included in my anthology of “Ameri-
can Dramas: National and Local", is his most effective stage
piece. "This Fine-Pretty World", though it might be a
little strained in its consciousness of a lingual lilt of the moun-
taineer, and in its adherence to race characteristics, is equally
as strong in its folk-lore value as Hatcher Hughes's "Hell-Bent
for Heaven", and Lulu Vollmer's "The Shame Woman",
Sun-Up" and "The Dunce Boy." His opera on "Rip Van
Winkle" was a better libretto than any of the existent dra-
matic versions of the Washington Irving story. His "Canter-
bury Pilgrims", used as an outdoor pastoral comedy by the
Coburns, contained much of the zest of Chaucer, and showed
itself later easily convertible into a pageant. So one might
review Percy MacKaye's entire work and find it predomi-
nantly serious, with here and there a deep vein of humor.
Passionately desirous of serving humanity, he speaks in
accents which the crowd very often cannot understand. He
often binds together the interests of a community in imagery
which is measure of his own culture: there creeps in an
academic quality. But always there is the amplitude of his
vision, and that is the part of him he inherited from Steele
MacKaye.
350
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE STORY OF THE WELL-MADE PLAY: AUGUSTUS THOMAS,
WILLIAM GILLETTE, AND SOME BOX-OFFICE DRAMATISTS
CC
I
DURING the season of 1895-1896, the Theatrical Syndicate
was formed. From that time until the present, the theatre
has suffered from a wrong emphasis placed upon the word
commercial", and from a wrong estimate of the box-
office and what the public wants. For years words were
bandied back and forth in extenuation and in criticism, actors
fought against the "trust" and then succumbed to it. Sarah
Bernhardt, in sympathy with those who fought it, was forced
to act in circus tents, because the theatrical magnates refused
her playhouses in which to act. David Belasco, independent
of them, claimed that, unless he walked in the middle of Broad-
way, some one would dart from a doorway and stab him in the
back. The booking of "attractions" on the road was in the
hands of a monopoly which had it within their control to
make or break a man. Human nature being what it was —
and human nature of a certain calibre - the fight was long
and bitter. The magazines gave ample room to the views.
on both sides. The hated theatre "gang" wrote long treatises
on the necessity for combination, and painted graphically
what a speculative venture the "show" business was; investi-
gations were conducted to bring to light the underhand
methods by which managers were discriminated against, and
the degrading way in which theatre managers in towns out-
side New York were reduced to the position of mere janitors,
forced to take for their out-of-town theatres what the Syndi-
351
The American Dramatist
cate would send them. The same story has within the past
decade been enacted in the moving-picture industry.
>
The word is aptly chosen: the theatre became an
"industry", stabilized, to be sure the actor found himself
less a vagabond under the "Trust" system - but requiring a
manufactured product, standardized. There was no intel-
lectual standard; the lines of least resistance were followed.
Dramatists were trained to write to order, according to speci-
fications. Plays were built for actors; they followed a given
fashion, and, like a ready-made suit, at rehearsals the play
was altered to fit the figure of this actress, the ability of that
actor, and the taste of an audience that had previously hap-
pened to relish something of a particular seasoning. Just as
Paul Leicester Ford's "Janice Meredith" was written to com-
pete with Doctor S. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne", so were
Strongheart" and "Brown of Harvard" written to compete
with "The College Widow." It was argued that since one
dramatized novel — taking advantage of a "best seller"
- had made a "hit", another dramatized novel would be as
likely to "draw." And thus we had our "When Knighthood
Was in Flower", "The Pride of Jennico", and "Alice of Old
Vincennes." That "follow in a line" policy holds to-day in
the theatre: the theatre managers listen for the belled wether:
sheeplike they watch each other and kill creativeness and
originality by the "Butterick" pattern of a supposed success.
The Theatre Trust is a matter of theatre history. It only
concerns this study as it affects the dramatist. We have
hinted, in the Fitch chapter, how one manager limited him.
But he was not alone in this respect. Frohman and his con-
temporaries had willing ears of those content to follow the
lines of least resistance. Very little care was taken by the
writers of the all-important matter of technique, and the evi-
dence of such reliable men as Daniel Frohman is testimony to
the fact that many a manuscript was brought to eventual
success by travelling through the various offices and courting
criticism with each rejection. This criticism was given when
sought, and the astute playwright, of the theatrical quality of
Charles Klein, heeded.
352
The Story of the Well-Made Play
The manager looked for the sure-fire thing; if some play-
wright met with one success, he was sought after in the com-
petitive market. The newer man found it difficult to gain a
hearing, as the "sure-fire" men increased in number. These
men had had their dire days also, but they were now on top.
Eugene Walter had slept on a park bench for many a night;
Charles Klein though he had been able to make a living
with such opera librettoes as "El Capitan"- was having a dif-
ficult time to break into the legitimate. George Broadhurst,
busy with the shaping of farces, had not yet attempted such
a piece as "Bought and Paid For", which was hailed as the
great emotional drama of the hour. These dramatists and
others like Paul Armstrong, C. M. S. McLellan, and Milton
Royle were all interested in the external drama: the play of
type, the play of melodramatic feminine emotion, the play
of sentimental social fervor. Klein's "The Lion and the
Mouse", Broadhurst's "The Man of the Hour", were workable
pieces, "set" in their effects, and dependent on these effects
for their commercial value. Their glitter was false on closer
view, their climaxes more nearly akin to the old-time melo-
drama than to fundamental truth.
The distressing state of affairs was that, within these shallow
vortices of acting possibilities, Broadhurst and Walter and
Bayard Veiller exhibited certain ability to create well. Their
technical equipment was unfortunately well ahead of their
mental resources. One only has to compare Klein's “ The
Daughters of Men" with Shaw's "Widowers' Houses" to
realize that he had no real understanding of social or eco-
nomic condition, but merely grasped, in reportorial fashion,
at the externals of the problem. The dramatist of that time
was keenly alert to newspaper effectiveness. With astuteness,
Klein read Ida Tarbell's history of the Standard Oil Company,
and behold, there rose before him the main outlines of "The
Lion and the Mouse"! Edward Sheldon came across the
details of an editorial on the political leader, and wrote "The
Boss." There was no irony of a far-seeing interpretation.
about these plays: it was a stage structure, each erected to
catch popular interest.
353
The American Dramatist
The box-office being the goal, these men set out to reach
it. They did so with cleverness, though with no distinction.
Their scripts were written and rewritten; tried out on the
road, they went through a transformation from town to town,
the managers watching audiences each night with foxlike.
attention, to see what was telling and what fell flat. One
cannot deprecate the amusement quality of these variously
well-made plays. They afforded the actors what became
known as "actor-proof" parts. There was a trick employed
in nearly all of them to catch the breath of interest: the fight
in the dark, in Eugene Walter's "The Wolf"; an implement of
murder sought for and all the time to be seen by the audience,
in Veiller's "The Thirteenth Chair." The poor girl and the
wealthy man who tempts her, the beautiful wife and the
drunken husband who breaks his way into her bedroom, the
unmoral means which are justified because of effective ends.
- these run through the plays of the period. We have not
escaped the pattern, despite the increase of the better play
in the theatre. We still sentimentalize over such pieces as
Hartley Manners' "Peg o' My Heart" and Frank Bacon's
"Lightnin'"; the fact that David Warfield could go so many
years playing "The Music Master" illustrates the childlike
sentimentalism which still dominates our audiences. And,
when these plays are read, they seem so flimsy in their con-
tent, so slight in their outline. They become a triumph for
the actor, mere second-reader exercises for the dramatist.
They add little to the dramaturgy of the nation. It was
Warfield who made "The Music Master"; it was Laurette
Taylor who enriched Manners' genial Irish comedy, with its
trite invention. The American Theatre has always encour-
aged such frail shells that are scarcely worth reviving when
the magic touch of the actor has turned cold. No spiritual,
no intellectual motives moved these men. They walked the
highly sophisticated thoroughfare of Broadway, watching with
the showman's avidity for material. Channing Pollock
claims that it was in criticism of that crowd on the Rialto that
he wrote his sentimental and thoroughly old-fashioned play,
"The Fool." But one has to contrast the content of that
354
The Story of the Well-Made Play
play with the content of Charles Rann Kennedy's "The
Servant in the House" to see the difference between Kennedy's
understanding of human character, with the use of the symbol
made palpitant, and the shallow stage effectiveness of Pol-
lock's newspaper reporting.
I am not claiming that such plays had not a certain vitality
to them. They were clever, with a quickness characteristic
of the reporter after the surface; they represented a certain.
swift pace of American life, where new wealth, false standards,
sensational speculations, and misplaced power were daily
splashed before our eyes by the "yellow journals." The
dramatist of the time did not interpret these conditions; he
sought to show them in all their startling variety: his effort
was not to make his invention moving through its truth, but
through the novelty of successive situations. No problems.
moved him as they did John Galsworthy in "The Silver Box"
and "Justice." There was no sense of the "irony of things"
in what the dramatist did for the crowds who flowed through
the theatre district of New York. And the unfortunate thing
the Theatrical Trust did was to concentrate the life of the
theatre on or near Broadway. The whole country had to be
catered to from that narrow passageway. There was no
consistent development of the American dramatist of the
"box-office" school in interest, conviction, and vision. No
knowledge was required, only instinct for the theatrical.
Some of these men made fortunes and then came to the
end of their resources: they had said all they had to
say, had invented all they had to invent. The fickle crowd
turned to other idols. There were seasons when not to
have had a play by Winchell Smith, author of "The Fortune
Hunter", "The Boomerang", and "Turn to the Right",
would have been a disappointment to theatregoers. Men
like Edward C. Carpenter, author of the mildly agreeable
comedy, "The Cinderella Man", and the better "Pipes of
Pan"; like Paul Dickey, who wrote "The Misleading Lady",
have failed to carry on. Coming from his collaboration with
David Belasco in "The Rose of the Rancho", one thought
that Richard Walton Tully, with his "The Bird of Paradise"
355
The American Dramatist
and "Omar, the Tentmaker", would at least contribute some-
thing definite to the picturesque stage which combined some
of the broadness of "Ben Hur" with the subtler switchboard
effects of Belasco's "The Darling of the Gods" and "The Girl
of the Golden West." But, like Winchell Smith and E. C.
Carpenter, Tully became involved in theatrical management-
a management pledged to the old order rather than to the
new management of a highly speculative nature.
We cling
with hope to Frank Craven, whose "Too Many Cooks" and
"The First Year" show a rich and simple observation, for
he has an original vein to contribute.
>
Thus, we could go through a long list of playwrights who
have "made good" in the theatre, according to the box-office
standard, but who have contributed not one whit to the body
of American dramaturgy. Through them one gains an idea.
that the theatre is merely a cardboard playhouse. From
them, the New Theatre, when it was established, gained noth-
ing in the way of native plays. Sheldon's "The Nigger"
was a little too advanced for the regular theatre to risk at the
time. But it had none of the real moral bravery behind it
that marks the work of Eugene O'Neill. The shallowness of
Sheldon was to be seen in his "Salvation Nell", which becomes
even more surface when compared with Shaw's "Major Bar-
bara." Mary Austin's "The Arrow Maker" was a species.
of archæological restoration of Indian folklore, which did not
have vitality enough to keep it alive in public interest. It
was after the failure and abandonment of the New Theatre
that Winthrop Ames, his belief still firm that the American
dramatist should be encouraged, offered the famous ten-thou-
sand-dollar prize, which was won by a novelist, Alice Brown,
whose interest in the theatre has been of secondary nature.
She brought to the stage, in "Children of Earth", a quality
of feeling her locality; passionless though the drama was, the
New England spirit was more deeply ingrained in it than the
New England inheritance which Moody tried to suggest in
"The Great Divide."
No movement, no effort of a private nature to give the
American dramatist a "boost" in the days before the Great
356
The Story of the Well-Made Play
War, would have done much to wean the playwright away
from the direct line between himself and the stage, and the
only way was that which the commercial manager dictated.
II
Charles Klein, with the nervous technique of the re-
porter after "copy", was a typical disciple of sheer theatri-
calism; his day of "The Auctioneer" and "The Music Mas-
ter" was not his day of "The Lion and the Mouse", "The
Third Degree", "The Gamblers", and other dramas heralded
as social studies. He was much more suited to the German
sentiment of his early pieces than he was to business condition.
All of his plots creaked with inconsistencies: his ethical discus-
sions gave way before unethical but "strong" central situations.
He was not any too accurate a reporter either; living at the
period when the "crook" play — greatly encouraged at the
box-office by the Henri Bernstein importation, "The Thief”
- was in vogue, he fell into the popular trap of steeping his
crook" with an emotionalism which played upon the unthink-
ing audience and won applause. Being representative of his
class, therefore, Mr. Klein's comments on the fate of the dram-
atist with the commercial manager are historically enlight-
ening, even though the rules he formulated may be shallow
and merely expedient. There is a certain pride with which
he claimed for himself, in an article written in 1915, that he
started the era of the graft play with his "The District.
Attorney", in 1890. The theme of graft is always useful, he
asserted, in a commercial age. The crime play, he boasted,
was, in 1915, the order of interest. The historical play, he
suggested jeeringly, was dead: to him it really never had lived,
because history is prosaic! Thus, human interest was pigeon-
holed by the "box-office" dramatist. It was such precon-
ceived notions which often fooled the manager and the play-
wright, and made them both feel that, no matter how long
they had been in the business, they still had a lot to learn.
Along comes a play of character: it's the vogue — away with
situation! The playwright was pictured as a man searching
357
The American Dramatist
outside the beaten path for a novelty. New angles of the
triangle were twisted out of old material. The mathematical
theory was that the more people who used the same theme,
the less value the theme had for box-office consumption. It
was not alone his experience as a dramatist which made Klein
argue this way; he had been one of the Charles Frohman play
readers, had sifted through a multitude of manuscripts, had
seen at close range the way in which the new dramatist was
handled, had waded through the mass of ill-arranged material
submitted, each applicant believing that the manager was
ready to dig in his pockets and spend money lavishly. In the
system of the day there was no room for the genius who fol-
lowed his own course. It was an era of the plodding play-
wright. Individuality had to pass through the standard mold.
Illusive ideas might come into an office and stay there for
others to work over, the manuscript returning to the poor
author. If a play was accepted, its title might be changed
many times, the various parts pared down to make the "star
part more prominent, new scenes and situations knocked into
the structure, all to strengthen its drawing power.
وو
Thus, the highly speculative theatre went its way, shaping
the dramatists in its own image. In those days, such men as
Henry W. Savage used to proclaim that four weeks would tell
whether a play had money in it; if the box-office told a differ-
ent story, "plant something new that may blossom into a
profitable success. Everything had to be concentrated on
getting back the "investment.' "Play a mill town on pay
day", was the slogan. Not a thing was done unless the balance
sheet was before the manager to tell the whole story. A sated
public demanded extravagance of realistic detail; fortunes
were expanded before the curtain rose on the first act; the
profits had to come in quickly. "I made a fortune out of
'The Lion and the Mouse', confessed Henry B. Harris,
the manager"a play that was technically and logically
wrong, that failed utterly under analysis, that would not
stand adverse criticism for five consecutive minutes."
Was
this a recommendation to the American dramatist of the
time to be illogical, just so the "punch" came at the right
358
The Story of the Well-Made Play
point? Such a manager never approached the theatre from the
intellectual angle; he was dealing with a commodity, not an
art; he had a formula which he thought was less of a risk
than originality. He also, more than likely, had a "star"
to be catered to, and this "star" knew in what he or she
shone best.
It might be that William De Mille wanted to make "Strong-
heart" a problem play, but Henry Harris's story smacks of the
manager's attitude. According to his view, "Strongheart"
was written on the "safe" plan. He said: "Robert Edeson
advanced the idea of a college-bred Indian for a play, and I
suggested the football interest that was in it. I set William
C. De Mille to work on the scheme, paying him in advance for a
year's work. Within a twelvemonth the play was handed in.
But it was rewritten seven times in fact, two years' addi-
tional work was put on it, before it was ready for production."
Yet, even with this expensive process, wherein not a jot of
faith in the dramatist as an artist was to be noted, the manager
could not reckon the value of his investment. This much he
knew and the knowledge holds to-day with the theatre
organized so one-sidedly that he must make good in New
York. That city was the City of Dreadful Night; there could
be no harder failure than a great metropolitan one. A play
might fail on the road and be entirely changed before it
reached the Mecca; but on Broadway a failure was sent to
the storehouse; it could never go on the road, for there was no
New York prestige to back it. So much of a fetish was this
New York success idea, that if a play started making money on
the road before it reached Broadway, the manager sought to
keep it on the road for fear that, if it were given a chance before
Gotham's hardened "first nighters", it would be condemned
and would never recover.
The period of the Theatre Trust was a period of whipping
plays into shape. Belasco tells the story of his writing "The
Rose of the Rancho" twelve times with Richard Walton Tully
before it was in condition for his theatre. In other words a
new play was always guilty until it was rewritten. It was
under suspicion if it was literary. It was a thing of bolts and
359
The American Dramatist
rivets. The life that was breathed into it came from a com-
bination of acting and stage incandescence. It appealed to
the crowd on the side of sensation. If there was any art value,
any spiritual meaning to it, these qualities were accidental.
The manager felt that he could thus handle the home drama-
tist. And the home dramatist was willing to be so manipu-
lated.
In the meantime, Henry Arthur Jones, Pinero, Carton,
Grundy, Marshall, Rostand were sending plays across the
water, which were not thus manipulated. The manager had
faith in them because he had seen them abroad on his annual
visit, and had seen them work, without having to pay the
initial cost of experiment. The commercial theatre abhorred
experiment on the terms of the creative dramatist. The
commercial theatre had its own terms. It was on these terms
that certain dramatists rose to prominence. Men like Augus-
tus Thomas and William Gillette were a part of that theatre;
they worked from the inside. And others of their "school"
have worked from the inside, like James Forbes and Channing
Pollock. Forbes's "The Chorus Lady" was shaped for a
particular actress; his "The Show Shop" was built out of
a theatre life he knew as an actor, a road-agent, a general
manager of the Henry Harris enterprises. Pollock's ven-
tures were shaped out of his experiences as a press-agent.
Thomas had always been of the theatre; Gillette was an actor
and wrote largely for his own peculiar personality. Inside
their limitations, these men created sincerely. And, in so far
as they were sincere, they far exceeded the mass of insincerity
which the amateur native playwright piled upon the commer-
cial manager's desk through play bureaus and play agents.
III
Clyde Fitch possessed ingenuity; so does Augustus Thomas.
Clyde Fitch depended very largely on external detail, as in
"Girls"; Augustus Thomas piled up eccentric marks to such
an extent in "The Other Girl" that persons who did not
know Broadway could not understand it. In "The City",
360
The Story of the Well-Made Play
Fitch proved, just before his death, that he could handle a
powerful theme, however disagreeable; in "The Witching
Hour" and subsequent dramas, Mr. Thomas has clearly
shown that the cardboard play is no longer sufficient to carry
his new interests.
Mr. Thomas's early pieces, "Alabama" (1891), “In Miz-
zoura" (1893), and "Arizona" (1900), dealt with a life which
stirred with something more than smart-set witticism and
city environment. Then followed a period when French
technique gripped him, and he has never escaped his indebted-
ness to the foreign facility for making conversation. His
broad comedy period encouraged him to draw upon his
newspaper observation, and to produce plays deliciously
clever but effervescent.
Most of his plots were fragile, slender threads of experience
to carry his fine sense of humor. "Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots"
(1905) is an apt example of this. On the other hand, "The
Earl of Pawtucket" (1903), a Dundreary and Chumley imita-
tion, and “On the Quiet" (1901) proved to be farces of excel-
lent pattern. Meeting success with the former, through the
acting success of Lawrence D'Orsay, Thomas produced an-
other play, "The Embassy Ball" (1905), scintillating but
flimsy, a species of wit which in no way touched the heart,
and unhappily distorted American types.
Mr. Thomas has technique at his finger's end; he is a man
of the world, with a reporter's instinct for timely interests.
As all dramatists should be, he is thoroughly familiar with
American life, and, since his broad comedy period, his observa-
tion and his thought have deepened. Born in St. Louis,
Mo., on January 8, 1859, he was public-school bred; became
page boy in Washington during the Forty-first Congress;
studied law; became a writer and illustrator for such papers
as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Louis Republic, the
Kansas City Times, the Kansas City Mirror (1886), the
Northwestern Miller, and the New York World. Six years
were passed in the freight department of a railroad, and with
his knowledge of law he made ready to enter politics.
interest in the latter is constantly manifest.
His
361
The American Dramatist

AUGUSTUS THOMAS (1859-
)
A complete list of Mr. Thomas's plays in Moses' "Representative
Plays", Vol. III.
Alabama.
In Mizzoura.
Arizona.
Colorado.
Madison Square Thea-
tre, New
J
York,
April 1, 1891.
Hooley's Theatre, Chi-
cago, August, 1893.
Grand Opera House,
Chicago, June 12,
1899.
Palmer's Theatre, New
York, January 12,
1902.
The Earl of Pawtucket. Madison Square Thea-
The Witching Hour.
As a Man Thinks.
tre, New York,
February 5, 1903.
Hackett Theatre, New
York, November 18,
1907.
39th Street Theatre,
New York, March
13, 1911.
Library
Plays
Edition
by
of Issued by
Mr. French.
Samuel Each play contains
an
Thomas.
Mr. Thomas's New By Walter P. Eaton.
autobio-
graphical intro-
duction.
In "At the New
Birth.
Theatre
and
Others."
109-
116. Boston:
Small, Maynard
As Augustus Thomas By Walter P. Eaton.
Thinks.
Mr. Augustus Thomas | By Frederick
and
of
some
Works.
his
Smith.
& Co. 1910.
In "Plays and Play-
ers." 25-33. Cin-
cinnati: Stewart
& Kidd. 1916.
M. Sewanee Review,
192-198,
15:
April, 1907.
362
The Story of the Well-Made Play

AUGUSTUS THOMAS (1859-
) Continued
The Plays of Augustus By William Winter.
Thomas.
In "The Wallet of
Time." Vol. 2.
New
York:
Moffat, Yard &
Co. 1913.
The Witching Hour. By Walter P. Eaton.
In "The American
Stage
of To-
day."
Boston:
Small, Maynard
& Co. 1908.
His début as dramatist was made when, in 1887, he drama-
tized Mrs. F. H. Burnett's "Editha's Burglar" and also acted
in it. Before this, as early as sixteen, he wrote plays like
"Alone" and "A Big Rise" for amateurs.
Mr. Thomas is the author of three plays that, while they
show the technique for which he is justly noted, likewise sound
an interest in telepathy. These are "The Witching Hour"
(1908), a manuscript which he had held for ten years, until
the time was opportune; "The Harvest Moon" (1909), and
As a Man Thinks" (1911). In "The Witching Hour", a
psychology of suggestion, of intimidation, was developed with a
consistency and dramatic effectiveness much more convincing
than in Charles Klein's "The Third Degree." "The Har-
vest Moon", while not so interesting a plot, served further
to convince one successfully of Thomas's sincere interest in
subconscious effect. His science was rudimentary; his
exposition such as a man who had seen these phenomena
would describe them. But none the less are they interesting,
and dramatically effective. And there was a sincerity to the
"The Witching Hour" unique at the time. Some may say
that Mr. Thomas's attitude toward the theatre is unscho-
lastic; but, if we stop to think, the theatre is never scholastic;
it rises upon the popular interests of the people. It is not
necessary for a drama success to be literature. I remem-
363
The American Dramatist
ber Mr. Thomas summing up a few of his plays in this
fashion:
"Alabama", if it were produced now, would have no special
audience or following. It came at a time, however, when the
country was tired of sectional strife, and when it believed there
should be a reconciliation. Colonel Henry Watterson said
in two public speeches, and also editorially, that up to the
time of the production of "Alabama", he had had no assistance
of any kind to bring about this reconciliation between the
sections, and that "Alabama" did more in one night than he
had been able to do in ten years.
"Arizona", he continued, was played just at the time
of the Spanish War, and had to do with the raising of a volun-
teer regiment—young men going to the front.
"The Other Girl" was popular when the prize-fighter was
an idol in New York, just after the repeal of the Horton Law.
"The Witching Hour" is a seizure of the general attention that
is given to telepathy and allied topics. And under all that,
lies my own theory, expressed on more than one occasion, that
the theatre is the place for the visualizing of ideas that the
theatre is vital only when it is visualing some idea then and
at the time in the public mind. The theatre is a vital part of
everyday life; it is an institution, and as an institution it has
a claim upon the popular attention principally in that fact.
When it becomes a thing preservative, a museum for certain
literary forms, or a laboratory for galvanizing archaic ideas,
it is almost useless, and seldom successful as a business enter-
prise.
In "As a Man Thinks", Mr. Thomas's vision became no
longer fragmentary. Once he read his papers too assiduously,
but in this play he added a wider culture and a deeper under-
standing. Its organic unity was intellectual, yet his dialogue
was so excellently constructed that one did not realize how
many problems he dropped at will, attacking the next with
equal vigor and freshness. The interesting point to note
about Mr. Thomas's telepathic dramas is that he not alone
stated a problem; in addition, he assumed an attitude. This
is why "As a Man Thinks" was invigorating.
Where Mr. Thomas showed growth was in the manifold
364
The Story of the Well-Made Play
-
variety of his statements; in the digested, rather than in the
reflected, opinions he expressed. "As a Man Thinks" should
easily win its way on the Continent; its technique was more
French than American. But, notwithstanding, it had, in its
last act
which is a play in itself what the American
people epitomize as "uplift." The title of this play was
simply a variation of the biblical phrasing, "As ye sow, so
shall ye reap." The play itself had no single purpose, but on
the other hand it had no indefinite suggestiveness. Its inter-
est was a well-plotted matter, showing skill in the tech-
nique of the well-made play.
Never before had Mr. Thomas dipped his ladle into the
crucible of life with more effect; never had he shown surer
grip of the handle. As a man thinks, so are his plays. There
is every evidence in "As a Man Thinks" that Mr. Thomas was
thinking. And because of that, he ceased placing so much
dependence upon the cardboard house.
His dramas were always well mounted; they always con-
tained atmosphere in their scenes; they were always well
dressed and well acted. But there was something beyond the
witticism of lines in Thomas of the period marked by “The
Witching Hour" and "As a Man Thinks." He had the same
brilliancy, but he also possessed dignity and seriousness. Not
one of his other plays has ever reached this plane of authority.
And that is the limitation of the theatre training he received.
He stands self-confessed in a very delightful set of prefaces
he has written for a library edition of a number of his plays :
"Oliver Goldsmith", "In Mizzoura", "Mrs. Leffingwell's
Boots", "The Earl of Pawtucket", and "The Witching Hour."
He traces the processes by which these plays came to life, the
external incentives, drawn from his own interests and expedi-
ency. He
He suggests the way in which an actor may creep into
the structure, how biography may guide the inventive direc-
tion of one's mind. These prefaces become a handbook for
the novice in the technical art of play building. They become
autobiographical, and are written with pleasant humor. Mr.
Thomas has done a service in thus giving one a peep into his
workshop, with all the chips and dramatic shavings lying
365
The American Dramatist
""
""
around on the floor. He has made vivid bits out of his own
life that have served him in his "trade." He was not ashamed
of making a play with scissors and pastepot. He so con-
fesses in "Oliver Goldsmith. "Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots',
he naïvely writes, "was salvage; that is to say, it was the
marketing of odds and ends and remnants, utterly useless for
any other purpose. Does not this statement show the card-
board nature of the product of the nineties? But it may well
be asked whether play structure does not under all conditions.
involve certain elements Mr. Thomas takes such pains to
unfold for the amateur? A play cannot live alone by ideas:
it has an organism which must fit in with the organism of the
theatre. That is something Henry James never could under-
stand. It is a thing Mr. Thomas understood about as well
as any of his contemporaries. He met these conditions with
gusto; he even tried to show that the play of this character
could carry idea without detracting from its workableness as
a stage vehicle. The bones of a play were important to these
dramatists; they are important to all plays. In the period
preceding Thomas and Fitch and Gillette and Belasco, these
bones seemed to be crushed and crumbled, in something that
breathed hard to live, suggested no live humanity, and be-
came real only in so far as the actor was able to make it real.
Like Mr. Gillette, Mr. Thomas within recent years has added
nothing to his list of plays. Unlike Mr. Gillette, who for
many reasons has not been over-active on the stage, Mr.
Thomas has been engaged in theatre operations, working with
the theatre managers in their last struggles with the actors -
combined as the Actor's Equity, a labor union who made
demands for their own economic betterment. This is theatre
history, affecting the dramatist only in those aspects which
have nothing to do with his initial impulses of creation,
which are the impulses most potent in the building up of a
real native drama.
IV
William Gillette is another American dramatist who was
master of the well-made play - a species that involves the
366
The Story of the Well-Made Play
cardboard characteristics used with reticence. He was born in
Hartford, Conn., on July 24, 1855, his family lineage compris-
ing many noted names. His father was at one time United
States Senator and a man of keen intellect; among his rela-
tives he counts Henry Ward Beecher and Charles Dudley
Warner. Young Gillette's education was carefully conducted.
It seems that as far back as nursery days the boy owned his
miniature theatre, and was quick in his mechanical inventions.
Thus equipped, Gillette, as early as 1877, had received a cer-
tain amount of theatrical training.
It is the primary object of every dramatist to amuse an
audience. It is the primary object of every audience to seek
amusement. But there are standards of pleasure as there are
standards of morality, and we have to question our right to
enjoy, as we question our right to live. Amusement varies
with the type of play, and this type varies with the grade of
playhouse.
Now, it has been the primary object of William Gillette to
amuse, and every audience that he drew was given healthy
amusement. His standard of pleasure was simple: to hold the
attention by appealing to a childlike thirst in all of us for a
story and for excitement. His types of play are so varied that
we find different pleasure in "The Private Secretary" from
that in "Secret Service." Only once did Mr. Gillette as an
actor approach a problem with great success; that was in
"The Admirable Crichton", which J. M. Barrie wrote.
As a
a dramatist himself, Mr. Gillette has never had any other
purpose than to amuse; and he has reached his effects through
farce and melodrama. These two elements were raised to the
highest grade through superlative workmanship; they were
found appropriate for the best audiences because of the stage
management and the peculiarly individualistic acting of Mr.
Gillette. "Sherlock Holmes" (1899) was an example of a rous-
ing melodrama, constructed in harmony with his method of
acting.
Joseph Jefferson once said that he had no set ambition to
uplift the stage, and in consequence his memory is sweet rather
than invigorating. William Gillette has claimed that he cares
367
The American Dramatist
nothing for critical theories; that, when he has reached the
heart of the masses, he knows he is right. He has never
sought to prove any problem. But, as a dramatist, he has
been able to demonstrate that neither farce nor melodrama
needs to sacrifice the essential qualities of humanity.
In "The Private Secretary" there is a lovable atmosphere
surrounding the diffident minister, no matter how ridiculous
the positions in which he is placed. Throughout "Sherlock
Holmes", the great detective and Dr. Watson are forceful
characters, apart from the situations of force through which
they make their appeal. There is no doubt in my mind as to
how much of this has been due to William Gillette, the actor.
These rôles, which made his stage career, were themselves
made by his method of acting -tense, mostly silent, persis-
tently dominant, and, as Norman Hapgood once wrote, deeply
theatrical and stealthy. Upon the stage he was quiet, slow,
dignified; his style was one of nervous repression, of dry
humor that was incisive and subtle. Such slowness, in the
midst of rapid action, of tense situation, was peculiar to this
actor alone.
Mr. Gillette has written many plays since he began his
career as a dramatist in 1881. There were divers failures
between successes.
With the aid of Mrs. F. H. Burnett, beginning as Thomas
began, he wrote "Esmeralda" in 1881; he adapted "Digby's
Secretary" from the German (1884), and "She" from Rider
Haggard's novel (1887). From the French and German
he took many situations. But he could so transmute ideas.
as to make "Because She Loved Him So" (1899) and "Sher-
lock Holmes" essentially his own, even though the former
was taken from the French, and the latter from Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle's stories. Some say even that "The Private Sec-
retary" lurks on the German stage. As examples of his
own originality, therefore, we have to turn to "Held by the
Enemy" (1886), "Too Much Johnson" (1894), "Secret
Service" (1896), and "Clarice" (1905).
There has been no set system to Gillette, the dramatist; in
this respect he is much more difficult to characterize than as an
368
The Story of the Well-Made Play
actor. For, if we say that his dramas represent "well-made”
plays, we attribute to them an artificiality which is usually
attributable to Scribe. Were I to measure the dramatist by
"The Private Secretary", I should claim that, while it was
loosely strung and faithfully modelled along conventional lines
of farce, at least it was excellently illustrative of the genre.
Were I to measure him by "Held by the Enemy", I should
call it typical melodrama, which had just failed in its aim for
consistency and truth, even though it foreshadowed a better
drama and reflected in the war correspondent something of the
"Private Secretary." "Secret Service" possesses all the
tone and color of Southern feeling during the Civil War;
atmospherically it holds all the stress and strain. South-
erners, treasuring memories of the sectional struggle, have suc-
cumbed to its appeal. Mr. Herne's "Griffith Davenport
much sounder in its deeper phases alone can be compared
with it; by its side, Bronson Howard's "Shenandoah" is
stagey.
وو
From the motive standpoint, Mr. Gillette might have been
led to write a play of purpose, after appearing in "The Admi-
rable Crichton" one of the most delightful of social
satires. But he was content to amuse himself with the char-
acter of the Butler, a rôle which fitted exactly into the eccen-
tricities of Mr. Gillette, the actor. Once he allowed himself
to stretch beyond his limitations, and, in his own adaptation of
Bernstein's "Samson", he entered the realm of emotion. But
he is distinctively unemotional as an actor. Even in simple
love scenes, such as one finds in "Secret Service" and in
"Clarice", he made appeal through the sentiment of situation,
through the exquisite sensitiveness of outward detail, rather
than through romantic attitude and heart fervor.
It has gone against the grain for Mr. Gillette to be purpose-
ful; one would think that this might lead to his being prolific.
But Mr. Gillette has always been the most cautious of drama-
tists. Fundamentally, he is right regarding his belief that
audiences wish to be amused. He turned on green lights
in "Sherlock Holmes " the same green lights that
illuminate the pages of "Ragged Dick" and people who
369
The American Dramatist
patronized Ibsen's "The Wild Duck" and "Rosmersholm'
sat enthralled. He dramatized a cigar in "Secret Service"
and in "Sherlock Holmes", using it also to effect in Barrie's
"The Admirable Crichton." As a dramatist Mr. Gillette
has done much to prove the legitimacy of melodrama.
In plays by Gillette and Thomas, one can see that there has
always been something more than their mere articulateness.
In their hands the cardboard play has never been shallow.
One regrets, however, that their "serviceableness" to the
theatre "
as it was", keeps them from being of very much im-
portance to the theatre "as it is" and "will be."
370
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE AMERICAN DRAMATIST'S NEGLECTED OPPORTUNITY:
PAGEANTRY. SHOULD THE POETIC DRAMA BE DRAM-
ATIZED? JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
I
It is a healthy condition for us to have reached in drama,
when we become conscious of its presence in the community,
and when we are furthermore made aware of its power, both
positive and negative. For, after all, it is not through accident
that the theatre was established, but as a result of the funda-
mental instinct for expression and as a symbol of some over-
towering emotion, within the experience of us all. The old
tribal vocero, or songs of grief, so excellently discussed by
Professor Gummere, while more primitive in form and more
elemental in idea than the modern civic response to condition,
are not so very far removed in the communal psychology
which necessitated them, from the present social response
which Le Bon has analyzed in his treatise on "The Crowd."1
Hence, the theatre is founded upon what might almost be
termed an immutable masonry of human need. We could
change Pinero's wisdom in "Mid-Channel" and direct it to
our ends by saying that since man and woman and the shape
of a hen's egg are the constant facts of life, the theatre is
1 See chapter in Clayton Hamilton's "The Theory of the Theatre" on "The Psy-
chology of Theatre Audiences", pp. 30-58; also W. P. Eaton's "The American Stage
of To-day", in which there is a chapter on “Crowds and Mr. Hamilton”, pp. 282-
290; also Professor Brander Matthews's "A Study of the Drama", Chapter IV,
"The Influence of the Audience", pp. 68-91.
R
371
The American Dramatist
something beyond external endowment; it finds its sanction
in, nay more, is coincident with, the very act of living.
There is no doubt that we have, for the instant, lost sight
of the reasons why the theatre exists, even though we are
growing more and more conscious of its importance as a
social institution and as a cultural and an educational force;
we are also not quite sure in our minds whether we have a
right to enjoy what we enjoy, even though public decency
bars "The Moulin Rouge" from the theatre, and establishes
a censorship for moving pictures.
In our attitude toward the playhouse, we are constantly
contradicting ourselves, possibly because we find, with Goethe,
that it is easier to do than to think. That is characteristic of
communal restlessness, if Le Bon is right in his assertion that
an idea must be transmuted into action; therefore, excessive
sentiment and symbols are representative of popular taste.
The theatre is not only a source of amusement, but it
should be a source of the right kind of amusement; that is the
only way in which it will ever become permanently instruc-
tive; through vital interest rather than through set and
deadly purpose will it ever hope to mold public opinion. If
the Mayor of Philadelphia was overcautious in prohibiting the
New Theatre company from presenting Galsworthy's "Strife"
in that city, for fear that its labor motive would draw fire
from the car strikers at war in 1910, the New Theatre was un-
wise in heralding its mission — which was to clear the atmos-
phere of Philadelphia with a little of Galsworthy's philosophy
about capital and labor.
Yet the incident was significant, for it pointed to one of the
essential functions of the theatre- to prompt civic thought;
and it likewise indicated its true relation to the civic body.
It is necessary to emphasize these conditions, inasmuch as
our present discussion is to deal with communal consciousness
of art and civic interest in art.
We have dropped many adjuncts of the theatre because we
have tried to limit the world of drama to the horizon of the
footlights. We have devoted ourselves so insistently to
subtle considerations of the clash of individual will with indi-
372
The American Dramatist's Neglected Opportunity
vidual will, that we have let slip an expression of art which
results from such a principle as Le Bon's that "collectivities
alone are capable of great disinterestedness and great devo-
tion."
If one reads dramatic history correctly, it is very evi-
dent that while forms change and the methods of appeal
alter, the psychology of the crowd remains fundamentally
the same. Not only is this true, but, even though our audi-
ences are herded together under the same roof, and no longer,
as a general rule, cling to the hillside beneath a clear sky, they
go to a Hippodrome as of yore, even though the spectacle is less
violent than the ancient one; they witness Ibsen's "Ghosts",
not realizing its nearness to "Edipus"; they applaud Pav-
lowa and Mordkin, and are gripped by the ecclesiasticism of
the Middle Ages found in Maeterlinck's "Sister Beatrice",
or in the Reinhardt spectacle of "The Miracle."
The footlights, the picture frame of the proscenium arch,
the orchestra, all tend toward making the theatre more inti-
mate and more subtle. Hence, in the legitimate drama there
is a group sentiment rather than a communal sweep, a more
calculating effect or artifice than appeals to a great crowd. In
fact, the more delicate an actor's art, the more limited his
immediate influence, as far as the numbers of his audience are
concerned. No one could regard the extensive spectacle of
Schiller's "The Maid of Orleans", as given some years ago
by Miss Maude Adams before fifteen thousand spectators in
the Harvard Stadium, as anything more than an interesting
pageant, totally unsuited for any other than visual effect.
When the city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, celebrated its
founding, in 1909, by an elaborate fête, during which Percy
MacKaye's "Canterbury Pilgrims" was mounted in gorgeous
processional, another fifteen thousand were moved in the
spirit of popular appreciation of broad color and large ensemble.
In neither of these attempts did the interest proceed deeper
than that created by novelty, but both of them to a great ex-
tent suggested the possibility of a communal art, distinctively
American in its image and in its historical significance.
Shall the theatre, therefore, be taken at times from the
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The American Dramatist
footlight into the sunlight and the moonlight? Is that the
quickest and best way of developing a civic consciousness of
theatrical art? We look back on the Hudson-Fulton celebra-
tion (1909), with its water pageant rather devoid of intent in
the day, but brilliantly aglow at night, with its floats far less
artistically conceived than the Mardi Gras groups in New Or-
leans; we recall the massiveness of "Caliban" at the City
College Stadium, and we wonder whether this carrying of the
art impulse into the open, beneath the sunlight or the moon-
light, will tend to sharpen civic appreciation, or simply to
cater to a liking for bulk. For, even a processional demands
the preservation of sequence as well as the maintenance of
association; it necessitates the participation of citizens rather
than the employment of professional actors.
Once more we have Ben Greet to thank for turning our
eyes from the footlight to the sunlight and the moonlight.
It was about twenty-two years ago that, with the inestimable
assistance of Miss Edith Wynne Matthison, he brought
Shakespeare into the open, and the warm sunlight of a summer
afternoon played fitfully on Rosalind's hair, while in the eve-
ning the moon suffused “A Midsummer Night's Dream" with
a fairy quality which no incandescence could effect.
That initial impulse was followed later by other move-
ments. It encouraged colleges to amateur endeavor; it
made possible the Coburn Players; it suggested festivals to
small communities and to social groups in crowded quarters
of our cities. In other words, though we harked back to the
archaic, we realized that it was only to pick up some art
instinct which might just as well be developed to-day as it
was in the time when guilds were civically responsible for
their parts in royal and religious processionals.
This revival was not in a true sense a revival, but a resump-
tion of communal expressiveness. Throughout the country
there was shown an incentive to symbolize historic association
- at the opening of a bridge, in commemoration of the dis-
covery of a river, in celebration of a country's past, or in the
tercentenary of a city's founding. There is every reason to
believe that such an impulse, sanely directed, could become
374
The American Dramatist's Neglected Opportunity
properly instructive, and could exert an influence on popular
taste.
II
When art is brought into the sunlight it must be buoyant
and not self-conscious; it has to shape itself, not to the one,
two, three of theatrical mechanism, but to the pulsating va-
garies of Nature. Rosalind's voice must be suited to the
twitter of winging birds, her laugh must wait upon the echo
of itself. I have seen "Twelfth Night" in the starlight, when
the actors' voices were resonant with a peculiar aloofness,
accentuated by swaying trees and by the expressive silence
of sleeping things. Nature seems to play with art in the
open; that is why art must play with Nature. For sunlight
tends toward the real emotion and moonlight toward the
dreams of an exalted spirit, while both demand that artifice
approach nearer and nearer to the essence of art, and that the
shadow of a feeling be as expressive as the shadow of a leaf.
The time had arrived, we thought then, for us to make use
of our natural resources in our communal expression. This
did not mean that we had to desert the theatre, that we had
to discount the footlight. It simply meant that we need not
waste the opportunities offered by the sun and moon. It
meant that in our public education we must be made conscious
of the fact that Nature furnishes us with stage accessories
which only a communal drama may utilize. The members of
the Bohemian Club, in California, with their red-wood forest,'
have revelled in this consciousness since 1878.
1
Only years will prove whether or not this communal inter-
est will some day result in a special folk-drama, a special
folk-music, a special folk-dance, a special folk-pageant. At
the present time, communal play writing, as handled by
Professor Frederick H. Koch, of the University of North
1 The Stage Guild Masques, by Stevens and Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, were done
for the Art Students' League, Chicago. They were "The Daimis's Head" (Mardi-
Gras, 1911), "The Masque of Montezuma" (Feb. 20, 1912), "Cæsar's Gods" (Mardi-
Gras, 1913), "Rainald and the Red Wolf" (Mardi-Gras, 1914). The Cliff-Dwellers
gave "The Masque of Quetzal's Bowl", Feb. 10, 1911.
375
The American Dramatist
Carolina, is resulting in a most encouraging development of
a type of one-act play, as sincere in the handling of local mate-
rial as was the Gaelic revival under the inspiration of Yeats.
Our contention is that the time is just as propitious now for
this communal renaissance and consequent communal expres-
sion as it ever was in any period of dramatic history. It is
only the footlight that has really changed, that typifies theat-
rical convention. We are just waking up to the fact that we
have let slip a valuable asset in art; we have done that, even
though we hear everywhere the necessity for our being in har-
mony with Nature. The Greeks utilized sunlight and moon-
light in their communal expression; but we, in accord with
our general wastefulness of natural resources, have been artis-
tically blind to all but the incandescent bulb. Reinhardt,
and others on the Continent, with their Circus Theatres, their
playhouses for five thousand, bring back to us the possibilities
of the Greek Theatre. For many years past, the Berkeley
Hearst Theatre has led the way to a revival of interest in
Greek drama.
When audiences take to the open, their amusements expand
to accord with the space around them. An entirely different
set of values has to be reckoned with. The open invites
only that kind of entertainment which harmonizes with the
peace and quiet of the hills on one hand, and with the majesty
and beauty of the scenery on the other. The Greeks drew
religion and tragedy from the secret sources of Nature; they
conducted their dances, they sang their Bacchic choruses,
they celebrated their national sentiment beneath the blue
sky. Theirs was a mixture of religious devotion and exalta-
tion with definite art form. Has an open-air theatre had any
appreciable effect upon our theatrical condition?
created any special type of dramatist, other than poets to com-
pose choral odes, like those Percy MacKaye created for his
father's dream, "Columbus"? Such a playhouse has thus far
had no influence whatever upon our conventional theatre, save
in so far as pageantry and patriotism have raised slightly the
art ideals of the crowd and the civic pride of the citizen.
In the open air, we can never hope to have the same class of
Has it
376
Pageantry
play that is given us in the closed-in theatre, unless we have a
communal fervor religious or patriotic to sustain it.
Out of doors demands something strictly pictorial. For
subtlety is lost where largeness is demanded, and delicacy
of manner has to give way before charm of movement. "The
School for Scandal" would scarcely set well on the green-
sward stage.
Yet masques and carnivals and pageants and civic parades.
are necessary in the life of a people, and a public stadium
we have hoped would revive old customs, vivify old manners.
The open-air theatre invites a new drama and encourages an
old form. Some day, Americans may find themselves with
a new pageantry of such magnitude that children can learn
their history from panorama more real than that now given
them in the moving picture, and as resplendent as that sus-
tained by the medieval guilds or by the Elizabethan Court.
On public holidays, the theatre in the open air offers the
dramatist a new outlet for expression of an expansive kind.
A communal Christmas, a sane Fourth of July, the public
function before the grave of the Unknown Soldier such
opportunities suggest to the poet and to the artist infinite
varieties of form and expression. Thus far, but few evidences
are given that the opportunities are realized.
But, in order to have this pageantry of high excellence, a
species of pageant master, such as Percy MacKaye has
repeatedly described, will have to be trained. And one of the
first things he will have to do will be to keep the poet within
bounds, for the greensward stage has its limitations, as well.
as the legitimate theatre. Yet, a well-trained pageant master,
even though we are striving for sane celebration of Indepen-
dence Day and effective demonstration on Columbus Day, is
not as necessary for us to have as well-trained stage managers
for our roofed playhouses. People flock to the hillside for a
game of football or baseball, and they go to the parks for
music only when they are not scared away by programs too
classical for their tastes.
People participate in pageantry when there is an anniver-
sary of civic import. We have had ample evidence of that.
377
The American Dramatist
They are sure to seek the open for amusement of a democratic
sort. Yet, in order to give people drama at minimum cost,
which seems to be the aim of social workers, it is not necessary
to go to the open as the only means, especially when the me-
dium of Nature does not invite the modern drama, distinctive
of our day.
The Civic Theatre¹ has been debated as often as a National
Theatre, and some reformers have even gone so far as to seek a
Theatre of Ideas, as though there were such a thing. What
New York has debated is a stadium, run as our parks are run,
only with the endeavor to keep it in touch with the theatrical
life of the city. Their park symphonies have proven so potent
that any political effort to discontinue them results in vocif-
erous protest. But there has not yet been heard a persistent
public clamor for a civic form of theatre entertainment.
The Hippodrome for several years presented large splashes
of color on its mammoth stage, and met success only when
it stayed away from the spoken word. We hear much about
what an educational institution might do for the theatre,
but has any institution ever approached the Shuberts and
asked them to mount an historical pageant on the Hippo-
drome stage or in the open? Pageantry has failed, thus
far, to inspire the playwright to give us an adequate histor-
ical drama.
It is well for a city to drive its citizens more into the open,
to educate them in the ways of Nature. To do that, there
are better means than by taking the theatre and making it
subservient to Nature. The pageant is educational as the
college revivals are educational. But Nature demands a play
in accord with her own humor. "As You Like It" is typical
of this — and with her own setting, "A Midsummer Night's
Dream" is such a piece. A drama that will train the citizen's
ear to the trill of a lark is certainly a drama for all nations, but
1 It is well to recall the excellent endeavor on the part of the late Charles Sprague
Smith, Director of the People's Institute, New York City, to coöperate with the the-
atrical managers. Reduced prices were offered to school children and wage earners,
and plays were recommended by a committee. The idea was well meaning, but met
with many handicaps.
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Pageantry
the hope for a national drama does not lie in the open-air
theatre, even though the hope of the poet might rest upon a
stadium ode or a pageant choral.
III
There have been many experiments in the American
Theatre which one would have thought sufficiently broad in
scope to have called forth the best efforts of the American
playwright. If there had been any clear understanding of the
relation which the poet bore to the theatre, we might have
developed a pastoral drama at the time Ben Greet swept
through the country giving performances of Shakespeare on
the greensward under the patronage of college groups and
society people. But the entertainment he delighted us with
was kept alive by exacting efforts on his part, and the poet
put his pastoral inspirations into short poems rather than into
long dialogues. Only Percy MacKaye, with his "Canterbury
Pilgrims", which the Coburns offered for several summers, had
the vision to preach the gospel of outdoors in America; he it
was who first realized the beauty of sunlight and moonlight;
he it was who grasped at the democratic possibilities of the
stadium; he it was who did more than any one else to show
communities the potency of pageantry; he it was who brought
his poetic gifts to bear upon all types of outdoor entertain-
ments, celebrating the vagaries of Nature in Masques and
Chorals of far-reaching effectiveness.
The poets however seem to have had their own battles to
fight against conventions which directly affected them, and
seem to have cared little for the problems of the theatre.
If Thomas Woods Stevens turned his efforts in the direction
of pageantry, he did so more in the spirit of director than of
poet, though he had within him an imagination that could
visualize the scene and shape dialogue appropriate to his
needs. Others too followed in his wake men connected
with "Foundations" and colleges. But theirs were self-con-
scious efforts, with an eye upon the renaissance of the pageant
as given in England; and their endeavors were bent more in
379
The American Dramatist
the direction of education than of conquest of a dramatic.
form. The pageant continues to be an occasional "stunt"
which passes when the occasion is over.
Professor George
Pierce Baker's "Pilgrim's Tercentenary" (1923), Sidney
Howard's pageant, commemorating the Battle of Lexington
(1925), were huge undertakings of such a character as create an
impulse that soon dies. The pageant has established so far
no traditional loyalty to it as a civic form; it is not looked
toward as a recurrent celebration, like the Greek devotionals,
which became part of religious festivals. It may be that we
have been feeling our way for some outlet through which
to express our communal feeling. That emotion rises to a
great pitch during a World Series; but we have created no
drama which so appeals to a crowd. We have a quiet belief
in our folk legends, like "Rip Van Winkle" and "Hiawatha"
but they are not as devoutly wished for by the crowd as a
"home run.”
IV
We are being constantly reminded of the inadequacy of
the so-called poetic drama to fill the essential demands of
the theatre; and, whenever the poetic drama fails to hold
the boards, we are prone to deplore the insufficiency of public
taste. Yet we are servile imitators, and show no willingness
to look behind the traditions with which we are often shackled.
There is a preconceived notion that something is lacking in the
person who declaims against the literary drama, the closet-
drama, or the poetic drama. Candor makes us confess that
there is as much ignorance on the part of those who are against
as of those who are for it. The mistaken attitude assumed by
both ranks is founded upon a contradiction of terms and upon
the identification of the conventions of a type with the essence
of the poetic principle.
In our consideration, we would not proceed as far as Poe
in that peculiar essay of his on "The American Drama",
where he suggests that "the first thing necessary is to burn
or bury the 'old models' and to forget, as quickly as possible,
that ever a play has been penned"; we are too thoroughly
380
The Poetic Drama
in advocacy of an historical perspective for dramatic criticism.
But we do believe with Coleridge that "it is to be lamented
that we judge of books (as well as of plays) by books, instead
of referring what we read to our own experience."
All things of the theatre should be applied to the theatre.
An unactable drama is a contradiction in terms; a poetic
drama is simply one phase of a larger and more inclusive art.
A college professor once declared that the "playhouse has no
monopoly of the dramatic form", while another, in just refu-
tation, called attention to the fact that Byron, Landor,
Shelley, Coleridge, Johnson, Tennyson, and Browning, whose
dramas are relegated to the closet, if not to the shelf, wrote
for the stage and failed.
There is only one thing intended for the playhouse, and
that is drama; whatever its form, whatever its content,
it must satisfy the conditions through which it has elected
to reach the human spirit. To the university man we would
say that poetry has no monopoly of the poetic spirit; that
conventions have deceived us into believing the poetic drama
to consist of such rhythm, of such rhyme, of such length,
when in reality its vital measure is the exaltation of the human
spirit in the light of truth and beauty.
The modern theatre has been focussing its rays closer and
closer upon life — never upon anything else; it made no dif-
ference whether you were outside the veil with Ibsen peering
in; or inside the veil with Maeterlinck peering out the
active being, spirit, intellect, or flesh was concerned with its
protagonist.
According to our idea, the poet has not only misinterpreted.
the functions of drama, but has limited the essence of the
poetic to a manner of expression; he has not only been con-
tent to deal with life in the abstract, but he has departed from
life in search for beauty. Despite these conditions and these
counter-elements, we are safe in claiming, nonetheless, that
the time is propitious, as it always has been, for the poetic
drama. It will never come from the poet who lacks the dra-
matic sense, but it will be born of the dramatist in whom the
poetic impulse is quick.
381
The American Dramatist
Whenever a poet turns playwright, we may be sure that
we are to be treated to a baffling maze of half-formed ideas,
to metaphor and simile that are lost to the listening ear before
they are fully uttered. It does not do to have the dramatist
pause in his essential stage structure in order to listen to his
own music. The stage is progressive, not contemplative;
direct, not indefinite; particular, not general. Remove from
it the power to hold, and it is no longer a theatre in the sense
that people would have it.
Such drama, I claim, is twice removed in its relationship
to the bare boards of the stage, by reason of its surcharged
beauty and by reason of its classic form. For the actor, it
is only an exercise in reading; for the audience, it has the
heavy odor of crowded flowers, badly arranged. The poet,
turned dramatist, is condescending toward the stage; and
he has added nothing to the theatre that it did not already
know; has gained nothing from the theatre, even though there
was much to gain. He has put poetry into the form of drama,
without having any drama in his poetry.
V
When Josephine Preston Peabody's "The Piper" won the
Stratford prize, and was played at the Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre by Benson and his company, in the Summer of 1910,
many people proclaimed that blank verse had come into its
own again. No manager in America before then would touch
it for presentation, and it was once declined by the New The-
atre, which hastened later to produce it. There is much to
say in extenuation of the American attitude. "The Piper"
is drama twice removed - because of its beauty, and because
of its form, loosely knit. There is also a pronounced indefi-
niteness of idea.
1
Naturally, Mrs. Marks ¹ (Miss Peabody) had some justifica-
tion in her confidence that she had given the stage a notable
poetic contribution; naturally she had theories regarding
1 Mrs. Marks died in 1924. She wrote "Marlowe " (1901) and other dramas
mentioned in my "Representative American Dramas: National and Local.”
382
Josephine Preston Peabody
the province of poetry on the stage. But her technical ideas
were wrong, and not in accord with the modern practice of the
theatre. Maybe, as a poet, she was right in her method, but
it was a rock upon which she foundered. She there found the
battered wrecks of Thomas Bailey Aldrich's "Judith of Bethu-
lia", of Percy MacKaye's "Sappho and Phaon", wrecks
beautiful in their dramatic inertia, clogged with the passive
wealth of simile and metaphor. Mrs. Marks's mind was
literary the themes she selected for her plays were drawn
from literary biography. Her passionate regard for Shake-
speare, her own type of mind, her personality, which was strik-
ingly beautiful but undramatic - all proclaimed her farthest
away from the "hardened" theatre which demands so much
compromise, which abhors expansiveness and contemplation,
and explanation of inner condition.
The realism which was symbolized by Ibsen, and the sym-
bolism which was realized by Maeterlinck not only served to
intensify dramatic material and narrow external action, but
they opened a channel for the actor which only his genius
could compass. It called forth some exceptional playing in
the theatre, different from the statuesque playing of the
"golden days", where "words, words, words" were muttered
in tones and with gestures beyond the naturalness of man.
The worn-out "tricks" of the theatre have been confiscated,
along with the old-fashioned theatrical methods of interpreta-
tion. Introspective significance has decreased the violent
reaction, and the most beautiful acting has now become the
most quiet acting.
How many of us have returned again and again to Lamb's
essay on the "Tragedies of Shakespeare", in which occurs.
the significant passage, anent the impracticableness of play-
ing "Hamlet" - a passage which reads: "Nine parts in ten
of what Hamlet does are transactions between himself and his
moral sense, transactions reduced to mere words for the
sake of the reader. This leads one to believe that an Eliza-
bethan commentator may some day issue an edition of Shake-
speare with passages, called by Lamb "silent meditations",
printed in italics to serve as psychological stage directions.
383
The American Dramatist
Nevertheless, there is something in Lamb's argument. His
latest adherent is Maeterlinck, who likewise believes in the
unsuitableness of unseen forces for expressive interpretation.
They must be quietly realized. Lamb and Maeterlinck have
both found the theatre incapable of solving the problem of
meditation on the stage, yet the poetic drama must of neces-
sity deal with just those phases of character and of destiny
which are hardest to reconcile with custom and habit and
familiar, commonplace movement. I believe that the contem-
plative element, which has been so much a part of the poetic
drama of the past, can be dealt with by what the scenic artist
calls the "visible" mood of a play. The scenic artist, it seems
to me, points to a return of the poetic theme to the stage;
while the architectural revolution which threatens the pro-
scenium arch, suggests that no background the poet might in-
vent will be too broad for the concrete stage of the future to
handle.
Dramatic literature of recent years represents a revulsion
from conventional notions which have grown up around
ancient models. Quotidian happenings in the development
of the individual have been raised to high dignity. All of
this change has brought a consequent change in the poetic
drama; the scope of the playwright has become wider with
the development throughout the world of more democratic
tendencies in society. The entire progression is indicated
by Maeterlinck's statement that whereas once there was no
poetry in drama save that which narrated the passion of
a lover like Romeo or Tristan or Paolo, now a cottager, seated
alone by a lighted lamp in the midst of the forces of Fate, is
more vitally true and more profoundly significant for us all.
Violent activity must be attached to a spiritual centre, to
what Coleridge termed a point of relative rest. Expressionism
goes further. The loose structure it has adopted to suggest
Freudian states of mind affords the dramatist opportunity to
defy unities of time and place, and emphasize the unity of
"mood" and spiritual meaning. The new form admits of a
poetic content.
The poetic drama is therefore in the process of adjustment;
384
The Poetic Drama
when we demand it for our stage, we do so with preconceived
notions of literary excellence and of poetic fervor which, when
put to test, fail to stimulate the active curiosity of external
vision, and clog the dramatic progression by an overplus of
"sublime images" in themselves demanding
in themselves demanding a slow mind.
Drama moves continuously; the poetic drama, with its
demand upon imagination, its appeal to the moral judgment,
and its lack of "corporal dimensions", requires to be read.
The mind of the reader must be allowed to turn back; the
mind of an audience can never turn back.
The poet who writes for the stage should ever remember
that the average theatre judges him by his explicit word;
through this is the implicit meaning caught. Most attempts
of the unskilled playwrights to deal with symbolism have
resulted in an unfailing quality of indefiniteness mere
decoration without the fundamental surety of nature beneath.
For even imagination has its consistency; we understand only
in so far as we ourselves have experienced. James Russell
Lowell claimed that to be a mystic gave no one the license to
be misty.
It is well to approach our subject from these various indirect
channels, for the poetic drama is not a special form, per se;
but, to our manner of thinking, any play in which humanity
is raised to the heights of greatest spiritual activity or fulfil-
ment. Poetry, therefore, becomes only one of the numerous
factors that make drama what it is. Blank verse does not con-
stitute the poetic drama, though some may think so; height-
ened speech, so beyond the realm of consistent usage, is not
its distinguishing mark. Poetry may only hope to have its
significant place on the stage when it expresses spiritual quality
and psychological strength, amidst environment which allows
of much intensive development, and yet which remains fa-
miliar.
"Art for art's sake," said Mr. Herne, who in America has
thus far come nearest giving us the poetry of the common
life, "is mere decoration, but I will not take the truth for
truth's sake with the realist, unless it be the essential truth."
Hence, our new poetic drama will occupy a position much
385
The American Dramatist
like the oft-conceived "third empire", so vividly developed
by Ibsen; consistent art with consistent truth, art consistent
with truth, essential art with essential truth - these are the
statements. Ibsen has shown the vital meaning in the com-
mon thing; Emerson has told the common man of the vital
thing. From the mystic and the realist combined, we in
America should be able to evolve a poetic drama. We are
not lacking the content but the form. The expressionist
believes he has discovered it.
The inevitable conclusion stares us in the face. Our great
English poets wrote for the theatre, and most of them failed.
Macready thrust Browning to the fore; Irving preserved
Tennyson for a while. It is wrong to say, as though there
were a constitutional incompatibility between the two, that
the reason why these men failed lay in the fact that literature
is divorced from the stage. The real matter is that the poet,
however much he might love the theatre, has never mastered
the technique, and has become impatient of the theatre's
restrictions. The miniature painter and the mural artist
do not use the same brush, though the latter might find it
necessary at times to employ a hair line.
Shall we, therefore, have to confess that the poetic drama
needs to be dramatized? This is only a facetious way of
saying that out of a mass of beauty and fancy, of imagination
and meditation, the poetic drama must be lifted on to a plane
of kinship with common sense and human development. In
Chicago, at one time, "Macbeth" was given before an au-
dience in moving pictures; the police had to stop the per-
formance, so violent the action; the whole spiritual quality
of the piece had been sacrificed for the shell. The poetic
drama has suffered from the other extreme!
Coleridge, metaphysician though he was, nevertheless
realized the need for a reconciliation between characters as
they exist ordinarily with their manner and speech, and the
same characters idealized in proportion, stressed in language,
filling a large destiny rather than doing an ordinary deed.
Until Ibsen arrived, we had only a vague notion as to the util-
ization of the commonplace on the stage; we were told by the
386
The Poetic Drama
text-books that a play dealt only with the significant moments
in the development of the individual — and by significant
they meant violent or picturesque moments. The melodram-
atists abused this idea, the romanticists and sentimentalists
conventionalized it. Then Ibsen, even though trained in the
methods of Scribe, wrote "A Doll's House", and soon followed
it with the white-heat realism of "Ghosts", and brought the
soul out of its shreds and patches into the familiar light of
day familiar and sometimes cruel.
The little moments in life pulsed with vitality. Ibsen used
the ordinary speech of intercourse and surcharged it with
spiritual intensity. Curiously, before Ibsen was known in
America, Mr. Herne had exemplified by his "Margaret
Fleming" what depths lay in the tragic of the commonplace;
he had instinctively worked out for himself, despite the fact
he was forced back into the old subterfuges of the melodrama-
tist in "Shore Acres" and "Sag Harbor", the whole theory of
the active presence of hidden forces a recognition which
quickens the entire gamut of life and raises the ordinary into
the realm of the poetic.
When Mrs. LeMoyne presented "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon",
the one of Browning's plays nearest stage requirements, the
weight and beauty of the lines turned the audience into pas-
sive listeners of something being read aloud. We forgive in
opera what we will not countenance in drama; long recitative
passages are colored by music which serves as the necessary
stimulant to emotion. The poetic drama, popularly con-
ceived, needs to be relieved of its overweight. Percy Mac-
Kaye's "Sappho and Phaon" and Stephen Phillips's "Ulys-
ses" suffered from this accentuation of beauty to the detri-
ment of motive power; Hauptmann's "The Sunken Bell",
with all the excellence of its symbolic texture, dragged in the
moralizing speeches which dulled the mind. The same heavi-
ness was evident in Ridgely Torrence's "El Dorado" (1903)
and "Abelard and Héloise" (1907), and in Olive Dargan's
"Lords and Lovers" (1906). The need for dramatization
is commensurate with the wearying effect upon the average
audience.
387
The American Dramatist
Maeterlinck, after having tested a theory of the unexpressed
in drama, so marvelously worked out in "The Intruder",
finally arrived at the conclusion that "whatever the tempta-
tion, he [the dramatist] dare not sink into inactivity, become
mere philosopher or observer"; he learned through experience
with his "puppet theatre" that no situation should be held
in abeyance to profundity of speech. The poet, according to
Coleridge, has handicapped his success in drama through
certain self-conceit; he has forced the actor, who is supposed to
interpret character, to stand still and read long descriptions
of his own psychology, when, if he be a real actor, he could
have suggested all by a flash of expression or a gesture.
It is
true, as Henry Arthur Jones has intimated, that realism is
only justifiable where there is spiritual beauty beyond.
,,
Bernard Shaw has always persisted that wherever emo-
tional climaxes are reached in Shakespeare, "we find passages
which are Rossinian in their reliance on symmetry of melody
and impressiveness of march to redeem poverty of meaning.
His quarrel with the theatre of Shakespeare is our quarrel
with the general conception of the position poetry occupies
in drama. Most poets regard the drama, not as a reflection, a
transcript of life, but as a commentary on life, expressed
through the medium of dialogue; they subject everything to
their own artistic needs, believing, no doubt, that the pre-
dominance of true poetry will cover up the lack of drama,
whereas it only serves to accentuate the fact that drama is
not there.
The commendable feature about William Vaughn Moody's
"The Great Divide" was his proper, though not perfect, use
of the poetic content in the dramatic mold; it possesses
certain elemental largeness, and its characters are human, re-
taining their average proportions in the midst of their spirit-
ual aspirations and expansion. Mr. MacKaye's "The Scare-
crow", based on Hawthorne, attempted almost successfully to
combine the hidden force with the outward expression, but he
did not quite reach the texture of New England conscience.1
¹ In its acted form, however, with Mr. Frank Reicher in the title rôle, it was most
effective.
388
The Poetic Drama
A surprising proportion of any poetic play deals either with
irrelevant imagery, or with mental introspection which pre-
cedes action. From speech, it falls into declamation; from
character it passes into nothing more than a vehicle for theory
or poetic idea, cut aloof from the essential meaning of the
moment.
VI
We know that life is greater than drama; that art, what-
ever its form, is only a means of expressing our comprehension
of the life in which we find ourselves. But most of our poets
who have attempted drama have not realized how close to
life drama really is. It is not a vehicle, but an expression;
it does not hold, but it gives out. "Peter Pan” represented
the genius of Barrie dramatizing Wordsworth's "Heaven lies
about us in our infancy", in terms of common experience and
of eternal truth. "What Every Woman Knows" and "Qual-
ity Street" did not defy the laws of the familiar, yet both plays
are shot through with a poetic quality of sentiment.
Far from disparaging the poetic drama, we claim that our
stage thirsts for it. Yet we do not blame the manager for
being wary of the conventional form, which has neither prof-
ited by Maeterlinck nor learned of Ibsen. The pulse of life.
throbs through the land; there is in our mundane existence
the call to the higher things; from the wheat fields year after
year comes the cry for labor - the epic cry from the soil.
The poet stands confused before the dilemma. "How,"
he questions, "shall I reconcile the poetic language with the
man of wage, with the machinery of utility, with the average.
moments of life?" Man has his exalted feelings, even when
his feet are firmly planted upon earth. I remember once
walking along a country road with Clyde Fitch; we passed a
fleshy, grimy truck driver in the open field, with a flower in his
apology for a buttonhole. "There," said Mr. Fitch, "is the
poetry of ordinary existence.”
At supreme moments, language, thought, spirit, become
supreme. The blacksmith may talk in the poetry of his
389
The American Dramatist
uncouth prose; but no one can take from him the purity or
rhythm of his feeling when his feeling is pure and rhythmic,
or the high resolution of his character, when circumstance and
situation prompt it to act, or the strength of his primal being
when he is strong. The poet must not mold his character to
suit a preconceived notion; in drama one must be true to
life rather than to the conventions of art. We know of no
form for the theatre other than drama - drama which is
divided into relative grades, dependent upon the predomi-
nance of certain artistic qualities. Even in dealing with the
unseen, Maeterlinck never fails to refer to "active" forces.
Only on rare occasions does the average person speak aloud
to himself; that is why the soliloquy in realistic drama has
fallen into ill favor. And so, one by one, the conventions of
drama are disproven or else laid aside for a while.
We need another name for that play which we have been
accustomed to call "poetic drama"; we need to discover that
the old form has falsified beauty, since it has taken it away
from character, from life. Only when we have written a real
drama in which poetry occupies its essential position in rela-
tion to life, will we cease in our belief that the poetic drama
needs to be dramatized.
390
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE CASE OF THE AMERICAN ONE-ACT PLAY
T
THE one-act play can be made into a great thing; there are
many examples of its supreme potency. Its craftsmanship
is a beautiful articulation when it is handled with the high
seriousness it deserves. One has only to read Synge's "Riders
to the Sea" to feel what a folk rhythm will do in the way of
atmosphere, what a supreme valuation of words will suggest
in the way of a full tide of fundamental emotion. Anything
short, which has its longer counterpart, has curiously been
looked upon as a secondary consideration. But the one-act
play is not a foreshortened drama, it is not a remnant cut
from any larger piece, it is not a segment of anything that
could be amplified, it is not a part of a whole. It is itself,
with as complete a life within itself as any other art form has.
Its time element is its only limitation, and in that segment of
time which is not the three-hours' traffic of the stage
there must be shaped a complete emotion, a complete justi-
fication for that emotion; there must be told a complete story,
and all the many reasons for its development must be sug-
gested. Into a few minutes, as the theatre reckons it, there
must be swiftly, unerringly injected - not necessarily a slice
of life, not necessarily an incident amplified, but a sense of the
eternal, a sense of the palpitant human.
The remarkable thing about the development of the one-act
play is that it is of such recent origin. Not that we have not
•
391
The American Dramatist
had the one-act measurement before the eighteen-nineties,
when the play form that we are considering began to impress
us. There have been, since the early days of mediævalism,
examples of the short drama, either dropped into larger ones,
as the comedy of Mak, or as a special form, called an interlude.
But I believe that the laws which govern the one-act plays are
of modern realization; that they have nothing to do funda-
mentally with those older short plays, whose compressions.
were largely prompted by social and spiritual conventions
rather than by any realization of their intrinsic art value.
But it does not matter in the long run whether we have to go
back to the Commedia dell'arte for a commencement of the
one-act play, should we wish to trace its external history, or to
Heywood and to the Frenchmen, who, since the days of Molière,
have written farces, burlesques, commediettas, and various
drolleries. I do not believe we have to go back so very far at
all to determine when the philosophy of the one-act form, as
we know it, began to impress itself upon the dramatist in the
theatre.
There are comparative similarities between the short-story
form and the one-act play; they also have similarity of dif-
ferences between their larger counterparts, the novel and the
drama, which admit of fuller complication. But in one re-
spect the short story falls away from relationship to the one-
act play: its emotional quality, its vital force do not have
to stand as rigid a comparison with human experience as the
drama; its movement does not have to be of as clear-cut a
design; does not have to be, I venture to say, though such
supreme story-tellers, as De Maupassant and O. Henry, use
patterns which unfold inevitably and swiftly, and hence are
dramatic prose, even if not intended to be acted.
The case which Edgar Allan Poe once made against the
long poem was one based entirely on a temperamental lyrical
sense which he himself possessed as a poet. One could not
possibly assert, for example, that emotion cannot be sustained
for any length of time by a long work of art. But drama
recognizes the necessity of relieving the strain of emotion,
believing that the stress of excitement can be carried over
392
The Case of the American One-Act Play
periods of rest, of variation. I refer to Poe merely because, in
his strictures against the long poem, which would not apply
to the long play, he mentions certain qualities which are so
peculiarly essential to the life of the one-act play.
The value of the poem [he writes] is in the ratio of this elevat-
ing excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal
necessity, transient. That degree of excitement, which would
entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sus-
tained throughout a composition of any great length. After
the lapse of half an hour at the very utmost, it flags — fails —
a revulsion ensues and then the poem is, in effect and in
fact, no longer such. . . .
One can see here that Poe overlooked the development of
true emotion, its gradations to a crisis. One can see here also
that he looked, in poetry, for a fine frenzy of feeling which was
to his taste, highly colored with temperament, which gives
rise to efflorescence of language. To him beauty had nothing
to do with either intellect or conscience. Truth was, in his
view, inimical to the poet.
•
In enforcing a truth [he said further] we need severity
of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must
be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that
mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the
poetical.
The rhythmic flow of words under excitation at high pres-
sure was therefore his conception of lyric poetry. In his use
of the word "unimpassioned" above, he did not realize that
tension which the artist may call forth by calm. Otherwise,
his paragraph about truth might be descriptive of the tech-
nique of Synge, of Dunsany, of many of the best exponents
of the one-act play. And I see where a comparison might be
made between this form of drama and certain forms of lyric
poetry where the swift fulfilment of its emotional mission
must not be allowed to lag by reason of any creative depres-
sion.
393
The American Dramatist
II
One cannot match the material out of which the modern
one-act play was cut with any material of an older period and
of a similar shortness. John Maddison Morton (1811-1891)
was in England the perpetrator of a host of afterpieces,
curtain-raisers, in direct imitation of the light and flimsy
entertainments which used to regale the English theatre of the
Garrick period, and which were brought to this country with
the first band of players who ventured to the colonies. These
loosely put together contrivances, which made the most
of comic elements, and were saved merely by the skill with
which they were acted, are now but literary relics. They were
conveniently used to take the bad taste of unremitting tragedy
or classicism away from an audience which wanted a sort of
happy conclusion to an evening's outing. They were also
used in the Morton period to satisfy the groundlings, who came
to the theatre early, and who had to wait for the arrival of
late comers, when the real bill was given: hence the habit of
curtain-raisers. The theatre abroad has had to cater to a
special class. If a close examination into the early interlude
were made, it would be found that it became at times a sort of
entertainment, shoved in between courses at my lord's table,
for the mild instruction and amusement of the diners.
None of these reasons can be given for the vigorous develop-
ment of the one-act play in this country; nor can we stretch a
point and say that the form developed from the innocuous
"recitation" or dialogue "habit" of the church festival,
however much we may recognize that the church festival has
been vastly improved by the better one-act play, and by the
strong impulse given to amateur acting in this country. Even
in the eighties, when W. D. Howells applied his realistic
observation to a set of parlor dialogues which had insight,
quality, and form, I cannot see in them any relationship to
the truly dramatic one-act play, save in so far as he brought to
the work, as a fictionist, certain qualifications which are the
qualifications of the dramatist. "Invention in the vulgar
sense", O. W. Firkins recognized in them, as though dramatic
394
The Case of the American One-Act Play
(6
form coarsened one's handling of the materials of life. To
any one who reads “ The Albany Depot", "The Elevator", or
The Mouse Trap", there will be detected in Howells the
ability to vary a slight incident in an amusing way, the excel-
lent knack of swiftly accentuating the vagaries of outward
character. But the deeper emotion, the meaning of dialogue
beneath the mere repartee quality which his farces exhib-
ited, he was incapable of handling in the one-act form. His
plays were all cut from the same strip. Nevertheless, when a
Howells farce found its way to the London stage, Bernard
Shaw-probably remembering Morton's perpetrations, which
were the pattern for most of the "curtains" of the Victorian
period breathed in gratefulness for some literary applica-
tion to the form. He wrote, December 7, 1895, of Howells's
“A Dangerous Ruffian":
The little piece showed, as might have been expected, that
with three weeks' practise the American novelist could write
the heads off the poor bunglers to whom our managers gener-
ally appeal when they want a small bit of work to amuse the
people who come at eight. But no doubt it is pleasanter to
be a novelist, to have an intelligent circle of readers comfort-
ably seated by their firesides or swinging sunnily in hammocks
in their gardens, to be pleasantly diffuse, to play with your
work, to be independent of time and space, than to conform
to the stern conditions of the stage and fight with stupidity
before and behind the curtain.
All of which is, in itself, a commentary on theatre conditions
of the time, and on the state of the one-act play in Great
Britain just at the moment when Yeats and Synge and Lady
Gregory, through the Irish dramatic renaissance, were about
to show how excellent a form the one-act play really was.
The short story crept upon the practisers of the art almost
without their knowing what a distinctive, separate form it was,
- of a structure its own and with individual laws of its own
nature. Many were the definitions of its special province,
among the most interesting being Bret Harte's contention
that humor was its starting point. I quote that part of Bret
Harte's explanation, taken from his Cornhill essay, published
395
The American Dramatist
in July, 1899, and used by Professor Pattee, in his “Develop-
ment of the American Short Story":
as
But while the American literary imagination was still under
the influence of English tradition, an unexpected factor was
developing to diminish its power. It was humor, of a quality a
distinct and original as the country and civilization in which
it was developed. It was at first noticeable in the anecdote
or "story", and, after the fashion of such beginnings, was orally
transmitted. It was common in the bar-rooms, the gather-
ings in the country store, and finally at public meetings in the
mouths of "stump orators." Arguments were clinched and
political principles illustrated by a "funny story." It in-
vaded even the camp meeting and pulpit. It at last received
the currency of the public press. But wherever met it was
so distinctively original and novel, so individual and charac-
teristic, that it was at once known and appreciated abroad as
an American story. Crude at first, it received a literary polish
in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was
concise and condensed, yet suggestive. It was delightfully
extravagant, or a miracle of understandment. It voiced
not only the dialect, but the habits of thought of a people or
locality. It gave a new interest to slang. From a paragraph
of a dozen lines it grew into half a column, but always retain-
ing its conciseness and felicity of statement. It was a foe to
prolixity of any kind; it admitted no fine writing nor affecta-
tion of style. It went directly to the point. It was burdened
by no conscientiousness; it was often irreverent; it was de-
void of all moral responsibility, but it was original. By de-
grees it developed character with its incident, often, in a few
lines, gave a striking photograph of a community or a section,
but always reached its conclusion without an unnecessary
word. It became and still exists as an essential feature
of newspaper literature. It was the parent of the American
66 short story.
Some of these characteristics persist not only in the short
story but in the one-act play; and some of these character-
istics are also the weakness of the two forms. For an anecdote
that becomes a good short story, in the hands of the excellent
craftsman, remains an anecdote in the hands of the bungler;
396
The Case of the American One-Act Play
and many of our magazine stories are merely incidents spread
in a thin invention over a certain length. Harte does not
define what is short-story material; he merely indicates what
factors may be used in a short story. But these factors are
often used for themselves alone; anecdotes, labored incidents.
clamor for an excuse to be put in short narrative form. And it
is exactly in the desire on the part of the unskilled to put
anecdotes into short stories and plays of one-act length that
the uninitiated are deceived in the belief that short-story writ-
ing and one-act play construction are the easiest kind of writ-
ing, merely because of the shortness. This contemptuous
attitude for the small form is not dispelled yet. Such an ex-
cellent one-act play as Barrie's "The Twelve-Pound Look "
was regarded by the late Charles Frohman as a waste of good
material in small space, and he begged the author to make it
into a big play.
The habit of not regarding the one-act-play form as worthy
of the highest creative ingenuity, the custom of looking at it as
a mere catchall for just those separate factors which Harte
believed were behind the short story, has handicapped its
development in this country. This is one of the causes for its
not attaining distinction which at least equals the fervor with
which the practice of the form has been manifested from coast
to coast. The form has not been consistently practised but
has been forced for a practical purpose. "Neither Mr. Yeats
nor I take the writing of our plays lightly," Lady Gregory once
confessed. And Lord Dunsany, when the divine hand of
creation seemed to be upon him, and he was writing his in-
imitable plays of special atmosphere, declared in a letter:
"I want to write about men and women and the great forces
that have been with them from their cradle up. .. I
merely set out to make a work of art out of a simple theme."
It is not too much, therefore, to insist that the one-act
form at its best requires a workmanship which in some
respects is more exacting than the longer play; and which,
while it has to face certain problems similar to the longer form,
has, by reason of its own nature, necessitated closer handling
of materials. The numberless variations we get, in the multi-
397
The American Dramatist
tude of one-act plays published in a year, which are merely
variations of the same theme, the infinite similarities of situa-
tion, the flat projection of figures rather than rounded character
to carry the dialogue, the utilitarian purposes of the writers
who forget the art in the restricted requirements of amateurs,
who constitute the market for the one-act play all these
elements militate against the best development of a genre (7
which has every possibility of attaining the highest pitch of
dramatic effectiveness.
III
This matter of materials for the one-act play is an impor-
tant one. Every dramatic season is witness to innumerable
long plays which get produced, so thin in their substance, so
slight in their story, that even skill in characterization will
not conceal the poverty of their invention. "It should have
been a one-act drama," we say to ourselves. This conclusion
may be true and it may not. There may be elements in a
theme thin under any condition other than a paragraph or a
half-column. Of course, many one-act plays "get away with
it" in just this sort of argument. And that is why there are
so many half-creditable plays being written. There seems to
be no realization that the materials for a one-act play, though
they may be helped by the form - made more powerful, more
striking, more consistent without padding - are supremely
important to the play as a literary contribution, as a work of
art. Our anthologies are flooded with small dramas for “men
casts", for "women casts", for this occasion and that, show-
ing that in a way the one-act play has taken the place of the
old time recitation, and meets the requirements of an improved
amateur actor. But the form is "aped"; it is, as the artist
would say, “sheked"; the surface is smooth, but the skeleton
is not there. It is clever, barring which it is dull, faulty.
Percival Wilde, in his excellent treatise on "The Craftsman-
ship of the One-act Play", recognizes the vast life of the small
play not so different from its larger brother, but swifter,
more exacting in its selective process; but he sees in both
398
The Case of the American One-Act Play
processes similar ends: the effective utilization of raw mate-
rials. And the raw material must have substance, quality;
it must be living substance.
Death and birth are swifter than the swiftest one-act play;
they are so swift that they alone as subjects for a long drama
would be beyond the human endurance of an audience. They
are an incident and must be led up to with varying uses of
materials for relief. There are crises in life, and they may be
led up to by a skilled dramatist. Which is more effective:
Maeterlinck's "The Intruder" or Eugene O'Neill's "The First
Man?" The one has consummate emphasis while the other
offends the nerves by rasping over-emphasis. Birth and death
handled in different ways and different forms. The one-act
play deals with culminations; if the first act of a long drama
held the climax, the play would be over.
There are many subjects which cannot be treated swiftly;
their potency would be missed, their interest for the spectator
would be robbed, their very shortness would be so baffling as
to deluge the reader or observer with more questioning doubts
than the solution could satisfy. The writer must determine
this fitness for himself, and, by his determination, he is partly
judged this and the execution are everything. Professor
Frederick H. Koch confessed to me that he found difficulty in
persuading his pupils at the University of North Carolina,
who are writing plays dealing with the folklore of their hills
and mountains, to use the long drama form. They seem to
sense that the one-act play can best hold the intense tragedies
of their people. Is this reticence on their part, is it a desire
to seek practice in a form they can work over oftener until
they gain surety? Or is it not the same impulse in them which
is behind the balladist: elemental emotion is always seeking
the quickest expression; when it is attenuated it loses fire and
makes the play a mere exploitation of unusual condition,
manners, and customs. The play then becomes folklore rather
than folk passion, and we get what Poe contended he found
in all long poems: "After passages of what we feel to be true
poetry, there follows, inevitably, a passage of platitudes which
no critical pre-judgment can force us to admire."
€
399
The American Dramatist
I do not contend that long plays cannot be made of such
materials as these students are using; but I believe that their
elemental passion is just as effective if used in the manner of
Synge, if not more effective. Percy MacKaye's "This Fine-
Pretty World", Lulu Vollmer's "Sun-Up" and more partic-
ularly her "The Dunce Boy", Hatcher Hughes's "Hell-Bent
for Heaven", Roscoe Brink's "Catskill Dutch", whatever
their excellences in story and character, primarily exploited
unusual locale and custom; and in each one of these plays
there was a something precious, a something meticulous, which
detracted from the big effect, which delayed the elemental
passion for the sake of showing off its condition. A play of a
single lyrical impulse is better for its terseness in exquisite
form.
This impulse need not necessarily be a violent one: rather
must it be intense: like lightning from a clear sky. Fate is
ever at our elbow, the Greeks believed. Mr. Koch's student,
who wrote the simple little mountain play, "The Return of
Buck Gavin", naïvely came upon what he thought was a new
discovery but it was none the less true for being old. He
wrote: "The dramatic is not the unusual. It is happening
daily in our lives. Some of us, perhaps, toil on a mountain
farm, and, when we relax from the stolidity of mind, and allow
ourselves thought, it is to think bitterly on the unvaried,
monotonous grind of our existence. Here is drama in the
true sense."
Rather should he have said: Here is material for drama in
the true sense. For it is only after the dramatist has chosen
his theme, developed the passionate quality of his material,
seen its reactions on living character, and then selected.
through that quality in him which makes the dramatist -
the essentials, that the drama itself is ready to be born.
IV
A few dates are necessary for our better understanding of
the rise of the American one-act play. Its growth was prob-
ably hastened through conscious imitation and through
400
The Case of the American One-Act Play
""
that social necessity which created the Little Theatre move-
ment. The Abbey Theatre gave us the Irish one-act plays,
and they went consciously to work to create a dramatic liter-
ature. They even issued a pamphlet of instructions, "Advice
to Playwrights Who Are Sending Plays to the Abbey, Dublin.
The movement fired the imagination, and those who came to
see the little group, went away to write. "I asked Mr. Len-
nox Robinson," writes Lady Gregory, "how he had begun, and
he said he had seen our players in Cork, and had gone away
thinking of nothing else than to write a play for us to pro-
duce." It was only in 1899 that Yeats sent Synge about his
significant job in the Aran Islands. There came to us in
America many stories of the Free Theatre in France, of the
Freie Buehne in Germany, of the generosity of Miss
Horniman, first with the Irish Players and then with the
Manchester Repertory Theatre, in 1907. Our pioneer Little
Theatre was established in Boston, under the inspiration of
Mrs. Lyman W. Gale, who had just witnessed the Irish
Players on their first visit to America. The social settlements
probably forestalled her in the actual establishment of a
specialized theatre, but, as an independent entity, the Toy
Theatre heads the story. Then there followed quickly the
development of acting groups throughout the country; not
prompted, as had been many dramatic clubs, by social im-
pulse; not actuated by any such collegiate ambition as
marked the Yale Dramatic Association, for example, which I
like to link with the drama in the colleges of colonial times,
but moved by a growing discontent with the professional
theatre under speculative management, and by a determina-
tion to bring to their communities something of the best that
was being written by the European playwrights. Most no-
tably (since they were not handicapped by the necessity for
translation) these amateurs looked to the drama renaissance
in England, the soil for which was first turned by Henry
Arthur Jones, and Arthur Wing Pinero, and the Archer trans-
lations of Henrik Ibsen.
The professional theatre in America had not given any en-
couragement to the one-act play. As for that, neither had the
401
The American Dramatist
manager in England, except as a stop-gap. But, just as on the
Continent and in Great Britain, the revolutionary groups
sought a form which at first would not demand too supreme
an effort, financially or from the point of view of acting, so
in this country the one-act play was hailed and encouraged
by the amateur for the Little Theatre. I take George Middle-
ton and Percival Wilde as among the first writers to see the
possibility of the form, and they were among the first to whom
the amateurs turned.
The publishing of plays had just begun to be a habit. It
was found that the literary quality, which was one of the excel-
lent signs of drama renaissance in England, entitled a play
to permanent and worthy printing. The old plays in quality
had been about as poor as the quality of printing in the early
Lacy and Samuel French editions. Now, a play was to be a
book, a thing to be carefully read. Jones, always champion-
ing the freedom of the theatre - his "The Renascence of the
English Drama" was written in 1894 wrote a pamphlet on
the reading of plays. It had wide circulation. It probably en-
couraged the libraries to give countenance to the purchasing
of the play book. And this was furthered no doubt by the
Drama League of America, called into being through the im-
pulse of the Drama Club, of Evanston, Ill., in 1910. The
League was only a sign of the times, as the Stage Society had
been a sign of revolt in London; fostering the "revolution-
ary" movement and organizing audiences for the support of
worthy plays.
Thus began the craze for Little Theatres, and the increased
demand for better material for the amateur actor. Thus
started a revolt against the American Theatre, and a demand,
through the wide reading of plays which educated a theatre
audience for better acting drama, for a different playhouse.
In the revolt we perforce went through a period of mad experi-
ment, thoughtlessly throwing overboard everything to clear
the decks for action. All the little art centres began furiously
to work for the improvement of the theatre, for the encourage-
ment of the dramatist, for higher forms of entertainment.
The groups sprang up over night in the most unexpected quar-
402
The Case of the American One-Act Play
ters they drove saloons out and turned the space where once
the bar had been into a stage; they sprouted on the wharf of
Provincetown, Mass., in the agricultural colleges of the West.
A mass of art feeling in this country sprung aleak, and over-
flowed Arizona, North Dakota, everywhere. The Rockies
could not stem the tide which moved to the coast.
A community feeling was thus aroused. The Little Theatre
was too small to hold it all. With the fervor of the prophet,
Percy MacKaye began preaching the Civic Theatre, began
doing the pageant work which accustomed whole cities to the
joy of creation. The dawn of a new era had come. Like
shopkeepers taking down their blinds to display their wares,
educators took down their barriers, in this early dawning, and
let the impulse in. Drama began to be taught in the schools
and colleges. Professor George P. Baker, of Harvard, and
others, began to desert lone courses in Shakespeare and Resto-
ration drama, and to give thought to the living play, the cur-
rent flowing through the contemporary playhouse.
The movement became an epidemic; its explanation was
the desire for self-expression. There was no real depth of
understanding to the activity. It was a new game. Yet the
people were in the beginning using something which was
fundamentally important to the future life of the theatre in
America. They were utilizing something out of which a
national development might arise, which still may arise in
unexpected manner. W. B. Yeats was once asked to explain
the object behind the Irish National Dramatic Society. He
expressed it in these words:
and the
Our movement is a return to the people
drama of society would but magnify a condition of life which
the countryman and the artisan could but copy to their hurt.
The play that is to give them a quite natural pleasure should
either tell them of their own life, or of that life of poetry where
every man can see his own image, because there alone does
human nature escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays about
drawing-rooms are written for the middle classes of great
cities, for the classes who live in drawing-rooms, but if you
would uplift the man of the roads you must write about the
403
The American Dramatist
roads, or about the people of romance, or about great historical
people.
This fervor of Yeats was the fervor which directed also much
of the impulse toward a new theatre in Great Britain at the
time. It resulted in a narrow local sense, which was sincerely
used and beautifully shaped, but was so lacking in universal
impulse as to be limited in appeal. Robinson and Murray
added to the Irish repertory, and were content to appeal to
those of their environment. Miss Baker's "Chains had a
London suburban significance. Granville-Barker's "Waste"
became more English politics than drama. J. O. Francis's
"Change", despite its intellectual appeal of syndicalism, was
too Welsh, too non-conformist for America. Githa Sowerby's
"Rutherford and Son" and Stanley Houghton's "Hindle
Wakes" were of a middle-class quality peculiar to a certain
type of society. Yet these plays were born of the impulse
Yeats defined. And we in America to-day are seeing the
persistence of the movement which swept England a quarter
of a century ago, when George Kelly writes "The Show-Off",
dealing with West Philadelphia, Owen Davis gives us "Ice-
bound", dealing with Maine, and Eugene O'Neill garners
up his hatred of all New England in "Desire Under the Elms."
V
Many books have been written on the Little Theatre move-
ment, and these emphasize the various reasons given by the
many groups for their organizing and for their selection of
repertories. Each group, in its history, shows variation, and
yet withal similar mistakes and struggles for subsistence. It
must be noted that in this amateur movement probably more
money has been wasted in good intention and poor execution
than the permanent results have warranted permanent
results as affecting the professional theatre. But these vari-
ous centres have done, and are still doing, excellent work in
advance of the wider opening of territory into which the
regular theatre will eventually go. Even though at present
404
The Case of the American One-Act Play
they do not seem powerfully to affect the professional theatre
situation, they shed light in communities where light is sorely
needed. They
They are attempting the artistic thing, prompted by
artistic longing.
In the fifteen years which mark the Little Theatre life,
positive results however have had their indirect effect on the
professional theatre. From these amateurs have come the
initial experiments in stagecraft; in the midst of these ama-
teur groups there have developed playwrights and actors
who later went forth into a larger sphere. The stages of these
Little Theatres showed to the larger playhouse the practical
application of new methods of lighting; they showed the real
effectiveness of the philosophy of inner content which marked
the aim of the foreign producers. The Washington Square.
Players created a group of playwrights; so did the Province-
town Theatre. There are volumes of one-act dramas to mark
their community cohesion. In the Universities the same
thing happened, and now we have Harvard Workshop plays
and Yale Playcraftsmen plays, and books of dramas from
Vassar, from North Dakota, from North Carolina. As their
contribution, Stuart Walker (with his Portmanteau Theatre)
and the Neighborhood Playhouse showed how stimulating it
was to discover a dramatist, like Dunsany, whom the regular
theatre tried to bribe away from the Little Theatre after they
had given him a chance. The same was the case with O'Neill,
who has entered a broader sphere of theatre life than the orig-
inal Provincetown group had to offer, yet who owes to them,
quite as much as they owe to him, the means of escaping the
restrictions of a commercial theatre.
The word "little" has had much more stress put upon it
than it deserves. That the theatres were little was due largely
to the fact that the groups were little and could afford no
more; that they were little made it possible for the amateurs
to limit themselves to those productions suitable for a small
stage. The one-act play seemed to be the natural outlet.
And what we had at this time, illustrative of the form, was
called forth by the demand. When the supply was not
sufficient, the groups turned to the foreign plays. But, even
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The American Dramatist
in those early days, the Little Theatre groups showed that
their ambition tended toward the larger play. The Hull
House Theatre presented Ibsen's "Pillars of Society" and
Galsworthy's "The Silver Box", "Justice", and "The
Pigeon", besides Shaw's "You Never Can Tell", "The Devil's
Disciple", and "Arms and the Man." In comparison with
the improved conditions which many of the groups have
recently shown, the acting of such ambitious attempts may
have then been crude. But none the less the amateurs even
thus early dispelled the notion that the Little Theatre
was wholly pledged to the one-act play.
Yet, even though certain groups developed beyond the
crudeness of the amateur, and are still doing so taking the
place, in some communities, of the professional theatre, which
seems at present to have cut the country at large out of any
participation in the regular theatre's offering there were
so many more that could not advance out of their amateurish-
ness that the one-act dramatist found a wide market for the
good thing, even though it might be destined to be badly
acted. Long before the professional theatre thought of show-
ing the dramatist what possibilities for stage mounting the
new scenery and the new directing offered him, thus broaden-
ing his creative horizon, the Little Theatre directors-no-
table among them, Sam Hume and Stuart Walker and the
Misses Lewisohn - showed him what the possibilities were.
The producing of such plays as those by Dunsany and O'Neill;
the foreign theories of stage decoration as practised in the
Little Theatre by Rollo Peters, Lee Simonson, and Robert
Edmond Jones, encouraged the dramatist in his belief that
the one-act canvas could be much more expansive than its
compressed technique; might have an horizon as far as the
stars, even though its technique must be reticent. Little
Theatres gave their bills of one-act plays, mixing the American
beginner with the foreign masterpiece: Schnitzler and Musset
with Alice Gerstenberg; Maeterlinck and Andreyeff with
Goodman: Tchekhov and Porto-Riche with Alice Brown;
Molière and Strindberg with Philip Moeller. It was an excel-
lent association. It primed the American dramatist in a
406
The Case of the American One-Act Play
spirit of emulation, and sometimes of imitation. The results
were satisfying.
Changes occurred swiftly in the personnel and character of
the Little Theatre, and names, once prominent in its develop-
ment, have given way to others in groups that have taken
warning by the mistakes made by their predecessors. There
is possibly more sound knowledge of theatre technique among
certain amateur groups than there was at the outset. For the
laboratory theatres have sent forth their students to do
pioneer work, to lend their experience in establishing the good
work in arid sections. From the North Carolina group has
gone forth a prophet, imbued with belief in the soundness of
using local materials, and he has started play writing in two
States-Wyoming and Arizona-where the young dramatists
draw native problems from the sections they know best.
One group which pioneered many movements and which
proved of use to the Little Theatres was the Washington
Square Players. They are no more, though the wraith of
their being crops up now and again, and hovers over the flour-
ishing Theatre Guild, of New York. Here is the grown child
of amateur parentage; where wisdom developed in it
first the spirit of semi-professionalism, and afterwards the
spirit of full professionalism, though financially it is not so
subject to the dictates of the accustomed theatre competition.
From its infant days, the Theatre Guild has shown, through
ups and downs in public confidence, a persistent spirit
of experimentalism. And though now it has grown into
a corporate body of large size, with several theatres to
manage in New York - one given in trust by stockholders
who have confidence in its record of the past and have
faith in its aliveness the Guild managers are example
of what the Little Theatre in other communities might
develop into under proper community encouragement.
But it is significant that since the Theatre Guild has come
into the larger sphere of influence, it has deserted the field of
the one-act play, save where it might come to the rescue to
bolster up any undue shortness of a long play. Does this mean
that these former devotees of the one-act play in their ama-
407
The American Dramatist
!
teur days are now showing that they too believe in the sup-
posed weakness of the one-act drama as a professional theatre
asset? Does it mean that they too are now of the belief that
a bill of one-act plays, for the theatre audience that pays for
its amusement, has not the unity of interest which a long play
would create? Personally I believe that a bill of three one-
act plays is prevented from being of general value just be-
cause it demands three separate shifts of attention on the part
of an audience; three efforts of adjustment to different
characters, different surroundings, and different stories. Such
an entertainment as O'Neill's "S. S. Glencairn", which consists
of a cycle of sea plays whose unity of mood is holding, is a
different matter. Its unity of "mood" holds the plays to-
gether.
The one-act play in this country is therefore bound to be
handicapped by the limited need for it in the professional
theatre. It is discouraging to the playwright to have to
appeal solely to the amateur, and to the schools and colleges.
Yet he has the field of the printed page, if that contents him,
which I doubt. George Middleton wrote, in one of his pref-
aces:
These little plays were written for acting, but arranged
for reading. Knowing how small an opportunity the profes-
sional stage in this country gives for the serious one-act drama
so common on the Continent, they are modestly offered to
those who see some dignity in the form, and who realize that
certain dramatic ideas find their best expression in the concen-
trated episode. The growing demand, also, among readers,
for plays, has encouraged the author to write these, and their
unexpected publication in the magazines has prompted him to
bring them together.
This was penned in 1911. Since then, Mr. Middleton has
deserted the field, and turned to the larger form which the
theatre demands.
The Little Theatre has proven its usefulness, and it is still
functioning, but now more in the spirit of a community theatre
than of an amateur experiment. The country is still dotted
408
The Case of the American One-Act Play
with such groups, and there is an alertness to them which
betokens eventual good. But they are none the less amateurs,
and their menace is partly that emphasized some years ago
by David Belasco, who is reported to have said: “While I
believe in amateur acting organizations, and want them to
exist and receive every encouragement, it is unwise so to
praise their efforts as to turn their heads completely, until
these play-acting actors really think they can act." The Be-
lasco Cup, which he now offers the Little Theatres, in competi-
tion, suggests that he has modified his views somewhat. The
standards of good acting have in truth been very much lowered
in this country by the Little Theatre. But this is another
story which has nothing to do with the playwright's work,
except to discourage him, if he has written a good play, and
has had the misfortune to see it given by a company of "play-
boys" born in a bare room a few nights before.
VI
There are many worthy examples of the best type of one-act
play written by Americans. In the initial years, George
Middleton and Percival Wilde stood free of any particular
groups, and wrote their plays for all who might want them.
Their influence throughout the country on amateurs has there-
fore been wider than that of any other writers in the field.
They were the first to develop an expertness in the use of
materials, which showed that they understood the one-act
play to be an art form with a peculiar technique. Wilde went
farther than Middleton, because his belief in and fondness for
the form were more sincerely deep-founded, more clearly under-
stood. In the years to come we will have to accord Wilde the
credit for having written a book on the technique based on a
far-reaching belief in the infinite possibilities of the one-act
play's effect. No one before him had so clearly, so broadly,
so fairly stated the case of this genre of drama. For, after all,
it is drama, and, besides its special technique, it has an under-
lying technique which is that of the theatre.
And it is just here that Wilde, always experimental in his
409
The American Dramatist
>>
writing, is perhaps our most challenging exponent of the
one-act form, even if he has not yet created as sharply as
O'Neill in his early pieces, or as Susan Glaspell in "Trifles.'
He has shown the excellent use to which the form may be
put in the writing of children's plays; he has shown it adapt-
able to realism, to fantasy, to symbolism. But his handicap
which keeps him from approaching the distinctiveness of
Dunsany, of Synge, even of Barrie is one for which he is
not to blame: his aloofness from any passionate belief in or
disbelief in life itself, at the present time one of the American
dramatist's consuming limitations. If his social conscience
was as great as his convictions regarding the technique of the
one-act play, his little dramas would be more than varied
clever stories, unerring at times in their dramatic arrangement,
but never giving full outlet to whatever lyric passion they
might contain. In so far as this is true, there is a note of arti-
ficiality about them, even in so affecting a piece as "Confes-
sional." Recognizing that with Wilde, Middleton deserves
the credit of being among the first to see in the one-act play a
technique of its own, I have never been able to see in his ideas
supposedly advanced social ideas - the virility claimed
for them. When they have come to the point of assertion,
they have always fallen short, both in their psychology com-
plex and their human effectiveness. Here Wilde is more
subtle, as when one compares his "A Question of Morality"
with Middleton's "A Good Woman."
The play in its short form has been used effectively to illus-
trate many points. Rita Wellman's "Funiculi Funicula
and Alfred Kreymborg's "Lima Beans" are opposites both
in technique and in spirit; they call for different types of
acting. Delicacy of treatment in such pieces as Alice Brown's
"Joint Owners in Spain" (pointing to the fact that she was
not unmindful of Lady Gregory's "The Workhouse Ward");
sharpness of satire in George Cramm Cook and Susan Glas-
pell's "Suppressed Desires"; a certain brilliant cleverness
in the comedy handling of Philip Moeller's "Helena's Hus-
bands" (showing somewhat a young man's imitation of
Shaw); the sincerity of Lewis Beach's treatment in "The
410
The Case of the American One-Act Play
-
Clod"; the charm and fancy in Stuart Walker's "Six Who
Pass While the Lentils Boil" these alone are indication
of the variety and the skill of the one-act play writers. Of
course many rush in who have neither the dramatic sense
nor the technical aptness, and they either create obscurely
or put into dialogue material which is unfitted to the drama
form. Such poetic obtuseness as one finds in Edna St. Vincent
Millay's "Aro da Capo" leaves one in confusion; such inci-
dental materials as underlie the work of Christopher Morley,
measure how easily one may misinterpret the function of the
one-act form. Our anthologies, compiled with haste often-
times, bring together a clutter of this material, and the exten-
sive sales of these books suggest that they find ready market
with the amateur, whose discrimination is still not what it
should be, and who is easily led astray.
The one-act play is a form that tempts every type of writer.
A theatre manager, Arthur Hopkins, writes "Moonshine";
a college professor, Jeannette Marks, has gone afield to do her
Welsh dramas; a poet of the road, Harry Kemp, establishes
for a while a theatre of his own for his own one-act pieces;
journalists, editors, novelists have all dropped casually into
the form with varying success. But not one of them has
created distinctively merely adequately and to the satis-
faction of the amateur, whose criterion is simplicity of back-
ground and ease of acting. The plain kitchen of the farm-
house, a crowded tenement living-room, the side room off a
saloon, a park bench in the high light, with surrounding dark-
ness the more stark the scene, the wider the appeal to the
amateur. This constant practical reminder has probably
served to keep the mind of the dramatist a little circum-
scribed. For the average writer of the small plays has little
native impulse to fall back on; he imitates what he has read,
reproduces what he has heard second hand, is not moved by
sincerity so much as by cleverness.
I do not wish to suggest that sincerity is not a mark of much
of the material in the one-act play form. It comes unex-
pectedly every year: in published collections, in Little The-
atre Tournaments. John W. Rogers's "Judge Lynch" has
411
The American Dramatist
this quality uppermost. And the same quality is dominant in
most of the plays written in class under the direction of Pro-
fessor Koch, at the University of North Carolina. But if
there is not the underlying nearness of the dramatist to his
material, then there is bound to be imitation. This does not
mean that similarity of theme or situation between plays is a
direct plagiarism of one or the other. The dramatist's mind
is open to the barest suggestion. It may be that Miss Brown
had been reading "The Workhouse Ward" when she thought
of her "Joint Owners in Spain"; it may be that O'Neill's
"Anna Christie" set Percival Wilde's mind in the direction
of "The Luck Piece." Undoubtedly Owen Davis, when he
came to write his long plays, "The Detour" and "Icebound",
set about the task with his eye on O'Neill. But similarities
are oftentimes coincidences. Koch calls attention to a play
written by one of his students, Paul Greene's "The Last of
the Lowries", which parallels Synge's "Riders to the Sea", in
one case the North Carolina law claiming the mother's sons,
in the other the sea demanding its terrific toll.
VII
We have had many instances of the one-act play appearing
later as a longer drama. Clyde Fitch dashed off a one-act
sketch which he called "The Harvest", written on the train
between New York and Boston. It became the second act of
"The Moth and the Flame." It is said that James Forbes's
"The Chorus Lady" and Eugene Walter's "The Easiest
Way" both started as sketches. Ernest Howard Culbertson
turned his one-act, "Goat Alley", into a long play. And the
recent example of skilled transforming is George Kelly's "The
Show-Off", which had served as a successful vaudeville sketch,
called "Poor Aubrey." These exceptions prove no case
against the inadequacy of the one-act form to be a thing in
itself. They merely indicate how themes often slip into the
short lengths that could easily be made otherwise. Nor in
thus analyzing the qualities of the true one-act drama am I
attempting to exalt it above its real value.
412
The Case of the American One-Act Play
Any art form is vital when it is supremely used if the form
is perfect; if there pulses in it the thing we call life, which
makes it throb and move others by its movement; if it com-
pletes its emotion beautifully, with a clean-cut finish. It may
be a one-act play or a three-act drama. It is a supreme asset
in either case. But the unfortunate thing is that there is
little encouragement for the skilled playwright to devote his
best talents where only the Little Theatres will make use of
them. The one-act play must be a side-issue with him, and
he must look to the printed page for its wide appeal.
Only when such a movement as the Irish Theatre created a
"school", was there a justification for their poets to write the
one-act plays which are among our best examples of the form.
If some theatre organization of like character should ever
arise in this country, there would be a similar response among
our dramatists. Now, the form is used haphazardly by the
writer, unless it happens that, writing in class, he is told about
the Irish Players and is advised to go and do likewise out of his
own soil.
The Little Theatre and the one-act play have through a
necessity been drawn closely together. The Little Theatre
has passed its stage of experiment in one direction; it now
faces a period of experiment in another. Where once it helped
in the break away from the conventional manager, now its com-
munity significance and experimental character are making it a
valuable advance-agent in the theatre's spread throughout
the country. Some of these theatres, like those in Dallas,
Texas, and New Orleans, La., might almost be considered
semi-professional, since they have trained directors, make use
of the latest devices for stage illusion, and are well versed in
the latest theories of stagecraft. Such standards as are main-
tained by the group in New Orleans, which calls itself Le Petit
Théâtre du Vieux Carré, seem to satisfy more than a mere
band of amateurs. If only there was closer connection between
these theatres, all working for the good of the larger theatre,
some quicker results might follow-results which allowed the
professional actor to appear through the country, rather than
to confine himself to the highly competitive lights of Broadway.
413
The American Dramatist
But here again, when the Little Theatre becomes semi-
professional in its technique, it seems to desert the one-act
form. It desires wider scope for an evening's entertainment,
rather than for a half hour. It wants also to keep up with
Broadway and to bring to its own people what the Broadway
manager has not yet shown an eagerness to bring on his own
speculation. The one-act play drops again to a third position
for its maintenance. It has to remain close to the channel
where it finds its greatest demand. This is unfortunate for,
as I have tried to suggest, it is capable of the highest develop-
ment. What its future will be depends on whether there is a
social demand for it. Such craftsmanship as Charles Rann
Kennedy gave to his "The Terrible Meek" and "The Chas-
tening" is worthy the closest study; the plays themselves are
worthy the highest acting. They are not exacting as to scene,
and they can be slipped into the smallest auditorium. There
was much in Stuart Walker's Portmanteau Theatre scheme,
which he seems to have deserted for the stock theatre experi-
ments he has been carrying on for many seasons in the middle
West. Like the interlude, it could be slipped in at the oppor-
I believe the one-act play could be raised, in
its execution both in the writing and in the acting-to
professional requirement, and taken inexpensively to com-
munities where the regular theatre is never seen or heard of.
This is a large country, and the playhouse has barely pricked
its surface. It is only in New York that the night time is
pierced by a million candles.
tune moment.
In the meanwhile, the one-act drama is a useful adjunct to
the larger theatre, even though the larger theatre gives it a
cold hand. For, in the form, the playwright may find himself,
may develop his technique, may study closely the exquisite
rhythmic interaction of the thing we call a play, no matter
what its size may be.
414
CHAPTER TWENTY
EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE "NEW" DRAMA
I
THE American Drama has to its credit many examples of
those pleasant accidentals, which are hard to account for,
since they spring to light unexpectedly, and are difficult to
attach to any broad mental tendency or any personal con-
viction. A careful analysis of the commercial theatre will
bring to view two positive and excellent results of the box-
office demand: the theatre manager of the Frohman era
stabilized the theatre business, and demanded a more or less
standardized drama. Though the dramatist found it neces-
sary to obey the dictates of a speculative business, he had to
give a care to the technique of his product; had to see that
the parts worked smoothly were, in the theatre sense, "actor
fit." If he had an idea which seemed salable, and his script
was not of standard parts, the manager had usually a “play
doctor" in the offing, who could snip here and paste there,
until the play became articulate, well rounded, producible,
and effective. The box-office school of drama, with the slo-
gan, "Give the public what it wants", turned out some excel-
lent mechanicians, and the technical quality of the American.
Drama became vastly improved.
eli
There were several attempts to teach technique to the
aspiring dramatists in correspondence courses, and Professor
Baker's "Workshop 47", at Harvard, was founded on the same
practical plan that our schools of journalism are: certain
problems could be studied, certain architectural rules could
415
The American Dramatist
be mastered, certain writing could be done, which might send
a playwright far along the road toward success, without the
painful process of learning his trade by being rejected by
managerial office after managerial office. In other words, it
was during the box-office régime that the technique of the
drama became a self-conscious matter with the playwrights.
Benefit came from this. One only has to compare the plays of
the eighteen-eighties with those of the eighteen-nineties to see
how much more superior the latter are than the former. The
technique was perfected through many processes of elimina-
tion and reconstruction. The actor had a hand in it, the di-
rector, every one, in fact, who attended rehearsal. Often-
times, the poor author found himself completely snowed
under, his title changed, his characters shifted, his motives.
twisted. But none the less a workable play was the result.
He learned much in the agonizing process.
The accidentals of which I speak were born of this period.
They were manipulated before they saw stage light, but they had
the advantage of being fundamentally conceived for themselves
alone. They were signs of what the dramatist might do in an
atmosphere of independence rather than of expediency. But,
as an illustration that the theatre of the time was exacting
and numbing, these accidentals were never followed up by
anything as good; they were hopeful signs that blossomed and
dropped out of sight. They were nurtured for a while by such
societies as local Drama Leagues, and were referred to as
theatre successes of an artistic kind, too good for box-office
success. How many times the cry was raised, "This is the
American Drama." How many times we prophecied the
sweep of the stage with a new form of art. The box-office
standard, however, stood by; the economic theatre dampened
our ardor by declaring that these plays could not draw enough
to pay the rent. On their first appearance, such dramas as
Moody's "The Great Divide", Sheldon's "Salvation Nell”
and "The Nigger", Eleanor Gates's "The Poor Little Rich
Girl", Eugene Walter's "The Easiest Way", MacKaye's
"The Scarecrow", Benrimo and Hazelton's "The Yellow
Jacket", and Langdon Mitchell's "The New York Idea", were
416
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
prophecied to herald a new dramatic era. But, somehow, out-
side of initial cleverness and technical dexterity, nothing
happened and nothing followed. We never got the true
Moody play -originally called "The Sabine Woman
because Henry Miller pared it for fear its theme would be too
strong for the taste that showed itself at the box-office window.
Sheldon became a serviceable playwright for the actress look-
ing for parts, and his ill-health soon removed him from the
active field. Eleanor Gates flashed forth once with a dream
product that hinted at a possible emulation of Barrie. Wal-
ter, author of many expert melodramas, seems to have touched
the bed-rock of his life's philosophy, in "The Easiest Way",
and to have had little more to say. His expertness in the stand-
ardized technique was undisputed, but he was willing to abide
by the formula of the "punch", the "big situation. “The
Yellow Jacket" had a dire struggle to make ends meet. The
"lovers of art” stood by it, formed rescue parties to keep it on
the boards, and Charles Coburn was loyal to it for many sea-
sons. But the authors had had enough of themes poetic,
fantastic, exotic. They did not try it again. Mr. Mitchell
gave us a high comedy in "The New York Idea" that has
not staled with the years, that contains a universal smartness
to it, an ironical depth to it, which fashions have not thus far
outdated. But, evidently, he has not cared to subject himself
to the dictates of the managerial system, for he has not been
heard from in dramatic form for many years.
J
Thus, our survey could run in other channels, where the
dramatist has created well, according to the formula set by the
manager, and then dropped from the reckoning, either dis-
couraged or else turning to the moving picture. Within my
memory, I recall the enthusiastic reception of such pieces as
Edward Locke's "The Climax", A. E. Thomas's "Her Hus-
band's Wife", Charles Kenyon's "Kindling", Fred Ballard's
Believe Me, Xantippe" and "Young America." Was it
that they had done the trick once or twice, and could not make
it work again? Or was it that the demands of the box-office
ruled them out so completely that, rather than prostitute their
best efforts, they decided to "farm" in other quarters?
417
The American Dramatist
Then, suddenly, something happened in the theatre. A
new breath of life blew through the open door. The spirit of
reform began to undermine the commercial manager's grip.
This change came not from the theatre itself but from out-
side. It did not directly challenge the theatre at first, but
began an insidious propaganda among those whose money
flowed through the box-office. The publishing of plays found
a yearly increasing reading public, whose taste for the better
thing began to be whetted. Independent producing groups
1
amateurs to be sure, but potential entities later to de-
velop into such organizations as The Theatre Guild and the
Provincetown Players - began to challenge the commercial
manager on his own ground.
The Little Theatre development had a beneficial effect
upon the theatre, even though it was not professional. It
first of all encouraged the new scenic artist; it next encour-
aged experiments in play writing without thought of box-
office standards; it then roused the interest of the actor who
had long been suffering under stereotyped conditions. The
magazines began to publish articles on the "new" theatre,
the "new" drama, the "new" producer. Foreign experiment
took hold of youthful students who went abroad and sat at
the feet of Gordon Craig and Max Reinhardt. Just as Ibsen
seeped through the conventional theatre, so the other foreign
dramatists seeped through the book world, and the public
became familiar with playwrights who had had little chance
of being seen in the "old" theatre.
I do not believe that, even to-day, after the spirit of reform
has actually ploughed its way along the "hardened" theatre
centre of New York, the "old" commercial
old" commercial manager
knows yet what has happened to him. He still looks with
wonder at the success of the Theatre Guild. He sees that the
kind of drama, known as the "box-office model", while it still
pays, has a rival that also pays. If he is now doing the better
thing, it is not because of conviction but emulation. The
strange thing is that there seems to be a feeling among the
dramatists, who received their training under the old régime,
that they can do the "new stunt" as well as the younger man.
1
418
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
There is something more to the fostering of good drama than
mere improvement of technique. And yet, the writing of a
play from the "box-office" standard has proven financially so
attractive, that a great part of the drama effort has been a
matter of trying to hit the bull's eye, rather than to embody in
a play some conviction or to stamp a play with individuality.
On the latter score, it is surprising how much of a kind the
American Drama is. The slight difference between George
Broadhurst's "Bought and Paid For", Bayard Veiller's
"Within the Law", and Eugene Walter's "Paid in Full" is a
matter of differing incident. They are of the same cloth.
And Cleves Kincaid's "Common Clay" shows that even Har-
vard's Workshop 47 used to uphold the box-office pattern.
The point is that the theatre has proven an attractive
gamble, a cardboard game, where novelty has been the catch-
word. Much of our effort has gone in that channel and
proven highly effective. Only a few of our dramatists have
taken the trouble to be loyal to their personal point of view.
Their individuality has been lost in the shuffle. There are
identifying marks to George Cohan and to Frank Craven;
there is a light ease to Clare Kummer that makes her comedy
recognizable. But the realism of Arthur Richman in "Am-
bush" and of Gilbert Emery in "The Hero" is not highly in-
dividualized; it is a formula applied to a differing story.
When it comes to a study of the more recent drama, which is
of the old type and which yet embodies certain contemporane-
ous interests, it is a matter of reading individual plays and
then seeing where they will fit into an artificial scheme of
classification. Lewis Beach, with his "Square Peg” and “The
Goose Hangs High", goes into the realistic cubby-hole;
Zoë Akin, imitator of Pinero in "Declassé", flirts with half-
baked romantic situations and abhors idea. Jesse Lynch
Williams, with a certain condescension toward the theatre, not
unusual in the literary man, takes a blue print of Shaw's
"Getting Married" and plays cleverly with his own "Why
Marry?" and "Why Not?" One can pile up a roster of names.
representing a great extravagance of effort, with little perma-
nent and valuable precipitate worthy a period beyond box-
419
The American Dramatist
office serviceableness. Don Marquis's "Old Soak" does not
make him a dramatist: the character is no whit more memo-
rable than the Undertaker in Harry James Smith's "Mrs.
Bumpstead-Leigh" or the ne'er-do-well father in Edith
Ellis's "Mary Jane's Pa." Zona Gale has juggled with dra-
matic cleverness in "Miss Lulu Bett", which, for some unac-
countable reason, was awarded the Pulitzer Drama Prize for
1921. But the conditions that prompt the Award Committee.
for that prize are always strange. First of all, their decisions
may be overridden, as in the case of Hatcher Hughes's "Hell-
Bent for Heaven", which took the prize, in 1924, despite the
fact that the verdict was for George Kelly's "The Show-Off."
The play selected for 1925 was Sidney Howard's "They Knew
What They Wanted", when there was Laurence Stallings'
"What Price Glory" which, for originality, social effectiveness,
and power, was far more deserving.
The hit-and-miss method of our theatre has not, therefore,
produced any playwright of large proportion. In that re-
spect it has been wasteful; it has asked for compromises, and,
when these have not been made, it has frozen out attempts at
originality. It created a formula for farce-comedy as it did
for musical comedy; it demanded a stereotyped dramatiza-
tion of novels and a stereotyped adaptation of the foreign
play. Some men, starting out with an idea that the theatre
is a place for ideas, are quickly shaped into the serviceable
adjunct of the theatre. George Middleton and Guy Bolton
making ample money- submerge themselves; Robert
Housum writes a refreshing piece, "The Gypsy Trail", and
is not heard of afterwards. William De Mille writes "Strong-
heart" and "The Woman", and then turns to the moving
picture; Thompson Buchanan writes "A Woman's Way",
and then becomes editor of scenarios for a screen corporation.
With all this effort, it would seem that something more per-
manent would have been forthcoming to indicate the firm
presence of an American Drama. We speak of "our latest
supply" of playwrights with some justification. The young
men and women of talent who can produce one success are
being born every day; they are incubating in our college
420
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
workshops; every Little Theatre group hopes to emulate the
Neighborhood Playhouse that encouraged Dunsany, and the
Provincetown group that fostered O'Neill. In all soils, dra-
matic seeds are dropped, and the playwright springs forth.
But they all get immediately too close to the theatre. They
break into the theatre, having a "tip" as to how the "thing'
is done. Men like Winchell Smith, E. C. Carpenter, Samuel
Shipman are rarely away from Broadway; they watch the
market and hurry their wares along at the slightest veer of
popular taste. Yet, Carpenter's "Pipes of Pan" pointed to a
talent he might have nurtured, if he had not misinterpreted
the theatre's function. There is something exciting in watch-
ing the dramatic cat jump. A young man on a cattle ranch
thinks he can write a play; another young man in a State
Legislature has the same conviction. They rush to Harvard
- now, I suppose they will rush to Yale, since Professor Baker
has a new field to conquer with the Harkness endowment.
At an agricultural college a playwright elects to write a play,
the central plot of which is rivalry in hog growing; in the
mountains of North Carolina, a girl recalls a family feud and
puts it into dialogue form. There is activity in every quarter,
but there is sadly wanting any basic foundation. Every one
seems to be writing plays on the slimmest intellectual capital.
It is a condition to be deplored that men possessing the clever
dexterity of Avery Hopwood should not use the theatre in
other ways; having made a sufficient income, that they
should not give pause to their social responsibility in the
theatre. Such men still persist, even though the conditions.
which shaped the "box-office theatre" are changing. I
am not pleading that there is no room for the theatre piece
of the universal appeal of Frank Bacon's "Lightnin' though
I believe that a more deeply conceived "Lightnin'" might
have outlasted even Frank Bacon. The reason why we are
seeing no productions of "Rip Van Winkle" is not because
we can countenance no other Rip but Joseph Jefferson. One
has only to read the different dramatic versions of Irving's
story to understand why such trivialities disappear. But the
theme is still available.
421
The American Dramatist
The real charge against our playwrights has been that they
have brought to the theatre nothing more than their willing
selves, and a varyingly dexterous pencil. The theatre has
handled them as investments. "Anything for a production",
has been the slogan. I recall the mention, with bated breath,
that one of the conditions Eugene Walter exacted from David
Belasco, at the time negotiations were in progress for the pro-
duction of "The Easiest Way", was that not a word should be
changed. Marvel of marvels in an era when it was a wise
playwright indeed who could recognize his play at all on the
"first night." The strange thing is that the modern dramatist
has come forward with what he supposed was a novelty, not
knowing how plentiful were the playwrights of the past who
wrote upon the same themes. There was much talk in years
gone by of Harvey O'Higgins and Harriet Ford's "Polyg-
amy"; but Thomas Dunn English's "The Mormons
produced in 1858. Sheldon's "The Nigger" recalls Bouci-
cault's "The Octoroon." The later technique is better;
the situations possibly more tense. But the later product
is not any the better in its inner content.
II
was
The "new" spirit that came into the theatre was not
brought there by any initiative on the part of the American
dramatist. It came through artistic emulation of foreign
models on the part of easel painters, who saw the significance
of the art revolution, and went abroad to become exponents
of the latest theories of color and design. They were a happy,
care-free crowd of young men, who suddenly began making
scenery for our theatres, introducing reticence, color, balance,
beauty. With a certain elfish delight, they put into practice
the philosophy of the new art of decoration, claiming that
what really mattered in the theatre was the inner content, the
dominating mood. They plagued the managers of the com-
mercial theatre with their brilliant designs, smacking of the
Russians, imitative of the Germans; they flung inveigling
combinations of colors on the walls of out-of-the-way res-
422
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
taurants. The poor, ignorant, old-time manager began to
feel that what at first seemed prattle had some semblance of
reason about it; but, instead of employing the new artist im-
mediately, he tried to imitate the "new" art with meaning-
less bad taste and incongruous effects. There was enough
of the showman's novelty in the "new" scenery to intrigue
the old showman.
These young men of the decoration became the Peter Pans
of our theatre; they were like children rushing into a stale.
room with a handful of freshly picked daisies. With the au-
dacity of youth, they flung open the windows of the theatre,
and flung out, as useless, the gaudy back drops of a past age,
the stock sets suited to any and all plays. "We'll have no
more of these," they exclaimed. "You mustn't manufacture
scenery by contract, you mustn't piece together a play that
has a soul," they declared. "You must fondle it, urge it into
life, yield to its spiritual meaning. For it is a most delicate
thing, - the mystery we call a play." This was a strange.
message that sifted in through the box-office. What did these
wild artists mean by saying that drama had a mood, an atmos-
phere of its own? They demanded a readjustment of the
elements that went into a production. The designer, the
actor, the electrician must blend together under the creative
wand of the stage director; while the latter must have the
intelligence, the insight to make everything under his control
bring out in the play every tendril of meaning, every flash of
beauty, every throb of life in the text.
These new scene painters just happened accidentally upon
the theatre, as a child in the nursery happens upon a picture
book. They began as easel artists, who suddenly came within
the spell of Gordon Craig, the wilful boy of the theatre, who,
when all has been told about his playing "Hamlet" with
screens, about his wanting to abolish the actor from the stage,
about his belief in the wordless play really has stated in his
books however peculiarly - the true magic of the theatre.
These Americans did not, as might at first be thought, swallow
whole the theories of Reinhardt in Germany, Appia in Austria,
or Stanislavsky and Bakst in Russia. They were merely
-
423
The American Dramatist
inspired by the energy with which theatre art abroad was
revolutionizing the inner content of the play, the unity with
which it was conceived, the fulness with which it was inter-
preted, and the worthwhileness of the plays accepted by the
managers. The theatre was taking on a new meaning.
These young men, quickened and enthusiastic, returned home.
And what did they see? An American Theatre without
sensitiveness, with no direct aim or object; every one in it
trying to attract attention: the scenery yelling to be looked
at; the actor temperamentalizing all over the stage and mur-
dering both enunciation and gesture; the costumer arraying
the players as though they were so many manikins in costly
silks and satins an animated Fifth Avenue parade; the
playwright pandering to cheap taste, with an eye on the roy-
alty statement. These artists lay the blame for this deadened
theatre to methods employed by the commercial manager.
They dubbed the old methods as "Scenery of the Frohman
Era"; they shook their heads over the Belasco realism. It
was not that Frohman and Belasco had not done their part
in the history of the American Theatre, but the artists knew
that the philosophy of stagecraft which they had just
fathomed offered to them a theatre of greater significance, of
greater beauty, of more subtle appeal. With such a theatre,
the new playwright would become heartened.
Like all new movements, the practitioners immediately fell
into excesses; at first it seemed as though the "new" art was
as anxious for publicity as the old realism; there was so much
of the bizarre for the eye to see that the new scenery was quite
as distracting as the minute details so dear to the heart of
David Belasco. But, when Reinhardt first sent over his pro-
duction of "Sumûrun", when the Ballet Russe showed us the
vitality of the human form against a highly patterned back-
ground, when Bakst gave us new designs and combinations
of color, when Granville-Barker illustrated that Shakespeare
could possess new moods in the same situations, then we sud-
denly saw that our theatre was missing its true life.
"
The truth is we were sated with the McChesney cloakrooms,
the Potash offices, the Auctioneer second-hand stores, the
424
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
Wallingford broker offices, the Childs' restaurants of our stage.
Yet, our playwrights and producers had been frittering away
The new
their energies in giving us these "toys" to look at.
scenic artists, represented by such men as Robert Edmond
Jones, Lee Simonson, Rollo Peters, Sam Hume, Norman
Bel-Geddes, John Wenger and others, preached their gospel
in print, practised it wherever the "hardened" theatre would
give them a chance. Slowly they advanced beyond the limits
of the amateur theatre into the professional field, until now
they have their place in the "awakened" playhouse of the
A
present. The old manager had to learn the new terms.
new conviction was abroad that the theatre is a place for
beauty, for design, for color, for imagination, for plays with
spiritual content, for interpretation, for harmony of many
parts, for a certain kind of poetry. These young men un-
doubtedly unlocked the doors of the old theatre and took the
keys away from the janitors. It is they, and not the American
playwrights, who have probed new vistas. They have shown
that poetry need not be banished from the stage; they have
indicated by practical architectural design that the proscenium
stage need not limit the imagination of the dramatist or pro-
ducer; they have indicated that a line of footlights need not
hem in a play and keep it from contact with the audience.
This was not an initiative on their part; they had seen abroad
what they now determined to adapt to American condition.
Without the Continental stage producer, they might have
remained easel painters. Abroad, they saw what the live
theatre was doing for the producer and the playwright. Once
more, and in a new direction, the American Theatre was to
be subject to foreign influence. The vigor with which they
attacked the problems at home was typically American, but
the fundamental note was borrowed. Thus far the Theatre
Guild is dominated by the foreign note. If Reinhardt found
in Norman Bel-Geddes the man he wanted for the gigantic
production of "The Miracle", it was a recognition of that
daring amplitude which marks so many American under-
takings. An examination of the Bel-Geddes designs for a
contemplated production of Dante's "Inferno" will reveal the
425
The American Dramatist
same quality. But the American note has not yet been found
in the "new" theatre scheme of things. So, it does not sur-
prise us that whatever "new" has been attempted in play
writing, has received its initial inspiration from abroad.
III
He says
Eugene O'Neill confesses as much in his own case.
specifically: "We have endured too much from the banality
of surfaces. Strindberg knew and suffered with our struggle
years before many of us were born. He expresses it by in-
tensifying the method of his time and by foreshadowing both
in content and form the methods to come. All that is endur-
ing in what we loosely call 'expressionism' — all that is artis-
tically valid and sound theatre can be clearly traced back
through Wedekind to Strindberg's 'Dream Play', 'There
Are Crimes and Crimes', 'The Spook Sonata', etc.'
Whatever there is in O'Neill of the symbol of life, of the
moral urge, of the pessimistic, has not been taken from but has
been influenced by such sources., O'Neill is the sole example,
in American Drama of the present, of the man who has been
utterly divorced from the influences that have governed the
theatre of Broadway for three decades. He has never looked
toward the old manager for his existence as a dramatist, but
has pursued his own way, has given vent to his own personal
feeling, has drawn from his own narrow and sharp experi-
ence, not caring whether or not the theatre accepted him.
He has therefore wrung from a rather surprised following a loy-
alty that has no counterpart in the history of the American
Drama. There has been a peculiar fascination to his pessi-
mism, for it is a darkness richly fraught with a haunting qual-
ity of poetry; there has been a romantic vigor to his personal
history that has somehow crept into everything he has so
far done, and has given it an autobiographical value. There
is no unconcern shown by O'Neill in his creating; it is very
much part of him, built on a scale which measures his interest
in the unseen forces, shaping (or should we say destroying?)
existence. His eye has been largely on the side of the world's
426

OF
70%
AIN
PERCY MACKAYE
Photo Nickolas Muray, New York
EUGENE O'NEILL
The one paved the way for the present American Drama; the other is paving the way for the future American Drama.

Eugene O'Neill and the " New" Drama
injustice, on the side of the underdog, as against the shams
and social inequalities of the limited life he has seen. O'Neill
became playwright with something to say, and he has gone
down into the depths of a personal bitterness, which is felt
in all of his plays — a bitterness with a relentless negation,
which has its romantic sides.
His success has been wrung from the most unprepossessing
surroundings. A band of devoted followers who now seem
to be capitalizing his victory, and whom we fear are keeping
him circumscribed in his interests - gave him the opportunity
to prove the effectiveness of his first essayals in drama
one-act plays of the sea. The Provincetown Players may
always boast that they had faith in O'Neill when the regular
theatre would have nothing to do with him. In their ill-
lighted, crude playhouse, they produced for a select audience
'these haunting little dramas, which began to be talked of out-
side, until O'Neill became a much discussed hero of his own
experiences. A saga grew up around him, and young play-
wrights began to wonder whether it were not well for all
beginners to run away to sea in order to escape the humdrum
of conventional life.
Here was a man who had filled his mental note-book with
all sorts of rough pictures of unconventional humanity. He
had been an ordinary seaman in the forecastle, he had been
an able seaman on an American liner. He had braved an
irate father, he had suffered parental punishment, a lonely
figure living on a pittance in New London, Connecticut. He
had faced a long illness, with the dread of its final conquest.
Then, in a small room, eking out an infinitesimal income by
reporting on a local newspaper, he had made his first attempts
to put into play form some of the rebellion, some of the super-
stition, some of the rough-hewn poetry of the life below deck.
I have called attention many times to the way this experi-
ence of O'Neill's paralleled the experience of John Masefield.
But there was a great difference between the two men. Bit-
terness had eaten into O'Neill until it colored his entire view-
point of life. "The Hairy Ape" is the very epitome of that
bitterness. There are certain conditions which shape souls
427
The American Dramatist
EUGENE GLADSTONE O'NEILL (1888- )
See Moses' "Representative American Dramas: National
and Local"; also O. Sayler's “Our American Theatre."
Beyond the Horizon.
Produced, 1920.
The Emperor Jones.
Produced, 1920.
Anna Christie.
Produced, 1921.
The Hairy Ape.
Produced, 1922.
Welded.
S. S. Glencairn.
All God's Chillun Got Produced, 1924.
Wings.
Desire Under the Elms. | Produced, 1925.
Produced, 1924.
Produced, 1924.
Eugene O'Neill, the By Oliver Sayler.
American Playwright.
In "Our American
Theatre." New
York: Brentano,
c. 1923.
The Playwright Un- By Thomas H. Dickin- In "Playwrights of
bound: Eugene
O'Neill.
son.
the New Ameri-
can Theatre.'
New York: Mac-
millan. 1925.
In "A Study of the
Modern Drama."
New York: Ap-
pleton. 1925.
Eugene
O'Neill - A By Barrett H. Clark.
Study.
Eugene O'Neill.
By Ernest Boyd.
In
"Portraits:
Real and Imag-
inary.'
New
York:
Doran.
1924.
Eugene O'Neill.
Eugene O'Neill.
Eugene O'Neill.
By Clayton Hamilton. | In "Conversations
By Hugo von Hofmanns-
thal.
By Walter P. Eaton.
on
Contempo-
rary Drama."
New York: Mac-
millan. 1924.
Freeman, 7: 39–41,
March 21, 1923.
Theatre Arts Mag-
azine, 4: 286-
289, 1920.
428
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
so that they do not fit anywhere. O'Neill has more than once
faced such conditions. But bitter though he might be, he saw
a certain grim beauty in the humanity he chose to deal with
in his plays. Unmasked, bared to the soul, raw life surging
in emotion, roaring with hate, instinct with sex, calm with the
exhaustion of spent blasphemy, living to the full a life of
energy-hating, loving, lusting, wasting away with disease
the people whom O'Neill chose to depict were primal. There
was no sophistication about them. Life is a force bursting
all bounds, in the O'Neill dramas. If life is limited, at that
point O'Neill's bitterness eats its way. Outward condition
became a hindrance, except in so far as it suggested the inward
state. Realistic though some of his scenes may be, that
realism is merely a fictitious thing; it is intended as a symbol
of an inward state. The one naturalistic play he has written
- "Anna Christie" is the one play of his in which he has
small interest. Its success was based on its evident qualities;
its only values to O'Neill are the elements in it the casual
observer fails to see. There is the untamed in O'Neill;
there is seething in him the tragic color of humanity unex-
pressed. He is striving always to give expression to this thing
unexpressed. To the casual dramatist, love is a matter of the
meeting of lips; to O'Neill, love is a thing between souls
undisturbed by the outward faithless lapses of two beings.
The poetry he tried to suggest in "Welded" is of a different
quality from that which the conventional poet finds in "Tris-
tan and Iseult" or "Francesca da Rimini.
or "Francesca da Rimini." Such a situation
as that in "Welded" appeals to him.
It is this highly individualistic attitude on the part of
O'Neill which has won for him a recognition abroad. In that
respect he is doing now what Whitman and Poe did before him.
He is adding a new note to American letters and carrying it
beyond national boundaries. Of all our playwrights, O'Neill
is to-day best known in England, France, Germany, and Russia.
After his Harvard study and Professor Baker confessed
that he never had a more apt pupil — O'Neill wrote with a
haunting imagination about the sea. "The Moon of the
Caribbees", "Bound East for Cardiff", "The Long Voyage
429
The American Dramatist
Home", and "In the Zone" were a cycle whose unity was not
wholly felt until in later years they were given together under
the binding title of "S. S. Glencairn", - grim little canvases,
as definite in mood as Dunsany's plays, though not as fault-
lessly constructed. O'Neill seems restless under too strict a
limitation of technique. He bends his form to his purpose,
not always with best results, not always with clearness, not
always with unity of impression. He has not yet found himself
in the difficult task he has set, often mixing realistic details
with expressionistic symbols. He confesses himself that this
mixture was partly the reason for the failure on the stage of
"Welded."
But there are other limitations to O'Neill, due to the limited.
segment of life he has experienced and has thus far portrayed.
He is an uncompromising dramatist. He'll not even ac-
knowledge that problems stated on paper fail in effectiveness.
because they are not possible of reconciliation with life as it
is lived in so-called civilized communities. He writes his
plays, not in the hope that they will find acceptance, but be-
cause he is interested in them. "All God's Chillun Got
Wings" is a study in racial intermarriage between the Negro
and the white. It is a special case, not a general solution;
but, as a special case, it is none the less against the sympathy
of even the most liberal observer, because it has against it a
whole series of ethnological proofs. Such a case as O'Neill
depicts exists. That's all he claims: he has taken the special
case; he has tried to analyze the black mind under these
conditions, as he analyzed the black folklore superstition in
"The Emperor Jones." But the cases are different, because,
in the latter play which is a superlative example of a one-
act unity under the guise of a seven-scene development
one does not get a social problem fraught with irreconcilable
oppositions, but a racial panorama, effective, enlightening,
and poetically true. In this respect O'Neill becomes unwit-
tingly a realist: a naturalistic depiction of the forces of Nature
in their unmoral workings is at the bottom of "All God's
Chillun Got Wings." Granting its fundamental wrongness,
first as a piece of art and then as a correct study of causes and
430
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
effects, the play then becomes a striking example of wasted
statement. What is supposed to be a tragedy demanding of
sympathy, is a tragedy with a whole line of misplaced and
unnatural instincts. It is difficult to believe that there are
whites longing to be black. DuBois's "Souls of Black Men"
illustrates that the other way round is much truer and much
more demanding of the white man's sympathy. O'Neill's
irony in "All God's Chillun Got Wings" is not sufficiently
effective to counteract the defects here suggested.
But, as I have said, O'Neill does not care for acceptance.
He rides over everything in his uncompromising way.
He
stamps out life as though it were a sort of conflagration. If he
has a hatred, he lets it consume him. His detestation of New
England has flamed dull red in "Beyond the Horizon" and "De-
sire Under the Elms." In these he becomes as much a special
pleader as does Sinclair Lewis in "Main Street." Youth has
its minarets of gold beyond the narrow confines of a grinding
existence. Chance plays havoc with the far horizons. The
hills may bind so that there is only one escape, - through
death. O'Neill becomes so immersed in the fog of tempera-
mental blackness that it is difficult to see his goal at times.
A looseness of structure, to which he is wedded, does not help
to clear matters. There is no surety that, in the struggles he
represents, he always sees the soul which he truly attempts to
prove is the only worthwhile starting point. His violences
of external action, which are as pronounced as the melodra-
matic overemphasis of the "old" theatre, are often confused,
often wrong in distracting the observer from the real purport
of the play. I found myself sidetracked in sympathy for the
young couple in "Desire Under the Elms" the moment the
mother strangled her baby in order to prove that her love for
the boy was "beyond the dreams of revenge. O'Neill is as
ruthless in his art as he is about human life. He has no
quality of yielding; he does not see fully, but narrowly and
intensely. This intensity often gets his scene across, but
leaves it full of holes on closer study.
وو
O'Neill's most successful attempts have been "The Emperor
Jones" and "The Hairy Ape", yet in the latter one sees him.
431
The American Dramatist
incapable of dealing with character outside the sphere of his
early experience. The girl who gives the Ape his first shock
that, in the scheme of things, he does not "belong", is a
flaw that hurts. His pen thus far is limited; his interest thus
far is insensible to the fine psychologies of an educated class.
He can deal with the awful tragedies of injustice; he knows
nothing, seemingly, of the softer qualities of justice. There
stalk in the world a myriad evils; beauty there is, but his
folk seem to be dumb before it. All the folks in "Desire
Under the Elms" have a brute quality before the graces of
life. This may be due to the very conditions against which
O'Neill fulminates, but there is no spiritual hint that beauty is
the ultimate goal. I believe that such lack is due to a lack of
technical surety which makes O'Neill other than he intends to
be and strives to be. He does not wish to be direct, but his
situations are almost mathematically built up; he does not
wish his people to speak with their mouths but with their souls.
Yet here is how he impresses Hofmannsthal :
The characters in Mr. O'Neill's plays seem to me a little
too direct: they utter the precise words demanded of them by
the logic of the situation; they seem to stand rooted in the
situation where for the time being they happen to be placed;
they are not sufficiently drenched in the atmosphere of their
own individual past. Paradoxically, Mr. O'Neill's characters
are not sufficiently fixed in the present because they are not
sufficiently fixed in the past. Much of what they say seems
too openly and frankly sincere, and consequently lacking in
the element of wonder or surprise: for the ultimate sincerity
that comes from the lips of man is always surprising. Their
silence, too, does not always convince me; often it falls short
of eloquence, and the way in which the characters go from one
theme to another and return to the central theme is lacking
in that seemingly inevitable abandon that creates vitality.
Besides, they are too prodigal with their shouting and cursing,
and the result is that they leave me a little cold towards the
other things they have to say.
O'Neill is not a pleasant accidental; rather is he a new start-
ing point in the history of the American Drama. One cannot
432
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
consider him from the old angle. He is not as frankly experi-
mental as Elmer Rice in "The Adding Machine", or as John
Howard Lawson in "Processional", but his work is more per-
sistently identified with his own personality. For a while
this is interesting, but it sooner or later gets on one's nerves;
sincerity becomes almost a mannerism, rebellion becomes
calculated. All of his effects have a set method of approach;
certain phrases are so often used that they begin to lose their
meaning; they become easy symbols of identification. They
take the place of reasoning, of justified position. In his pain
there is power, but it beats upon hurt ears rather than willing
ears, it rasps. The nobility of life occupies secondary place.
in his calculations. His irony is scattered, except possibly in
"The Hairy Ape": there it reaches a telling conclusion, where
the brute man is bandied about by the brute world and the brute
animal, and meets death because he can find no justification
for himself with either. "Desire Under the Elms" would
have been much more effective if he had clearly analyzed his
conclusions; he dealt almost lyrically with the love existent
between the young wife and her stepson; there were supreme
passages of fundamental passion shown in scenes that were
poignant in their meaning and their happening. Relentless
condition closed in upon them with a kind of semi-humorous
exercise of outward justice. But was there a positive meaning
to the tragic wreck of the young lives? Hard character went
marching on, and plain murder went murkily justified, to prove
a love which was not fine frenzy but suppressed passion of a
wild kind, stronger than hate, yet tainted with it. What
would have been the effect on the play had O'Neill brought
into the girl's make-up a suggestion of insanity? How would
the play have developed if the girl had killed old Cabot
- an act much more likely to gain the sympathy of an audi-
ence than what she did do?
But the
One has to take O'Neill seriously because he does nothing
that is not sincerely dealt with.
time has arrived
when one expects a deepening of his vision. He has not gone.
far beyond the horizon of his first stage. What his second
stage of development will be is where we leave him now,
433
The American Dramatist
hoping that he will escape his relentless view of humanity as
something debased, as in the Dark Ages, as devoid of noble
instincts, as in the clay cloying to be free. His social philoso-
phy is still in a state of being born.
IV
O'Neill broke upon the regular theatre world with his "Be-
yond the Horizon." It was produced by John Williams, and
won the Pulitzer Prize for 1920. "Anna Christie" won the
same prize for 1922. No American dramatist has been more
discussed, more closely watched from season to season. He
has been involved in controversies centering around censor-
ship; definitive editions of his plays have been issued; and a
great value is placed upon O'Neill first editions in the book
world. This is an unusual turn of affairs in the theatre.
Heretofore, a successful play has never meant so much as the
bare announcement of a new O'Neill play means to-day. We
are expectant, because we know that there is no hit-or-miss
method about his attack. None of his contemporaries have
created the interest he has.
Yet there are other dramatists who have added to play
writing in America. Some years ago, Elmer Rice startled the
critics by constructing a drama, "On Trial", in which he at-
tempted, with success, a technical stunt; the development of a
story backward, by means of moving-picture methods. Then
he wrote several conventionally imitative plays under the influ-
ence of the German school. Thus far, however, his most dis-
tinctive work has been in "The Adding Machine", a psycho-
analytical play, done in the expressionistic style, wherein he
registers a poignant criticism against the machine civilization
of the times. He warns against the conquest of devolution.
Though he denied publicly that, in shaping this play, he gave
thought to "Liliom", "R. U. R.", "Masse Mensch'
"The Hairy Ape", and asserted that his content and form
were indissolubly wedded, evinced so he claims by the
fact that it took exactly seventeen days to write the play, still
it will be safe to infer that "The Adding Machine" belongs to
or
434
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
that stream of expressionism wherein we also group John
Howard Lawson's "Processional", and Kaufman and Con-
nelly's "Beggar on Horseback"; they are adaptations of a
foreign model. In all of these expressionistic plays, there are
currents or forces which move with the relentlessness of Greek
Fate. Stark Young hints of "Processional" that its pathos
comes from the sight of this quivering and confused young
life in the midst of forces whose power he must feel but whose
counsels he can only faintly share or understand." So,
in "The Adding Machine", "Processional", "Beggar on
Horseback", and those foreign plays which are in the new style,
there is a pattern beneath the literal thing which is the very
life and meaning of the drama. Lawson, in "Processional",
has done much to show that the expressionistic style may be
set to American rhythms. He has done it crudely, for it is a
pioneer effort in jazz drama, which has ample illustration of its
truth daily in our newspapers. Here is drama which concen-
trates irony on condition, with an effectiveness quite as strong
as any realistic treatment of social ailments. Repressive and
expressive forces are suggested in a series of scenes which are
states of mind rather than sordid actualities. The meanness
of a room somehow finds itself denuded of particular furniture
but becomes representative of narrowness of mind and mean-
ness of soul. There is something akin to allegory in all this.
There is something scientific about it also; drama takes on a
quality of diagnosis: it is feverish, restless, oftentimes mor-
bid, always unusual and strange.
In this respect expressionism errs quite as much as realism
which, in the theatre, seems for the nonce to have fallen upon
days of distrust and suspicion. It detracts the attention just
as much as detail for which Mr. Belasco is despised: it is just
as confusing, just as cluttering. It offers one the opportunity
of being kaleidoscopic, and that means a looseness of structure
and a looseness of thinking that are covered up by novelty,
until one subjects the play to closer analysis. Then one sees
how uncertain the form in its present practice.
Lawson naïvely states his purpose in writing "Proces-
sional." He says:
435
The American Dramatist
I have tried to approach the procession of American life.
from the point of view of a strictly native idiom. During the
past five years the theatre has opened many new doors.
New York has discovered Europe. And the native play has
plowed fresh fields. But this has been only a beginning, rich
in expectation but poor in achievement. The American play-
wright must create his own structure and his own language.
He cannot borrow expressionism from Germany any more
than he can shut himself up in one of Pinero's drawing-
rooms. He must find the rhythm of his own age. In a sense,
perhaps, this is a jazz rhythm. At least jazz gives a super-
ficial impression of the mechanistic unrest of the period. But
the inner meaning of jazz is as hard to find as the inner mean-
ing of a locomotive or a political campaign. It seems to me
that any play worth its salt must find inner human values in
this pulse of the times.
The various conflicting ideas as to the elements which make
for expressionism would indicate that the form is not yet satis-
factorily evolved. It remains to be seen whether it is destined
to be more than a means of escape from hardened forms of
realism, or whether it is in itself a form worth preserving. We
had from Theodore Dreiser, in his "Plays of the Natural and
the Supernatural", a series of experiments which were known
to us before the Theatre Guild made theatre audiences famil-
iar with "Liliom" and "R. U. R." Dreiser is the forerunner of
a metaphysical school which delights in expressionism. His
book was issued in 1916. In a sense he harkened back to Poe;
in another sense he led the way to one of the roads we now
travel.
V
I cannot take these examples as anything more than isolated
attempts to break from the realistic way in which, through our
newspaper experience, we have become accustomed to see
things. Charles Kean, Henry Irving, and Beerbohm Tree
accustomed the spectator to a mass of archæology which
buried the play and lost its mood. The new scenic artist
rediscovered possibilities of poetic drama. In our plays of
the past we did not probe far beneath the surface; we had
436
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
inherited prejudices and fears to cope with: truth scorched'
where it should have enlightened. We have been educated
away from these dodgings since the days when Ibsen first.
shocked us. Still within the ken of many of us are the senti-
mental palliatives we were treated to in our plays, and are still
treated to. For we are not completely out of the woods yet.
CC
But we are primed for refreshing irony, and hail it with
gusto. The flair of George Kaufman and Marc Connelly in
"Dulcy" and "To the Ladies" has almost a Gilbertian value
to it. They could give us an American libretto as fresh as
'Patience" and "The Mikado." They are of the tradition
George Ade and Mr. Dooley started, which the colum-
nists have maintained in the press. Facing the facts good-
naturedly seems to be the chief claim of these writers.
F. P. A. conceived the bromidic Dulcy in his daily New York
Tribune "stunt", and he had fun with an American quality
which no serious critic could have got away with in such happy
fashion. One can strike deep by such a method. The exqui-
site variety of that irony may spread over a large area, as
George Kelly spread it in "The Torch Bearers" or else concen-
trate on one character representative of a national weakness, as
in "The Show-Off." Mr. Kelly far exceeds Miss Rachel Croth-
ers in the handling of such a method. The latter's "Express-
ing Willie" skims the surface of a great American tragedy of
successful incompetence. Aubrey Piper, in "The Show-Off",
is more subtle, though no less innocuous than Willie. Be-
tween Willie and Aubrey is to be found a change that has
befallen the American Drama.
CC
Can it be said that the American Drama has any peculiar
symptoms of its own? Are we still predominantly beholden
to the foreign theatre, as we were in the past? Our survey of
American Drama has suggested that we have largely excelled
in what Mr. Gilbert Seldes calls our 'seven lively arts."
The Yankee type still persists, though there is a sea of differ-
ence between Solon Shingle and Ethan Frome. What is the
art of Al Jolson but the art of the minstrel? The business
and legal types of the present are still related to the Judge Bard-
well Slote and Colonel Mulberry Sellers of old. Strange to say,
437
The American Dramatist
politics have ceased to play any part in our drama, since
Charles Hoyt and Edward Harrigan put them into a burlesque
atmosphere. "Processional" has a subtle echo of the Mulli-
gan series. The low type here used is reminiscent of the out-
look of Harrigan. It is much nearer life than Sheldon's
conception of it in "Salvation Nell." O'Neill's "All God's
Chillun Got Wings" is an intellectualized Harrigan. If the
truth must be told, Hoyt and Harrigan had those very jazz
rhythms which Lawson believes are characteristic of American
life. But they wrote plays in a period when incongruity was
acceptable, and technique was not much considered.
>
Our folk sense in the theatre, as seen in such plays as Lulu
Vollmer's "Sun-Up", "The Shame Woman", and "The
Dunce Boy", in MacKaye's "This Fine-Pretty World", and
Hatcher Hughes's "Hell-Bent for Heaven" and "Ruint", is
being consciously developed. Our historical sense seems to
be dormant; it was John Drinkwater who gave us a Lincoln
play and a Lee chronicle, far different, far more effective than
Howard's "Shenandoah" or Fitch's "Barbara Frietchie."
Our life is not sufficiently homogeneous for us to develop a
high sense of comedy, or rather a sense of high comedy.
Most of our social plays are lacking in manner, are what
one critic facetiously called them comedies of bad manners.
But, in comparison with the immediate past, our comedy has
emerged from an era of noise to an era of wit and clear seeing.
It has a vernacular of its own, but so had the plays of George
Ade.
There is no reason to doubt that our American Drama is
vastly better than it used to be. We cannot dismiss as trifling
such pieces as "Clarence", "The First Year", "Ambush."
"Dulcy" is not a flip creation. But we have fallen down in
the story quality of our plays. We are still woefully lacking
in idea, still woefully lacking in clear thinking I would
suggest Jevons' Logic as a text-book in our play writing courses.
وو
we are wanting in our ability to "follow through.'
We still write cleverly much that is not worth writing about.
And, in the average of what we get in a dramatic season, there
is much that is scrapped. We are wasteful of our talents.
438
Eugene O'Neill and the "New" Drama
It seems almost as though we did not think anything worth
while unless it was based on a European model. The drama
is still regarded by our thinking author as a plaything, some-
thing to amuse the public with, lightly and cleverly. Our
literary workers still turn to the theatre as a sort of outlet for
a trick, a sleight of hand. Yet, when they fail, they blame the
theatre, rather than examine their own handling of an instru-
ment which they do not yet realize is delicate and more diffi-
cult than any other form of literary expression. It is more
than a stunt when a substantial success is met with in the
theatre. By some luck of the gods they have created well;
there is no reason why they should not create well again if
they have thorough knowledge of their medium, and if they
have something to say. Until this is realized, we will have to
take our blue prints from Germany: we will have to write
dramas which run until they are worn out, when, like
the Ingersoll watch, it is cheaper to get a new supply. We are
clever in our comedies, we are swiftly active in our farces, we
still cling to the old melodrama, the old romance, the old play
of "big moment." While we have every reason to be thank-
ful that new vistas are offered the American dramatist, we
have still much work to be done.
439
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE ROSTER
We break off abruptly in our narrative, because a develop-
ment is continuous, and must be added to to-morrow. For
each generation of actor and playwright has individual prob-
lems to consider, some of them dependent on what has gone
before, others so far away from what custom looks for that a
story about them alone is advisable. There has been no at-
tempt in this survey to be inclusive, - to indicate all the play-
wrights, to discuss all their works, to mark all their pro-
ductions. What I have endeavored to do is to place before
the reader those high lights in a development which is pic-
turesque on its social side and rather disillusionizing on its
art side.
We must be honest with ourselves. Our playwrights from
early times have worked very close to the theatre and the
actor. Their dramas have been like impromptus on the flute;
played for all they were worth, and changed by the player from
night to night, as the mood prompted. Unfortunate that
some of these plays were ever hastened into print, as evidence
of our literary poverty.
But fortunate indeed for the student,
who regards them as evidence for social study.
There are writers that I have left unmentioned, who have
been doing work of credit to themselves and certainly of
great profit. But to detail them would be merely to catalogue
them, and that is unprofitable as study and deadly to read.
I elected to discuss the American Dramatist — out of the wel-
ter of materials to give some general impressions of what he
440
The Roster
has tried to do, what he has had to contend with, how he has
conquered. There are infinite angles from which to view
him there are still fields to be opened up. I have here and
there hinted what there was still to do.
One of the most profitable theses a student could select
would be a consideration of the American play abroad.
From very earliest days it was the custom for the London
theatre to produce American Drama: the changes neces-
sary for its acceptance, the characteristics emphasized by the
British press as distinctively "Yankee", these matters of
Anglo-Saxon interchange have to be fully traced. There
have been American dramatists who have had to go abroad to
make a success before being accepted in their own land.
There have been others who have made great strides on the
Continental stage, which fact has utterly escaped the home
folks and the home critics. It is only when one surveys the
field of American Drama intensively that there is brought in
upon one the enormous amount of vital material that has
been allowed to lie fallow, and is only now being stirred. But
I believe that the American Drama is something that has to be
studied individually. It is difficult to narrate plots for others,
to detail characters too specifically, because the majority of
plots and characters are really not worth while remembering.
From 1870, this condition changes, because, from that date,
the literary sense, the speaking value of dialogue, the consis-
tent development of plot began to be considered. The Ameri-
can Drama to-day has an art quality about it which was
largely absent in the plays before 1870. With the advent of
Eugene O'Neill and the men of his generation, we face dram-
atists with a real technical equipment, a real spirit of free-
dom, and a consciousness of the need of a body of ideas.
We have taken from Europe for many a year; our theatre is
still taking from Europe. But somehow the eyes of the
dramatic world are upon us.
The obstacles against which we
have heretofore fought are mostly removed. We are being
watched in this year 1925. Nineteen twenty-six may necessi-
tate an added chapter of surprises and accomplishments.
441
..
:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This rather lengthy bibliography will put the reader in possession of most of the
important references relating to the American Theatre and the American Drama.
Many of the volumes referred to contain further bibliographical lists. In a num-
ber of instances the list has been cross referenced, so as to give the references an index
character. It is supposed that the reader will consult the contemporary magazine
cumulative indices, both dramatic and general. Rather than cumber the text of the
book with too many footnotes, it has been thought better to assemble authorities.
in this form. The * indicates a magazine article. The author wishes here to thank
Charles Scribner's Sons for permission to quote from the letters of Henry James;
and The Macmillan Company for allowing him to use correspondence from Judge
Daly's "Life of Augustin Daly."
* American Invasion of the London Theatre, The. Nation (New York), 69: 388-389,
November 23, 1899.
American Plays. Catalogue of a Collection of, 1756–1885. New York: Dodd &
Livingston. Annotated.
American Plays and Poetry in the Collection of C. F. Harris. Providence, 1874.
* American Playwrights on The American Drama. Harper's Weekly, Supplement,
February 2, 1889.
Andrews, Charlton. The Drama To-day. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.
1913.
* Archer, William. Development of American Drama. Harper, 142: 75-86, De-
cember, 1920.
Playmaking: A Manual of Craftsmanship. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. 1912.
Atkinson, F. W. List of American Drama in the Atkinson Collection, 1756–1915.
Brooklyn, 1916. (The Collection was purchased, 1925, by the University of
Chicago.)
Baker, George P. Harvard Workshop Plays. New York: Brentano's. (See also
his Technique of the Drama. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co.)
Modern American Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe. 1920.
Becks Collection of Prompt Books in the New York Public Library. Bulletin, Febru-
ary, 1906, 100–148.
Beegle, Mary Porter, and Jack R. Crawford. Community Drama and Pageantry.
New Haven: Yale University Press. 1916.
Belasco, David. The Theatre Through Its Stage Door. Edited by Louis V. De Foe.
New York: Harper & Bros. 1919.
Plays Produced Under the Stage Direction of. A Bibliography. New York, 1925.
Privately Printed. (See under William Winter.)
443
The American Dramatist
Bird, Robert Montgomery, The Life and Dramatic Works of. By Clement E.
Foust. New York: Knickerbocker Press. 1919. Bibliography, 161–167.
(University of Pennsylvania Thesis.)
Blake, Charles. An Historical Account of the Providence Stage. Providence:
George H. Whitney. 1868.
* Boker, George H. Playwright and Patriot. A. H. Quinn. Scribner's, 73: 701-715,
June, 1923.
Boucicault, Dion, Career of. Townsend Walsh. Dunlap Society Publications,
1915. (See also Moses' Representative British Dramas: Victorian and Mod-
ern. Bibliography.)
* Articles by Dion Boucicault
The Decline of the Drama. North American Review, 125: 235-245. September,
1877.
The Art of Dramatic Composition.
January-February, 1878.
North American Review, 126: 40-52.
The Story of Ireland. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1881.
London Audiences. Theatre (English), July-December [September 1]. 1884.
The Decline and Fall of the Press. North American Review, 145: 32–39. July,
1887.
Coquelin-Irving. North American Review, 145: 158-161. August, 1887.
My Pupils [Madison Square Theatre, New York School]. North American Review,
147: 435-440. October, 1888.
Shakespeare's Influence on the Drama. North American Review, 147: 680–685.
December, 1888.
The Début of a Dramatist [Autobiographical]. North American Review, 148:
454-463. April, 1889.
Early Days of a Dramatist [Autobiographical]. North American Review, 148:
584-593. May, 1889.
Leaves from a Dramatist's Diary [Autobiographical]. North American Review,
149: 228-236. August, 1889.
Theatres, Halls, and Audiences. North American Review, 149: 429-436. October,
1889.
The Future American Drama. Arena, 2: 641-652. November, 1890.
Books relating to Dion Boucicault
Letter ... to the Dramatic Authors of France. Translated by Charles James
Mathews from himself, as a specimen of "fair imitation or adaptation" accord-
ing to the terms of the international copyright convention. London: J. Mitchell.
1852.
•
Ibid. Lettre aux auteurs dramatiques de la France. [In connection with
Boucicault's interest in the copyright laws, vide Reade and Dickens.]
Mathews, Charles James, Life of. Charles Dickens. [Chiefly autobiographical.]
London: Macmillan (2 vols.). 1879.
Our Actors and Actresses: the dramatic list. Charles Eyre Pascoe. [Good
article on Boucicault.] 1880.
Readiana: Comments on Current Events. London: Chatto & Windus. [Con-
tains a discussion about "Foul Play" and plagiarism.] 1883.
Actors and Actresses in Great Britain and the United States. Ed., Matthews &
Hutton. [Mr. and Mrs. Boucicault, by B. E. Martin.] 1886.
444
Bibliography
Charles Reade, Dramatist, Novelist, Journalist. Charles L. Reade and Rev.
Compton Reade. [Ed., New York.] 1887.
Dickens, Charles, and the Stage: A record of his connection with the drama as
playwright, actor, and critic. T. Edgar Pemberton. London: Geo. Redway.
1888.
Memories of Fifty Years, by Lester Wallack. New York: Scribner. 1889.
Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson. New York: Century. 1890.
Life of Burton, W. E. W. L. Keese. (Dunlap Soc. Pub., vol. 14.) [Ref., Agnes
Robertson.] 1891.
·
Acting and Actors. A Book about Theatre Folk and Theatre Art. Alfred
Ayres. Preface, Harrison Grey Fiske. New York: Appleton. [On the
Palmer-Boucicault School of Acting.] 1894.
Le Théâtre Anglaise, hier, aujourd'hui, demain. Pierre Marie Augustin Filon.
Paris. [Ed. tr. by Frederic Whyte, with Introduction by Henry Arthur Jones.
New York: Dodd, Mead. References to Boucicault.] 1896.
American Actors of To-day, Famous. F. E. McKay and C. E. L. Wingate.
[Boucicault, by Vance Thompson.] 1896.
Actors of the Century. Frederic Whyte.
1898.
Drama of Yesterday and To-day, The. Clement Scott. 1899.
Plays of the Present. Clapp & Edgett. 1902.
Reade, Charles, as I Knew Him. John Coleman. London: Treherne & Co. 1903.
Boucicault, Dion, Magazine Articles(*) relating to
Athenæum (English), March 8, p. 337. [On Boucicault's "The Life of an Ac-
tress."] 1862.
Once a Week, 26: 430, May II. Dion Boucicault. [Short but concise. Men-
tions "Foul Play"; also his (B.'s) brothers.] 1872.
New York Times, July 4. [On Mrs. Boucicault.] 1875.
Harper, 51: 293, July. [Easy Chair.] [George W. Curtis.] On the "Shaugh-
raun." 1875.
Spirit of the Times, New York. [Through files of year et seq. for references.]
1879.
Theatre (English), August-December. [November, pp. 186-188.] Boucicault on
Himself.
1879.
Arena, 3: 47–60, December. Dion Boucicault. A. C. Wheeler. 1890.
Saturday Review (English), 70: 373, September 27. [Death notice of D. B.
Estimate.] 1890.
Academy (English), 38: 278, September 27. [Death notice, D. B.] 1890.
Critic, o. s. 17: 158, September 27. [Account of D. B.] 1890.
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445
The American Dramatist
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* Cheney, Sheldon. American Playwrights and the Drama of Sincerity. Forum,
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* Coad, Oral S. Stage and Players in Eighteenth Century America. Journal of
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*The Gothic Element in American Literature before 1835.
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*Colby, Elbridge. Early American Comedy. New York Public Library. 1919.
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446
Bibliography
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1
I
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* Augustus Thomas. Book-Buyer, 16: 323, May, 1898.
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*
Gay, F. L. First Play in America. Nation, 88: 136.
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Ginisty, Paul. Le Mélodrame. Paris.
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Godfrey, Thomas. The Prince of Parthia. Edited, with an Introduction, Historical,
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Goldberg, Isaac. The Drama of Transition. Native and Exotic Playcraft. Cin-
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C1922.
Goldman, Emma. The Social Significance of the Modern Drama. Boston: R. G.
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Grau, Robert. Forty Years' Observation of Music and Drama. 1909.
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Hackett, James H. Notes, Criticisms, and Correspondence upon Shakespeare's
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* American Playwrights of To-day. The Mentor, vol. 11, no. 2, 11-18, March,
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Bibliography
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Harris, C. Fiske. Index to American Poetry and Plays in the Collection of. Provi-
dence, 187-.
Harrison, Gabriel. John Howard Payne: Dramatist, Poet, Actor, and Author of
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* Hawtrey, Charles. Theatrical Business in America. Fortnightly, 79: 1010-1016.
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*Historical American Plays. A. E. Lancaster. Chautauqua, 31:359–364, 1900.
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CC
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Johnson, James Gibson. Southern Fiction Prior to 1860. Bibliography. Char-
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* Klein, Charles. Psychology of the Drama. Reader, 7:374-377.
* Religion, Philosophy, and the Drama.
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Kotzebue sa Vie et son Temps. Charles Rabany. Paris, 1893.
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Krows, Arthur Edwin. Play Production in America. New York: Henry Holt &
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* Lancaster, A. E. Historical American Plays. Chautauquan, 31:359–364.
* Law, Robert Adger. Early Theatre Performances in Charleston. Under "News
for Bibliophiles." New York Nation, p. 201, February 27, 1913.
*
Early American Prologues and Epilogues. New York Nation, 98:463–464,
April 23, 1914.
* Charleston Theatres.
(See Eola Willis.)
1735-1766. New York Nation, September 3, 1914.
Leonard, Sterling Andrus. The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays. [Atlantic Publica-
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Levasseur, A. Lafayette en Amérique en 1824 et 1825. 1829.
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Macgowan, Kenneth, and Robert
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Mackay (Holt), Constance D'Arcy.
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The Little Theatre in the United States. New
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MacKaye, Percy. The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure.
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Community Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1917.
*Steele MacKaye: Dynamic Artist of the American Theatre. Drama, no. 4:
138-161, November, 1911; no. 5: 153-173, February, 1915. See also Theatre
of Ten Thousand. Theatre Arts Magazine, 7:116–126, 1923.
Mantle, Burns. The Best Plays series.
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Marbury, Elizabeth. My Crystal Ball.
Beginning the season of 1919–1920. Bos-
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* Matthews, Albert. Early Plays at Harvard. New York Nation, p. 925, March 19,
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* Matthews, Brander. The American on the Stage. Scribner's, 18: 321-333, July,
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*
Rip Van Winkle Goes to the Play. Scribner's, November, 1924, 548–553.
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* Found at Last: Early American Drama.
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The Group: A Farce (1775). Mercy Warren.
The Battle of Bunkers-Hill (1776).
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The Politician Out-Witted (1789). Samuel Low.
The Contrast (1790). Royall Tyler.
André (1798). William Dunlap.
The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage (1808). James Nelson
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Noah.
45I
The American Dramatist
Vol. II. Fashionable Follies (1815). Joseph Hutton.
Brutus; or, The Fall of Tarquin (1818). John Howard Payne.
Sertorius (1830). David Paul Brown.
Tortesa, the Usurer (1839). Nathaniel P. Willis.
The People's Lawyer (1839).
Joseph S. Jones.
Jack Cade (1841). Robert T. Conrad.
Fashion (1850). Anna Cora Mowatt.
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). George L. Aiken.
Self (1856). Mrs. Sidney F. Bateman.
Horseshoe Robinson (1858). Clifton W. Tayleure.
Vol. III. Rip VanWinkle (1850). Charles Burke.
Francesca da Rimini (1855). George Henry Boker.
Love in '76 (1857). Oliver Bell Bunce.
Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy (1887). Steele MacKaye.
Shenandoah (1888). Bronson Howard.
In Mizzoura (1893). Augustus Thomas.
The Moth and the Flame (1898).
Clyde Fitch.
The New York Idea (1906). Langdon Mitchell.
The Easiest Way (1909). Eugene Walter.
The Return of Peter Grimm (1911). David Belasco.
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The Girl of the Golden West (1905). David Belasco.
The Witching Hour (1907). Augustus Thomas.
The City (1910). Clyde Fitch.
The Scarecrow (1910). Percy MacKaye.
The Piper (1910). Josephine Preston Peabody.
Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (1911). Harry James Smith.
It Pays to Advertise (1914). Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter
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The Famous Mrs. Fair (1919).
James Forbes.
The Emperor Jones (1920). Eugene G. O'Neill.
Nice People (1921). Rachel Crothers.
The Detour (1921). Owen Davis.
Dulcy (1921). George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly.
The Adding Machine (1923). Elmer L. Rice.
The Show-Off (1924). George Kelly.
Moses, Montrose, J., and Virginia Gerson (Editors). Plays by Clyde Fitch.
Memorial Edition. Four volumes. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1915.
Clyde Fitch [1865-1909] and His Letters. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1924.
Mowatt, Anna Cora. Autobiography of an Actress; or, Eight Years on the Stage.
Boston Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. 1854.
*Nathan, George Jean. What the Public Wants in Plays. McClure, 50:16–17,
76, November, 1917. (In his many books dealing with the popular and current
theatre, Mr. Nathan considers the functions of the critic.)
*Neidig, William J. The First Play in America. New York Nation, 88:86-88,
January 28, 1909.
452
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New York: Harper & Bros. 1868.
Snowden, Yates. South Carolina Plays and Playwrights. From the Carolinian,
November, 1909. Columbia, 1909.
Sonneck, O. G. T. Bibliography of Early Secular American Music. Washington:
Printed for the author. 1905.
- Report on the Star-Spangled Banner, Hail Columbia, America, and Yankee Doodle.
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Stanard, Mary Newton. Colonial Virginia: Its People and Customs. Philadelphia:
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Stone, Henry Dickinson. Personal Recollections of the Drama; or, Theatrical
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* Syndicate. The Theatrical. International, 99–122, January, 1900 (Norman
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Bibliography
Leslie's Monthly, October, 1904, 581-592; November, 1904, 34-42; December,
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Harper's Weekly, 42:202 (W. D. Howells).
*Theatre, American, First. G. H. Moore. North American History, 21:58.
Thomas, Augustus. The Print of My Remembrances. New York: Charles Scrib-
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11885.)
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Tompkins, Eugene, and Kilby, Quincy. History of the Boston Theatre. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. 1908.
Towse, John Rankin. Sixty Years of the Theatre: An Old Critic's Memories.
New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co. 1916.
* Tragedy. The Origin of. W. Ridgeway. Quarterly, 209: 504-523.
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Tyler, Mary Palmer, The Recollections of. Grandmother Tyler's Book. 1775-
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Tyler, Royall (1757-1826). The Contrast. Dunlap Society Pub., 1887.
(See also
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Vaudeville. Caroline Caffin. New York: Mitchell Kennerley. 1914.
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The American Dramatist
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* Woodworth, Samuel. O. S. Coad. Sewanee Review, 27: 163-175, June, 1919.
A LIST OF MODERN AMERICAN PLAYS
This list does not pretend to be complete. It is merely given that the student may,
at a glance, see who are some of the outstanding workers in the American Theatre.
The dates of production, in most instances, are supplied, so that an idea may be had
of the contemporaneous activity of the dramatists. Most of these plays have been
published, and are available for reading purposes. Unless otherwise stated, the
theatres mentioned are in New York. In the tables, throughout the book, certain
important plays by individual dramatists have been emphasized. They are not
here repeated.
Ade, George. The College Widow.
Samuel French.
The County Chairman.
Samuel French.
Father and the Boys.
Samuel French.
Samuel French.
Just Out of College.
One-Act Plays: Nettie, The Mayor and the Manicure, Marse Coving-
ton, Speaking to Father. Baker.
Akin, Zoë. Declassé. Empire Theatre, October 6, 1919.
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey. Judith of Bethulia. Houghton Mifflin Co.
Anspacher, Louis K. The Unchastened Woman. 39th St. Theatre, October 9,
1915.
Austin, Mary. The Arrow Maker. New Theatre, February 27, 1911.
Bacon, Frank, and Winchell Smith. Lightnin'. Gaiety Theatre, August 26, 1918.
Barry, Philip. You and I. Belmont Theatre, February 19, 1923.
Bateman, Mrs. H. L. Self. Burton's Chamber's Street Theatre, October 26, 1856.
Beach, Lewis. The Goose Hangs High. Bijou Theatre, January 29, 1924.
January 27, 1923.
A Square Peg. Punch and Judy Theatre,
Broadhurst, George. Bought and Paid For.
Playhouse, September 26, 1911.
456
Bibliography
Brown, Alice. Children of Earth. Booth Theatre, January 12, 1915.
Buchanan, Thompson. A Woman's Way. Hackett (Harris) Theatre, February 22,
1909.
Butler, Rachel B. Mama's Affair.
Campbell, Bartley. My Partner.
Little Theatre, January 19, 1920.
Union Square Theatre, September 16, 1879.
Carlton, Henry Guy. A Gilded Fool. Miner's Fifth Avenue Theatre, November 7,
1892.
The Butterflies. Palmer's Theatre, February 5, 1894.
That Impudent Young Couple. Empire Theatre, September 23, 1895.
Carpenter, Edward C. The Pipes of Pan. Hudson Theatre, November 6, 1917.
Coghlan, Charles. Citizen Pierre. Fifth Avenue Theatre, April 11, 1899.
The Royal Box. Fifth Avenue Theatre, December 21, 1897.
Cohan, George M.
Little Johnny Jones. November 7, 1904.
George Washington, Jr. February 12, 1906.
The Yankee Prince. April, 1908.
Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. September 19, 1910.
Forty Minutes from Broadway. March 14, 1912.
Broadway Jones. September 23, 1912.
Hello, Broadway. December 25, 1914.
Cohan, George M. and Earl Biggars. Seven Keys to Baldpate. Astor Theatre,
September 22, 1913.
Craven, Frank. The First Year. Little Theatre, October 20, 1920.
Crothers, Rachel. The Three of Us. Madison Square Theatre, October 17, 1906.
A Man's World. Comedy Theatre, February 8, 1910.
39 East. Broadhurst Theatre, March 31, 1919.
Mary the Third. 39th Street Theatre, February 5, 1923.
Expressing Willie. Forty-eighth Street Theatre, April 16, 1924.
Davis, Owen. The Detour. Astor Theatre, August 23, 1921.
Icebound. Harris Theatre, February 10, 1923.
Dazey, Charles. In Old Kentucky. Jacob Litt (copyright), April 27, 1897.
Dickey, Paul. The Misleading Lady.
Dodd, Lee Wilson. The Changelings.
Eaton, Walter P. and David Carb.
November 15, 1923.
Fulton Theatre, November 25, 1913.
Henry Miller Theatre, September 17, 1923.
Queen Victoria. Forty-eighth Street Theatre,
Emery, Gilbert. The Hero. Longacre Theatre, March 14, 1921.
Forbes, James. The Chorus Lady. Savoy Theatre, September 1, 1906.
The Show Shop. Hudson Theatre, December 31, 1914.
The Famous Mrs. Fair. Henry Miller Theatre, December 22, 1919.
Gale, Zona. Miss Lulu Bett. Belmont Theatre, December 27, 1920.
Gates, Eleanor. The Poor Little Rich Girl. Hudson Theatre, January 21, 1913.
Gillette, William. Held By the Enemy. Madison Square Theatre, August, 1886.
Too Much Johnson. Standard Theatre, November 26, 1894.
Secret Service. Garrick Theatre, October 5, 1896.
Glaspell, Susan. Suppressed Desires. Baker, 1924. (See also edition by Small,
Maynard & Co.)
Goodwin, J. Cheever. Evangeline. Burlesque. Music by E. E. Rice. Niblo's
Garden, July 27, 1874.
Harte, Bret. Two Men of Sandy Bar. Union Square Theatre, September 1, 1876.
Hazelton, George C., and J. Harry Benrimo. The Yellow Jacket. Fulton Theatre,
November 4, 1912.
457
The American Dramatist
Housum, Robert. A Gypsy Trail. Plymouth Theatre, December 4, 1917.
Howard, Sidney. Swords. National Theatre, September 1, 1921.
They Knew What They Wanted? Theatre Guild, season of 1925.
Howells, W. D. A Counterfeit Presentment. Boston Museum, April 1, 1878.
Yorick's Love. Cleveland, October 26, 1878.
Hughes, Hatcher. Hell-Bent for Heaven. Klaw Theatre, January 4, 1924.
Kaufman, George P., and Marc Connelly. To the Ladies. Liberty Theatre, Febru-
ary 20, 1922.
Dulcy. Cort Theatre, Chicago, February 20, 1921; New York Frazee Theatre,
August 13, 1921.
Kelly, George. The Torch Bearers.
Forty-eighth Street Theatre, August 29, 1922.
The Show-Off. Playhouse, February 4, 1924.
Kenyon, Charles. Kindling. Daly's Theatre, December 5, 1911.
Klein, Charles (1867-1915). The Lion and the Mouse. Lyceum Theatre, Novem-
ber 20, 1905.
The Third Degree. Hudson Theatre, February 1, 1909.
The Gamblers. Maxine Elliott Theatre, October 31, 1910.
Maggie Pepper. Harris Theatre, August 31, 1911.
The Daughters of Men. Astor Theatre, November 19, 1906.
Kummer, Clare. Good Gracious, Annabelle. Republic Theatre, October 31, 1916.
The Successful Calamity. Booth Theatre, February 5, 1917.
Be Calm, Camilla. Booth Theatre, October 31, 1918.
Lawson, John Howard. Processional. Theatre Guild, season of 1925.
Logan, Olive. Surf; or, Summer Scenes at Long Branch. Daly's Theatre, January
12, 1870.
Manners, J. Hartley. Peg o' My Heart.
Marcin, Max, and Frederick S. Isham.
Theatre, September 29, 1920.
Cort Theatre, December 20, 1912.
Three Live Ghosts. Greenwich Village
Marquis, Don. The Old Soak. Plymouth Theatre, August 22, 1922.
Matthews, Brander (with Bronson Howard). Peter Stuyvesant. Star Theatre,
October 2, 1899.
McHugh, Augustin. Officer 666. Gaiety Theatre, August 12, 1912.
Megrue, Roi, and Walter Hackett. It Pays to Advertise. Cohan Theatre, Sep-
tember 8, 1914.
Merington, Marguerite. Captain Letterblair. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
Miller, Joaquin. The Danites. Broadway Theatre, August 22, 1877. Sadler's
Wells, London, April 26, 1880.
Mitchell, Langdon. Becky Sharp. September 12, 1899.
The New York Idea. Lyric Theatre, November 19, 1906.
Pendennis. October 11, 1916.
Montgomery, James. Nothing but the Truth. Longacre Theatre, September 14,
1916.
Moody, William Vaughn. The Great Divide. Princess Theatre, October, 3, 1906.
London Adelphi, September 25, 1909.
The Faith Healer. St. Louis, March 15, 1909. New York Savoy, January 19,
1910.
Murdock, Frank. Davy Crockett. Niblo's Garden, March 9, 1874.
Parker, Lottie Blair, and Joseph R. Grismer. 'Way Down East. Newport, R. I.,
September 3, 1897.
Peabody, Josephine Preston. The Piper. New Theatre, January 30, 1911.
458
Bibliography
Rice, Alice Hegan. Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Savoy Theatre, September
3, 1904.
Rice, Elmer. On Trial. Candler Theatre, August 31, 1914.
The Adding Machine. Garrick Theatre, March 19, 1923.
Richman, Arthur. Ambush. Garrick Theatre, October 10, 1921.
Rinehart, Mary Roberts, and Avery Hopwood. Seven Days. Astor Theatre, No-
vember 10, 1909.
Rosenfeld, Sydney. The Senator. Star Theatre, January 20, 1890.
Royle, E. Milton. The Squaw-Man. Wallack's Theatre, October 23, 1905.
Sheldon, Edward. Salvation Nell. Hackett Theatre, November 17, 1908.
The Nigger. New Theatre, December 4, 1909.
Romance. Maxine Elliott Theatre, February 10, 1913.
Smith, Harry James. Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh. Lyceum Theatre, April 3, 1911.
Smith, Winchell. The Fortune Hunter. Gaiety Theatre, September 4, 1909.
Tarkington, Booth. The Man from Home. Astor Theatre, August 17, 1908.
Clarence. Hudson Theatre, September 20, 1919.
The Wren. Gaiety Theatre, October 10, 1921.
Thomas, A. E. Her Husband's Wife. Garrick Theatre, May 9, 1910.
Come Out of the Kitchen. Cohan Theatre, October 23, 1916.
Thompson, Denman, and G. W. Ryer. The Old Homestead: a sequel to Joshua
Whitcomb. Boston Theatre, April 5, 1885.
Tully, Richard Walton. The Bird of Paradise. Daly's Theatre, January 8, 1912.
Omar, the Tent-Maker. Lyric Theatre, January 13, 1914.
Twain, Mark. The Gilded Age.
Veiller, Bayard. Within the Law.
Park Theatre, September 16, 1874.
Eltinge Theatre, September 11, 1912.
The Thirteenth Chair. Forty-eighth Street Theatre, November 20, 1916.
Vollmer, Lulu. The Shame Woman. Greenwich Village Theatre, October 16, 1923..
Sun-Up. Provincetown Theatre, May 25, 1923.
Wallack, Lester. Rosedale. Wallack's Theatre, September 30, 1863.
Walter, Eugene. Paid in Full. Astor Theatre, February 25, 1908.
The Easiest Way. Belasco-Stuyvesant Theatre, January 19, 1909.
Williams, Jesse Lynch. Why Marry? Astor Theatre, December 25, 1917.
Why Not? Forty-eighth Street Theatre, December 25, 1922.
459
INDEX
ABBEY THEATRE, DUBLIN, 401
Accidentals of the American drama, 415,
416-417; O'Neill, as one of the, 432-
433
Actor, long influenced by the English
tradition, 4; early appearance of the
amateur, 20; vagaries of the early,
22; opposition to the, in Colonial days,
24-29; the Revolutionary Era and the,
40-41; 60; the mainstay of the early
theatre, 92; prejudice against the, 115;
individuality of the American, distinct
before 1860, 117; and the Theatre
Trust, 243; Fitch wrote for the, 325;
under Theatrical Syndicate conditions,
352; 354
Actor's Theatre, New York, 2
Adams, John, opinion of Mrs. Mercy
Warren, 47-48
Adams, Maude, and "The Maid of
Orleans ", 373.
Adams, Samuel, an opponent of the
theatre, 28
Adaptations, John Howard Payne and
his, 122-123; Cazauran and his, 172;
Daly and German, 178-179; Belasco
skilful in, 241; by Gillette, 368
Ade, George, 14; in journalism, 289;
enters the dramatic field, 289; keen
humor of his plays and comic operas,
289; and the "Sho-Gun ", 290
Advertising, the, of melodrama, 293 note;
deceptive theatre, 303
Akins, Zoë, 419.
the, and Ibsen and Shaw, 15-16; Lang-
don Mitchell's opinion of the, 16-17;
study of the drama as a reflection of,
life and taste, 92; meaning of the term,
in the 1870's, 175; public averse to
serious treatment of, character and
life, 191; "uplift", 260
American background, 1-17
American Company, the, presents Tyler's
"The Contrast ,72
American Drama. See DRAMA, AMERI-
CAN
American dramatist, effect of the theatre
on, 1; early lack of faith in the, 1;
progress of the worthy, 2; his develop-
ment, 5-7; his point of view, 8; early
tendencies of the, 9; and the quality of
"uplift", 10-12; his reaction to Con-
tinental influences, 12; the man of
letters as the, 14-15; his lack of obser-
vation, 15; lacked authority in the
theatre, 17; of the Colonial period, 18-
38; Royall Tyler the first, of the social
manner, 21; friendly feeling in the
colleges for the, 29-34; of the Revolu-
tionary Era, 39-55; William Dunlap
an outstanding, 56-76; imitative_ten-
dencies of the, 63; Royall Tyler
prominent as an early, 72-74; the
early, made an attempt to portray
lowly character, 74-75; his effort to
appeal to the sentiments and conditions
of the new nation, 83; the early, a
devotee to quick work and news value,
88; and the lack of copyright pro-
tection, 88-91; managerial treatment
of the, 90; endeavors to utilize the
American background, 92; early, an
imitator, 93-95; his sympathy for the
Indian, 97-98; his opposition to origi-
nality, 115; the offering of prizes to
the, 117-122; the 1870's tested the
ingenuity of the, 172; of Mark Twain's
era, 187; handicapped by adaptations
of foreign plays, 191; and journalism,
196; ideal training for the, 236; and
the new form in American drama, 260-
261; 264; temptation of the moving
Albany, New York, opposition to the
theatre in, 26
Albion, the, on the creation of a Native.
Drama, 87
Allen, James Lane, 14
Amateur actor, early appearance of the,
20, 30
Amateur theatricals, antedate the regular
theatre, 30
America, and the foreign theatre spirit, 3;
and the "dime novel" era, 295
American, the, and democracy, 10; in
defeat, 10; and the best man standard,
II; adaptability the genius of the, 11;
461
Index
American dramatist- Continued
picture for the, 307-308; and the
Frohman system, 309-311; influence
of the Theatrical Syndicate on the, 351-
353, 357-360; and the "box-office
"box-office"
drama, 354-356; amusement the
primary object of the, 367; opportuni-
ties offered by Nature to the, 375-377;
and the poetic drama, 379-390; and
the one-act play, 391-402, 407-414;
and the Little Theatre movement,
402-407, 408; and the "new" drama,
422-425; literary, looks on drama as
a plaything, 439; always in close con-
tact with theatre and actor, 440
American girl, Bronson Howard's por-
trayal of the, 201; in melodrama, 304-
305
American life, hope for a stronger por-
trayal of, on the stage, 14,
American manners, Clyde Fitch's influ-
ence on the drama of, 312
American Quarterly Review, 83
Ames, Winthrop, and his prize for an
American play, 356
“André” (Dunlap), preface of, quoted,
64; Brander Matthews' introductory
essay to, 64; 69
André, Major John, as a scenic artist,
40; and the famous "Mischianza", 43
Androboros" (Hunter), one of the
earliest plays written in America, 18,
20; America's first satire, 38
Anonymity, hiding the American play-
wright under, 87-88
Archer, William, quoted, 221
Aristotle, definition of tragedy, 266; and
comedy, 274
Art, Herne's belief in the relation of, and
business, 227; of the drama the art
of all arts, 230; dramatic, in the sun-
light must be buoyant, 375; any, form
vital when supremely used, 413
Aston, Anthony, quoted, 19; 25
Audience, must be persuaded not forced,
3; American, believes in the square
deal, 10; in the open, 376
Austin, Mary, and "The Arrow Maker",
96-97
BACON, FRANK, "Lightnin' 42I
Baker, Professor George P., 331, 403, 416,
421
Bakst, 423, 424
Ballad-opera, difficult to judge the early,
61; social and theatrical influences on
forms of, 61; 63
Ballet Russe, 424
Bannister, Nathaniel H., "Putnam, the
Iron Son of '76”, 107–108
Barker, James Nelson, 61, 74, 87, 135
Barrie, James M., and Charles Frohman,
309
Barton, Andrew, first uses "Yankee
Doodle" in his opera Disappoint-
ment; or, the Force of Credulity", 73
"Battle of Brooklyn, The", a Tory view
of Continental leaders, 52-53
Beach, L., "Jonathan Postfree", 75
Beach, Lewis, 419
Becque, Henry, 3
Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 18
Belasco, David, his anecdote of Bouci-
cault, 165; 173; and the Psychology
of the Switchboard, 230-259; a combi-
nation of conflicting elements, 231-232;
his love of solitude, 232; birth and
early life of, 233; as a struggling actor,
234; becomes a manager, 234; meets
Boucicault, 234-235; private secre-
tary to Boucicault, 235; manager and
stock dramatist in San Francisco, 235-
236; stage director and stock dramatist
of Madison Square Theatre, 236; con-
ditions in New York in 1882, 236-237;
institutes innovations, 237-238; in-
dividual and collaborated plays of,
238-240; the skilful stage manager
1890-1895, 241; fighting the Trust,
241, 243-244; list of his plays, 242-
243; and the Belasco Theatre, 244;
his corps of collaborators, 244; players
developed and plays produced by, 244
and note; his temperament and genius,
244-246; and his use of the electric
switchboard, 246-252; his inventive
talent, 253-254; his opinion of the
movements, 255-256; his con-
servatism, 256; his knowledge of the
history of American drama, 257; his
final value as of the theatre not as
playwright, 258; and the Theatrical
Syndicate, 351; and "The Rose of the
Rancho", 359
new
Belasco Theatre, the, 244
Benrimo and Hazelton's "The Yellow
Jacket", 416, 417
Berkeley, Sir William, Governor of Vir-
ginia, 18
Bidwell, Barnabas, 31; and "The Mer-
cenary Match", 36-37; a scholarly
man, 37
Bird, Robert Montgomery, 130, 138
Björnson, Björnstjerne, 3
462
Index
Blank verse, and Miss Peabody's "The | Brougham, John, 150
Piper", 382
a
Boker, George Henry, 60; early poetic
talent of, 139; an assiduous worker,
139; list of his plays, 140; R. H. Stod-
dard on, 141-143; his workmanship, 143
Boucicault, Dion, the prolific, 146–170;
birth of, 146; parentage and early
life, 146-147; begins professional career,
147-148; his analysis of "London
Assurance", 148-151; further
further suc-
cesses of, 151-152; characteristics of,
153-155; marriage, 154; comes to
America, 155; his claim of having
invented the Irish Drama, 157;
rapid worker, 158; his disagreement
with Webster and production of "Rip
Van Winkle", 159-160; collaboration
with Charles Reade, 161; a dominating
personality in the theatre, 162; second
marriage, 163; death of, 163; versa-
tility of, 163; some of his best-known
plays, 165-166; Belasco's anecdote of,
165; the sources of his dramas, 166
note; business methods of, 167–168;
and "The Shaughraun", 168-169;
lack of permanency in his work, 170;
Vance Thompson's estimate of, 170;
171, 176, 178; and Bret Harte, 179-
180; on the drama of the future, 190;
234-235; 237, 294, 298
Boucicault-Howard period, 12
Booth, Junius Brutus, 135
Boston, Massachusetts, opposition to
the theatre in, 25, 28; high society of,
satirized in "The Motley Assembly", 52
Boston Transcript, on the work of Clyde
Fitch, 310
Box-office, William DeMille and the, 331;
the goal of many dramatists, 354; the,
standard, 356; school of drama de-
veloped able mechanicians, 415; model
now has a rival, 418
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 29, 30, 31,
43; his difficult struggle for an educa-
tion, 44; his ability as a writer of
dialogue, 44; and his "The Battle of
Bunker-Hill", 44; and "The Death
of General Montgomery ", 45-46; his
patriotism, 46; his style, 46
Broadhurst, George, "Bought and Paid
For", 353
Broadway Journal, quoted, 85-86
Brooks, Van Wyck, 13; on the American
environment, 116
Brother Jonathan, relationship to Yankee
character in American Drama, 98
Brown, Alice, and her prize play "Chil-
dren of Earth", 356; and Moody's “The
Great Divide", 356
CC
Brown, David Paul, his rapid writing of
Sertorius", 135; on the merit of his
own plays, 137
Browning, Robert, and "A Blot in the
'Scutcheon", 387
Bunce, Oliver Bell, 107
Burgoyne, General Sir John, converts
Faneuil Hall into a playhouse, 40; and
his play the "Blockade of Boston",
48; satirized by Mrs. Mercy Warren
in "The Blockheads", 48-49
Business, American drama has not seri-
ously dealt with, problems, 13;_method
in American theatre under Frohman
régime, 310
Business type of American drama, 95
CAMERA, the moving picture and the
world-wide field of the, 306
Capital and labor, "Baron Rudolph" and
the struggle between, 199
Carpenter, E. C., "Pipes of Pan", 421
Cazauran, A. R., his deftness in adapta-
tion, 172
Censorship, and the drama, 3; in Eng-
land, 9
Chaplin, Charlie, 278
«Ε
'Character and Opinion in the United
States", quoted, 17
Charles-Town. See CHARLeston, South
CAROLINA
Charleston, South Carolina, early theatre
in, 19; 21
“Charleston Stage, The", quoted, 19
Cheer, Miss, 23; her extensive repertoire,
24
Civic Theatre, 378
Civic thought, an essential function of
the theatre to prompt, 372
Classic spirit, struggle between romantic
spirit and, 293,
Clinton, General Sir Henry, as a suc-
cessful theatre manager, 40–41
Closet-drama, people welcome the, 115;
a legitimate form in itself, 132; weak-
nesses in, 133; attitude toward the,
one of culture, 145
Coad, Professor Oral S., 22, 31; his inter-
esting "Life of William Dunlap", 57;
61, 62, 63; quoted, 66; 67
Coburn Players, the, 374, 379
Cockings, George, and "The Conquest
of Canada", 34-36
463
Index
Cohan, George M., the popular concep-
tion of American wit, 288-289
Coleman, S., the play publisher, 122
Coleman, William, a discriminating and
able critic, 79
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and the recon-
ciliation of characters, 386; 388
Collections of plays in manuscript and
type, 113-114
College of New Jersey. See PRINCETON
COLLEGE
College of Philadelphia, early plays at, 29
College of the City of New York, drama
in the, 374
Colleges, the drama encouraged in the,
in early days, 29-34; rising tide of
feeling against Great Britain in the,
44; amateur drama in the, 374; the
one-act play and the, 405
Colman, Reverend Benjamin, and his
tragedy of "Gustavus Vasa", 30; 31
Colonial theatre, the, 18-38
Columbian Celebration Company, and
Steele MacKaye's Spectatorium, 343-
345
Comedy, American writers urged to com-
pete in the realm of, 86; Brander
Matthews on our, 174; musical, 261;
and tragedy, 264; and American
humor, 264; a real valuation of, 271;
the Greek idea of, 275; in Shake-
speare, Molière, and Congreve, 275-
276; George Meredith an analyzer of,
276; and farce, 277
Comedy of manners, 323
Comic opera, 260, 262; George Ade's, 290
Comic Spirit, an illusive factor in literary
history, 271; humanistic aspect of,
271; the existing sense of the, 271-272;
as affecting drama, 272; what it means
in the affairs of life, 273, 274; Shake-
speare, Molière, and Congreve and the,
275-276; a vital discussion of the,
needed, 276; exists in our literature
but not in our drama, 291
Communal art, people gave first expres-
sions to, 4
Community, expressiveness in the, 374;
nature in our, expression, 375; a pos-
sible folk-drama and, interest, 375
Congress, issues an interdiction against
the theatre, 41 and note
"Conquest of Canada; or The Siege of
Quebec, The" (Cockings), 22; a con-
scious attempt to use historical material,
34-36
Consistency, musical comedy abhorred, 262
Contrast, The" (Tyler), 5; effect of,
on William Dunlap, 67; rapid writing
of, 73; Jonathan in, the first stage
Yankee, 72; introduction of "Yankee
Doodle" in, 73
Cooke, John Esten, 24
Cooper, Thomas Abthorpe, 67
Copyright, lack of, protection for dra-
matic authors, 88-91
Corcoran, Katherine. See HERNE, MRS.
JAMES A.
Courtney, W. L., and his "The Idea of
Tragedy", 266
Craftsmanship, improvement in the, of
American plays, 6-7
"Craftsmanship of the One-Act Play,
The" (Wilde), 398
Craig, Gordon, 418, 423
Craven, Frank, "Too Many Cooks",
and "The First Year", 356
Crinkle, Nym, and Steele MacKaye, 337
Critic. See DRAMATIC CRITIC
Crothers, Rachel, 10; "The Three of
Us", 197
Crowd, the, 371; psychology of, remains
the same, 373
Curtain-raisers, 394
DALY, AUGUSTIN, 171; his plan for adap-
tations, 172-173; quoted, 176; 177,
178; and the native dramatists, 178-
179; and Bret Harte, Mark Twain,
Howells, and James, 180-183; 187,
188, 192, 237
Davis, Owen, 14; quoted, 15; and his
success in melodrama, 296-297, 298-
299; and the legitimate drama, 299-
301, 302, 304
Davis, Richard Harding, 12
Delsarte, François, and Steele MacKaye,
334-335
DeMille, Cecil, 331
DeMille, Henry C., 237-238; collabo-
rates with Belasco, 238-240; 331, 333,
339
DeMille, William, his contributions to
the theatre, 331; and the demands of
the box-office, 331; 333; and “Strong-
heart", 359
Dime novel era in America, 295
Domestic life, Bidwell's early play por-
traying, 36-37
Double stage, an invention of Steele Mac-
Kaye, 237
Douglass, David, 21, 23; defends the
actor's calling, 25; his unique manner
of circumventing opposition, 26-28
464
Index
Drama, as an art, 2; relation between | Drama League of America, furthers the
literature and, 132-135; the art of all
arts, 230
Drama, American, English influence on
the early, 3-5; importance of the model
used in study of the, 5; what consti-
tutes an, 7-9; in the Colonial period,
18-38; received with favor in the
colleges, 29-34; of the Revolutionary
Era, 39-55; Dunlap and Tyler identi-
fied with beginnings of, 56; William
Dunlap the Father of, 60; and contem-
porary theatrical history, 60; diverse
channels of the, 62; literature of the
early, 71; identification of the theatri-
cal with the dramatic a weakness of the,
82-83; James K. Paulding on the,
83; its early lack of a national character,
84; Rees on the decline of the, 84-85;
effect of the offering of prizes on, 86-87;
and the lack of copyright protection,
88-91; as a reflection of American
life and taste, 92; early, moved in
definite currents, 93-94; the refining
process in the, 95; the Indian in, 96–
98; and the Yankee character, 98-102;
social" types of, circa 1845, 102-106;
lack of the historical sense in the, 106-
III; the "city" type in the, 111-112;
growth of interest in the study of the,
113-114; pervaded by a second-hand
spirit, 116; of the 1870's, 172–173;
handled as a commodity in the 1870's,
177; Bronson Howard, Dean of the,
189-207; William Winter's disrespect
for the modern, 208-209; Herne a com-
manding figure in, in the 1890's, 208;
David Belasco's influence in, 237-
259; the Theatrical Syndicate and,
241-244, 351-356, 359; forms of, 260-
291; utilized the native element in
the 1880-1890's, 279; melodrama in,
292-308; at a low ebb, 309; the Froh-
mans and, 309-311; Clyde Fitch's
place in, of his time, 312-328; Percy
MacKaye, pageantry and the com-
munity spirit in, 345-350, 371-380;
the poet, poetry and, 380-393; the one-
act play and, 391-402, 409-414; the
Little Theatre influence in, 402-409,
418; pleasant "accidentals
accidentals" of the,
415-422; the “new” spirit and its influ-
ence on the, 422-425; Eugene O'Neill
the free-lance of the, 426-432; O'Neill a
new starting-point of the, 432-435; im-
provement shown in the, 438; the field
of, must be studied intensively, 441
reading of plays, 402
"Dramatic Authors of America", quoted,
84; 93
Dramatic Authors' Society, 167
Dramatic critic, early, 21, 78-79; his lot
not a happy one, 77; Dunlap's opin-
ion of, 77-78; Edwin Forrest's atti-
tude towards the, 79; Washington
Irving as a, 79; Isaac Harby's idea of
the functions of the, 81-82; Poe as
a, 85-86; William Winter as a, 208-
209
Dramatic criticism, the first American,
77; William Coleman's, of a high type,
79-80; and Clyde Fitch, 314, 326
Dramatic literature, American, has not
been neglected, 92-93
Dramatics, educational, 45-46
Dramatization of novels, 263-264
Dreiser, Theodore, and "Plays of the
Natural and the Supernatural", 436
Drew, Mrs. John, and scenic realism in
"London Assurance
“Drifting Apart (Herne), a powerful
وو
""
231
temperance sermon, 219-220
Dunlap, William, 19; quoted, 22 note;
on the quality and worth of the early
actors, 23; the Nestor of the American
drama, 56-76; impulse to write plays,
56; friendship with men of letters, 56;
value of his "History of the American
Theatre", 56; "Life" of, by Coad,
57; discrimination as a dramatist, 57;
pages from his Diary, 58-59; accused
of plagiarism, 60; of high ideals as a
manager, 60; not strikingly original
in his work, 62; followed the methods
of his day, 63-64; Brander Matthews
on
André" by, 64-65; misfortunes of
his later life, 65; birth of, 67; early
life, 67; enters theatrical life, 67-68;
varied interests of, 68; artistic talent,
68; death of, 68-69; voluminous non-
dramatic writings of, 69; a man of
distinct culture, 69; some of his plays,
70; his "History of the American
Theatre" of distinct value, 71-72; his
contemporaries, 74; his contributions.
to American Drama of real worth, 76;
opinion of dramatic critics, 77-78
“Dunlap, Life of William.' See "LIFE
OF WILLIAM DUNLAP"
Dunne, Peter Finley, 14
EATON, W. P., "The American Stage of
To-Day", 371 note
465
Index
Educational dramatics, our first essayals | Footlights, 247, 254
in, 45-46
Electrician, present-day methods of the
stage, 247-248; at rehearsals, 248-253;
and the "light-plot", 250-252
Eliot, George, and Steele MacKaye, 336
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 386
England, influence of drama of, on that
of America, 3-5; melodrama in, 294
Evans, Nathaniel, 31
Experimental Theatre, winning the man-
ager's interest for the, I
Expressionism, 5; Lawson's "Proces-
sional" and, 435; wherein it some-
times errs, 435; conflicting ideas of the
elements that make for, 436
""
"FALL OF BRITISH TYRANNY, THE
(Leacock), an early chronicle play, 49-
51
Faneuil Hall, when, was a playhouse,
40; 48
Farce, the early, 66; and comedy, 277-
291
Farmer, the stage, in the early plays, 75
Fitch, Clyde, 7; wrote for the theatre
of his day, 309; Boston Transcript |
on work of, 312; "Letters" of, 312–313;
as a conversationalist, 313; played
the theatrical rules for success, 313;
on his successes abroad and the in-
difference of American public, 314;
Howells' opinion of "Glad Of It",
315; his distinctive contribution to the
theatre of the day, 315; chafes at
restraint imposed by lack of producers,
315-316; had certain qualities of the
novelist but also the dramatic instinct,
316-317; a realist, 317; his sincerity,
317-318; a typical New York drama-
tist, 319; his varied forms of drama,
320; his interest centred on the femi-
nine side of his plays, 320; the so-called
Fitchian flavor of his plays, 321; his
method of creating humor, 321-323;
list of his plays, 322; and the comedy
of manners, 323; his successes abroad,
324; in point of variety resembled
Pinero, 324; personality of his charac-
ters and their model, 325; his plays
excellent examples of stagecraft, 325;
and the press, 326; his style distinc-
tive, 326; extravagant in his inven-
tion, 327; his love of activity, 328;
quoted, 389
Folk-drama, 375,
Forbes, James, "The Chorus Lady"
and "The Show Shop", 360
Ford, Paul Leicester, 14, 18, 93
Foreigners, condescension of, towards
Americans, 116
CC
Forest Rose, The" (Woodworth), popu-
larity of, 75
Form, time is ripe for new, in American
drama, 260
a
Forrest, Edwin, and the dramatic critics,
79; and his offer of prizes, 117, 119–
121; steeped in melodrama, 121;
dominating figure, 129; and the work
of the Philadelphia School, 130; 138
"Francesca da Rimini" (Boker), 134,
141, 144
Free Theatre in France, the, 401
Freie Buehne in Germany, the, 401
Freneau, Philip, 31
Frohman, Charles, persuasive and mag-
netic personality of, 309; Barrie's
tribute to, 309; his commanding posi-
tion in the theatre world, 309-310;
love for his profession, 310-311; his
policy, 311
Frohman, Daniel, 238, 309
GALE, ZONA, "Miss Lulu Bett" and the
Pulitzer Prize, 420
Gallery god, and melodrama, 297
Garland, Hamlin, quoted, 8, 220, 223
Garrick, David, 3
Gates, Eleanor, 416, 417
Gay, John, "The Beggar's Opera" orig-
inal of musical comedy, 261
German conception of comedy, 276
Gilbert, W. S., 260, 261, 262
Gilded Age, The
dramatized, 184–185
Gillette, William, 7;
CC
(Mark Twain),
and 'Sherlock
Holmes", 298; a master of the well-
made play, 366; his primary object
to amuse, 367; varied types of his
plays, 367;
Sherlock Holmes" a
rousing melodrama, 367; and "The
Private Secretary", 368; adaptations,
collaborations, and original work of,
368; difficult to characterize, 368-
369; cautious as a dramatist, 369
Glasgow, Ellen, 14
Glaspell, Susan, 14
Godfrey, Thomas, 18, 23, 30, 31; and
"The Prince of Parthia",
32; fas-
cinating personality of, 32; 73, 135
Granville-Barker, Harley, 424
Folk sense, in the American theatre, 438 | Greek drama, revival of interest in, 376
466
Index
Greek, tragedy, 266, 267; comedy, 274,
275; derivation of melodrama, 292
Greeley, Horace, 80
Greet, Ben, our obligations to, 374; 379
Gregory, Lady, quoted, 397, 401
Group, The" (Warren), 43, 47; pub-
lished day before Battle of Lexington,
49
Gummere, Professor, and the tribal
vocero, 371
"Gustavus Vasa" (Colman), first tragedy
written in America, 30
HACKETT, JAMES H., 100; and his offer of
a prize, 118-119
Hallam, Lewis, an early actor of note,
20, 21, 23; and the opposition to plays
and players, 25-26, 72
Hallam, Mrs. Lewis, 21
Hallam, Miss Beatrice, 21, 24; and the
dramatic critics, 77
Hamilton, Clayton, "The Theory of the
Theatre", 371 note
Harby, Isaac, on dramatic criticism, 81-
82; and his experience in reading his
"The Gordian Knot", 90
Harper, Joseph, 23
Harrigan, Edward, 6; a delineator of a
special type, 278–285; list of his plays,
283; 287, 288
Harris, Henry B., 358, 359
Harte, Bret, collaboration with Bouci-
cault, Mark Twain, and Daly, 179–180;
183-184
Hart, Tony, 278
Harvard College, early plays at, 29, 30, 31
Hasenclever, Walter, 2
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 2, 4; "The Sunken
Bell", 387
Henderson, Archibald, 23, 32
Henrietta, The" (Howard), a character-
istic American play, 199
Henry, John, 23; and the opposition to
the actor, 25-26; 72
Henry, Mrs. John, a traditional beauty, 24
Herne, James A., 6, 14; quoted, 16;
Winter's unfair criticism of work of,
208-209; influenced by work of W. D.
Howells, 210; the chief character-
istic of his manuscript plays, 211-212;
birth of, 212; early entry on theatrical
life, 213; marriage, 214; meeting and
collaborating with Belasco, 214; second
marriage of, 214; influence of the
Boucicault drama on, 215; the natural-
ness of his acting, 215; list of his plays,
216-217; his gift of simplicity, 218;
|
his sense of fairness, 219; and "The
Rev. Griffith Davenport", 219; "Drift-
ing Apart" and Mrs. Herne's Mary
Miller, 219; his estimate of his own
plays, 221-222; the intellectual and
spiritual change in, 222; "Margaret
Fleming", 222; his activity as a writer
in two classes, 223; and the first per-
formance of "Margaret Fleming'
223-224; as a stage manager, 225;
took his art seriously, 226; firm in his
convictions and willing to state them,
227; his love of the beautiful and of
truth, 228-229; and the tragic of the
commonplace, 387
Herne, Mrs. James A., her inspiration,
214; her acting in "Drifting Apart",
219; Hamlin Garland's comment on,
220; in "Margaret Fleming", 224
Herrick, Professor Robert, on Clyde Fitch,
313-314
Hill, "Yankee", his portrayal of the
Yankee character, 100; IOI; offers
prize for play, 118
Hippodrome, the, 378
Historic association, use of the pageant
to symbolize, 374
Historical sense, American drama lacking
in any great, 106
History, American drama has not seri-
ously dealt with, 13; George Cocking's
early use of, in "The Conquest of
Canada", 34-36; Dunlap and the use
of, in his plays, 63-65; but lightly
treated in drama of early 1800's, 84;
in the American drama, 106-109
"History of the American Theatre"
(Dunlap), an interesting source
the early theatre atmosphere, 56; 60,
68; value and interest of, 71-72
Hodgkinson, John, 23
of
'Home, Sweet Home", sung for first time
in Payne's "Clari", 61
Hopkinson, Francis, 31, 135
Hornblow, Arthur, 20 note
Howard, Bronson, 2; on what constitutes
an American play, 8; 172, 173; Dean
of the American drama, 189-207; his
method unaffected by the later tech-
nique, 191; birth of, 192; early years,
193-194; first ventures in playwriting,
194-195; in journalism, 196; marriage,
197; his treatment of the American
character, 198-199; his "The Young
Mrs. Winthrop", 198; list of his
plays, 200-201; his repartee, 201; his
formula, 202; a painstaking worker,
467
Index
Howard, Bronson - Continued
202-203; his right to the title of
"dean 203-204; death of, 204;
memorial meeting in honor of, 204–205 ;
a practical worker in the existent
theatre, 205; a respecter of dramatic
construction, 205; lectures and ad-
dresses by, 205-206; his influence of
the managers of his time, 206; 238;
and "The Young Mrs. Winthrop", 333
Howells, William Dean, 6; and Augus-
tin Daly, 180–181; 185, 187; his
position in American literature, 210
211; on Herne's "Margaret Fleming",
224; appreciation of Edward Harrigan,
281-282; and his parlor dialogues,
394-395; Bernard Shaw on "A Dan-
gerous Ruffian" by, 395
Hoyt, Charles H., 14; the farce-comedies
of, 277, 278, 279, 280, 285-288; list
of his plays, 287
Hudson-Fulton celebration, 374
Hugo, Victor, 3
Human element, all plays
must have
American,
distinction
some dominant, 15
Humor, 116; comedy and
264; Charles Johnston's
between wit and, 277
Humphreys, Colonel David, 73
Hunter, Governor Robert, and his "An-
droboros: A Biographical Farce", 38
Hutton, Laurence, 93, 112, 173
IBSEN, HENRIK, 2, 3, 4, 15; always in
advance of his public, 197; and tragedy,
267, 268, 269, 387; 383, 386, 418
Indian character, fared as well in drama
as in fiction, 95; the "type" distinct,
95; table of, plays, 96
Ireland, Joseph N., 19
Johnston, Charles, his distinction between
humor and wit, 277
Jones, Henry Arthur, 7; on the literary
value of modern drama, 134; "Mrs.
Dane's Defence", 270; on realism,
388; 401; on the reading of plays, 402
Jones, J. S., on the lack of copyright
protection, 90–91; and his "The
People's Lawyer", IOI
ΙΟΙ
Journalism, many playwrights came from,
196
KAUFMAN and Connelly, and “Dulcy",
437
Kean, Charles, 156, 436
Keene, Laura, 158
Kelly, George, 10; and his handling of
irony in "The Torch Bearers" and
"The Show-Off," 437
Kemble, Charles, and John Howard
Payne, 125-126
Kemble, Fanny, on the American's sym-
pathy for the French character, 82
Kennedy, Charles Rann, "The Servant in
the House", 355
Kester, Paul, and “Don Quixote”, 272
Klein, Charles, quoted, 15-16; and "The
Lion and the Mouse", 353; a disciple
of theatricalism, 357; and the graft
play, 357
Knickerbocker School of Playwrights, 131
Knowles, Sheridan, 5; declares "Mac-
beth" a melodrama, 296
Koch, Professor Frederick H., and com-
munal play writing, 375; and his pupils
and the one-act play, 399, 400
Kotzebue, A. F. von, 63
LABOR, affiliation of the actor and, 2
Lamb, Charles, on tragedy, 383-384
Irish National Dramatic Society, Yeats Lawson, John Howard, 2, 14;
on the objects of the, 403
Irish Players, the, 401
Irving, Henry, 436
Irving, Washington, as a dramatic critic,
79, 123; collaboration with John
Howard Payne, 125-126
JACK CADE" (Conrad), 120, 121, 173
James, Henry, and Augustin Daly, 182-
183; 185-188
Jamestown, Virginia, 19
Jefferson, Joseph, 159–160
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 14
""
John Street Theatre, New York, 67; first
performance of Tyler's "The Contrast
at the, 72
Proces-
sional" and the expressionistic style,
435; his purpose in "Processional",
435-436
Leacock, John, 43; and his early chroni-
cle play "The Fall of British Tyranny",
43, 49-51; 135
"Legitimacy of the Closet-Drama, The",
132 note
"Legitimate" drama, Douglas Jerrold
coins the term, 296
Lewis, Sinclair, 14
Le Bon, and his treatise on "The Crowd",
371; 372
"Life of William Dunlap” (Coad), a
fascinating record of the man, 57
Lighting, present-day stage, 247-253
468
Index
"Literary History of the American Revo-
lution" (Tyler), 40
Literature, early appearance of the Indian
and Negro character in dramatic, 20;
the Gothic element in American, 62-63;
our dramatic, 92-93; early dramas
failures as, 93; devotion to the, of
England, 116; false to separate, and
drama, 132-133; the American idea
in, 204; a revulsion in dramatic, 384
Little Theatre, success of the, movement,
2; the pioneer, in America, 401; the
craze for the, 402-403; literature of
the, 404; influence of the, on the pro-
fessional theatre, 405; development
in the, 406-407; and the community
theatre spirit, 408-409; and the one-
act play, 405, 413-414; its desire for
a broader field, 414; beneficial effect
of the, on the theatre, 418
Local sense, and Clyde Fitch, 319–328
Logan, C. A., and the Yankee character,
100
"London Assurance" (Boucicault), 148–
151
Longfellow, Henry W., quoted, 133
"Lord Chumley" (DeMille Belasco), and
239-240
"Lost Lady, The" (Berkeley), one of the
earliest plays written in America, 18
Low, Samuel, 73
Lyceum Theatre, the, and Frohman and
Belasco, 238
Pilgrimage" and "Jeanne D'Arc",
346; list of his plays, 347; had spirit
of the pioneer, 348; and civic pag-
eantry, 348-349; his desire to serve
humanity, 349; "The Scarecrow"
his most effective stage piece, 350;
his "Canterbury Pilgrims" presented
at Gloucester, 373; 379; and "Sappho
and Phaon", 387; and the Little Thea-
tre movement, 403; 416
Maclaine, Archibald, Shakespearean.
scholar, 23
Madison Square Theatre, New York,
236-238
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 3; and tragedy,
267, 268, 270, 383; and Charles Lamb,
384; and the unexpressed in drama,
388
Mallory Brothers, and Steele MacKaye,
339-340
Manager, slow to change type of drama,
3; influenced by the English tradition,
4; handicaps of the early, 21; activi-
ties of the early actor-, 24; the, in
the Revolutionary Era, 40; Dunlap's
high ideal as a, 60, 66, 67-68; early,
distrustful of the native drama, 87-88;
treatment of the dramatist by the,
90-91; Boucicault as a, 159–162;
personality of Daly as a, 171; of the
1870's, 175–176; the, of Daly's era,
187; Belasco's success as a, 237–259;
the period of Frohman as a, 309–312,
315-316; the, under the Theatrical
Syndicate, 351-360; and pageantry,
377; and the dramatists of the " new
spirit, 422-423, 425; O'Neill independ-
ent of the, 426
MACKAYE, JAMES STEELE, invents double
stage, 237; and his dream for a Specta-
torium, 329; early experiments of,
329-330; his birth and early life, 333-
334; a protégé of Delsarte, 334-335;
his school of acting, 335-336; as an
actor and playwright, 336-340; list
of his plays, 337-338; and the Mallory
brothers, 339–340; a serious-minded
man, 340-341; and "Paul Kauver"
("Anarchy"), 341-342; his School of
Expression and the American Academy
of Dramatic Arts, 342; personal pop-
ularity of, 342; and the Spectatorium
at Chicago, 343-345
MacKaye, Percy, and his father's plans
for a Spectatorium, 329; success in
civic pageants, 330; came to the
theatre as a poet, 331-332, 333; his
impulses have a social foundation,
332; birth of, 345; and "A Garland
for Silvia", 345; and "Fenris the
Wolf", 345-346; “A Canterbury | Masques and pageants, the value of, 2
Manchester Repertory Theatre, 401
Manners, Hartley, "Peg o' My Heart",
354
Marble, Dan, an exponent of the Yankee
character in drama, 86
Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 374
"Margaret Fleming" (Herne), the intense
realism of, 222-223; difficulty in first
presentation of, 223–224
Markoe, Peter, 61, 73
Marks, Mrs. Lionel.
JOSEPHINE PRESTON
Mark Twain, in collaboration_with_Bret
Harte, 180; and Augustin Daly, 182;
183-185
See PEABODY,
Maryland Gazette, 21, 24; contained
first dramatic criticism in America,
77
469
Index
Matthews, Albert, on the early plays at | Murray-Kean, early theatrical ventures
Harvard, 30
Matthews, Brander, 6, 93, 130; on closet-
drama, 132, 133, 145; 174-175;
quoted, 273-274; "A Study of the
Drama", 371 note
Mathews, Cornelius, on the lack of copy-
right protection, 89
Melodrama, Dunlap first introduces the
French, in New York, 62; Rees rails
against the, trash, 84; 174, 260; use
of the term, undergone many changes,
292; historical view of, 292; and the
relation between music and drama,
293; unique methods of advertising,
293 note; in England, 294; Belasco
and Daly and, 295; characteristics of,
of the 1890's, 295, 296–297; and the
gallery gods, 297; and Owen Davis,
298-301; waning popularity of, 301;
Theodore Kramer and, 302; technique
of, in the 1890's, 303-305; and the
moving picture, 305-306, 307
Meredith, George, as an analyzer of
comedy, 276
Merington, Marguerite, 315-316
Merry, Mrs. Robert, 23, 67
Meyerhold, V. E., 2
Middleton, George, quoted, 408; and
Percival Wilde, 410
Mind in the Making, The" (Robinson),
17
Minshull, John, 74
Miracle plays, the old English and French,
295
"Mischianza", the famous, in Philadel-
phia, 43
Mister Dooley. See DUNNE, PETER FINLEY
Mitchell, Langdon, on Americans, 16–17;
and his high comedy "The New York
Idea", 416, 417
and
Molière, and the Comic Spirit, 275
Moody, William Vaughn, 2, 14, 15;
"The Great Divide", 388; 416; and
"The Sabine Woman", 417
Morton, John Maddison, and the early
curtain-raisers", 394
Moving picture, melodrama and the,
305-306; world-wide field of the, 306;
technique of the, 306-307; history of
the, 307; a temptation for the play-
wright, 307-308
Mowatt, Mrs. Anna Cora, 9; Poe's
critique of her "Fashion", -85-86; 93,
95, 102; and her "Autobiography of
an Actress", 103; 104, 105
Munford, Colonel William, 52
of, 20
Music, relation between, and drama, 293
Musical comedy, an early manager's
opinion on, 4; a hybrid type, 261;
popularity of the form, 261; ephemeral
life of, 262; lack of consistency in,
262
NASSAU STREET THEATRE, NEW YORK,
19, 20
National Academy of Design, William
Dunlap and the establishment of the,
68
National characteristics, Colonial plays
devoid of, 38
National Theatre idea, I
Negro, crude attempts at, dialect, 75;
delineation of the, character, 103-104
New England pedler, relationship to
Yankee character in American drama,
98
New England School of Playwrights, 132
"New" Spirit, in the theatre, 422-425
New Theatre, 356; and Galsworthy's
"Strife", 372
New Theatre, New York, 230
New York, early performances in, 20;
and General Clinton's successful mili-
tary theatre, 40-41; first performance
of "Fashion" in, 102-103; the theatre
of the 1870's in, 171 et seq.; Belasco in,
236-244; and the era of Hoyt, Harri-
gan, and Weber and Fields, 277-288;
advertising melodrama in, 293 note;
and Fitch's appeal to the local sense,
329; and the Theatrical Syndicate, 351;
the flourishing Theatre Guild of, 407;
the spirit of reform and the theatre
centre of, 418
Nirdlinger, Charles F., "The World and
His Wife", 270
Noah, M. M., a contemporary of Dunlap,
74
Norris, Frank, 14
Novel writing and play writing, 263-264,
316
Novels, dramatization of, 263–264
ONE-ACT PLAY, possibilities of the, 391;
of recent origin, 391-392; similarity
between the short-story form and the,
392; and the earlier curtain-raisers,
394; requires a high type of work-
manship, 397-398; the matter of
materials for, 398-400; the rise of the
American, 400–401; not encouraged
470
Index
}
by the professional theatre, 401-402;
the natural outlet for the Little Thea-
tre, 405; and the Theatre Guild, 407–
408; little need for it in professional
field, 408; many examples of best type
of, by Americans, 409; Wilde as an
exponent of the, 409-410; its adapta-
bility, 410-411; its temptation for
the writer, 411; and sincerity and
imitation, 411–412; changing the,
into a longer drama, 412; the Little
Theatre deserting the, 414; a useful
adjunct to the larger theatre, 414
O'Neill, Eugene, 2, 13, 14; quoted, 426;
has blazed his own trail, 426; success
from unprepossessing environment,
427; his mental note-book, 427; and
Masefield, 427; "The Hairy Ape"
the epitome of his bitterness, 427, 429;
list of his plays, 428; Anna Chris-
tie" his one naturalistic play, 429;
his individualistic attitude, 429; plays
of the sea, 429-430; his limitations,
430; "All God's Chillun Got Wings
and “Emperor Jones", 430; his_un-
compromising manner, 431;
New
England, "Beyond the Horizon" and,
431; his most successful plays, 431-
432; Hofmannsthal's opinion of, 432;
not a pleasant "accidental", 432-433;
to be taken seriously, 433; Beyond
the Horizon" and the Pulitzer Prize, 434
Open-air Theatre, 374, 375, 376; and a
new pageantry, 377
CC
Owens, John E., as Solon Shingle, 101
PAGEANT MASTER, 377
Pageants, the value of, 2; Percy Mac-
Kaye and, 330
Pageantry, the open-air theatre and
a possible new, 377; and historic
celebrations, 377; is educational, 378
Paine, Robert Treat, 80; high opinion
of the social influence of the theatre, 81
Palmer, Albert M., 171; on dramatic
situation and plot, 177; 236, 237
Park Theatre, New York, 67, 68
Parlor dialogues, Howells's success in
writing, 394-395
Pattee, Professor, on the American short
story, 396
Paulding, James K., on a National drama,
83-84
Payne, John Howard, 5; "Home, Sweet
Home" sung for first time in his
“Clari”, 61; 74; on the lack of copy-
right protection, 88-89, 126-127;
دو
closely identified with the theatre of
London, 122; as an adapter of French
plays, 122; his host of friends in Eng-
land, 122-123; best work written
while abroad, 123; hampered by Eng-
lish theatre cliques, 123-125; list of his
plays, 124; Clari and "Home,
Sweet Home", 125; collaboration
with Washington Irving, 125-126;
dramatic benefits offered, 126; for-
sakes the theatre, 127; his life one of
violent contrasts, 127-128; much of
his work of little real worth, 128; 130
Peabody, Josephine Preston, 332; and
her prize play "The Piper", 382
Pennsylvania Chronicle, 25
Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré, Le, New
Orleans, 413
Phelps, Professor William Lyon, on Clyde
Fitch as a conversationalist, 311
Philadelphia, in history of American
theatre, 135
Philadelphia School of Playwrights, work
of the, and Edwin Forrest, 130; 132;
student's enthusiasm evident in work
of, 134; takes high rank in American
theatre and drama, 135; list of plays
by, 136-137
Pinero, Arthur Wing, "Iris", 269; 401
Play, essentials of an American, 7-12
Playbill, Douglass' unique, to allay oppo-
sition in Newport, 26-28
Plays, the publishing of, 402
"Plays Produced Under the Stage Man-
agement of David Belasco", 257-258
Poe, Edgar Allan, conscientious as a
dramatic critic, 85-86; on "The Amer-
ican Drama", 380; and his case against
the long poem, 392-393, 399
Poet, has misinterpreted the functions
of the drama, 381; when, turns play-
wright, 382; theatre judges, by his
explicit word, 385; generally fails in
the theatre, 386
Poetic drama, inadequacy of the so-
called, 380; in process of adjustment,
384-385; the stage desires the, 389;
another name desired for, 390
Political type, in American drama, 95,
107
Politics, not adequately dealt with by
American drama, 13, 438
Pollock, Channing, and "The Fool",
354-355
"Ponteach" (Rogers), America's first
problem play, 36
Portmanteau Theatre, Stuart Walker's, 414
471
Index
Port Royal, Nova Scotia, early perform- | SANTAYANA, GEORGE, quoted, 17
ance at, 18
Potter, Paul M., 263
Power, Tyrone, 22
Prince of Parthia, The" (Godfrey),
first play by an American presented
on professional stage, 18; 23, 30, 73
Princeton College, early plays at, 29, 31
Prizes, the offering of, for plays, 117-122;
awarding of, not necessarily conclusive,
420
Publication of plays in early days, 105
RAGTIME MUSIC, 261
Reade, Charles, 161
Realism, the, in "Margaret Fleming",
223; wherein it sometimes errs, 435
Rees, James, 48; quoted, 69; on the
decline of the drama and dramatic
talent, 84; his "The Dramatic Authors
of America” a fascinating record, 93;
119
Reinhardt, Max, 329, 418, 423, 424, 425
Repartee, Bronson Howard's use of, 201
"Representative American Dramas, Na-
tional and Local" (Moses), 382 note
Representative American Dramatists"
(Moses), 109, 144
"Representative Plays" (Moses), 19 note
Reverend Griffith Davenport, The"
(Herne), 219, 220; William Archer's
comment on, 221; 224
Revolution, the theatre, 14
Revolutionary Era, the drama and the
playwright of the, 39–55
Revolutionary writers were special
pleaders, 54
Rice, Elmer, his unique "On Trial", 434;
and the distinctive "The Adding
Machine", 434-435
CC
Rip Van Winkle", and German folk
superstition, 63; 421
Robertson, Agnes (Mrs. Dion Boucicault),
153, 154, 155-157, 158, 159
Robin, Abbé, on early plays at Harvard,
31
Robinson, Professor James H., quoted, 17
Rogers, Major Robert, and "Ponteach",
35-36; 95
Rogers Brothers, 278
Romantic spirit, struggle between classic
spirit and, 293
"Rose of the Rancho, The" (Belasco
and Tully), the "light-plot" of, 250-
252
Rowson, Susannah, 61
Royal Gazette, quoted, 40–41
Satire, Androboros" America's first,
38; contest in, between Loyalist and
Royalist, 42-43; Mrs. Warren's effec-
tive handling of, 47; in Charles Hoyt's
farces, 285-286
Scene painter, the new, 423
Schlegel, and melodrama, 293-294
Seldes, Gilbert, "The Seven Lively Arts",
278; 437
Seilhamer, George O., 19, 24, 25, 41
Shakespeare, and tragedy, 267; and com-
edy, 275
Shaw, George Bernard, 3, 4, 15; and
emotional climaxes in Shakespeare,
388; opinion of Howells' "A Dan-
gerous Ruffian", 395
Sheldon, Edward, and "The Boss", 353;
416, 417
"Shore Acres" (Herne), 14
Short-story, the one-act play and the,
form, 392; Professor Pattee on the
American, 396
Singleton, John, his prologue for first
performance of "Lethe" in Williams-
burg, 21
Smith, Charles Sprague, and the People's
Institute, 378
Smith, Harry B., quoted, 9
Smith, Richard Penn, his preface to "The
Eighth of January", 88; 139
Smith, Winchell, "The Boomerang",
and "The Fortune Teller", 355
Social drama, "Fashion" the high-water
mark of the, of the period, 102-106
Social plays, our, lacking in manner, 438
Sonneck, O. G., on Tyler's "May Day
in Town", 61
Sothern, E. H., and Percy MacKaye, 346
Southern dramatists, the, 130
Southern School of Playwrights, 132
Southwark Theatre, Philadelphia, 19,21, 40
Spectatorium, Steele MacKaye's concep-
tion of a, 329, 343-345
Spirit of the Times, The, quoted, 86
Stage Guild Masques, the, 375 note
Stage lighting, psychology of, 247-255
Starring system, independence of the
theatre frustrated by the, 84
Stanislavsky, Constantin, 2, 423
Stevens, Thomas Woods, 379
Stock company, 171; demands made on
the dramatist by the, 239
Stoddard, Richard Henry, on George H.
Boker, 141-143
Stone, John Augustus, 95
Storer, Maria. See HENRY, MRS. JOHN
472
Index
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, her prejudice
against the theatre, 29; and the drama-
tization of "Uncle Tom's Cabin” 109-
III
Strindberg, Johann August, 2
Sudermann, Hermann, 4
Sullivan, Arthur, 261
Sunlight, moonlight and footlight, 374, 375
Supernatural, early dramatists resorted
to the, 63
Switchboard, Belasco and the psychology
of the, 246, 247-255
Synge, J. M., and "Riders to the Sea",
391-401
TABLES OF PLAYS:
Some Colonial Plays, 33
Some Plays of the Revolutionary Pe-
riod, 42
Some Pre-National Plays, 55
William Dunlap, 70
Some Indian Plays, 96
Plays with Yankee characters, 99
Some Yankee Plays, 102
John Howard Payne, 124
Knickerbocker School of Playwrights, 13 1
Philadelphia School of Playwrights,
136-137
George Henry Boker, 140
James A. Herne, 216–217
David Belasco, 243-244
Edward Harrigan, 283
Charles H. Hoyt, 287
Clyde Fitch, 322
Steele MacKaye, 338
Percy MacKaye, 347
Augustus Thomas, 262-263
Tarkington, Booth, quoted, in
Taylor, Tom, the Yankee in his "Our
American Cousin", 9
Technique, attempts to teach, of the
drama, 415-416; mere improvement
of, not all in fostering good drama, 419
Thanet, Octave, 14
Theatre, effect of the American, on the
playwright, 1; effort to free, from the
speculator, 1; as a social institution,
2; changes came slowly in the, 3;
English background in early, 3; Eng-
lish influence on early, 4; long and
devious road of the, 5; broader field
opened for the, 14; beginnings of,
18-38; early buildings for the, 19;
sectarian and political opposition to
the, 24-29; during the Revolutionary
Era, 39-55; and William Dunlap and
his contemporaries, 56-76; early critics.
interested in broad aspects of the, 81;
standard repertory of the, in early
1800's English not native, 91; early
dramas for, not for reading, 92; his-
tory in the, 109; flourished in spite
of poor material, 111-112; influence
of Philadelphia School in the, 135–139;
Boucicault and the, 146-170; status
of the, in the 1870's, 171-178; Augus-
tin Daly and the, 178-188; and Bron-
son Howard, 189-207; the psychology
of the switchboard and the, 246–254;
great changes in the, 254-256; Ameri-
can, has created no special form of
drama, 260; American, forgetful of
its past, 278; advertising, 293 note;
the legitimate, and melodrama, 298;
and the coming of the moving picture,
305-308; the Frohman system and
the, 309-311; a narrow parochialism
in the, 315; Steele MacKaye and the
mechanism of the, 329; the poet,
poetry and the, 331-332, 345-346,
379-390; innovations of MacKaye
in the, 335-337; pageantry, the com-
munity spirit and the, 348-350; the
Theatrical Syndicate and the, 351-353,
359-360; "box-office" drama and the,
354-359; and human need, 371; a
more intimate and subtle, 373; the
out-of-doors, 373-375; natural re-
sources in communal expression in the,
375; masques, carnivals, pageants and
the, 377-378; the Civic, 378; the
modern, and life, 381; and the advent
of the one-act play, 391-402; and the
rise of the Little Theatre, 402-409,
418; an attractive gamble, 419; the
new" spirit in the, 422-425; the
old, without sensitiveness, 424; Eugene
O'Neill and the American, 426–434;
folk sense in our, 438
Theatre Arts Magazine, 329
Theatre Guild, New York, and experi-
mentalism, 407; and the one-act play,
407-408; still dominated by the foreign
note, 425
Theatrical Syndicate, formation of the,
351; Belasco's independence of the,
351; made the theatre a stabilized
"industry", 352; as it affects the
dramatist, 352-357; and whipping
plays into shape, 359
Thomas, Augustus, 7, 8; quoted, 9; 197;
and telepathy, 260, 363; his sectional
division of the country, 319-320; his
ingenuity, 360; early plays of, 361;
473
Index
Thomas, Augustus Continued
a master of technique, 361; birth and
varied career of, 361; list of his plays,
362-363; on three of his own plays,
364; evidences of his growth, 364-
365; and "As a Man Thinks", 365;
prefaces to his plays, 365-366
Thorndike, Professor Ashley, 265
Tiaroff, 2
Tolstoi, Lyoff, 3, 4
Toy Theatre, Boston, 401
Tragedy, and comedy, 264; as a form not
constant but a convention of art, 265;
Aristotle's definition of, 266; Greek
conception of, 266; differing forms of,
266-268; as a form of art not of the
American spirit, 269; dramatic terms
too narrow, 270
Tragic Spirit, American recognition of,
should be pronounced, 264; Americans
blind themselves to the, 267; as one
unchangeable principle, 269
Tree, Beerbohm, 436
Trust, the Theatrical, and Belasco, 241,
243-244
Tyler, Professor Moses Coit, 19, 20, 40
Tyler, Royall, 5; first playwright of
American social manner, 21; his influ-
ence on William Dunlap, 56, 72;
Sonneck on his "May Day in Town",
61; introduces the first stage Yankee
in America, 72; rapid writing of "The
Contrast", 73; plays of timely interest
by, 73-74; 99, 100
"UNCLE SAM", relationship to Yankee
character in American drama, 98
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" (Stowe), 14, 29
University of North Carolina and the
one-act play form, 399
"Uplift", the quality of, in American
drama, 10; crudely expressed by Amer-
ican drama, 260
Upton, Robert, 20
VAUDEVILLE, 261; now legitimatized, 262;
chief characteristics of, will live, 262 ; has
no unified or consecutive interest, 262;
has a "time clock" value, 263
Virginia Gazette, quoted, 20, 21
Virginia Magazine of Historical
raphy, 20 note
Vocero, the tribal, 4, 371
Wallack, Lester, 171, 173, 192, 236
Walter, Eugene, and "The Easiest Way",
270, 416, 417
Warfield, David, and "The Music
Master",
2 354
Warren, Mrs. Mercy, 43; her effective
use of satire, 47; John Adams' opinion
of, 47-48; and General Burgoyne, 48-
49; 50
Washington, George, and the Congres-
sional ban on the theatre, 41; his
enjoyment of "Darby's Return",
60; a subscriber to publication of
Tyler's "The Contrast", 73
Washington Square Players, 405-407
Weber and Fields, 6, 278, 287
Wignell, Thomas, 22; as the first stage
Yankee in "The Contrast", 72
Wilde, Percival, and "The Craftsmanship
of the One-Act Play", 398; as an ex-
ponent of the one-act play, 409-410
Wilkins-Freeman, Mary E., 14
William and Mary College, early theat-
ricals at, 19, 29-30
Williams, Jesse Lynch, 419
Williamsburg, Virginia, 3, 20, 21, 30
Willis, Eola, as to the first theatre in
America, 19; 20, 21, 30
Willis, Nathaniel P., 117
Winter, William, belittled the work of
Herne, 208; his limited vision, 209;
his preference in drama, 209
Wister, Owen, quoted, 11
Wit, Charles Johnston's distinction be-
tween humor and, 277
Wood, William B., quoted, 24, 87
Woods, A. H., and melodrama, 297, 298,
299, 304
Woodworth, Samuel, best known as a
poet, 75; popularity of his "The Forest
Rose", 75
YALE COLLEGE, early plays at, 29, 31
Yale Dramatic Association, 401
Yankee, first stage use of the, character,
72; similarity in type of stage, 75;
Dan Marble an exponent of the, type,
86; need for study of the, character
in drama, 98-100; characteristics of
the, type, 100–102
Biog-"Yankee Chronology", Dunlap's ex-
planation of the additional stanzas
to, 65
"Voice of Nature, The" (Dunlap), first
French melodrama in New York, 62
WALLACK, JAMES, and his offer of prizes
for plays, 117-118
"Yankee Doodle", first stage use of, in
Barton's "Disappointment", 73
Yeats, W. B., 401; quoted, 403-404
ZOLA, ÉMILE, 3
474


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