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THE DEVELOPMENT OF 
 THE DRAMA 
 
v.i 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF 
 THE DRAMA 
 
 BY 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 LITT.D. (yALE) 
 PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1904 
 
lo-J 
 
 ENGL. LIB. FD. 
 
 Copyright, 1903, by 
 Brander Matthews 
 
 Publhhtd SepUmber, iqcQ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The interesting story of the slow evolution of 
 the drama, from, its rude beginnings far back in 
 the forgotten past to the pictorial complexity 
 of the present day, has not hitherto been told in 
 a single volume. Most of the existing histories 
 of dramatic literature are unduly distended with 
 critical biographies of distinguished playwrights. 
 Some of them — in particular, Schlegel's — are 
 filled with the echoes of bygone controversies. 
 No one of them, moreover, has taken into account 
 the threefold influence exerted on the form of 
 the drama of every epoch by the demands of 
 the actors, by the size and shape and circum- 
 stances of the theaters of that time, and by the 
 changing prejudices of the contemporary audi- 
 ences. 
 
 Each of these influences has been kept in mind 
 constantly in the present attempt clearly to trace 
 the development of the drama itself, down 
 through the ages, without ever delaying to nar- 
 rate the lives of the leading writers who found 
 in this form of literary art their chief means of 
 self-expression. Such criticism as there may be in 
 
 t^> 10:^5 
 
PREFACE • ^ 
 
 the following pages is not so much philosophical 
 or even esthetic as it is technical ; it is concerned 
 less with the poetry which illumimes the master- 
 pieces of the great dramatists than it is with the 
 sheer craftsmanship of the mdcst skilful play- 
 wrights. The desire of the author has been to 
 bring out the essential unity of the history of the 
 drama and to make plain the permanence of the 
 principles underlying the art of the stage. 
 
 As it has seemed best to leave the book unen- 
 cumbered with foot-notes, it may be recorded here 
 that the conventions of the drama have been con- 
 sidered (at greater length than was here possible) 
 in a paper published in a volume entitled 'The 
 Historical Novel, and Other Essays ' — a volume 
 which also contains an essay on * The Relation of 
 the Drama to Literature.' In the third edition of 
 another volume, 'Aspects of Fiction,' there was 
 included a paper on 'The Importance of the 
 Folk-Theater.' 
 
 Of the ten lectures which make up the present 
 volume, one or more have been delivered during 
 the past two or three years at the Royal Institution 
 of Great Britain, at the Brooklyn Institute, at 
 Columbia University, and before the National 
 Institute of Arts and Letters. 
 
 B. M. 
 
 Columbia University 
 
 in the City of New York. 
 
 vi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGB 
 
 I The Art of the Dramatist .... i 
 
 II Greek Tragedy 38 
 
 III Greek and Roman Comedy .... 74 
 
 IV The Medieval Drama 107 
 
 V The Drama in Spain 147 
 
 VI The Drama in England t86 
 
 VII The Drama in France 227 
 
 VI 11 The Drama in the Eighteenth Century 26} 
 
 IX The Drama in the Nineteenth Century 296 
 
 X The Future of the Drama .... 325 
 
1/ 
 
I. THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 CRITICISM nowadays is franker than ever 
 before in acknowledging the kinship of the 
 various arts— painting and sculpture, music and 
 poetry and the drama. As an American poet 
 once made an Italian painter say, 
 
 It seems to me 
 All arts are one,— all branches on one tree,— 
 All fingers, as it were, upon one hand. 
 
 And yet at the same time criticism is ever re- 
 vealing an increasing appreciation of the special 
 characteristics of each of the arts, a keener relish 
 for the qualities peculiar to that art alone and 
 absent from all the others. While every art can 
 make us see and feel and think, each in its own 
 way, the means of each are as different as may 
 be; and whenever their methods are confused 
 there is at once loss of power and misdirection of 
 energy. Ut is a part of the duty of the epic poet 
 to tell us a story; of the painter to give us an 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 impression of the visible world ; of the sculptor 
 to fill our eyes with the beauty of form alone; 
 and of the musician to charm our ears with 
 rhythm and with harmony. But when the 
 painter puts his chief reliance upon story-telling, 
 and when the poet seeks to rival the musician, 
 then of a certainty will they fail to attain the higher 
 summits of possible achievement in their own 
 arts. 
 
 (It is in their technical processes that the arts 
 re strangers, in the methods by which the artist 
 xpresses himself; and this is why technic is 
 gain coming into the high esteem in which it 
 was held during the Renascence, the most glori- 
 ous epoch for all the allied arts since the day when 
 Pericles ceased to rule over Athens. Craftsman- 
 ship, the mastery of his tools— this is what we 
 are now demanding of the practitioner of every 
 art. Craf tsman ship can be his for the asking; he 
 can have it if he will pay the price in toil and care 
 and time. The message he may have to deliver 
 is the gift of God, after all; but the artist himself 
 is responsible for the clearness and the eloquence 
 of its delivery. The prime duty of the craftsman 
 is to know his trade, that he may give a fitting 
 form to whatsoever ideas may hereafter possess 
 him. His second obligation is to understand the 
 possibilities of his art, its limitations, its bounda-( 
 ries, so that he may conquer all temptation to tryj 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 to do what cannot be done by the only means at 
 his command. 
 
 ^One art there is, and only one, which canf avail 
 itself at will of almost every device of all the other 
 arts. One art there is which can reach out and 
 borrow the aid of the poet, the painter, the sculp- 
 tor, the musician, compelling them all to help it 
 toward its own perfection. One art there is 
 which, without danger of confusion, without 
 departing from its own object, without loss of 
 force, can, at one and the same time, tell a story, 
 and give an impression of the visible world, and 
 fill our eyes with the beauty of form, and charm 
 our ears with rhythm and with harmony. This 
 one art is the art of the drama, the art which 
 most completely displays the life of man— "the 
 VDungest of^t he, sis ter arts." the British poet 
 called it, " where all their beauty blends " ; 
 
 For ill can Poetry express 
 
 Full many a tone of thought sublime, 
 And Painting, mute and motionless, 
 
 Steals but a glance of time. 
 But by the mighty actor brought, 
 
 Illusion's perfect triumphs come; 
 Verse ceases to be airy thought, 
 
 And Sculpture to be dumb. 
 
 To many of us the drama gives merely un- 
 thinking amusement in the playhouse; and to 
 not a few others it presents itself as the loftiest 
 
 3 
 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 form of poetry. To some its chief quality is that 
 it enables them to disentangle the philosophy of 
 the dramatist himself, and to declare his ethical 
 code; and to others it affords satisfaction because 
 it is ever a gallery of character-portraits, wherein 
 we can each of us enlarge our knowledge of our 
 fellow-man. To a few it is significant as the 
 material by which we can best distinguish na- 
 tional characteristics ; and to more it is of value 
 chiefly because of its words, which can be 
 scanned and parsed and traced to their sources. 
 /And to the scantiest group of all, perhaps, dra- 
 1 matic literature is ever interesting because it is the 
 V highest manifestation of the dramatic instinct uni- 
 versal in mankind, and because it supplies abun- 
 dantly the special pleasure which only the art of 
 the dramatist can provide. 
 
 To this smallest body I confess myself to be- 
 long. The drama is interesting in many ways, 
 no doubt; but to me, 1 admit, it is always most 
 interesting when it is considered simply as drama 
 —as a work of dramaturgic craftsmanship pre- 
 pared especially to be performed by actors, in a 
 theater, before an audience. As all the great 
 plays were written to be played, it is perhaps 
 most profitable always to consider them from 
 this point of view— from the point of view of the 
 playhouse, in the terms of which they were con- 
 ceived. Other methods of approach there are 
 4 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 also, of course, but this is ever the most neces- 
 sary. Nor is it a work of supererogation to 
 repeat this apparently obvious statement, and to 
 persist in reiterating it, since the essential quality 
 of the mighty masterpieces of dramatic literature 
 is only too frequently neglected. Praise is abun- 
 dant for the poetry that adorns the great plays, 
 for their sentences of pregnant wisdom, for the 
 subtlety of their authors' insight into conflicting 
 human motives; but due consideration is seldom 
 bestowed on the skill with which the action is 
 conducted-4tlje_acti^n, which is the heart of the 
 play, and without which it is lifeless and inert, . 
 To some of us it seems like an arrant absurdity 
 that school-boys should now be forced to scan 
 the pathetic passages of Sophocles, and that 
 school-girls should be set to parse the swift re- 
 partees of Shakspere, before these young students 
 have been made to see clearly that the tragedies 
 of the Greek and the romantic-comedies of the 
 Englishman are as great as they are, not because 
 of any mere metrical or grammatical felicity, but 
 because of their admirable cj ramatu rgic structure 
 —because Sophocles and Shakspere were both 6i 
 them born playwrights; because they were, first 
 of all, not writers of poetry, but makers of plays, 
 masters of all the tricks of their trade, and pos- 
 sessing completely all the resources of their craft. 
 The dramatist needs to have his full share of play- 
 
 5 
 
 i,\ 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 ./naking skill before he can adequately display his 
 power as a poet; and i^s this play-making skill, 
 this dramaturgic faculty, which sustains and vi- 
 talizes every masterpiece of dramatic literature. 
 
 The dramaturgic faculty is evolved slowly with 
 the growth of civilization ; and play-making skill 
 is one of the latest of human accomplishments. 
 But the rudimentary effort is everywhere visible, 
 even among the most primitive peoples. As we 
 t consider the history of human progress we per- 
 
 "^Iceive that the drama is almost the very earliest of 
 Uhe arts, as early, perhaps, as the art of personal 
 adornment; and we discover, also, that it is the 
 
 J very latest to attain its complete expression. 
 
 - Only among the races which may be excep- 
 tionally endowed with energy of imagination and 
 with power of construction does the drama arrive 
 at its highest possibility of achievement. In these 
 rare cases it is the most splendid expression of the 
 special gifts of these races; it is the sublime 
 summit of their literatures. But in the noblest 
 works of the great Greek dramatists, and in the 
 most powerful plays of the Elizabethans, the 
 same principles are applied which we discover 
 doubtfully in the rudest theatrical attempts of the 
 lowest savages. Sophocles profited by Aeschylus, 
 and Shakspere by Marlowe; but if it had not been 
 for many humble beginners following one an- 
 other, each bettering the effort of him who went 
 6 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 before, and all alike forgotten now, Aeschylus 
 and Marlowe would never have found a form of 
 drama ready to their hands. By considering the 
 dramaturgic art throughout its whole history, 
 we can best win our way to an understanding 
 of its essential principles. We learn most, no 
 doubt, by a study of the workmanship of the 
 undisputed masters ; and yet only at our peril do 
 we neglect the obscure origins of the art far back 
 in the remotest past. 
 
 It is out of crude efforts, such as may still be 
 observed among the Eskimo and the tribes of the 
 Amazon, that the dramatic art was toilfully devel- 
 oped by our own predecessors as taste refined and 
 civilization advanced. The traditions of these 
 rude play-makers were passed down from genera- 
 tion to veneration, and the art slowly discovered 
 itself. rThe true dramatist is like the true states- 
 man in recognizing that nothing substantial caa. 
 bejTiade^out^Qfhand, and that not hing survives 
 whidTisnot a dev'eTopment of institutions already 
 existin g. The one untried novelty in the Consti- 
 tution of the United States soon failed of its pur- 
 pose; and whenever the merely literary critics 
 have succeeded in persuading the dramatic poet 
 to discard the playhouse methods of his own 
 day, the result has been disastrous.! Art must 
 7 ( 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 always make haste slowly; and no art ever 
 sprang like Minerva full grown from the head of 
 Jove— not even the dramatic art in the city of the 
 violet crown, where Phidias wrought the tower- 
 ing statue of the wise goddess. 
 
 In these earlier attempts at the drama there is 
 no tincture of literature; and more often than not 
 these primitive plays were even unwritten, being 
 wrought out by word of mouth. Sometimes they 
 were a combination of pantomimic action with 
 song and dance; and sometimes the dramatic ele- 
 ment served solely to emphasize the important 
 passages of a narrative chant. In the childhood 
 of a race or of an individual, we discover that the 
 lyric, the dramatic, and the narrative are only 
 imperfectly differentiated from one another; and 
 we can gain some insight into primitive condi- 
 tions of the drama by going back to our own 
 childhood, since youth is the special season of 
 make-believe, strong as that instinct is ifi all the 
 seven ages of man. The child is ever imitative 
 and mimetic. The little girl is willing to credit 
 her doll with feelings like her own and to hold 
 converse with it; she is glad to pretend that it is 
 ill; and she is delighted to be able to change the 
 sheets on its bed as the trained nurse changed 
 hers when she herself lay sick. (I'One of the most 
 striking discoveries of modern Science has made 
 it plain that we must each of us follow the de- 
 8 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 velopment of our ancestors, and pass through the. 
 successive stages of animal and social evolution. > 
 Much of this journey takes place before we are 
 born, but not a little is left for the years of in- 
 fancy and of youth. ^ 
 
 It is from the observation of children and from 
 the study of savages that the comparative an- 
 thropologist has been able to throw so much light 
 on the earlier stages of human progress. Pro- 
 fessor Grosse, in his illuminating discussion of 
 the 'Beginnings of Art,' points out that pure 
 narrative " requires a command of language and 
 of one's own body which is rarely found," and 
 that " children and primitive peoples likewise are 
 indeed unable to make any narration without 
 accompanying it with the appropriate demeanor 
 and play of gesture." Professor Grosse notes 
 that common usage means by a drama, *' not the 
 relation of an event enlivened by mimicry, but its 
 direct mimic and verbal representation by several 
 persons " ; and he asserts the existence of this in 
 even the lowest stages of culture. He recognizes 
 as one root of a more elaborate drama the duet of 
 the Greenlanders, for example, in which "the 
 two singers are not only relating their adventure, 
 but are representing it by mimic gestures " ; and 
 he finds a second source in the mimic dance. 
 Out of one or the other a true drama gets itself 
 evolved at last; and its slow rise in the dramatic 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 scale is in strict proportion to the rise of the 
 people itself in the scale of civilization. The 
 form is enlarged and enriched; it expands in 
 various directions ; it will lack literature for long 
 years, until at last there arrives a dramatic poet 
 who takes the form as he finds it, with all its 
 imperfections and inconsistencies. He accepts it 
 without hesitation, certain that it will serve his 
 purpose, since it has already proved that it is sat- 
 isfactory to the contemporaries whom he has to 
 please. In time, after he has mastered the form 
 as he has received it from his predecessors, he 
 makes it his own and remodels it to his in- 
 creasing needs, when he has gained confidence 
 in himself, and when he hais broadened his out- 
 look on life. 
 
 As simple as any primitive play, and as char- 
 acteristic, is this pantomime represented by the 
 Aleutian Islanders : " An Aleut, who was armed 
 with a bow, represented a hunter, another a bird. 
 The former expressed by gestures how very glad 
 he was he had found so fine a bird ; nevertheless 
 he would not kill it. The other imitated the mo- 
 tions of a bird seeking to escape the hunter. He 
 at la§t, after a long delay, pulled his bow and 
 shot: the bird reeled, fell, and died. The hunter 
 danced for joy; but finally he became troubled, 
 repented having killed so fine a bird, and la- 
 mented it. Suddenly the dead bird rose, turned 
 
 lO 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 intoa beautiful woman, and fell into the hunter's 
 arms." Here we have a dramatic action, com- 
 y\ plete in itself, and yet extremely simple. It was 
 ^capable of being performed anywhere and any- 
 )^hen, since it called for no costumes, no scenery, 
 *id no stage-properties. It needed no words to 
 be^plainly understood. It dealt with elementary 
 emotions, following one another in obvious suc- 
 cession. It was wholly within the compre- 
 hension of the spectators; and by the magical 
 resuscitation and transformation at the end, it 
 was likely to appeal to the love of the marvelous 
 always potent among savages. 
 
 Dropping down from Al aska to Australia , we 
 find a more spectacular pantomime, requiring 
 more performers and a more careful preparation, 
 even if not an actual rehearsal. On a moonlight 
 night some five hundred spectators gathered in a 
 clearing of the woods lighted by a huge fire; 
 and on one side there was seated an orchestra 
 of about a hundred women. " The first scene 
 consisted in the representation of a herd of cattle 
 which came out of the woods to pasture on the 
 meadow. The black players had painted them- 
 selves appropriately to their characters. The 
 imitation was skilful; the motion and behavior 
 of each head of the herd were amusingly natural. 
 Some lay on the ground and chewed their cuds. 
 Others stood and scratched themselves with their 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 horns and hind feet, or licked their companions 
 or their calves. Others rubbed one another's 
 heads in a friendly way. After their bucolic idyl 
 had lasted a little while, the second scene began. 
 A band, of blacks were perceived creeping upon 
 the herd, with all the precautions which the na- 
 tives use in such cases. At length they wore 
 near enough, and two cattle fell, struck b3(^ 
 spears, to the highest delight of the spectators, ' 
 who broke out in enthusiastic applause. The 
 hunters began to skin their prey, dress it, and 
 cut it up— all with the most painstaking exact- 
 ness. The third scene was opened with a 
 trotting of horses in the wood. Immediately 
 afterward a troop of white men appeared on 
 horseback. Their faces were painted a whitish 
 brown; their bodies blue or red, to represent 
 colored shirts; and the lower parts of their legs, 
 in the absence of gaiters, were wrapped with 
 brushwood. These white men galloped straight 
 up to the blacks, fired, and drove them back. 
 The latter collected again, and a desperate battle 
 began, in which the blacks beat the whites and 
 drove them back. The whites bit off their car- 
 tridges, fixed the caps on their guns— in short, 
 went regularly through all the motions of loading 
 and firing. As often as a black fell the specta- 
 tors groaned, but when a white man bit the dust 
 a loud shout of joy went up. At last the whites 
 
 12 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 were disgracefully put to flight, to the unbounded 
 delight of the natives, who were so excited that 
 the merest trifle might have changed the sham 
 fight into bloody earnest." 
 
 There we have a sophisticated analog of one 
 of the best known of American spectacles— the 
 attack on the Deadwood coach and the driving 
 off of the Sioux by Buffalo Bill, aided by his reck- 
 less rough-riders. In one peculiarity the Aus- 
 tralian pantomime is more significant than the 
 Aleutian : we are told that one of the performers 
 took no actual part, but served as the director of 
 the whole exhibition, accompanying the succes- 
 sive scenes of the pantomime with an explanatory 
 song. Here we catch a glimpse of the expositor, 
 who in the medieval drama was expected to com- 
 ment upon the successive scenes of a passion- 
 play and to expound their meaning. 
 
 Perhaps there is no need now to point out 
 again the absence of any literary quality from 
 these plays of the Aleutians and of the Austra- 
 lians, or from those of all savages in a similar 
 stage of social development, ^n fact, pantomime 
 itself is proof positive that the d rama can be _abgx^ 
 lutely ind ependent of litera ture, that it can come 
 into Jjeing ^without the aid of the written word, . 
 an d that it can support itself by its ow n devices/ 
 In the earliest periods of culture the drama does 
 exist without literature ; and it is only when the 
 >3 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 people among which it is cherished reaches a very 
 ' high state of civilization thafthrdramalslabkl^ 
 j appeararth^rtoftiestToriTr of poetry, after having 
 W lived for centuries, perhaps, without any literary 
 ' pretensions whatever. 
 J^These inherent tendencies do not cease to be 
 effective with the advent of civilization ; if they 
 are truly inherent in humanity they must be at 
 work to-day. And altho the action of these in- 
 stinctive forces is not now with us what it was 
 when our remote ancestors were yet uncivilized, 
 still it is visible if only we take the trouble to look 
 for it. There are few periods when the sponta- 
 nemis^gro^th of the unliterary drama is not to 
 be seen somewhere ; andlhe I^story of the theater 
 supplies many instances of the reinvigoration of 
 the regular drama by the irregular forms, ^^r 
 example, the Italian_^cgmedy;;0^-masks seems to 
 have originated in the humorous jesting of me- 
 dievaMdjlage^^festiyals ; and nothing could well 
 be~more frankly unliterary than these perform- 
 ances, since the plays were absolutely unwritten, 
 the chief of the company explaining the plot to 
 his companions, and the several comedians then 
 improvising the dialog during the performance 
 itsely Yet this comedy-of-masks was lifted into 
 literature by Moliere, whose first long play, the 
 * fitourdi,' is nothing more or less than a comedy- 
 of-masks carefully written out in brilliant verse, 
 H 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 In like manner the melodrama, which had 
 been elaborated year by year in the variety-shows 
 of the eighteenth century fairs of Paris, served 
 early in the nineteenth century as a model for the 
 striking plays of Victor Hugo and of the elder 
 Dumas. In Hugo's case the rather violent frame- 
 work of the melodrama was so splendidly draped 
 and decorated by his incomparable lyric magnifi- 
 cence that a critic so susceptible as Mr. Swinburne 
 was moved to hail the French poet as of the race 
 and lineage of Shakspere. The French melodrama 
 and the Italian comedy-of-masks were each of 
 them, at one stage of its career, almost as unlit- 
 erary as the pantomimes of the Aleutians and the 
 Australians; and yet we can see how each of 
 them in turn has been elevated by a poet. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It is, perhaps, going a little too far to assert 
 that the drama can be as independent of literature 
 as painting may be, or as sculpture; and yet this 
 is an overstaj^iSB^nt only : it is not anjjjatruth. 
 The painter seeks primarily for pictorial effects, 
 and the sculptor for plastic effects— just as the 
 dramatist is seeking primarily for drarojUk effects. 
 On the other hand, there is no denying that the 
 masterpieces of the graphic arts have all of them 
 a poetic quality in addition to their pictorial and 
 «5 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 plastic qualities. To be recognized as master- 
 pieces, they must needs possess something more 
 than merely technical merits; but without these 
 technical merits they would not be masterpieces. 
 No fresco, no bas-relief, is fine because of its 
 poetic quality alone. In like manner, we may be 
 sure that there is no masterpiece of the drama in 
 ^hich the poetic quality, however remarkable it 
 /may be, is not sustained by a solid structure of 
 ' dramaturgic technic. The great dramatist must 
 be a poet, of course; but first of all he must be 
 a theat£tJ2pet, to borrow the useful German term. 
 And irTs a German critic— Schlegel— who has 
 drawn attention to the difference in dramatic 
 capacity which subsists among nations equally 
 distinguished for intellect, " so that theatrical tal- 
 ent would seem to be a peculiar quality, essen- 
 tially distinct from the poetic gift in general." 
 By the phrase " theatrical talent " Schlegel obvi- 
 ously means the dramaturgic faculty, the skill of 
 the born^glay-makgr. Voltaire says somewhere 
 that the success of a poem lies largely in the choice 
 of a subject; and it is even more certain that the 
 success of a play lies in the ei^i^pf t be sj^ cial 
 asp^Jg^f the subject which shall be shown in 
 action on the stage. If the poet is not a play- 
 wright, or if he cannot acquire the playwright's 
 gift of vickij^i^r^j^ut the scenes which will unfail- 
 ingly move the hearts of the spectators, then his 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 sheer poetic power will not save him, nor any 
 affluence of imagery— just as no luxuriance of 
 decoration would avail to keep a house standing 
 if the foundations were faulty. 
 
 This dramaturgic faculty, without which the 
 most melodious poet cannot hope to win accep- 
 tance as a dramatist, seems to be generally in- 
 stinctive. It is a birthright of the play-maker, 
 from whom it can sometimes be acquired by 
 poets not so gifted by nature. For example, 
 Victor Hugo was a poet who was not a born play- 
 wright, but who managed to attain the essen- 
 tial principles of the craft— essential principles 
 which poets of the power and sweep of Byron 
 and Browning were never able to grasp. These 
 British bards were without the dramaturgic fac- 
 ulty which was possessed, in some measure, by 
 the unliterary play-makers who devised the Italian 
 comedy-of-masks. 
 
 In the early days of any art there is always 
 imperfect differentiation; and the polychromatic 
 bas-reliefs of the Egyptians remind us that it was 
 long before painting and sculpture were sepa- 
 rated. Not only are comedy and tragedy not 
 carefully kept apart, but the drama itself is com- 
 mingled with much that is not truly dramatic, 
 and only by slow degrees iz it able to disentangle 
 itself from these extraneous matters. Even in 
 the days of the great Greeks a lyric element sur- 
 
 «7 
 
/ 
 
 THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST' 
 
 vived in their tragedies which was often quite 
 undramatic; and even in England, under Eliza- 
 beth, the stage was sometimes made to serve as 
 a pulpit on which a sermon was preached, or 
 as a platform on which a lecture was delivered, 
 while the action of the play was forced to stand 
 still. 
 
 There is also to be noted in every period of 
 play-making a frequent element of mere spectacle. 
 The rhythmic movements of the Greek chorus in 
 the orchestra and their statuesque attitudes were 
 meant to take the eye, like the coronation pro- 
 cessions in the English chronicle-play of ' Henry 
 VIll.' Anything of this sort is in its appropriate 
 place in the masks of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, 
 or in the comedies-ballets which Moliere was so 
 fertile in inventing for Louis XIV; but it is quite 
 out of keeping with the serious drama, being 
 wholly spectacular. Equally undramatic are the 
 so-called " jigs " of the Elizabethan comic actors 
 and the ground-and-lof ty tumbling of the acrobatic 
 performers who took part in the Italian comedy- 
 of-masks.' The persistent exhibition of trained 
 animals of one kind or another, and their arbitrary 
 inclusion Within the story of the play itself, belongs 
 to this frankly amusing aspect of theatrical enter- 
 tainment. Here again the mere poet is likely 
 to be unyielding where the born playwright is 
 tolerant, sometimes even finding his account in 
 i8 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 this taste of the public for the tricks of an over- 
 educated quadruped. In the 'Two Gentlemen 
 of Verona ' Shakspere wrote a part for a trained 
 dog, whereas it was a trained dog that led Goethe 
 to resign the control of the Weimar theater; —but 
 then, Goethe was a poet rather than a theater- 
 poet. 
 
 IV 
 
 • All these dogs and dances and processions are 
 mere accidental accessories ; and they have no vital 
 relation to the fundamental principles of drama- 
 turgy. By slow degrees the dramatist gets con- 
 trol of his material, and comes to a conscious 
 appreciation of the necessities of his art. He 
 may not be able to formulate the conditions which 
 these necessities impose, but he has an intuitive 
 perception of their requirements. These drama- 
 turgic principles are not mere rules laid down by 
 theoretical critics, who have rarely any acquain- 
 tance with the actual theater; tji^j^^jaws, in- 
 herent in the nature of the art ItseTTTstanding 
 eternal, as immitigable to-day as when Sophocles 
 was alive, or Shakspere, or Moliere. It is because 
 these laws are unchanging that the observation 
 of the modern theater helps to give us an insight 
 into the methods of the ancient theater. And 
 we can go a step further, and confess that the 
 latest burlesque in a music-hall, with its topical 
 19 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 songs and its parodies, may be of immediate as- 
 sistance to us in seizing the intent and in un- 
 derstanding the methods of Aristophanes. 
 
 To M. Ferdinand Brunetiere— who profited, 
 
 perhaps, by a hint of Hegel's— we owe the clearest 
 
 statement of one important law only dimly per- 
 
 jjceived by earlier critics. He declares that the 
 
 I [drama differs from the other forms of literature 
 
 j ijin that it must always deal with some exertion 
 
 ( |of the human will, /if a play is really to interest 
 
 ' Vis, it must present a struggle; its chief character 
 
 must desire something, striving for it with all 
 
 the forces of his being.^ Aristotle has defined 
 
 tragedy as "the imitation of an action," but by 
 
 action he does not mean mere movement— the 
 
 fictitious bustle often found in melodrama and in 
 
 farce. Perhaps the Greek critic intended action 
 
 to be interpreted struggle, a struggle in which the 
 
 hero knows what he wants, and wants it with all 
 
 his might, and does his best to get it. He may 
 
 be thwarted by some overpowering antagonist, 
 
 or may be betrayed by some internal weakness 
 
 » •f his own soul; but the strength of the play and 
 
 'Its interest to the spectator will lie in the balance 
 
 /of the contending forces. 
 
 Prometheus, riveted to the rock, is determined, 
 at any cost to himself, not to reveal the secret- 
 which the unjust god is seeking to wrest from 
 him. Oedipus, the king, insists vehemently and 
 
 20 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 irrevocably on discovering the secret that can 
 bring only his own doom. Romeo is headstrong 
 to marry Juliet, and Juliet is bound to wed 
 Romeo, no matter who says them nay, and in 
 spite of the fierceness of the deadly feud of the 
 two families. Shylock purposes to have his 
 pound of flesh, and he is not to be turned aside 
 from his lust of revenge by any magnanimous 
 appeals for mercy. TartufTe is resolved to go 
 any length to get Orgon's money, and he is ready 
 to run any risk to get Orgon's wife. Lady Teazle 
 is set on having her own way, and in gratifying 
 her varying whims, even tho she ruins herself. • 
 tf A determined will, resolute in seeking its ownj 
 end, this is what we always find in the dramatic 
 form ; and this is what we do not find in the lyric' 
 or the epi^ (In the lyric the poet is satisfied if 
 he is able to set forth his own sentiment. (The 
 epic poet— with whom the novelist must needs 
 be classed nowadays— has to do mainly with 
 adventure and with charactecj His narrative is 
 not necessarily dramatic; it may, if he should so 
 prefer, be as placid as a mill-pond. There is no 
 obligation on the novelist to deal with what Ste- 
 venson has finely called the great passionate crises 
 of existence "when duty and inclination come 
 nobly to the grapple." He may do so if he 
 chooses, and if he does, his novel is then truly 
 dramatic; but he need not deal with this conflict 
 
 21 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 unless he likes, and not a few novels of distinc- 
 tion are not intended to be dramatic. Gil Bias, 
 Torri Jones, and Waverley, Mr. Pickwick and 
 Tartarin of Tarascon, Silas Lapham and Huckle- 
 berry Finn, are none of them beings of unfaltering 
 determination, nor do they exert a controlling 
 influence over the conduct of the stories to which 
 they have given their names. Each of them is 
 more or less a creature of accident and a victim 
 of circumstance. No one of them is master of his 
 own fate, or even steersman of his own bark on 
 the voyage of life. M. Brunetiere has drawn our 
 attention to the many resemblances between * Gil 
 Bias ' and the * Marriage of Figaro ' in local color 
 and in moral tone; and then he points out that 
 the comic hero of the novel is the sport of chance 
 —he is passive ; while the comic hero of the play is 
 active, he has made up his mind to defend his 
 bride against his master; and this struggle is the 
 core of the comedy. The drama of Beaumarchais 
 might be turned into a narrative easily enough; 
 but the story of Lesage could never be made into 
 a play. And here we may perceive a reason why 
 the modern novel of character-analysis can very 
 seldom be dramatized successfully. 
 
 This law of the drama formulated by M. Brune- 
 tiere carries with it certain interesting corol- 
 laries. For example, if the drama demands a 
 display of the human will, then we are justified 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 in expecting to find the theater feeblest in the 
 races of little energy and most flourishing among / 
 the more self-assertive peoples, and especially in/ 
 the periods of their outflowering and expansion.! 
 This is precisely what we do find; and here we* 
 have the explanation of Schlegel's assertion that 
 " in the drama nationality shows itself in the most 
 marked manner." The native Egyptian has been 
 the slave of many masters for scores of centuries, 
 never strong enough of purpose to rise against 
 them and rule himself; and to-day the fellahs of 
 the valley of the Nile appear to be exactly what 
 their ancestors were three and four thousand 
 years ago. Since the dawn of history they seem 
 never to have had souls of their own ; and a care- 
 ful search amid the abundant material in their 
 rmiseums fails to find any trace of a native drama. 
 i^The drama has no place in the existence of the 
 >^^ak-willed Egyptians^ but it is likely to have a 
 place of honor among the more determined na- 
 tions, more particularly in the years that follow 
 hard upon the most abundant expression of their 
 vitality. And this is why we find the golden 
 days of the drama in Greece just after Salamis; 
 in Spain not long after the conquest of Mexico 
 and Peru ; in England about the time of the defeat 
 of the Armada; and in France when Louis XIV 
 was the foremost king of Europe. Golden days 
 like these do not always follow the periods of 
 23 
 
 / 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 energetic self-expression even among the most 
 vigorous races, or else there would have been a 
 noble dramatic literature in English in the nine- 
 teenth century, when both Great Britain and the 
 United States were expanding exuberantly, but 
 when the abundant vitality of the Americans and 
 
 rthe British found other outlets than the theater. 
 Yet it is only among the energetic races that the 
 , drama flourishes vigorously. If any people begins 
 to relax its will and be languid, then its drama is 
 likely soon to flag also and to become enfeebled; 
 and this is what seems to have happened in 
 France in the last quarter of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. If any people, virile enough in other ways, 
 accepts a doctrine benumbing to the individual 
 res pj^tg jbility of man, it is not likely to de- 
 velop a drama; and this is perhaps the reason 
 why the theater did not establish itself among the 
 sturdy Saracens, who bade fair more than once to 
 overpower all Europe,— those valiant warriors 
 having believed in f oreor ^ination rather than in 
 free-will. 
 
 There is yet another corollary of this law of M. 
 Brunetiere's ; or at least there is a chance to use it 
 here to elucidate a principle often insisted upon 
 by another French critic. The late Francisque 
 Sarcey maintained that every subject for a play, 
 \ I every theme, every plot, contained certain pos- 
 '^Uible scenes which the playwright was bound to 
 
 24 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 present on the stage.1 IThese he called the scenes 
 a f aire, the scenes whiSh had to be done, which 
 could net be shirked, but must be shown in 
 action. ^He asserted that the spectator vaguely 
 desires these scenes, and is dumbly disappointed 
 if they take place behind. closed doors and if they 
 are only narrated. I Now, if the drama deals with 
 a struggle, then trie incidents of the plot most 
 likely to arouse and sustain the interest of the 
 audience are those in which the contending forces 
 are seen grappling with one another; and these- 
 are therefore the scenes a faire, the scenes that 
 have to be set upon the stage before the eyes of 
 the spectators. 
 
 Thus it is in the presence of the public that 
 Sophocles brings Oedipus to the full discovery of 
 the fatal secret he has persisted in seeking. Thus 
 Shakspere lets us behold a street-brawl of the 
 Montagues and Capulets before making us wit- 
 nesses of the love at first sight of Romeo and 
 Juliet. Nor is Shakspere satisfied to have some 
 minor character tell us how lago dropped the 
 poison of jealousy into Othello's ear: he makes 
 us see it with our own eyes,— just as Moliere 
 makes us hear Tartuffe's casuistical pleading with 
 Orgon's wife. One of the most obvious defects 
 of French tragedy, especially in its decadence 
 toward the end of the eighteenth century, is the 
 frequent neglect or suppression of these necessary 
 25 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 y frOes.a nd the constant use of mere messengers 
 to narrate the episodes which the spectator would 
 rather have beheld for himself. Victor Hugo 
 remarked that at the performance of a tragedy of 
 this type the audience was ever ready to say to 
 the dramatist that what was being talked about 
 seemed as tho it might be interesting— *'theij 
 why not let us see it for ourselves ? " 
 
 M. Brunetiere's law helps us to perceive the 
 necessary subject-matter of the drama; and M. 
 Sarcey's suggestion calls our attention to the neces- 
 sary presentation of the aciitest moments of the 
 struggle before our eyes. The drama has other 
 laws also, due to the fact that it is an art; it 
 has its conventions by which alone it is allowed 
 to differ from nature. In every art there is an 
 implied contract between the artist and the public, 
 permitting him to vary from the facts of life, and 
 authorizing him to translate these facts and to 
 transpose them as his special art may require. 
 The painter, so Mr. John La Farge has reminded 
 us, arrests and stops upon a little piece of paper 
 " the great depth and perspective of the world, its 
 motion, its never resting " ; while the sculptor 
 transmutes "this soft, moving, fluctuating, col- 
 ored flesh in an immovable, hard, rigid, fixed, 
 26 
 
■^bS^ucs..* V-^ 
 
 THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 colorless material." As Goethe once tersely | 
 phrased itT*' Art is called art only because it is \ 
 not nature. "' -—— —- \ 
 
 The conventions of the drama, its permitted 
 variations from the facts of life, are some of them 
 essential, and therefore eternal; and some of them 
 are accidental only, and therefore temporary. It 
 is a condition precedent to any enjoyment of a 
 play that the fpuxtlL\\^aiLof every room shall bei 
 removed, so that we can see what is going on, ' 
 also that the actors shall keep their faces turned 
 toward us, and that they shall raise their voices so 
 that we can hear what they have to say. It is 
 essential, moreover, that the dramatist, having 
 chosen his theme, shall present it to us void of 
 all the accessories that would encurnber it in real 
 life, showing us only the vital^£pi&odes, omitting 
 whatever may be less worthy of our attention, 
 and ordering his plot so that everything is clear 
 before our^es, to enable us to understand at 
 once every fresh development as the story unfolds 
 itself. And as the action is thus compacted and 
 hightened, so must the dialog also be coiidej;i.sed 
 and strengthened. It is only a brief time that we 
 have to spenB Tn the theater; and therefore must 
 the speech of every character be stripped of the 
 tautology, of the digressions, of the irrelevancies 
 which dilute every-day conversation. 
 
 These things are essential, and we find them 
 27 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 alike in the ancient drama and in the modern. But 
 it is a matter of choice whether the characters shall 
 employ prose or verse, Racine using rime, Calde- 
 ron using assonance, and Shakspere using prose 
 or verse or even rime as occasion serves. Verse 
 and rime and assonance are all arbitrary variations 
 from the customary speech of every day, but so 
 also is the picked and polished prose of Sheridan, 
 of Augier, and of Ibsen. Still further removed 
 from the mere fact is the convention of the lyric 
 drama—that all the characters shall sing, as tho 
 song was their sole means of expression ; and the 
 convention of pantomime— that all the characters 
 shall communicate with one another, and reveal 
 their feelings to us, by gestures only, as tho the 
 art of speech had not yet been elaborated. 
 
 Temporary and accidental conventions seem 
 natural to us if we happen to be accustomed to 
 them, but they strike us as grossly unnatural 
 when they are unfamiliar. We do not object if 
 a flimsy frame of canvas is lowered before our 
 eyes to represent the castle of Elsinore, or if a 
 stone wall suddenly becomes transparent that 
 Faust may have a vision of Margaret. But we 
 are inclined to smile at the black-robed attendant 
 who hovers about the Japanese actor to provide 
 a fan or a cushion, and who is supposed to be 
 invisible or even non-existent. We should be 
 taken aback if, after a murder was committed off 
 28 
 
UN 
 
 THE ART OF THE DRATVIATIST 
 
 the Stage, a door suddenly flew open, revealing 
 the criminals and the corpse posed in a living 
 picture; and yet this is said to have been a device 
 of the Greek theater. And we should laugh out- 
 right if we could listen to one of the medieval 
 mysteries as they were acted in Portugal, when 
 we heard the devil speaking Spanish, as it was 
 always the custom of the Portuguese to represent 
 him. 
 
 It is of these conventions that Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds was thinking when he asserted that "in 
 theatric representation great allowance must al- 
 ways be made for the place in which the exhibi- 
 tion is represented, for the surrounding company, 
 the lighted candles, the scenes visibly shifted in 
 our sight, and the language of blank verse so 
 different from common English, which merely 
 as English must appear surprising in the mouths 
 of Hamlet and of all the court and natives of 
 Denmark. These allowances are made ; but their 
 being made puts an end to all manner of decep- 
 tion." This last assertion we must qualify, since 
 actual deception is no more the aim of the dra- 
 matic art than of the pictorial; in either case the 
 illusion is ours only because we are willing that 
 it should be. But when the painter requires us 
 to make allowances for ** the place in which the 
 exhibition is represented," and also for *'the sur- 
 rounding company," he names two of the three 
 29 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 conditions under which the playwright has to 
 work perforce. 
 
 VI 
 
 As a drama is intended to be performed by 
 actors, in a theater, and before an audience, the 
 
 (dramatist, as he composes, must always bear in 
 mind the ^l.ay,ei:s*.the play house^ and the play- 
 goers. ^ The lyric poet needs to take thought only 
 for the fit expression of his mood of the moment; 
 and even the epic poet, if haply he had a patron, 
 could be independent of his contemporaries. But 
 no dramatic poet can be satisfied until he has seen 
 his work in the theater itself, where his characters 
 are made flesh and blood before his eyes, and 
 where he can feel the thrill of the audience at his 
 commuiiicable emotion. 
 
 Of these three conditions in conscious con- 
 formity with which the dramatist labors, probably 
 the least variable is the personality of the actor. 
 The playhouse has taken many shapes in differ- 
 ent climes, and the spectator rnust change with 
 civilization itself; whereas the histrionic tempera- 
 ment is very much the same throughout the ages. 
 It is well to remember that the actor must always 
 do his work, not in private, like the poet or the 
 painter, but in public, like the orator; and that 
 the instrument of his art is always his own per- 
 son. These are reasons why it is hard for him 
 30 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 to escape self-consciousness. For the opportu- 
 nity to perform he is dependent on the dramatist, 
 altho he cannot help believing that he must under- 
 stand the principles of his own art better than 
 any one else. This is a reason why he may seem 
 sometimes intolerant or overmasterful. But he 
 loves his art loyally, and clutches eagerly at every 
 chance to exercise it and to develop his own vir- 
 tuosity. This loyalty of the actor the dramatists 
 have always relied on; and his virtuosity they 
 have always been glad to utilize. So it need 
 surprise no one to be told that Sophocles was 
 said to write his plays for a given actor, just as 
 M. Sardou has composed certain of his pieces to I 
 fit a given actress. If we find that Hamlet is I 
 getting fat and scant of breath, we may wonder ' 
 whether this was not, perhaps, because Burbage 
 was putting on flesh about the time when Shak- 
 spere was revising the tragedy; and if we dis- 
 cover that a certain character in one of Moliere's 
 comedies has a limp, we may surmise that this is - 
 merely because the part was to be played by 
 B4iart, the author's lame brother-in-law. It is \ 
 this dependence of the dramaturgic artist on the 
 histrionic which makes the drama so complex an ' 
 art. The work of the dramatist can be revealed 
 completely only by the labor of the actors; and , 
 one reason why there was no masterpiece of the • 
 drama in the middle ages is to be found in the I 
 3> 
 
\ 
 
 I 
 
 L 
 
 THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 I fact that the medieval actors were all of them only 
 I amateurs. 
 
 However little the psychology of the tragic 
 comedians has changed in the succeeding cen- 
 turies, there have been many modifications in the 
 shape and size and circumstances of the theaters 
 in which they perform; and these modifications 
 have exerted a potent influence on the successive 
 forms of the drama. We can see one cause for 
 the massive simplicity of Egyptian statuary in 
 the fact that it had to be wrought in tough 
 granite and in obstinate porphyry; and we can 
 ascribe to the more delicate Parian marble a part, 
 at least, of the exquisite perfection of Greek 
 sculpture, while the capricious grotesquery of 
 carving in the medieval cathedral may be due to 
 the ease with which the friable sandstone of 
 northern Europe could be worked, f Perhaps the 
 severe dignity of Greek tragedy wVs caused" by 
 the imm £ns£ _size ^ofL-the Theater of Dionysus, 
 where many thousand citizens gathered under 
 the open sky; and, in like manner, may not some 
 portion of the rapidity and variety of the Eliza- 
 bethan drama have been due to the unadorned 
 platform thrust out into the yard of the Globe 
 Theater ? 
 
 The tragedies of Shakspere were performed by 
 daylight in a playhouse modeled on the court- 
 yard of an inn and not wholly roofed; the com- 
 32 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 edies of Moliere were brought out in an altered 
 tennis-court, on a shallow stage lighted by can- 
 dles ; the * School for Scandal ' was written for 
 the huge Drury Lane Theater, with its broad 
 proscenium-arch, dimly lit by flaring oil-lamps; 
 and the ' Gay Lord Quex ' was produced in one 
 of the smaller theaters of London, with a pro- 
 scenium like a picture-frame, brilliantly illumined 
 by the electric light. After these examples it is 
 absurd to deny that the condition of the building 
 in which a. play is performed may modify the 
 structure of the play itself.^ 
 V Far more powerful than the influence of the 
 \ theater or of the actor upon the dramatist is 
 r<the influence of the audience, an influence not on 
 (the form of the play, but on its substance. As 
 those " who live to please must please to live," so 
 the play must be what the audience makes it. If 
 the spectators are all coarse brutes, the drama 
 will be coarse and brutal; and if they are fun- 
 loving and free from sickly sentimentality, then 
 it is possible for the playwright to indulge in 
 romantic-comedy. The drama is thus, of neces- 
 sity, the ruQ^t^ democratic of the arts ; and any 
 attempt to organize it on an aristocratic basis- 
 such as Goethe ventured upon in Weimar— is 
 foredoomed toj^ilure. The drama appeals al- 
 ways to the broad public, and never to any self- 
 styled upper class. A great poet may Be haughty 
 ^3 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 and reserved, and ready to retire into an ivory 
 tower; but a great dramatist must needs have an 
 understanding of hisj^jow-man ; he must have 
 toleration and, above all, sympathy. 
 
 The influence of the spectator upon the play- 
 wright is like the pressure of the atmosphere upon 
 man: he may never even think about it, but 
 all his organs are adjusted to it none the less. 
 Schlegel remarked that ** much must always de- 
 pend on the capacities and humors of the audi- 
 ence, and, consequently, on the national character 
 in general, and the particular degree of mental 
 culture " ; and he might have gone further and ^ 
 asserted that the particular degree of moral culture 
 was equally important. Before a Greek audience 
 the husband of Alcestis could, without losing 
 sympathy, accept his wife's offer to die in his 
 stead— altho to us the fellow seems a pitiful 
 coward. Before a Spanish audience the husband 
 who is the * Physician of his Own Honor' could, 
 without losing sympathy, kill the wife whom he 
 knows to be innocent, because there is k scandal 
 about her— altho to us the man is merely a mur- 
 derer. This sympathy of the audience is what 
 even the most primitive playwright is always 
 seeking. The Australian pantomime of the cattle- 
 raid and the sham-fight would have failed to 
 please if the natives had not at last beaten off 
 the white men. In his * Medea ' Euripides appa- 
 34 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 rently brought in Aegeus mainly that he might 
 flourish a claptrap eulogy of Athens, the city 
 where the play was to be acted ; and in ' Henry 
 V ' Shakspere descends to a hyperbole of praise 
 of England, which in the mouth of any one else 
 might sound like the acfne of jingoism. 
 
 The dramatist does not appeal to the spectators 
 as individuals; he appeals to the audience as a 
 whole, the audience having a collective soul which 
 is not quite the same as the sum total of their 
 several souls. A crowd, as such, is not a mere 
 composite-photograph of its constituent persons ; 
 it has a certain personality of its own. By 
 sheer force of juxtaposition the characteristics 
 which the majority have in common are made 
 more powerful, while the divergent characteris- 
 tics of the individuals are subordinated or elimi- 
 nated. When he is one of a multitude a man 
 feels and thinks for the moment like the multitude, 
 altho when he is alone again he may wonder 
 why he yielded. As the dramatists must strive to 
 arouse the em otions of the multitude , they cannot 
 consider the sp ecial Hkings or the special know- 
 ledgeof any single man or of any minor group of 
 men. They must try totriid the gl eafesfcommon 
 denominator of the throng. I That is to say, they 
 must ever seek the universal— for it is only at 
 th eir peril that they can use the particuj a^ 
 
 35 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 VII 
 
 Desiring to please the audience as a whole, the 
 dramatists are always ready to accept its verdict 
 as final. There is no immediate appeal from this 
 judgment, rendered in the theater itself, whether 
 it is favorable or adverse. As Regnard makes 
 the comedian say, *' It is the public which deter- 
 mines the fate of works of wit— and our fate; 
 and when we see it come in crowds to a new 
 play we judge that the piece is good, and we do 
 not care for any other assurance." And here the 
 comedian was indisputably right; the approval of 
 the public is the first proof of worthy success, 
 ^for there are no good plays save those which have 
 7 been applauded in the playhouse. The recog- 
 nized masterpieces of the drama have all of them 
 been popular in their own day. Sophocles and 
 Shakspere, Lope de Vega and Moliere, Sheridan 
 and Beaumarchais, were, every one of them, 
 widely appreciated by their contemporaries. 
 True it is, also, that there have been other play- 
 wrights whose contemporary success was unde- 
 niable and whose fame is now faded— Hey wood, 
 for example, and Kotzebue and Scribe, in whose 
 works posterity has failed to find the element of 
 permanency. 
 
 Altho the works of Heywood and Kotzebue 
 and Scribe call for no consideration from a lover 
 J6 
 
THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST 
 
 of literature only, since purely literary merit is 
 just what they lack, they still demand attention 
 from a student of dramatic literature, who can spy 
 out in them the selfsame qualities which gave 
 immediate success also to the masterpieces of the 
 great dramatists. The drama is an art which has 
 developed slowly and steadily, and which is still 
 alive; its history has the same essential unity, the 
 same continuity, that we are now beginning to 
 see more clearly in the history of the whole 
 world Its principles, like the principles of every 
 other art ^re ete rnal and unchanging, whatever 
 strange aspects the art may assume. As history 
 is saiH to be only past politics, and politics to be 
 in fact only present history, so in dramatic litera- 
 ture what once was helps us to understand what 
 now is, and what now is . aids us to appreciate 
 what once.was. .If only we could behold all the 
 links weshould be able to trace an unbroken chain 
 from the crudest mythological pantomime of 
 primitive man down to the severest problem-play 
 of the stern Scandinavian, whose example has 
 been so stimulating to the modern stage. 
 
 37 
 
 / 
 
II. GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 THE distinguished French engineers who 
 crossed the Atlantic in 1893 to study the 
 wonders of the World's Fair in Chicago paused 
 for a while in New York on their way, and were 
 taken around the city to visit the most notable 
 monuments of their art that the American metrop- 
 olis had then to show. At the moment when 
 the boat on which they were embarked, turning 
 out of the North River, rounded the Battery and 
 brought them at last in full view of the Brooklyn 
 Bridge swung high in air beyond their heads, 
 one of my scientific colleagues at Columbia Uni- 
 versity happened to be standing by the side of 
 the foremost of the foreign visitors as they were 
 captivated by the sudden vision of that splendid 
 span thrown boldly across an arm of the sea. 
 " How beautiful it is!" cried the Frenchman at 
 once. — Comme c'est beau ! Then, a moment later, 
 he added, " How well done it xsV —Comme c'est 
 Men fait! And finally, after he had looked long 
 38 
 
Cr^EEK TRAGEDY 
 
 and steadily, he said with redoubled admiration, 
 "How well it is t.iought out\"—Comme c'est 
 Men etudU! 
 
 Have we not here, in these sincere utterances, 
 simply the three stages of admiration through 
 which the expert must always pass in the stimu- 
 lating presence of the consummate work of art ? 
 Its pure beauty will strike him at once; then he 
 perceives the masterful skill of the craftsman who 
 wrought it; and last of all he recognizes the solid 
 labor underlying the skill and the beauty. And 
 under no other circumstances do we pass so cer- 
 tainly through these stages of admiration as when 
 we give ourselves to the contemplation of the 
 masterpieces of the Greeks. It matters little 
 what the art or what the scale of the work, unfail- 
 ing felicity is what we find, and easy spontaneity, 
 whether it is the tiny Temple of Nike or the 
 Parthenon itself, whether it is a mere Tanagra 
 figurine or the Winged Victory of Samothrace, 
 whether it is a late idyl of Theocritus or a full- 
 orbed tragedy of Sophocles. 
 
 Yet it would be very uncritical if we were to 
 assume the Greeks to be so marvelously gifted by 
 nature that they could grasp perfection at the first 
 brave clutch for it. However incomparable the 
 final achievements of the Greek people in sculp- 
 ture, in architecture, and in the drama, the be- 
 ginnings of these arts were as humble in Greece 
 
 39 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 as anywhere else. Not a fev; temples must have 
 been put together more or jess clumsily, before 
 the Parthenon could raise its superb beauty on 
 the steep Acropolis; and many a hundred of the 
 ruder archaic statues served to train the eye and 
 the hand of the sculptors before they could com- 
 pass the power and the grace of the Hermes. 
 The masterpieces survive for our constant delight; 
 while the primitive attempts that failed to satisfy 
 even the crude taste of those who wrought them 
 —these have vanished or are neglected. We are 
 now coming to see, however, that these earlier 
 efforts are invaluable atds for the fuller apprecia- 
 tion of the final masterpieces. As Haeckel has 
 reminded us, the mind of an educated man of the 
 highest civilized races is " the last link of a long 
 ancestral chain, and the innumerable older and 
 inferior links are indispensable for its proper 
 understanding." Adequately to esteem the true 
 value of Sophoclean tragedy, we need to know 
 the obscure root from which it sprang, and to 
 trace its growth from the prehistoric past. 
 
 II 
 
 i^ A RECENT investigator into the beginnings of 
 the arts, Professor Hirn, holds the drama to be 
 the earliest of them all; and he goes so far as 
 to suggest that a rude pantomime, accompanied 
 40 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 perhaps by a dance, or by a rhythmic chant, may 
 be older even than language itself. Very early 
 among the Greeks we get hints of a miracle-play w 
 in honor of Demeter; and perhaps in this we may 
 see a germ of the later drama, since whatever 
 may have preceded it is now hopelessly beyond 
 our knowledge, altho we may hazard a guess 
 that it had been evolved slowly out of a panto- 
 mimic dance, probably at first without spoken 
 words. It was in the springtime that the festi- 
 val of Demeter was celebrated ; and in the fall, 
 when the grapes were trodden out, the vine-clad 
 Dionysus had his turn with revelry and joyous 
 song and orgiastic dance. (\t is from religious ^ 
 exercises, set off always with music and often ^ . 
 with dancing, that the drama has evolved itself 
 in almost every literature— in Chinese, for ex- 
 ample, and again in Sanskrit. \ The development 
 of a true drama does not alWays take place— ap- 
 parently not in Hebrew literature, for one; but if 
 it does, then this is its source always. " By the 
 simultaneous employment of mimicry, song, 
 speech, and instrumental music," so Professor 
 Letourneau declares, (* the opera-ballet of the 
 early a^es was the form of esthetic^ inost fitted 
 stronf^ly to impress spectators and actors, and at 
 the S'lme time to satisfy a very lively psychical 
 warW that of projecting mental images outward, 
 of pi Producing, with all the relief of reality, what 
 4» 
 
/t 
 
 GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 exists in the bmin only in the state of recollec- 
 tion or desire. ( The civilized theater is only the 
 natural development of this opera-ballet; and it 
 preserves an equal attraction and an equal power 
 even after losing the lyrical form which dated 
 from its origin." 
 
 In the civilized theater of the Greeks, the 
 drama never wholly gave up the lyrical form it 
 inherited from the remote ancestor which M. 
 Letourneau terms the opera-ballet of savage tribes. 
 It grew out of one or another of the Dionysiac 
 commemorations; of this we may be certain, 
 altho we must be doubtful as to the successive 
 stages of its expansion. The information we get 
 from Aristotle is painfully summary. ** Tra- 
 gedy," he tells us, "as also comedy, was at first 
 mere improvisation. The one originated with the 
 leaders of the dithyramb, the other with those of 
 the phallic songs. . . . Tragedy advanced by 
 slow degrees: each new element was in turn 
 eveloped." The ditjjjjfamb was a swinging 
 hymn to Dionysus sS^ l)y a chorus of youths 
 sometimes somewhat under the influence of the 
 new wine. At first this chorus was but a band 
 of revelers, with an impromptu chant fitted rudely 
 to the dance they were devisinj spontaneously. 
 The most striking of these impromptu (iants 
 would tend to become traditional, thereairAo 
 be varied from only on hints from the mor^i in- 
 42 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 ventive of the young fellows— much as to-day, 
 in a negro camp-meeting, we may hear new words 
 fitted to an .air which itself is in process of modi- 
 fication. 
 
 /, In time the most ingenious member of the 
 chorus wpuld be recognized as the leader, and 
 he would be expected to *' line out " the songs 
 and to conduct the dance to the music of the 
 flute. We are told that it was Arion who earliest 
 of all wrote out the lyrics which had hitherto 
 been more or less improvised, and, to balance 
 them, stropjie and antistrophe. Arion also it 
 may have been who first put the singers into the 
 costume of satyrs, making them a band of fol- 
 lowers accompanying Dionysus himself. Their 
 faces were stained with the wine-lees, in honor of 
 the god perhaps, and yet it may be that this was 
 to give a fuller freedom to the individual, embold- 
 ened by this elementary disguise— just as an 
 American boy is far less shamefaced when he 
 uses burnt cork to black up as a negro-minstrel 
 than when he takes part in any ordinary private 
 theatricals. 
 
 The differentiation of the leader from the chorus 
 would allow a colloquy between the leader and 
 the chorus; and the leader might in time be 
 moved to act out a part of the legend of the god's 
 life while the chorus commented lyrically or else.. 
 , took part in the action. But the most important 
 
 43 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 Step remained to be taken ; and this is ascribed to 
 'yj^spis. The poet who was already the leader 
 became also an actor, not always personating a 
 single character, but assuming several characters 
 in turn. To enable him to disguise himself he 
 wore a different mask for each of the several 
 characters he undertook, this device being sug- 
 gested to him perhaps by the fact that the priest 
 of Demeter always wore a mask at her mysteries. 
 From the moment when the play was thus 
 peopled by several characters, even tho they 
 were presented one after the other and never 
 two together, a plot was possible, however 
 slight: a complete action could be shown, how- 
 ever elementary ; and the struggle essential to the 
 true dramatic form could be represented before 
 the spectators to arouse their sympathy. 
 VJhe poet-leader of the chorus having been devel- 
 oped into an actor, the chorus promptly raised an- 
 other of their members to take his place as their ' 
 chief, just as we see^^in the history of modern music 
 how the conductor differentiated himself slowly 
 from the other instrumentalists, and how, when 
 he stood wholly apart from them, one of the first 
 violins was designated in his stead a.*: concert- 
 master. ^The lyrics of the chorus existed there- 
 after not only for their own sake, but also that 
 they might fill out the time while the actor was 
 making his exchange of one character for another.% 
 44 
 
/ 
 
 iREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 This increasing complexity came a little before or 
 a little after another step in advance; the play 
 itself was no longer improvised on the spur of 
 the moment; it was composed careifully, and 
 written out and committed to memory both by 
 the actor and by the chorus. The purely popu- 
 lar entertainment extemporized annually at a vin- 
 tage-festival began to be a work of art; and 
 literature came to the aid of the theater. And 
 at about the same time this elementary drama, 
 destined to so splendid a development, gave up 
 its nomadic career and established itself in 
 Athens. 
 
 " The country is lyric," so Longfellow declared, 
 **and the town dramatic." The lyrist may re- 
 lieve his own feelings in song with no need for 
 a listener; but the dramatist must conceive his 
 utterances always with a consciousness of their 
 effect when repeated before a crowd. It may be 
 that Thespis, who was an Icarian, headed a com- 
 pany of strollers performing at village-festivals, 
 and fixing itself finally in Athens at the invitation 
 of Pisistratus, the enlightened despot then striv- 
 ing to make his city the home of all the arts. 
 At first Thespis gave his performances as a 
 private enterprise, much as Moliere did when he 
 brought back to Paris the company he had 
 trained during his long years of wandering in the 
 provinces. But the Greeks liked everything to 
 45 
 
GREEK TRAGEDS 
 
 be done decently and in order, and they joyed 
 always in a competition of any kind. These are 
 probably the reasons why the state took over the 
 control of the drama. Thereafter tragedy was 
 performed at the City Dionysia, the great spring- 
 festival of the Athenians, when the visitors 
 thronged there from all parts of Greece. In the 
 course of time different dramatists were invited 
 / to present, each on separate days, groups of 
 / tragedies; and the cost of producing each group 
 was borne by a rich citizen, who paid for the 
 training of the chorus, for the costumes, for the 
 musicians, and for all the accessories of adequate 
 stage-management. There was in Athens then 
 a high sense of civic duty, as, indeed, there seems 
 to be now, when the stranger marvels to note 
 how many public buildings have of late been 
 given to the city by one or another of her loyal 
 sons. 
 
 The early dithyrambic chorus performed its 
 evolutions arouna an altar to Dionysus, in the 
 market-place, probably; and when the leader 
 began to hold colloquies with his fellows, a 
 platform was put up for him in the center of the 
 circle and at the side of the altar. When the 
 leader became an actor, playing various parts one 
 after the other, a booth of skins was erected be- 
 hind the platform, so that he could change his 
 mask and his costume out of sight of the specta- 
 46 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 tors. But as this booth would surely hide him 
 from the view of some of those standing all 
 around, the circle of spectators was broken at one 
 point, to which the booth and the platform were 
 moved back. In front of this new focus of at- 
 tention at least two thirds of the circular space 
 remained free for the movements of the chorus. 
 Beyond this open area, which was known as the 
 orchestra, the seats for the spectators were fanned 
 out on three sides. The low platform whereon 
 the actor appeared in front of the booth was the 
 only stage, and there was no scenery. 
 
 The circling seats for the audience were but 
 temporary erections, perhaps not unlike the tiers 
 of benches seen in our traveling circuses; and 
 they were not always stable. Probably this is 
 one reason why the market-place was abandoned 
 for a hollow of the hill that towered high over the 
 city. At the bottom a circular space was leveled 
 to serve as an orchestra, and above it, in concen- 
 tric rows up the sides of the curving slope, seats 
 of wood or of stone were arranged. As the 
 spectators were now so placed that every one 
 had a full view of the whole orchestra, there was 
 no longer any need for the platform on which the 
 actor had stood. IThe booth of skins was re- 
 placed by a more commodious wooden hut, in 
 which the^costumes of the actor would be better 
 protected from the weather, and the roof of 
 47 
 
 / 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 which could be utilized later in the development 
 of the drama by a god looking down on men 
 below, or by a watchman on the^housetop— very 
 much as the gallery over the stage was made 
 serviceable by the Elizabethan playwrights. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Very conjectural indeed must be any attempt 
 to set forth the successive steps by which a song- 
 and-dance of village revelers grew into a lofty 
 tragedy of a stateliness worthy of the noble city 
 where it was at last established. Arion is no 
 more than a myth, and Thespis is at best only a 
 tradition ; but Aeschylus is a fact at last. Ut was 
 Aeschylus who, so Aristotle informs us, "first 
 introduced a seg^nd actor; he diminished the 
 importance of the chorus, and assigned the lead- 
 ing part to the dialog. 1 As the first actor could 
 personate several characters, so also could the 
 second ; and thereafter the dramatist was at liberty 
 to people his play as amply as he chose, subject 
 to the sole limitation that only two of the per- 
 sonages of the drama should appear at the same 
 time. ' Aeschylus could well afford to diminish 
 the importance of the chorus, since he had now 
 the power to put before the spectators the two 
 opposing characters in whom was embodied the 
 struggle which was the backbone of the plot. 
 48 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 When the actually dramatic was thus made pos- 
 sible the poet had less need of the merely lyric. 
 With the aid of the two actors he could present 
 in action the culminating episodes of the essen- 
 tial struggle, the scenes d faire (to use Sarcey's 
 invaluable term), the scenes that must be shown 
 if the story is to hold the interest of the audience. 
 The Greek dramatic poets never wholly relin- 
 quished the lyric, out of which the dramatic was 
 evolving itself; but the former became less and 
 less important as the latter came slowly to an 
 understanding of its own powers and possibili- 
 ties. When we arrange the extant tragedies in 
 chronological order we cannot fail to discover 
 several stages of artistic growth, from the semi- 
 lyric * Suppliants ' of Aeschylus to the perfectly 
 proportioned and vitally dramatic * Oedipus ' of 
 Sophocles, with a later decline almost into melo- 
 drama in the 'Medea' of Euripides. Semi-lyric 
 the ' Suppliants Ts, and only semi-dramatic; it 
 seems to represent Greek tragedy as it was before 
 Aeschylus had discovered how to bring out the 
 dramatic elements inherent in his theme. To the 
 chorus was given* more than half of the words 
 spoken; and if only a few slight modifications 
 were made, a single actor could take all the char- 
 acters in turn. It was possibly the very first play 
 ever performed on the site of the stately Theater 
 of Dionysus, to be erected more than a century 
 49 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 later. It was given in the rough-and-ready be- 
 ginning of a theater which consisted of tiers of 
 seats circling above a hastily leveled orchestra, 
 at the bacji of which was a shed for the actors to 
 dress inX Stage there was none, for none was 
 needed; and scenery there was none, for no one 
 could yet foresee the possibility of any such 
 thing. 
 
 Into the orchestra file the Suppliants, the play 
 taking its name from the chorus which repre- 
 sented the daughters of Danaus, who have 
 escaped to Argos from enforced marriage with 
 their cousins. On entering they chant a prayer, 
 and then appears their father Danaus (the first 
 actor), who holds a brief dialog with them, 
 serving to put the audience in possession of all 
 the information needed to appreciate the sad 
 plight of the maidens. The King of Argos (the 
 second actor) then entering, the chorus entreats 
 him for protection against their pursuers; and 
 finally he promises to grant it. Left alone, the 
 maidens sing a hymn to Zeus, at the end of which 
 Danaus returns to report that the people of Argos 
 have ratified the King's promise of protection, 
 and this leads the chorus to sing an ode of 
 thanksgiving. Then Danaus (who has, perhaps, 
 mounted on top of the dressing-house) suddenly 
 descries the ship of the suitors approaching in 
 pursuit. He withdraws to give the alarm, and 
 50 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 the maidens sing an ode of lamentation. Now 
 enters the Herald of the suitors (the first actor, 
 who had previously impersonated Danaus), and 
 he sternly bids the young women follow him to 
 the ship, giving no heed to their terrified appeals 
 for mercy. The King of Argos returns, and a 
 bitter battle of words follows between him and 
 the Herald, after which both of them withdraw, 
 whereupon the chorus expresses, in a song, its 
 joy that the monarch has refused to surrender 
 them. At last Danaus comes back (the first actor 
 once more) to conduct his daughters into the city 
 itself for greater security. The maidens follow 
 their father out of the orchestra, and the play is 
 over. 
 
 If the dispute between the King of Argos and 
 the Herald had been narrated by a witness, and 
 not actually presented, then only one actor would 
 be required for the performance of the * Suppli- 
 ants,' one actor personating in turn each of the 
 characters. But without this dispute the play 
 would be less dramatic than it is ; and even now 
 its lyric abundance is what we notice first, the 
 adroit alternation of hymn and song and ode. 
 Yet there is a struggle sustaining these interludes 
 and justifying their existence; there is that con- 
 flict of will which is the very essence of the 
 drama. The daughters of Danaus are determined 
 not to marry their cousins— who are resolved 
 5> 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 that they shall ; and here the issue is joined, and 
 we have the possibility of dramatic interest. 
 There is even suspense, since the spectators are 
 in doubt, first, whether the King of Argos will 
 promise the protection sought, and second, whe- 
 ther he will afterward yield to the arrogant de- 
 mands of the pursuers. 
 
 In the later plays of Aeschylus, devised for per- 
 formance under similar conditions of theatrical 
 simplicity ,Aan open orchestra with no stage and 
 no scenery^with two actors only, with a full 
 chorus of fifteen men,— in these we see the same 
 imperfect differentiation of what is dramatic from 
 what is lyric^ In one of them, the 'Persians,' 
 we cannot really discover, in the episodes of the 
 play as we have it, any element of a conflict of 
 will. In another, * Prometheus Bound,' we can 
 see at the core of it the strife between Zeus (who 
 wishes to wrest a fatal secret from the mortal) 
 and Prometheus (who will stubbornly endure all 
 the tortures he knows ta be in store for him 
 sooner than disclose what he has resolved to keep 
 hid). In a third tragedy, 'Agamemnon,' also to 
 be performed by^two actors only, one of them . 
 impersonating Clytemnestra, and the other ap-. 
 pearing in turn as the Watchman, as the Herald, 
 as Agamemnon, as Cassandra, and as Aegisthus 
 —in this tragedy the struggle is more dramatically 
 presented, with a more skilful use of suspense. 
 52 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 Indeed, so artfully has Aeschylus ordered the 
 sequence of his plot that almost from the begin- 
 ning the spectator is oppressed by an awful sense 
 of impending doom. /With all its meagerness of 
 incident, the play is never lacking in theatrical 
 effectiveness ; it is not only truly tragic, it is also 
 really dramatic. 
 
 After Thespis, about whom we know almost 
 nothing, other play-makers had come— Pratinas 
 and Phrynichus, about whom we know some- 
 thing. As they had prepared the path for 
 Aeschylus, so Aeschylus made the way ready 
 for Sophocles, in whom the Greek theater had 
 its most accomplished artist. Aristotle tells us 
 that it wa^ophocles who first made use of a 
 third actpf, thus setting an example followed by 
 all who came after him, and who did not dare 
 ask for more actors than Sophocles had been 
 satisfied with. In Aeschylus we see the drama 
 emerging out of the lyric and seeking hesitatingly 
 to differentiate itself. In Sophocles we see the 
 drama solidly established, and yet supported and 
 relieved by lyric interludes which are made in- 
 tegral parts of a harmonious structure. He was 
 no violent reformer, and, indeed, it may be that 
 he was almost unconscious of the importance of 
 his improvements. Certain of his tragedies are 
 53 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 as undramatic as certain of the tragedies of 
 Aesciiylus. But in 'Oedipus the King,' on the 
 other hand, he showed how a Greek tragedy can 
 retain much of its primitive simplicity of outline 
 and yet express a gradually increasing intensity 
 of emotion, until at last the action rises to its in- 
 evitable and appalling catastrophe. 
 
 With a third actor in addition to the two used 
 by Aeschylus, Sophocles could present two char- 
 acters arguing face to face, with a third inter- 
 vening to change the current of the discussion. 
 He could reduce to a minimum all mere narration 
 by messengers; and he could show before the 
 eyes of the spectators the scenes a faire, the sali- 
 ent episodes of the vital struggle which was the 
 heart of his theme, as when Antigone stands up 
 against Creon, asserting that she did only her 
 duty when she bestowed funeral rites upon her 
 dead brother, whatever thp consequences to her- 
 self for thus violating the King's decrees Sopho- 
 cles made use of the chorus not only as a device 
 to gain time while the actors were changing 
 from one character to another, and not merely 
 to relieve the stress of the action by quieter pas- 
 sages of pure lyric when no actors were present;. 
 but in his hands the members of the chorus were 
 made subordinate personag«&4i£^^ play, closer 
 to the chief characters than the spectator was, and 
 therefore serving as intermediaries for the com- 
 54 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 municating of emotion, and suggesting to the 
 spectator by their words and deeds how he ought 
 to feel in the presence of so tragic a situation as 
 that then being presented. 
 
 Sophocles was thirty years younger than Aes- 
 chylus, and it is probable that the accessories of 
 a performance had been elaborated since the space 
 for the orchestra had first been leveled at the foot 
 of the curving hillside. The Athenians must soon 
 have seen that they had hit u^on the best possible 
 place for the stately procession and the grave 
 dances of the chorus ; and they w6uld therefore 
 be likely to establish themselves there perma- 
 nently, building the seats for the spectators more 
 solidly, for example, and putting up a permanent 
 house for the actors to dress in. This house 
 had been a mere tent of skins when the chorus 
 sang in the market-place, and even when the 
 orchestra was first m^de ready in a hollow of the 
 hills, the dressing-room may have been no more 
 than a hut of boards. But by the time Sophocles 
 was at the height of his career this shed had 
 probably been enlarged, or at least elongated, 
 until it formed a background to the full circle of 
 the orchestra. Intended for a purely practical 
 purpose as it was, its situation would be likely 
 soon to suggest some decorative treatment, 
 probably rather architectural than pictorial. 
 
 Aristotle tells us that Sophocles raised the 
 55 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 number of actors to three and added scene^aint- 
 ing; but no two authorities are in agreement as 
 to what we are to understand by the last word 
 thus translated. Scene-painting as we know it 
 nowadays, this is something which it is quite 
 impossible for Sophocles to have anticipated. 
 Aristotle's phrase may mean no more than that 
 the dressing-house owed to the suggestion of 
 Sophocles a more seemly appearance, and perhaps 
 even some symbolic decoration, in accord with 
 the time and place of the successive tragedies 
 which were to be performed before it. Very 
 likely the various plays of Sophocles were origi- 
 nally acted in an orchestra (which was a circular 
 space about seventy feet in diameter), and before 
 a dressing-house about as long as the orchestra 
 was wide, and provided with three doors opening 
 on the same level. Altho Attic audiences were 
 like Elizabethan audiences in that their prime in- 
 terest was in what was to be acted before them, 
 and in that they never gave a needless thought to 
 the special spot where the action was supposed 
 to take place, still the presence of a low-lying 
 edifice beyond the orchestra might be useful, not 
 only by confining the roving eye of the spectator, 
 but as suggesting to him the palace or the temple 
 in front of which the story was to be acted. 
 
 * Oedipus the King,' which is the masterpiece 
 of Sophocles, and indeed of all Attic tragedy, 
 56 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 begins with the slow and solemn entrance of the 
 chorus of Theban elders into the orchestra. Then 
 the center doors of the dressing-house open and 
 Oedipus comes forth (the first actor). He seems 
 taller than an ordinary man, because he has on the 
 buskin (or tragic boot), and because he is wearing 
 theIof!y'tragic mask, which rises high above his 
 own head. He asks what it is they want of 
 him, and he is answered by a Priest of Zeus (the 
 second actor), who beseeches the King to find 
 some remedy for the plague that besets the 
 people. Oedipus replies that he has already sent 
 his brother-in-law, Creon, to consult the oracle. 
 Then enters Creon (the third actor) with good 
 news: the blight will cease when vengeance is 
 done on the murderer of Laius (who was the 
 predecessor of Oedipus, and whose widow, 
 locasta, Oedipus has taken to wife). Creon and 
 the Priest of Zeus withdraw, but Oedipus re- 
 mains while the chorus intones a prayer; and 
 then he promises a reward for the name of the 
 murderer of Laius, and declares that he has sent 
 for Tiresias, the blind prophet. Tiresias enters 
 (the third actor again, but now wearing a differ- 
 ent mask) ; he seeks to avoid making any dis- 
 closure, until Oedipus loses patience and accuses 
 him of being a partner in the crime, whereupon 
 the seer declares that Oedipus himself is the 
 guilty one. 
 
 57 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 Certain of his own innocence, Oedipus sus- 
 pects Creon of having suborned Tiresias to make 
 this charge. But the blind prophet asserts his 
 own independence, and warns Oedipus that 
 " this day shall show thy birth and shall bring 
 thy ruin." Tiresias departs, Oedipus withdraws 
 into the house, and the chorus sings a hymn' of 
 foreboding. Then returns Creon (the third actor), 
 and Oedipus comes out to upbraid him with 
 treachery. They are now joined by locasta (the 
 second actor, who has, of course, changed his 
 mask also), and at his wife's appeal Oedipus 
 modifies his sentence of death against her brothef 
 to one of banishment. When Creon has departed, 
 Jpcasta asks the cause of the quarrel; and then 
 reveals to Oedipus that her first husband, LaTus, 
 was warned that he should die by the hand of 
 his own son, and that the father therefore caused 
 the child to be thrown from a cliff. Oedipus in- 
 quires how it was that Laius died, and then he 
 begins to perceive it to be dimly possible that he 
 himself may be the slayer of his wife's first hus- 
 band. Oedipus tells locasta that he was brought 
 up by the King of Corinth, but was once taunted 
 with the fact that he was not a true son, where- 
 upon he had gone to the oracle, which had 
 warned him that he should marry his own 
 mother, in fear of which sin he had abandoned 
 Corinth^ The King and Queen withdraw tOr 
 
 58 
 
 <7 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 gather in doubt -and sorrow, and the chorus 
 chants a song of destiny. 
 
 locasta comes forth on her way to prayer, 
 when there arrives a Messenger from Corinth 
 (the third actor once more), who announces the 
 death of the King of Corinth. locasta has Oedi- 
 pus summoned, and together they question the 
 Messenger, who, to relieve their minds, discloses 
 that Oedipus was only the adopted son of the 
 dead monarch, and that he himself had received 
 Oedipus as a babe from a servant of Laius. lo- 
 casta, after vainly imploring her husband to seek 
 no further, herself perceives the fatal truth— that 
 she is married to her own son after he had killed 
 his father. With a sudden cry of despair she 
 rushes within and is seen no more. Oedipus, 
 still groping, confronts the Messenger from Cor- 
 inth with an old Herdsman of LaTus (the second 
 actor again), and forces the aged servitor to admit 
 that instead of destroying the child of locasta and 
 Laius, as he was bidden, he had spared the boy 
 and given it to the man who is now present as 
 the Messenger from Corinth. At last Oedipus 
 sees that the oracles are fulfilled, and that he is 
 truly accursed. Overwhelmed with woe, he tot- 
 ters into the house, whereupon the chorus sings 
 an ode on the uncertainty of life. 
 
 Then comes one from within (the second actor), 
 to relate the suicide of locasta, who has hanged 
 59 
 
 / 
 
^ GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 herself, and to announce also the punishment 
 which Oedipus has inflicted on himself for his 
 unwitting sins: he has thrust out both his eyes. 
 Oedipus soon enters, probably wearing a different 
 mask, and he bewails his miserable fate, while 
 the chorus sympathizes. Next Creon returns to 
 assume the throne, but not to reproach his stricken 
 brother-in-law. Oedipus is about to go forth a 
 wanderer on the face of the earth, and Creon 
 allows him to bid farewell to his two little daugh- 
 ters, confided thereafter to the care of their uncle. 
 And when Oedipus and his children have with- 
 drawn with Creon, the chorus gravely sums up 
 the moral and warns the spectators that they are 
 to "call no man happy until he is dead." Then 
 they themselves circle slowly out of the orchestra 
 to the sad and piercing music of the flute, and 
 disappear at length behind the dressing-house; 
 and the play is done at last. 
 
 When Aristotle declared that tragedy is a higher 
 art than the epic, it was of this masterpiece of 
 Sophocles that he was thinking. Altho there are 
 here, in a single plot, parricide and incest and 
 suicide, horrible crimes linked in an inexorable 
 chain, so austere is the treatment and so lofty 
 the purpose that the play is void of offense. It 
 is full of terror, and it is charged with pity, for 
 not from fate alone does Oedipus suffer. His 
 punishment is also for his own pride and wilful- 
 60 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 ness; and his downfall is brought about because 
 he insisted on discovering what it was best for 
 him never to know. To exert one's own will is 
 the final proof of man's existence; and therefore 
 what the drama necessarily deals with is the most 
 significant action of human life. This essential 
 struggle Sophocles brings out more*sharply than 
 Aeschylus before him or than Euripides after him. 
 
 That a tragedy such as 'Oedipus the Kfng' 
 could delight and move the thousands of specta- 
 tors who sat in the seats that girt the orchestra, 
 or who stood higher up on the hillside— this is 
 testimony to the artistic sensibility of the Athenian 
 audience and to its trained intelligence. [The dra- 
 matist must always conform to the taste of those 
 to whom he is appealing. He may seek to im- 
 prove that taste, to elevate it and purify it, but 
 he cannot ignore it. If he fails to consider it, his 
 play will fail also. He is fortunate if his audience 
 is made up of all sorts and conditions of men, not 
 the educated orily, or the ignorant either, but 
 broadly chosen ;Cfor the more various the spectaT 
 tors, the more bravely can the dramatist deal with 
 the universal element of life. 
 
 Professor Jebb has reminded us that "the col- 
 lective impression of intelligent listeners ... has 
 a critical value of a kind which can seldom be 
 claimed for the judgment of any single critic"; 
 and he adds that " in the case of a people with the 
 6i 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 unique gifts of the Greek race,— their obedience 
 to reason, and their instinct for beauty,— the 
 critical value of the collective impression was ex- 
 ceptionally high." The Greek dramatist felt this 
 solidarity with the whole body of spectators 
 whom he was to delight and to thrill; he was 
 certain of a* sympathetic understanding of his 
 boldest effort; and by this certainty he could not 
 fail to be stimulated. 
 
 The beauty which Sophocles sought to set be- 
 fore the Athenian audience was not only a union 
 of the lyric and the dramatic, sustained by music: 
 it was pictorial also and plastic. The taste of the 
 spectators was as keenly critical of the sculp- 
 turesque attitudes of the actors or of the chorus 
 as it was trained to appreciate the delivery of a 
 phrase, the rhythm of a line, the propriety of a 
 speech, or the structure of the plot. The dra- 
 matist was responsible for the whole perform- 
 ance, for the complete art-work. It was his duty 
 and his delight himself to drill the chorus in their 
 maneuvers, and to see that the gestures were ever 
 graceful and the groupings always harmonious. 
 
 Among us who speak English the opera is the 
 privilege of the rich, with all the narrowing and 
 limitation that therefore ensues ; but if it was not 
 thus restricted in its scope, one might dwell at 
 length on a certain likeness between the tragedies 
 of Sophocles and the music-dramas of Wagner, 
 62 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY W 
 
 from which, indeed, they are 1^ remote in form 
 and in spirit than they are ^Pm the plays of 
 Shakspere as these are now performed. Wagner 
 was following Sophocles in seeking a simplicity 
 of theme as massive as it is splendid, and also in 
 wishing to add to the lyric and the dramatic all 
 the further beauty to be derived from a skilful 
 use of the plastic art. Wagner could avail him- 
 self of scenery and of artificial lighting and of 
 various mechanical devices impossible to Sopho- 
 cles; but undoubtedly the Greek dramatist, like 
 the German composer, relied upon the contem- 
 plation of characteristic attitudes and upon the 
 appropriate positions of the actors and of the 
 chorus. The ancient dramatist had even one 
 advantage over the modern in that his plays were 
 performed out of doors in the springtime, when 
 at any moment a breeze might sweep up from 
 the sea to flutter the flowing draperies of the 
 characters and of the chorus, and to blow their 
 loose garments about their bodies in lines of 
 unexpected beauty. 
 
 On the serene heights of dramatic poesy, where 
 Sophocles breathed freely as tho there only could 
 he find his native air, the third of the great Greek 
 dramatists was ill at ease; and in the plays of 
 Eurigyes we can perceive at least the beginning 
 6} 
 
^ GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 of a decline. fV^ structure of his plots is less 
 careful; the situBBns are more violent; the char- 
 acters are less worthy of pity ; the moral tone of 
 the whole work is less elevated and far less in- 
 spiriting.; If we admit that Aeschylus dealt with 
 demigods, and that Sophocles honored heroes, 
 while Euripides is interested rather in men as they 
 are, we must acknowledge also that man as 
 Euripides represents him is often a pitiful crea- 
 ture, involved in sensational adventures far less 
 significant than those to be found in the earlier 
 tragedies. Indeed, it is woman rather than man 
 whom Euripides likes to take as the chief figure 
 of his pathetic story— a woman often of unbridled 
 passions and swift to act on the primary impulses 
 of her sex. 
 
 Despite all the evidence of the extreme clever- 
 ness of Eu^ides, we can see that he was not a 
 born play-maker U^Sophocles; he had not the 
 same instinctive certainty of touch ; and he seems 
 also to have neglected the art of composition. 
 Even when by chance he has made choice of a 
 story in which there is a set struggle, such as 
 would give substance to a plot* he sometimes 
 fails to present the semes a fairei^^Xhe. scenes which 
 must be shown in action if the spectator is to find 
 full satisfaction./ His plays are frequently melo- 
 dramatic in their framework, while the poet is 
 ironic in his treatment of his theme, a combina- 
 64 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 tion which could not but be disconcerting to the 
 Athenian public. CHis tragedies%re lacking in the 
 noblej^im^rity to be found in the tragedies of 
 Sophocles, and they are also not so homogeneous, 
 being sometimes without the unity of design and 
 even without the unity of tone to which the 
 Greeks had been accustomed. The Attic distaste 
 for the abnormal and for the freakish will help to 
 explain the failure of Euripides to please his im- 
 mediate contemporaries; and it is evidence of a 
 later decline of the Greek delicacy of perception 
 that a wide popularity did come to Euripides 
 shortly after his death. 
 
 To-day our taste is not Attic, and even by tak- 
 ing thought we cannot put ourselves in the place 
 of the Athenian, to see his poets as he saw them, 
 and to weigh them in the equal scales. And this 
 is why many lovers of literature find Euripides 
 the most modern of the great Greeks, the least 
 remote in his attitude toward our common hu- 
 manity, the closest to us in emotion and in char- 
 acter-drawing. His plays may be less tragic than 
 those of his greater predecessors, less severe, 
 even less artistic. But we are not so particular as 
 the Athenians were; our standards of taste are 
 not so lofty; and we relish a broader pathos 
 than appealed to the Greeks.' Even if certain of 
 the plays of Euripides are not tragedies truly, 
 but tragi-comedies or melodramas or domestic 
 65 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 dramas, they are only the more modern for that. 
 Nowadays we are glad to greet a heroine who 
 has sinned and suffered, and whose sad situation 
 is so presented as to wring our hearts with sym- 
 pathy and to keep us dissolved in tears. Medea, 
 for example, is perhaps the earliest " woman with 
 a past " ; she is the ancestress of the * Dame aux 
 Camelias ' and of * Magda ' ; and the tragedy of 
 Euripides is like the dramas of Dumas and Suder- 
 mann in that it is little more than a star-part, a 
 piece intended for the exploitation of a single 
 actor,— as a brief summary will make plain. 
 
 The Nurse of Medea's children (the second 
 actor) enters the orchestra from the house, and 
 opens the play with a long speech, telling the 
 spectators how hard it is for Medea to bear the 
 new marriage which her husband lason is about 
 to make. The Teacher of Medea's children (thd 
 third actor) leads on the two boys, and informs 
 the Nurse that Medea and her children are to be 
 sent away. Before the Teacher takes the boys 
 into the house Medea is heard bemoaning her 
 fate. A chorus of Corinthian women now enters 
 the orchestra and asks the Nurse why Medea is 
 crying aloud. At the summons of the Nurse, 
 Medea (the first actor) comes forth and exposes 
 the reasons for her grief. Then enters Creon (the 
 third actor again). King of Corinth, and father of 
 the maiden lason is about to wed. He informs 
 66 
 
 > 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 Medea that she is banished with her children. 
 She begs a day's delay before her departure; 
 and Creon at last grants this just before he goes. 
 The chorus chants the degeneracy of the times. 
 
 Jason (the second actor) enters, soon revealing 
 himself to be a contemptible creature. He is 
 scolded and threatened by Medea. Even the 
 chorus comments adversely on his feeble self-de- 
 fense; and when he withdraws the chorus sings 
 a hymn to love. Aegeus (the third actor) arrives ; 
 he is an Athenian, and with him Medea agrees 
 to fly on his promise of shelter and protection. 
 When he is gone Medea declares her intention of 
 killing the bride of lason, and the chorus mildly 
 dissuades her. She retires to get a poisoned robe ; 
 and the chorus sings a stirring ode to the glory 
 of Athens. Medea comes back, and so does lason 
 (the second actor as before), whom she has sent 
 for. She calls her children to bear the robe to 
 Creon's daughter, that she may entreat Creon to 
 allow the boys to remain. After the chorus has 
 sung another song of condolence with Medea, the 
 Teacher brings back the two boys, and the 
 mother weeps over them, and bids them fare- 
 well. 
 
 Suddenly a Messenger (the third actor) rushes 
 in to bid Medea fly, since the poison has de- 
 stroyed both Creon and his daughter. Medea 
 rejoices, and, for further revenge on her false 
 67 
 
 \ 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 husband, she is now resolved to slay her two 
 boys also. She goes within the house, and we 
 hear the outcry of the children, while the chorus 
 expresses its disapproval of her deadly act. lason 
 comes back, and the chorus informs him of what 
 evil deed Medea has just been guilty. He orders 
 the doors to be broken in, whereupon Medea ap- 
 pears on the roof of the dressing-house, and is 
 borne away through the air in a chariot drawn by 
 dragons— probably represented by a basket of 
 some sort swung high in the air by a rope from a 
 crane at the end of the dressing-house. After 
 Medea has disappeared lason exhales his woe and 
 departs, followed by the chorus, declaring that the 
 gods do things for reasons inscrutable to mortals. 
 As we contemplate the evolution of Greek 
 tragedy, we see that the austere Aeschylus, in- 
 heriting a form semi-lyric and only semi-dramatic, 
 felt his chorus to be at least as important as were 
 his actors; we see that the sincere Sophocles, 
 developing the dramatic element, was yet able to 
 make the chorus helpful, in that it served to sug- 
 gest to the spectators the feelings he wished them 
 to have; and we see that the skeptic Euripides 
 found the chorus a useless survival which he did 
 not dare discard out of respect for tradition, and 
 of which he availed himself mainly for the dis- 
 play of his own lyric gift. He might be a care- 
 less playwright, a brutal realist, a frank sensa- 
 68 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 tionalist ; he was an exquisite lyrist. As Coleridge 
 said, his choruses " may be faulty as choruses, 
 but how beautiful and affecting they are as odes 
 and songs!" 
 
 VI 
 
 (The presence of the chorus in the orchestra 
 throughout the play accounts for the fact that the 
 Greek dramatists scarcely ever attempted any y 
 change of scene in the course of a tragedyj /For; 
 one thing, there was no scenery to change; and 
 for another, there was no easy way of making 
 plausible a substitution of one imagined place for 
 another while the chorus remained stationary be- 
 fore the eyes of 'the spectators; so here we have 
 a valid reason for what is called the Unity of 
 Place^ And the absence of any intermission dur- 
 ing the performance of a tragedy— due also, in 
 part at least, to the presence of the chorus— led 
 to a straightforward movement of the plot, one 
 episode following close on another, the inter- 
 vening choral odes allowing for whatever lapse of 
 time might be required by the plot. These exten- 
 sions of the duration of the action being taken for 
 granted, and not actually specified, many critics 
 have seen in Greek tragedy what is called the 
 Unity of Time. 
 
 The circumstances of the actual performance 
 will also account for most of the other peculiari- 
 69 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 ties of the Greek plays; and if, for instance, we 
 find in them few scenes of violence, of physical 
 excitement, of battle, murder, and sudden death, 
 grobably one reason is that combats and rapid 
 /motion of any kind were difficult to actors raised 
 
 ^ on the buskin ^nd partly blinded by the towering 
 tragic mask./ /J To fall to the ground in these 
 accoutrements would be to risk the ungraceful 
 and to break up the stately harmony and sculp- 
 tural beauty of gesture and of grouping, like that 
 of a bas-relief, which was called for by the min- 
 gling of the actors and of the chorus in front of 
 the low-lying dressing-house as a background. 
 
 The same circurnstances of the actual perform- 
 ance which mad^e the Greek dramatist seem to be 
 bound by the so-called Unities of Time and Place 
 forced him to deal only with the culminating 
 
 ^ moments of his plot, so compacted in the presen- 
 tation that more than one ancient tragedy appears 
 to be little longer than the fifth and final act of a 
 modern ^lay . As alljhat went before had to be 
 explained briefly in the earlier scenes, the Greek 
 was debarred from exhibiting the development or 
 the disintegration of a character such as can occur 
 only after a lapse of time. All his characters are 
 and must be unchanging. Prometheus and 
 Medea are the same at the end of the play as they 
 were at the beginning, and they retain always the 
 same fixed mask. Even Oedipus, who alters 
 70 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 his mask, and is broken and bowed with shame 
 and grief in the sight of the spectators, has had 
 no time yet to realize the full force of his dread 
 discovery. ^Yet the disadvantage of this was 
 lessened bwthe fact that every Greek dramatist 
 presented an the same day four plays, the last 
 being satiric, and the first three being sometimes 
 so linked together as to show successive incidents 
 of the same legend/ The four plays followed 
 one after the othei^ filling the long spring day 
 with pleasure; and in the intervals, no doubt, the 
 vast multitude on the hillside around the sunken 
 ring of the orchestra rose to their feet and 
 stretched their limbs and refreshed themselves 
 \Vith meat and drink,— in much the same fashion 
 as the latter-day pilgrims to Bayreuth are now 
 wont to do. 
 
 It is in the chorus that we must see not only 
 the germ, but the dominating influence of Greek 
 tragedy, /^he chorus survived to the end as the 
 ever-preslj^t evidence that tragedy had been de- 
 veloped out of the di thyra mb^ The early specta- 
 tors who gathered in the market-place to listen to 
 the Dionysiac lyrics were delighted with even a 
 mere hint of the drama; and in the beginning no 
 one had yet acquired the^gjdll needed to hold the 
 interest of an audience by the artful cumulation 
 of dramatic episodes. In the beginning the 
 * Suppliants,' which has little more action than an 
 7' 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 oratorio, and the ' Persians,' which appears quite 
 undramatic to us, because we are looking back, 
 may have seemed dramatic to the Greeks, because 
 they were looking forward— because these plays, 
 chiefly lyric as they are, are also nearer to the true 
 drama than anything that had gone before. The 
 undramatically distended lamentations of ' Philoc- 
 tetes,' even, were probably more interesting than a 
 choral ode would have been, if only because they 
 came as a relief between two choral odes. Aris- 
 totle traces the slow improvement with his cus- 
 tomary clearness : " It was not till late that the 
 short plot was discarded for one of greater com- 
 pass. . . . The number of episodes was also 
 increased, and other embellishments added." 
 
 The simplicity and the dignity which we ad- 
 mire in Greek tragedy are due partly to the cir- 
 cumstances of its origin. They are due partly, 
 also, to the Greek's gifts, to his inventiveness, to 
 his ingenuity, to his sense of form, to his desire 
 for order and harmony and symmetry. Crude 
 in certain ways the Greek drama is, as we cannot 
 help admitting; but still it is the most wonderful 
 in all the long history of the theater, because it is 
 fthh only great drama which has been wrought 
 out by a single people, wholly without any aid 
 from the outside, with absolutely no model to 
 profit b^ The dramatic instinct, the desirjito 
 personafe, the enjoyment of mimicry— these 
 
 12 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 things are inherent in all of us: sawages and 
 children possess them abundantly; and yet the 
 Greeks were alone in their artistic utilization of 
 these natural qualities, and in so availing them- 
 selves of these that they were able to develop a 
 drama, and to raise this drama to the loftiest 
 reaches of poetry, entirely on their own initiative. 
 This they did, and this no modern race has been 
 able to do, because the dramatic literature of 
 every modern language has come, at one time or 
 another, directly or indirectly, under the influence 
 of Greek tray^edy. 
 
 73 
 
III. GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 THE law of the theater, as M. Brunetiere has 
 formulated it, is that the drama must deal 
 with an exercise of the human will, and that 
 therefore a struggle of some sort is an essential 
 element in the pleasure we take in a play. A clear 
 understanding of this law is helpful in any ques- 
 tion of classification— for example, in the difficult 
 attempt sharply to set off tragedy from melodrama 
 and comedy from farce. /If the obstacle against 
 which the will of the herb 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 obsta- 
 cle 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 charac- 
 74 
 
 4 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 ters 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. But as there 
 is no hard-and-fast line separating these several 
 obstacles which the several heroes are struggling 
 to overcome, so the different types of play may 
 shade into one another, until it is often difficult 
 to declare the precise classification. Who shall 
 say that the * Comedy of Errors ' is not, in fact, 
 essentially a farce ? Or that the Elizabethan tra- 
 gedy-of-blood is not essentially a melodrama ? 
 
 Altho the true dramatist cannot but conceive 
 both the incidents of his play and its personages 
 at the same moment, yet we are accustomed to 
 consider tragedy and comedy nobler than melo- 
 drama and farce, because in the former the cha- 
 racters themselves seem to create the situations of 
 the plot and to dominate its structure; whereas 
 in the latter it is obvious rather that the situations 
 have evoked the characters, and that these are 
 realized only in so far as the conduct of the story 
 may cause them to reveal the characteristics thus 
 called for. Comedy, then, appears to us as a 
 humorous piece, the action of which is caused by 
 the clash of character on character; and this is a 
 definition which fits the * Misanthrope/ the ' Mar- 
 riage of Figaro,' the * School for Scandal,' and the 
 'Gendre de M. Poirier.' fin all these comedies 
 the plot, the action, the story, is the direct result 
 75 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 of the influence of the several characters on one 
 another. 
 
 A consideration of the history of dramatic liter- 
 ature will show that comedy of this standard is 
 very infrequent indeed, since the humorous piece 
 is always tending either to stiffen into drama, as 
 in ' Froufrou,' for example, or to relax into farce, 
 as in the ' Rivals.' Satisfactory as the definition 
 seems on the whole, and useful as it is in aiding 
 us to perceive clearly the true limitations of com- 
 edy, we must not insist upon applying it too 
 severely or we shall find that we have erased 
 from the list of the writers of comedy the names 
 of two of the greatest masters of stage-humor, 
 Shakspere and Aristophanes, from neither of 
 whom have we a single comic play the action of 
 which is caused solely by the clash of character 
 on character. The delightful fantasies of Shak- 
 spere fall into another class, which we may term 
 romantic-comedy, and in which we find the comic 
 plot sustained and set off by a serious plot only 
 artificially adjoined to it. The imaginative exu- 
 berance of Aristophanes displayed itself not in 
 any form fairly to be called comedy, but rather in 
 what may be described as lyrical-burlesque. 
 
 Three of the most important phases of Greek 
 tragedy are preserved for us in the extant dramas 
 76 
 
GRE'K AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, and of Euripides. 
 Other tragic writers there were, whose works are 
 now lost forever; but these three were ever held 
 to be the foremost, and we are fortunate in hav- 
 ing the finest of their plays. Three phases there 
 were also in Greek comedy, altho less clearly dis- 
 tinguished; and here we have not been so lucky. 
 To represent an early stage of its evolution, we 
 have half a score of Jthe lyrical-burlesques of Aris- 
 tophanes; but only a single play of his survives 
 even to suggest to us the kind of comic drama 
 which was acceptable in a second period when 
 other humorous playwrights rivaled him. The 
 third epoch, illustrated by the noble name of 
 Mefiander, can be but guessed at, since we have 
 noi the complete manuscript of even a single play. 
 Yet an attempt to trace in outline the devel- 
 opment of the Greek comic drama is not an alto- 
 gether impossible task, despite our deficiency in 
 illustrative examples. 
 
 Comedy seems to have sprung into being at 
 the vintage-festival of the Greek villagers, when 
 all was jovial gaiety and jesting license in honor 
 of Dionysus. " On public occasions, " so a recent 
 historian of the origin of art has reminded us, 
 " the common mood, whether of joy or sorrow, 
 is often communicated even to those who were 
 originally possessed by the opposite feeling; and 
 so powerful is infection of excitement that a sober 
 man will join in the antics of his drunken com- 
 
 77 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 rades— yielding to a drunkennejs by induction." 
 And these seasons of contagious revelry were ex- 
 actly suited to a development of the double desire 
 of mankind for personation— one man seeking to 
 get outside of his own individuality and to as- 
 sume a character not his own, while another finds 
 his satisfaction rather in the observation of this 
 simulation, in being a sympathetic spectator when 
 actions are represented not proper to the actor's 
 own character. 
 
 So it came to pass that there were companies 
 of young fellows, often disguised grossly as 
 beasts or birds, who broke out into riotous phallic 
 dances, enjoyed equally by those who looked on 
 and by those who took part. In time the dancers 
 grouped themselves in rival bands, the leaders of 
 which indulged in a give-and-take of banter and 
 repartee, certainly vulgar and personal, and prob- 
 ably as direct and artless as the chop-logic dialogs 
 of the medieval quack-doctor and his jack-pud- 
 ding, or of the modern ring-master and circus- 
 clown. The happy improvisation of this carni- 
 val spirit which happened to delight the crowd 
 one year would surely be repeated the next year 
 deliberately, perhaps only to evoke an unexpected 
 retort with which it would thereafter be con- 
 joined in what might prove to be the nucleus of a 
 comic scene of some length. Thus a species would 
 tend to appear, as the tradition was handed 
 78 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 down from season to season, enriching itself con- 
 stantly with the accretions of every venturesome 
 jester. However frail this framework might be, it 
 would be likely to contain a rough realization of 
 the more obvious types of rural character; and 
 almost from the beginning there would be abun- 
 dant and irreverent parody of heroic legend and 
 of religious myth. 
 
 Then in time this inchoate medley of ribald 
 song and phallic dance and abusive repartee ^ 
 would come to feel the influence of the other 
 dramatic species, the origin of which was quite 
 as humble; it would come to feel the influence of 
 tragedy as this had been organized at last with its 
 chorus and its three actors. Indeed, the same 
 native instinct which led the Greeks to regulate 
 tragedy and to attach it to a festival of the state 
 would suggest, sooner or later, that comedy 
 should also be adopted by the city. And this is 
 what happened in time, altho Greek comedy, 
 when taken over by the authorities, was appa- 
 rently far less advanced and far more archaic than 
 Greek tragedy had been when first officially regu- 
 lated. In the earlier dramatic poems of Aeschylus 
 we perceive tragedy not yet developed out of the 
 dithyramb and struggling to find its own form; 
 and so in the earlier comedies of Aristophanes we 4 
 discover not only a primitive but a very peculiar 
 stage of the evolution of the comic drama. 
 79 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 III 
 
 Close as Aeschylus, with his dominating chorus, 
 sometimes seems to the earlier rustic lyric, Aris- 
 -f tophanes is even closer. His work is often so 
 formless, his story is sometimes so disconnected, 
 his plot is so carelessly put together, as to force us 
 to the conclusion that the Greeks had not yet per- 
 ceived the need in the comic drama for that unity 
 which is so striking a characteristic of their greater 
 tragedies. Owing to this slowness of the Greeks 
 in evolving a type of pure comedy, as they had 
 already evolved a type of pure tragedy, the works 
 of Aristophanes impress us with their stran gen ess 
 and their inequality. Aristophanes himself, as 
 we see him in his plays, appears to us in three 
 aspects, each of which is seemingly incompatible 
 with either of the others. 
 I . First of all, he is indisputably one of the lofti- 
 est lyric poets of Greece, with a surpassing 
 strength of wing for his imaginative flights, and 
 with a surprising sweep of vision when he soars 
 
 ;?. on high. Secondly, he is the bitterest of satirists, 
 abounding in scorching invective for his political 
 opponents, and never refraining from any vio- 
 lence, any malignity, or any unfair accusation that 
 
 S would help the cause he had at heart. Thirdly, 
 he is a riotous and exuberant humorist, a forerun- 
 ner of Rabelais, reveling in sheer fun for its own 
 80 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 sake, heartily enjoying every laugh he could call 
 forth from the spectators, and ready at any mo- ^ 
 
 ment to descend to any depth to evoke it again, j 
 It is to his possession of these triple gifts that we 
 may ascribe the variety of opinions held about 
 Aristophanes. The gifts themselves seem in- 
 congruous and discordant, and the result of their 
 exercise in a single comic play is sometimes con- 
 fusing. It is the privilege of great genius, as 
 Voltaire maintained, and, " above all, of a great 
 genius opening a new path, to have great faults." 
 
 What seem to us the faults of Aristophanes are ^.--^^^ 
 partly due to his having opened a new path,— to 
 the fact that comedy, as he understood it, had 
 not yet disentangled itself from the phallic dance 
 out of which it had blossomed. On the modern 
 stage, so we have been told, there are three kinds 
 of dancing, the graceful, the ungraceful, and the 
 disgraceful;— and there need be no^ doubt as to 
 which adjective can best be applied to the comic 
 chorus of the Greeks. There were not a few ^ 
 lapses into vulgarity on the part of the Attic audi- 
 ences; and there was at times— as a historian of 
 Greek literature has admitted—" a great deficiency 
 in that elegance and chastity of taste " which we 
 are wont to associate with the name of Athens. 
 
 Aristophanes is a lyrist in all his plays, and a 
 satirist also; but only intermittently is he a comic 
 dramatist, concerned especially with the presen- 
 8i 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 tation of humorous characters immeshed in amus- 
 ing complications. He can be a comic dramatist 
 when he chooses, full of ingenuity in the invention 
 of droll situations; but he does not often choose, 
 
 ^ —preferring the satke^of real indjvkiuals to the 
 presentatTon of ideal ^characters. This satire of 
 real individuals is so abundant in his plays that 
 we may see in them the Greek equivalent to a 
 
 I collection of caricature-cartoons from a modern 
 comic newspaper. Like most modern caricaturists, 
 Aristophanes is a bitter partizan, seeking rather 
 to drive his point home than to be fair toward his 
 unfortunate model. In most of his plays the vic- 
 tims of his invective are politicians; but some- 
 times he lays his scourge across the shoulders of 
 a philosopher whose influence he dreads, or of an 
 author whose verses he detests. Thus, in the 
 
 ^ Clouds,' it is Socrates who is held up to ridicule, 
 
 4^and in the * Frogs ' it is Euripides. Perhaps the 
 ' Frogs ' is as typical of the lyrical-burlesque of 
 Aristophanes as any other. 
 
 The play opens with the entrance of Dionysus 
 and his slave Xanthias (personated by the first 
 and second actors) into the circular orchestra. 
 As the patron of the theater Dionysus is saddened 
 by the thought that there is now no good drama- 
 tist alive, and he has determined to go down to 
 Hades to bring back Euripides. For this perilous 
 journey he has disguised himself as Heracles, and 
 82 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 has come to get the advice of that hero himself. 
 When he has knocked at one of the doors of the 
 dressing-house at the back of the circular orches- 
 tra, Heracles (the third actor) comes forth and 
 tells him of the various ways of getting to 
 the nether world. After the demigod has with- 
 drawn, Xanthias complains of the weight of the 
 bundles with which he is burdened. Just then a 
 funeral procession passes before the dressing- 
 house, which formed a low background for the 
 figures in the orchestra; and Dionysus tries in 
 vain to get the bundles carried by the dead man 
 (apparently played by a fourth actor), who refuses 
 the unsatisfactory fee, saying, " I 'd see myself 
 alive first." 
 
 Neither in the orchestra itself nor on the front 
 of the dressing-house was there any attempt at 
 scenery, altho by the time of Aristophanes the 
 dressing-house itself may have become a perma- 
 nent erection, possessing a certain architectural 
 dignity. But the Greek dramatist, tragic or comic, 
 made no effort to realize to the eyes of the spec- 
 tators the places where the action was supposed 
 to happen ; and as he did not particularize, they 
 never gave a thought to mere locality. Thus 
 the Athenian orchestra, like the stage of the 
 Elizabethan theater two thousand years later, 
 was a neutral ground in which actions were ex- 
 hibited, and which might be here, there, and any- 
 83 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 where, as the plot required. Without any strain 
 on the imagination, the orchestra which had been 
 tacitly accepted as representing an open space in 
 front of the abode of Heracles is immediately 
 thereafter assumed to represent the shores of the 
 Styx. Charon (the third actor again) comes in, 
 rowing his boat,— and if we may snatch a sug- 
 gestion from modern burlesque, it is quite possible 
 that part of the joke here lay in the obvious make- 
 believe of Charon's skiff, which was perhaps but 
 a bottomless framework hung by a strap from 
 his shoulders as he walked forward, pretending to 
 paddle. 
 
 Charon goes to the side of the orchestra where 
 Dionysus and Xanthias are standing, and al- 
 lows the god to step into his boat, but refuses to 
 take the slave,— who thereupon agrees to rejoin 
 his master by walking around. As Charon puts 
 off with Dionysus, who pretends to help with 
 the rowing, part of the chorus enter, dressed as 
 frogs. These inhabitants of the sunless marsh 
 hoarsely chant a characteristic lyric as Charon and 
 Bacchus propel the boat through the midst, of 
 them. Then, as the two voyagers arrive on the 
 other side of the orchestra, the chorus of frogs 
 croaks itself off. Dionysus pays his fare to 
 Charon, who paddles off to the place whence he 
 came, —probably from behind the dressing-house. 
 Dionysus, left alone, calls for Xanthias, who runs 
 84 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 around the outer circle of the orchestra to rejoin 
 his master. And when the two are together 
 again the orchestra thereafter is supposed to rep- 
 resent Hades, the under-world. 
 
 Scared by the strange specters he now pretends 
 to see, Dionysus appeals for protection to his own 
 priest, whose seat was among the spectators and 
 always in the center of the front row. In this 
 daring unconventionality we may see an antici- 
 pation of the modern comedian who leans across 
 the footlights to make fun of the leader of the 
 musicians; just as the attire of Dionysus, doubt- 
 fully disguised as Heracles, had elements of hu- 
 morous incongruity not unlike those observable 
 in the funny man of to-day who wears a high hat 
 when attired in a Roman toga. 
 
 Then to the sound of the flute there revels into 
 the orchestra the full chorus, impersonating vota- 
 ries of Bacchus, happy shades of those who had 
 been duly initiated into the mysteries. While the 
 two visitors look on with humorous comment, 
 the chorus circles in and out with song and dance. 
 In the song a lofty lyric strain is broken into by 
 topical jests, local hits, and personal allusions. 
 In the dance there is a joyous parody of those who 
 took part in the mystic orgies. At last Dionysus 
 gets the chorus to tell him- which is the gate of 
 Pluto's realm ; and he knocks at one of the doors 
 of the dressing-house, declaring himself to be 
 
 85 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 Heracles. Then the door flies open and out 
 rushes the gate-keeper, Aeacus (the third actor), 
 who violently berates the sham Heracles for the 
 misdeeds of the real demigod on his visit to Hades. 
 Dionysus recoils in terror, and the gate-keeper 
 goes to summon assistance. 
 
 The frightened Dionysus then transfers his 
 lion-skin and club to Xanthias, who is to mas- 
 querade as Heracles. But when a maid-servant 
 of Proserpine's (the third actor again) appears 
 to invite Heracles in to a sumptuous banquet, 
 Dionysus insists upon taking back the emblems 
 of the demigod— only once more to yield them up 
 swiftly when two eating-house keepers (the third 
 and fourth actors) assail the false Heracles with 
 bullying demands for damage done on the demi- 
 god's previous visit. Then the gate opens again, 
 and Aeacus bids his aids seize the false Heracles, 
 who protests his innocence— and proffers his slave 
 to be tortured in proof of his assertion. There- 
 upon Dionysus declares himself, but Xanthias 
 maintains his claim, so Aeacus has them flogged 
 alternately to discover which is the god,— he 
 being the one who will not feel the pain of the 
 blows. Altho they cry out, both stand the test 
 so well that the puzzled Aeacus takes them within 
 for Pluto and Proserpine to decide which is truly 
 the god. 
 
 The chorus, left alone, turns to the spectators 
 
 86 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 and becomes the mouthpiece of the satiric drama- 
 tist, delivering what is called the parabasis, and 
 what is in fact a personal address of Aristophanes 
 to his fellow-citizens assembled in the theater,— 
 an address not unlike our latter-day after-dinner 
 speech on themes of the hour, now jocularly per- 
 sonal and now raising itself into genuine elo- 
 quence. In the modern drama there is nothing 
 exactly corresponding to the paj;^hasis, altho it is 
 sometimes like the topical song of a modern 
 burlesque and sometimes it resembles rather the 
 prolog of a comedy of Ben Jonson's or Dryden's, 
 not prefixed to the play, however, but injected 
 into the middle of it. Like these prologs often, 
 and like the topical songs generally, the parabasis 
 had nothing to do with the plot of the play. 
 
 When the parabasis is concluded, Aeacus and 
 Xanthias return, having fraternized as fellow- 
 servants, delighting to spy on their masters. 
 The noise of a quarrel is heard ; and Aeacus ex- 
 plains that this is Euripides disputing with Aes- 
 chylus, whose seat at table he wishes to usurp. 
 Aeacus further declares that as Dionysus is the 
 patron of tragedy, Pluto intends to let the new- 
 comer decide the dispute. The two slaves with- 
 draw; and the chorus chants a lyric description 
 of the coming contest. 
 
 Then Dionysus comes back with Aeschylus (the 
 second actor) and Euripides (the third actor); and 
 87 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 we are made to see another characteristic feature 
 of Aristophanic lyric-burlesque, —the ^^/, the dis- 
 pute, which has almost the formality of a trial at 
 law. Aeschylus and Euripides set forth in turn 
 their views of tragic art, with much satiric dis- 
 tortion of each other's theories, and with much 
 comic perversion of each other's verses. There 
 is incessant cut-and-thrust in the dialog, and ap- 
 parently there is also opportunity for frequent 
 parody of the actors who had played the parts 
 from which quotations are made. There is frank 
 burlesque in the use of scales, by which the best 
 lines of the opposing poets are weighed in turn; 
 but Dionysus is still in doubt when Pluto (a fourth 
 actor) enters to ask for his decision. Unable to 
 make a choice on literary grounds, Dionysus asks 
 the advice of the rival dramatists about the con- 
 temporary political conditions of Athens; and as 
 he finds Aeschylus to be the wiser counselor and 
 the nobler, it is the elder poet that he resolves 
 to take back with him to earth. Pluto, after 
 authorizing the departure of Aeschylus, and after 
 bidding the chorus to escort him triumphantly, 
 withdraws with Euripides, delaying a moment to 
 invite Dionysus to remain for a feast. Once more 
 the chorus circles around; and then, accompanied 
 by Aeschylus, it trails out of the orchestra. 
 
 The * Frogs ' is a delightful example of the 
 lyrical-burlesque of Aristophanes, commingled of 
 
 88 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 poetry and of personalities, generous in parody, 
 abundant in fun, and rich in artistic criticism,— 
 but thin in plot and meager in dramatically hu- 
 morous situations such as later comic dramatists ^ 
 have delighted to devise. It represents an early 
 period of literature, when the several species are 
 as yet imperfectly differentiated; and it is in fact 
 almost as lyric and as satiric as it is dramatic. 
 The story is straggling and the structure is loose. 
 Yet a lyrical-burlesque of this sort was exactly 
 suited to performance at the Dionysiac festival, 
 when the season was held to sanction every con- 
 ceivable license, and when the people of Athens^ 
 were so conscious of their freedom that they 
 were ready to laugh at jokes against themselves. ' 
 
 But as soon as the Athenians were shorn of 
 their liberties the play of this type became quite 
 impossible. The tyrants would no longer toler- 
 ate it; and perhaps the people would no longer 
 relish it. Personalities Were prohibited and satire 
 was pruned. The comic dramatist became cau- 
 tious and hesitating, and he was forced to seek 
 his theme in private life and not in public affairs. 
 This was fatal to lyrical-burlesque ; but it hastened 
 the development of a true comic drama. The 
 plays of Aristophanes were the product of special 
 conditions which have never been repeated, and 
 this is why he stands in a class by himself; he 
 has had no imitators and no followers. Modern 
 89 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 comedy owes nothing to his example; and even 
 the comedy of Menander, which was evolved from 
 the comedy of Aristophanes, seems to have speed- 
 ily become something wholly dissimilar. 
 
 J ♦ ,v 
 
 The comedy of Aristophanes was a medley of 
 boisterous comic-opera and of lofty lyric poetry, 
 of vulgar ballet and of patriotic oratory, of inde- 
 cent farce and of pungent political satire, of acro- 
 batic pantomime and of brilliant literary criticism,, 
 of cheap burlesque and of daringly imaginative 
 fantasy. Obviously most of these elements have 
 no necessary relation to the drama, and one by 
 one they were eliminated. The political person- 
 alities had to go first; then the lyric poetry and 
 the imaginative fantasy. The ' Plutus ' of Aris- 
 tophanes himself seems to be a specimen of this 
 uncertain transition stage, in which the humor- 
 ous poet is sadly shorn of his exuberance. He 
 is not content to deal with the commonplaces 
 of every-day life; and the theme he treats is really 
 a fable, or rather an apolog. Yet in ' Plutus ' the 
 absence of the more extravagant elements of his 
 lyrical-burlesques brings the later play closer to 
 comedy as we now understand it than were the 
 earlier pieces. 
 
 In the course of a few years after Aristophanes, 
 90 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 Greek comedy still further simplified itself. It 
 gave up the parahasi^, always an undiamatic- 
 excrescence ; and it surrendered the, rhorus, thus 
 abandoning at once the baUet_andLthe_gppra. It 
 made up for the loss of these things by elaborat- 
 ing the more dramatic elements, by relying more 
 upon the deline ation of char adjer, and by giving 
 more thought to the building up of the plot and 
 to the invention of comic situations. It re- 
 sponded also to the influence of the more realistic 
 treatment of life which Euripides had introduced 
 inter tragedy. Indeed, it is quite possible that 
 there was a fairly close agreement in method and 
 in attitude between Euripides, the last of the great 
 writers of Greek tragedy, and Menander, the first 
 of the great writers of Greek comedy. ^ 
 
 In the plays of Aeschylus, we see the lyric and 
 the dramatic existing side by sid|fe, and the drama 
 has not succeeded in making t4Te|ong subservient. 
 In the plays of Sophocles, we find the lyric fused 
 with the dramatic, welded into it, made helpful 
 to the tragic story. In the plays of Euripides, we 
 discover that the chorus lingers, like an atrophied 
 organ which the dramatist dared not amputate 
 out of regard for tradition. In the plays of 
 Menander, we note that the needful operation 
 has taken place. At the hands of Euripides the 
 chorus serves only to fill out the lyric interludes of 
 the dramatic action ; and it is this entr'acte music 
 9» 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 that Menander omits. Greek tragedy had been 
 lyric in its origin, and was perforce poetic ; where- 
 as Greek comedy, after Aristophanes, was free to 
 be prosaic, as was needful in dealing more directly 
 with the facts of every-day existence. As De 
 Quincey says, it is ever " the acknowledged duty 
 of comedy to fathom the coynesses of human na- 
 ture, and to arrest the fleeting phenomena of 
 human demeanor." 
 
 Unfortunately for us, no play of Menander's 
 has survived. We have a few fragments of 
 scenes; we have many quoted sentences; we 
 have the Latin adaptations of Plautus and Ter- 
 ence: but we have not a single play complete, by 
 which we could make up our own minds as to 
 his dramaturgic skill. We can judge of him as a 
 poet and as a moralist by means of the lines pre- 
 served here and there by his admirers. But altho 
 we have one play of Terence's which seems to 
 have been derived without admixture from Me- 
 nander, this is really not enough to justify any 
 judgment as to his play-making faculty. We 
 do not know much more about Menander as 
 a dramatist than we should know about Shak- 
 spere as a dramatist, if his works were altogether 
 lost, and if all we had left were, first, the librettos 
 of the French operas which had been founded on 
 his plots, and, second, the extracts in some dic- 
 tionary of * Familiar Quotations.' We are at lib- 
 92 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 erty to guess that Menander found compensation 
 for his sinking from the lyric heights of Aris- 
 tophanes by not descending to the depths of base 
 vulgarity in which the earlier poet reveled. We 
 may surmise that his plays were often genuine 
 comedies rather than mere farces,— in that he 
 sought the truth of life itself rather than the 
 boisterous laughter evoked by exaggeration. 
 Certainly his contemporaries continually testify to 
 the veracity of his scenes. "On the stage," as 
 Chamfort declared, ''the aim is effect; but the 
 difference between the good dramatist and the 
 bad is that the former seeks effect by reasonable 
 means, while for the latter any and all means are 
 excellent." 
 
 In other words, the plays of Menander seem to 
 
 have been an antjdpat ion of the mod ern rnmpdy« 
 
 of-intrigue and the modern comedy- ^-rman ners. 
 The plots were ingenious and plausible, and they 
 were peopled with characters common in Athens 
 at that time;— the miserly father, the spendthrift 
 son, the intriguing servant, the braggart soldier, 
 the o bsecuiou s parasite, the woman of pleasure, 
 —and here in this last type we find the most 
 marked difference between Menanderand Moliere, 
 for example. In modern comedy, as in modern 
 society, women occupy many conspicuous posi- 
 tions ; but in Athens respectable women took no 
 part in social life, remaining at home and caring 
 93 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 for their households. In Greek comedy, therefore, 
 women are little seen, and those who do appear 
 belong to the less respectable classes. It was 
 impossible for Menander to treat such a theme as 
 served Moliere in the 'FemmesSavantes,' Sandeau 
 in ' Mademoiselle de la Seigliere,' and Ibsen in the 
 * Doll's Home ' ; and here, no doubt, is the most 
 serious limitation of Greek comedy. To Me- 
 nander himself the deprivation is most inju- 
 rious, since he obviously possessed the delicacy 
 of perception that would have enabled him 
 to handle feminine character with insight and 
 subtlety. His prevailing tone, as Professor J ebb 
 notes, is " that of polite conversation, not with- 
 out passages of tender sentiment, grave thought, 
 or almost tragic pathos." 
 \. Altho the chorus had disappeared in Menander's 
 day, the tradition of the mask still survived. 
 The mask was probably a pasteboard head not 
 unlike those now seen in our comic pantomimes; 
 and a great variety of them had been modeled 
 for use in comedy, each of which served to declare 
 at once the character of the wearer and to an- 
 nounce on his first appearance whether, for in- 
 stance, he was a dutiful young man or a wanton 
 prodigal. Indeed, there were said to be ten dis- 
 tinct masks available for the several young men 
 of the play, nine for the old men, and seven for 
 the slaves. In a theater so vast as that at Athens, 
 94 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 it would have been impossible for the spectators 
 to perceive the changing expression and the 
 mobility of feature which on the modern stage 
 add so much to our enjoyment. Probably, more- 
 over, the Athenian of old was no more annoyed 
 by the facial rigidity of the masked characters 
 than our children to-day are disturbed by the 
 unchanging countenances of Mr. Punch and Mrs. 
 Judy and of Mr. Punch's other wooden-headed 
 friends. 
 
 The Greeks were clever and witty ; they were 
 admirably qualified fgx, comedy ; and their lan- 
 guage was likewise easy and flexible. The 
 Romans who conquered them and who fell cap- 
 tive to their charm were a more serious people, 
 not so likely to appreciate the comic drama; and 
 their language was a lapidary tongue, grave and 
 concise and a little lacking in lightness and fluid- 
 ity. Latin reflects perfectly the sanity, the solid- 
 ity, the robust common sense, of the race that 
 spoke it. Altho there was always a certain aus- 
 terity among the Romans, a certain deficiency in 
 humor, they had early shown their appreciation 
 of the primitive comic play which had been de- 
 veloped by their neighbors, the Etrurians. These 
 Atellan fables seem to have been little better than 
 crude farces, not unlike the rough rustic plays of 
 95 
 
 / 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 the Grecian vintage-festivals out of which Greek 
 comedy had been evolved. The themes of these 
 little pieces were probably as vulgar as the frag- 
 ments of dialog that have been preserved ; and the 
 chief characters were broadly marked rural types, 
 the memory of which may have survived through 
 the empire and through the middle ages to emerge 
 again in certain of the personages of the Italian 
 comedy-of-masks. 
 
 However low in language these early attempts 
 might be, and however rude in art, they could 
 have served as a root out of which a genuine 
 Latin comedy might have been developed, if the 
 Romans had really wanted such a thing. But 
 before this coarse Italic humor had a chance to 
 raise itself into literature, it was thrust aside, and 
 its place was taken by Latin adaptations of Greek 
 comedy. The native comic drama that had 
 proved its power to please the populace did not 
 die of this neglect,— indeed, it seems to have had 
 a sturdy vitality; but it was deprived of the 
 chance of artistic development, and no specimens 
 of it have been preserved. It survived humbly 
 in the shadow of its important Greek rival; and 
 yet, long after all traces of the Latin perversion 
 of the Attic drama had disappeared, the coarser 
 Oscan play showed signs of existence in the nooks 
 and corners of the peninsula. Being unliterary, 
 a drama of this primitive type rarely gets itself 
 96 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 recorded, even tho it continues to please the un- 
 cultivated public. 
 
 The earlier Roman attitude tov^ard the arts had 
 been a little contemptuous; but this changed 
 when they began to apprehend the beauty of, 
 Greek civilization. Having discovered that Greek 
 culture was valuable, the Romans, being a prac- 
 tical people, proceeded at once to import it, 
 wholesale, and in the original package. Their 
 dramatists became adapters, taking the plots of 
 the plays of Menand^r and of Menander's clever 
 contemporaries, and transferring these into Latin, 
 leaving the scene in Athens, but inserting an 
 abundance of local allusions to Roman manners. 
 They kept the types of character which the 
 Athenian dramatist had observed and which often 
 had only rare counterparts in Rome; the braggart 
 coward, for example, was a Greek and not a 
 Roman,— the Greek had no stomach for fighting, 
 whereas the Roman had shortened his sword 
 and enlarged his boundaries. As a result this j 
 Latin comic drama is singularly unreal, —as unreal "1 
 as certain English adaptations from the French 
 and the German, in which we feel a blank incon- 
 gruity between the foreign code of manners on 
 which the story is conditioned and the supposedly 
 Anglo-Saxon characters by which it has to be 
 carried out. 
 
 Nor was this the sole disadvantage under which 
 97 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 Latin comedy labored, for the circumstances of 
 its performance were also disastrous. Plays 
 were provided regularly three times a year by the 
 city authorities, and also at irregular intervals when 
 la high functionary took office or when a great 
 dignitary died. The actors were often slaves, 
 who might expect a beating if they failed to be 
 applauded, and who might hope for their freedom 
 I if they succeeded in pleasing the public. The 
 
 "1 performances took place in huge theaters modeled 
 upon that in Athens, except that two important 
 changes were made: the orchestra, being no 
 longer needed for the dance of the chorus, was 
 reserved for the seats of the more important offi- 
 cials,— and therefore, in order that these specta- 
 tors might see, the dressing-house was lowered 
 and brought forward, so that its roof might serve 
 as a stage. But of these officials and of the mem- 
 bers of the upper circles there were few likely 
 often to be present; and owing to this absence of 
 the more cultivated public, a Roman audience did 
 
 1 not represent all classes of the community like 
 
 the Athenian audience— and like the London 
 
 and Parisian audiences to which Shakspere and 
 
 Moliere were to appeal. 
 
 The audience which the Latin dramatist had to 
 
 j^ try to please was the roughest and most stubborn 
 of any known to the history of the theater. It con- 
 
 ^ tained chiefly men of the lower orders— andvery 
 
 98 "^"^ 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 few of these were natives, for the Roman was 
 serving abroad as a soldier or settled as a colonist, 
 while his city was filled with a riffraff of rustics 
 and strangers, uncouth barbarians many of them, 
 prisoners of war, and freedmen, ignorant and 
 brutal, knowing just enough Latin to make it 
 serve as a lingua franca. Any delicacy would be / 
 wasted on a crowd like this; and no jest could 
 be too gross or too violent to amuse coarse crea- 
 tures whose chief joy had been in the bloody 
 sports of the arena. [Sometimes Gresham's law 
 seems as imperative in the drama as in finance; 
 the lower tends to drive out the higher,— at least, 
 we all know that the theaters of New York 
 have a barren fortnight when a huge circus 
 comes to town. It is no wonder Terence com- 
 plained that one of his plays was twice deserted 
 by the spectators, who were suddenly tempted 
 away by the report of more violent delights else- 
 where. 
 
 VI 
 
 Before a mob of this sort, the Latin dramatist :^ 
 sought especially to make his pl ot clg aj; and he 
 was afraid of no reiteration to avoid misunder- 
 standing. He could not count on any intelligence 
 of comprehension, and so we find at the begin- 
 ning of one of his plays a prolog in which is 
 set forth the exact situation at the opening of the 
 99 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 Story, and which then proceeds to tell in advance 
 what the plot was going to be, returning finally 
 to explain again the state of affairs at the moment 
 when the action was to open. Ut is doubtful 
 whether all the prologs as we have them are the 
 work of Plautus himself; and it is true that this 
 explanation may have been distended simply 
 to allow more time for the turbulent folk still 
 standing to find seats, or at least to settle them- 
 selves in their places. But even if the prolog is 
 thus made to serve as a substitute for the overture 
 of the modern theater, there is something pitiful 
 in the precise prolixity of Plautus, so afraid that 
 the most stupid may fail to catch some essential 
 point. Yet the attitude of the Roman dramatist 
 is only an exaggeration of that recommended 
 by the old London stage-manager who said that 
 if you want the British public to understand any- 
 thing, you must tell them you are going to do it, 
 next you must tell them you are doing it, and at 
 last you must tell them you have done it,— '*and 
 then, confound 'em, perhaps they'll understand 
 you!" 
 
 The stage was a mere strip of platform in front 
 of a wide architectural background. In the later 
 Roman theaters, in that of Orange for instance, 
 this rear wall had become a stately elevation with 
 three elaborate doorways and with decorative 
 statuary. But even in the time of Plautus this 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 background, altho only a temporary erection of 
 wood, contained doors which served to designate 
 the homes of certain of the characters. In the 
 'Captives,' for example, the speaker of the pro- 
 log tells the spectators explicitly that a father who 
 has lost his son dwells in the house on the right, 
 and that another father who has also lost his son 
 lives in the house on the left; and two of the 
 doors in the rear wall were sufficient to represent 
 these two domiciles. 
 
 The a ctors did not wear ma sks. Many of their -^ 
 speeches were accompanied by a soloist on the 
 flute. Some of these passages were declaimed to 
 this accompaniment, thus resembling the recita- 
 tive of modern opera; and some were actually 
 sung to set tunes. Indeed, we are told that 
 sometimes a singer came forward to the side of 
 the actor to deliver these lyrical passages while the 
 comedian merely made the appropriate gestures, 
 —a convention which seems to us monstrous, 
 but which in itself is perhaps no more absurd 
 than the full orchestra accompanying the song of 
 Amiens far in the depths of the Forest of Arden. 
 /The first duty of the Roman dramatist was to 
 u& so clear that the stupid spectators could not 
 fail to follow the successive situations ; and his 
 second obligation, even more difficult, was to 
 move to mirth his miscellaneous and uneducated 
 audienceA Altho in theory Roman comedy was 
 
 lOI 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 only Greek comedy written in Latin, and altho 
 Roman comedy was therefore supposed to^deal 
 with Athenian life and manners, as a matter of 
 fact the Latin dramatists managed to get into 
 their plays not a little of the local color of their 
 own city. Plautus especially, not knowing him- 
 self much about Athenian life and manners, and 
 well aware that his uncultivated Roman audience 
 knew still less and cared nothing at all, — Plautus 
 dealt very freely with his Greek original. 
 
 The scene of his plays is always supposed to 
 be in Athens, but Plautus continually draws on 
 his own intimate knowledge of the Roman popu- 
 lace. He had a thorough acquaintance with the 
 speech, the methods, the every-day actions, of the 
 very class from which was collected the audience 
 to which he appealed. It was his object to make 
 this audience laugh, and he could do it by show- 
 ing them as they lived, by local allusions, by a 
 humorous reproduction of their sayings and their 
 doings. Plautus no more tries deliberately to 
 mirror Athenian habits and deeds than Shakspere 
 —in giving us Dogberry and Verges— tried to 
 mirror the ways of speech and the judicial customs 
 of Sicily. In spite of his professed Greek original, 
 Plautus was really giving a picture of low life in 
 Rome, as broadly humorous and as fundamentally 
 veracious as the picture of low life in New York 
 which was visible in Mr. Harrigan's comic 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 dramas, such as 'Squatter Sovereignty' for ex- 
 ample. 
 
 Here Plautus was apparently availing himself 
 of the direct methods of the earlier native comedy 
 of the Italians, of the Atellan fables, and of Fes- 
 cennine satire; and this is just what a born dra- 
 matist would do instinctively, even tho he had to 
 follow a foreign plot. There is no denying that 
 Plautus was a born dramatist,— born out of time, 
 unfortunately, and fallen upon evil days. The 
 circumstances of the theater did not encourage or 
 even permit his full development. But even if 
 he was taking over his plot from Menander, he was 
 strikingly fresh in his sketches of life among the 
 lowly as he knew it in Rome. He was vulgar, 
 no doubt, but vulgarity was perhaps what his 
 rude audience most relished ; and altho frank and 
 plain-spoken, he was not as indecorous as Aristo- 
 phanes, and he was never so indecent as Wy- 
 cherley. He had a hearty gaiety as well as a 
 broad humor; indeed, in comic force, in vis 
 comica, in the sheer power of compelling laugh- 
 ter, he can withstand a comparison even with 
 Moliere, the greatest of all comic dramatists. 
 
 vn 
 
 This comic force is just what was lacking in Ter- 
 ence. Where Plautus was plebeian in his point of 
 105 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 view, Terence was patrician. Plautus was a practi- 
 cal playwright, and Terence was a cultivated man- 
 of-letters. Plautus was invaluable for the informa- 
 tion he has indirectly given us about the life of the 
 Roman populace; Terence was valuable chiefly be- 
 cause his scholarly translations have preserved for 
 us not a few of the best of Menander's comedies. 
 Plautus dealt freely with the works of the Greek 
 dramatists, knowing that his audience was eager 
 to be amused by bold buffoonery, while Terence 
 sought to give a high literary polish to his faith- 
 ful renderings of Greek plays of a graceful ele- 
 gance, altho he knew they were to be acted before 
 spectators incapable of appreciating either ele- 
 gance or grace. It is no wonder that the comedies 
 of the later writer failed ; he lacked the instinct of 
 the born dramatist, who cannot help feeling the 
 pulse of his contemporaries and responding to 
 their unspoken demands. Terence had to wait for 
 a fit audience until his plays were performed in 
 the Italian Renascence before an assembly of cul- 
 tivated scholars, abundantly capable of appreciat- 
 ing his refinement. 
 
 It has been suggested that there was in Me- 
 nander something of the well-bred ease of the 
 man of the world, such as we see it in Thackeray, 
 and that in Terence there is rather the terseness 
 and high finish of Congreve. Certainly Ter- 
 ence is like Congreve in that he was of importance 
 104 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 rather as a man-of-letters than as a dramatist. 
 He was essentially a stylist, concerned rather with 
 his manner than with his matter. Indeed, as his 
 comedies dealt with the life of Athens, which he 
 did not know at first hand, and not with the life 
 of Rome, which he could not help knowing, and 
 in the language of which he was writing, he can- 
 not be acquitted of unreality and artificiality. He 
 had at times a haughty melancholy of his own; 
 and he resented the stupidity of the public, inca- 
 pable of seeing the surpassing merit of his trans- 
 parent translations. But he had no roots in the 
 soil; he was not only content to be an imitator: 
 he was even proud of being second-hand; and 
 what he strove for was at best but a reflected 
 glory. This was indeecfthe fatal defect of the Latin Min44 
 drama,— that the Romans were satisfied with a 
 colonial attitude in all matters of art. They had 
 conquered the Greeks politically ; but the Greeks 
 had taken them captive intellectually. Instead of 
 developing the native drama, and elevating it into 
 literature by giving it form and substance, they 
 preferred to dwell in servile deference to the 
 greater Greeks. 
 
 A dramatic literature is necessarily conditioned 
 by the audience for which it is intended. A mob 
 of lewd fellows of the baser sort will demand 
 plays fitted to their low likings; and this is one- 
 reason why the Romans, with all their ability,^ 
 105 
 
GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY 
 
 failed to hav e a worthy ramatic literature— their 
 theater was abandoned to the vulgar. On the 
 other hand, there is danger also if the dramatist is 
 forced to please only the cultivated, who are ever 
 prone to apply personal and dilettante standards; 
 and it is this which accounts for the sterility of 
 the Weimar theater when it was controlled by 
 Goethe. But in the Elizabethan theater, altho the 
 rude and boisterous groundlings filled the yard, 
 there were city madams in the rooms above, and 
 there were gallants sitting on the stage itself; and 
 altogether the playwright had before him a rep- 
 resentative public. So Moliere, inventing certain 
 of his comedies for the court of the king, always 
 counted on bringing them out later in his own 
 theater for the joy of the burghers of Paris. Yet 
 it may be doubted whether any audience to be 
 found in Paris under Louis XIV, or in London 
 under Elizabeth, was as carefully trained to under- 
 stand and to appreciate, or was as delicately dis- 
 criminating in its taste, as those which in Athens 
 flocked to behold the tragedies of Sophocles and 
 the comedies of Menander. 
 
 io6 
 
IV. THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 THE Greeks, from the rudest beginnings, and -^ 
 by the aid of their incomparable instinct for ^ 
 form, brought to perfection a lofty type of tra- "* 
 gedy and an original kind of comedy. The Latins, 
 who had at least the germ of a comic drama of 
 their own, were proud to borrow the comedy of 
 the Greeks, altho in their hands it could not but 
 be sadly sterile. ^^ in the stalwart days of the 
 Roman commonwealth the drama seems to have_^ 
 had scant encouragement in the capital, either 
 from the men of culture or from the coarser popu- 
 lace. When at last the empire solidified itself 
 upon the ruins of the republic, and the eagles of 
 Rome were borne almost to the confines of the 
 world, the cosmopolitan inhabitants of this im- 
 mense realm were never educated to appreciate { 
 the calm pleasures of the theater. They were 
 encouraged to prefer the fierce joy of the chariot- _ 
 race, the brutal delight of the arena, and the poi- 
 gnant ecstasy of the gladiatorial combat. The sole 
 107 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 vestiges of the true drama were the vulgar farces 
 of the rustics that lingered in odd corners of Italy, " 
 and the obscene and cruel pantomimes which 
 were devised to gratify the relish of the mob for 
 lewdness and to glut its liking for gore. Neither 
 the rough comic plays of the peasants nor the 
 abominable pantomimes of the court had any 
 relation to literature. 
 
 After the conversion of Constantine, the lust- 
 ful and bloody spectacles were accurst by the 
 church. It was to be expected that the Fathers* 
 should condemn the theater absolutely, since it 
 was— in the sole aspect in which they had occa- 
 sion to behold it— unspeakably vile. With the 
 triumph of Christianity theatrical performances ' 
 were abolished; and it must have seemed as tho 
 the drama was destroyed forever. It is true that 
 in some obscure nooks rural farces might lingerf*' 
 forgotten links in the chain that was to stretch 
 from the Atellan fables to the late Italian comedy- 
 of-masks. But this doubtful survival seems to 
 have little significance, and apparently the break in 
 the tradition of the theater was final and irrepara- 
 ble. When Constantinople supplanted Rome as 
 the capital of civilization, dramatic literature, 
 which had been a chief glory of Athens, ceased 
 from off the earth. For atho usand j^ars and 
 more the hjstory of the drama is all^arkness and 
 vacancy; and we have not a singfe name recor ded 
 108 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 of any author writing plays to be performed by 
 actors, in a theater, before an audience. 
 
 The desire for the drama, which seems to be 
 instinctive in human nature the wide world over, 
 from the Aleutian Islanders to the Bushmen of 
 Australia, the impulse to personate^ and lotalce 
 pleasure in beholding a story set forth in action, 
 —this may have been dormant during the long 
 centuries, or it may have found some means of 
 gratifying itself unrecorded in the correspondence -*. 
 of the time or by the chroniclers. Acrobats there 
 were, and wandering minstrels; and now and 
 again we catch glimpses of singers of comic 
 songs and of roving amusers who entertained 
 with feats of sleight-of-hand, or who exhibited 
 trained animals. These performers, always pop- 
 ular with the public at large, were also called 
 in upon occasion to enliven the solid feasts of the 
 rulers. Gibbon records that at the supper-table 
 of Theodoric, in the middle of the fifth century, 
 buffoons and performers of pantomimes were 
 " sometimes introduced to divert, not to offend, 
 the company by their ridiculous wit." And 
 Froissart records that when he was a guest at the 
 court of Gaston Phebus, toward the end of the 
 fourteenth century, strolling jesters sometimes ( 
 presented a little play during the repast, or acro- 
 bats went through their daring performances. 
 The entertainments described by Gibbon and by 
 nop 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 Froissart, however long the interval between 
 them, bear an obvious likeness to our latter-day 
 "vaudeville suppers." 
 
 But none the less dramatic literature, which 
 had flourished so gloriously in Greece, and which ^ 
 had tried to establish itself in Italy, was dead at 
 last; and even the memory of it seems to have 
 departed, for, in so far as the works of the Attic 
 tragedians and of the Roman comedians were 
 known at all, they were thought of rather as 
 poetry to be read than as plays that had been 
 acted. The art of acting was a lost art, and thel 
 theaters themselves fell into ruin. So it was thaf'^ 
 when the prejudice against the drama wore itself 
 out in time, and when the inherent demand for 
 the pleasure which only the theater can give be- 
 came at last insistent, there was to be seen the 
 spontaneous evolution of a new form, fitted 
 specially to satisfy the needs of the people under 
 the new circumstances. This new drama of 
 the middle ages sprang into being wholly unin- 
 fluenced by the drama of the Greeks ; it was, in- 
 deed, as free a growth as the Attic drama itself 
 had been. 
 )In its origin agafti, the medieval drama was not . 
 \ unlike the drama of the Greeks, —in that the germ [ 
 of it was religious,^nd that it was slowly elabo- 
 rated from what was at first only a casual accom- 
 paniment of public worship. The new form had 
 119 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 its birth actually at the base of the altar and at } 
 the foot of the pulpit; and it was fostered by the i 
 Christian church, the very organization that had 
 cursed the old form when that was decadent and 
 corrupted. Coming into being as an illustrative 
 incident of the service on certain special days of 
 the ecclesiastical year, the drama grew sturdily 
 within the walls of the church until it was strong 
 enough to support itself; and when at last it ven- 
 tured outside, it remained for a long while reli-^ 
 gious in intent. The history of its development 
 is very much the same throughout Europe; and 
 the religious drama of England is very like that 
 of France (from which, indeed, it is in some 
 measure derived), just as the religious drama of 
 Italy is like that of Spain, altho neither of these 
 had any appreciable influence on the otheiO 
 
 The reason for this uniformity is ^vious 
 enough. It was due to the double unity of the 
 medieval world,— that whiclT resulted from p^s^ 
 session of the same religion and that which was 
 caused by the consci ousness of a former union 
 underihe rule of Rome . All the peoples of west- 
 ern Europe had inherited the same customs and 
 the same traditions, because they had all been in- 
 cluded in the RomanEmpire, which had stretche 
 itself from the Black Sea to the Atlantic. wHien, 
 at last, the vigor of the Roman government was 
 relaxed, the barbarians of the north had broken in, 
 III 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 and had swept through southern Europe into 
 Africa and into Asia. The Franks had taken Gaul 
 for their own, the Goths had repopulated Italy, 
 and the Vandals had traversed Spain ; and as they 
 had all of them accepted Christianity, sooner or 
 later, the most distant lands had once more come 
 under the sway of Rome. 
 
 This is why it is that we find in the middle 
 ages a unity of western and southern Europe 
 closer than ever before or ever since. Just before 
 the Renascence, the peoples of all these varied 
 stocks, however much they might differ individu- 
 ally, were bound together by the common use of 
 the Latin language and by the common dominion 
 of the Roman law; they held the same beliefs 
 and they yielded to the same superstitions; they 
 revered the same ideals, they acted on the same 
 theories, and they had very much the same habits. 
 As yet the idea of nationality had not been born; 
 and the solidarity of those speaking each of the 
 modern languages had not been suggested. Eu- 
 rope was a unit because, altho it was segregated 
 into towns and even into small provinces, these 
 had not yet been compacted into distinct nations. 
 Towns and provinces and kingdoms were all in 
 accord in accepting the supremacy of the pontiff 
 of Rome and in yielding a doubtful allegiance to 
 the head of the shadowy monarchy which was 
 still called the Holy Roman Empire. 
 
 112 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 To declare with certainty just where it was that 
 the new drama first gave sign of life is quite im- 
 possible; and it is equally impossible to decide 
 whether it sprang up of its own accord in half a - 
 dozen different places, or whether the first tempt-— 
 ing suggestion of it was carried abroad from the 
 church of its origin for adoption in churches 
 widely scattered. There was far more migration 
 in the middle ages than is admitted by those who 
 consider them merely as a long period of stagna- 
 tion. Priests and merchants were continually 
 passing from one city to another a thousand miles 
 distant; and as the most of Europe was included 
 in the Holy Roman Empire, and as it acknow- 
 ledged also the sway of the Roman Pope, men 
 could remove from the east to the west, and from 
 the south to the north, with no feeling that they 
 were relinquishing their nationality, especially 
 as the priests, at least, could make themselves 
 understood everywhere in the same tongue. 
 
 Latin was the language of the church and of its ^ 
 liturgy ;(_and it is out of the Latin liturgy of the j^ 
 Christian church that the drama of the modern 
 European languages has been slowly developedj^^^ 
 It is not possible to trace all the steps by which 
 a very brief semi-dramatic adjunct of the service 
 of certain special days of the ecclesiastical year 
 "3 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA • 
 
 was slowly elaborated into a more or less com- 
 plete dramatic scene; and it is difficult to declare 
 just how it was that these several scenes were in 
 time detached from the liturgy and combined to- 
 gether in a cycle which presented the chief events 
 of the gospel-story. But it is practicable to prove 
 that there was a steady growth, beginning with 
 a single brief scene acted within the church, by 
 the priests, in Latin, and almost as part of the 
 liturgy, and developing, in the course of time, 
 into a sequence of scenes, acted by laymen out- 
 side the church, in the vernacular, and wholly 
 disconnected from the service. 
 
 The Christian church had so arranged its calen- 
 dar that every one of the chief events in the career 
 of Jesus was regularly commemorated in the 
 course of the year. Its liturgy was rich in sym- 
 bolism; and as the ritual was not everywhere 
 uniform, opportunites were frequent for sugges- 
 tive variations devised by the devout priests, who 
 were diligently seeking the means by which they 
 could best bring home the central truths of reli- 
 gion to a very ignorajit congregation. In many 
 churches, for example, the crucifix was removed 
 from the altar on Good Friday and borne to a re- 
 ceptacle supposed to represent the sepulcher, 
 whence it was taken on Easter morning to be re- 
 stored solemnly to the altar, in testimony of the 
 Resurrection. 
 
 114 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 The gospel-Story is rarely pure narrative; as it 
 is to be expected in the accounts of eye-witnesses, 
 it abounds in actual dialog. And where a dra- 
 matic passage was included in the service nothing 
 was easier or more natural than to let the narra- 
 tive be read by the officiating priest, while as- 
 signing the actual dialog to other priests, each of 
 whom should deliver the speeches of a single 
 character. Thus on Easter morning, in the col- 
 loquy between Saints Peter and John and the 
 three Marys, when the apostles ask what had 
 been seen at the sepulcher, each of the three 
 Marys can answer in turn. In time this inter- 
 change of dialog would lend itself to amplifica- 
 tion; and there is preserved a Latin manuscript 
 in which the scene at the sepulcher was presented 
 both in dialog and in action. In this interpolation 
 into the Easter service, the three Marys, Saint Peter 
 and Saint John, and " One in the likeness of a 
 gardener," all impersonated by priests or choir- 
 boys, speak the words set down for them in the 
 sacred text, and do whatever is there recorded of 
 them. 
 
 Altho scenes of this sort seem to have been first 
 invented to embellish the Easter services, Christ- 
 mas was soon discovered to offer an equal oppor- 
 tunity. For example, one of the very earliest of 
 these enlargements of the ritual showed the quest 
 of the shepherds. At the proper moment certain 
 '•5 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 priests holding crooks in their hands are to be 
 seen standing in the transept, and a chorister 
 from a gallery above announces to them the glad 
 tidings of the birth of Christ, the Savior of men. 
 Then, while other choristers scattered throughout 
 the galleries sing, " Glory to God in the highest, 
 and on earth peace, good will to men," the Shep- 
 herds advance to the choir, and halt at length before 
 a manger which has been arranged near the altar 
 and by the side of an image of the Virgin Mary. 
 There two other priests, personating Women 
 who had aided the Virgin-mother, ask the Shep- 
 herds what it is they are seeking, and then display 
 the infant Jesus to them. The Shepherds, after 
 adoring the new-born babe and its mother, de- 
 part singing ** For unto us a child is born,"— 
 which is the beginning of the high mass regularly 
 celebrated at Christmas. 
 
 More elaborate is a liturgical embellishment 
 dealing with the Three Kings, the Three Wise 
 Men of the East, and calling for a greater variety 
 of characters and for a more obvious effort to in- 
 dicate the different localities where the several 
 portions of the gospel-story were supposed to take 
 place. The huge churches, which had begun to 
 spring up all over Europe in the century follow- 
 ing the fateful year looo, were not encumbered 
 with pews, as are our smaller modern edifices; 
 and their free floor-space would contain multi- 
 ii6 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 tudes of Spectators, even tho lanes were kept open 
 through the throng to connect the altar and the 
 various doors. Within the chancel was the 
 manger, with an image of the Virgin-mother; 
 and also two priests stood there, personating 
 Women who had been assisting Mary. In a 
 pulpit, or in a gallery, was the chorister who was 
 to sing the message of the Angel. On a platform 
 not far distant was a throne, on which Herod sat, 
 surrounded by the members of his court, all of 
 these characters being assumed by officials of the 
 church. The Angel, the two Women by the 
 manger, and Herod and his courtiers, were each 
 in their several stations in the church before the 
 play began; and they were supposed not to be 
 able to see one another,— indeed, they were sup- 
 posed not even to be present until it should be 
 the turn of each to enter into the action. 
 
 First the Shepherds come into the church by 
 one of the doors ; and, passing through the ranks 
 of the congregation, they advance toward the 
 choir, where the Angel hails them wjth the glad 
 tidings, whereupon they go to the manger and 
 adore the holy babe ; and at last, after singing, they 
 stand apart. Then through another door on the 
 eastern side of the church enter the Three Kings; 
 and when they have come to the middle of the 
 edifice a star begins to guide them to the manger, 
 —this star being a light pulled along a wire. 
 117 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 Herod, silent on his throne all this time, has been 
 supposed not to see the Shepherds ; but the Kings 
 he does see, and so he sends a Messenger to ask 
 who they are. The Messenger questions them 
 at length, and finally bears back to Herod the 
 dread news that the King of Kings has been born, 
 and that the Three Wise Men of the East are 
 being guided to his cradle by the star above their 
 heads. Herod then consults the Scribes, who 
 proceed to search the Scriptures and to inform 
 him that the promised Redeemer should be born in 
 Bethlehem. Herod rages violently at these ill tid- 
 ings, and knocks the books from the hands of 
 the Scribes ; but, pacified by his son, he bids the 
 Three Wise Men follow the star and find the new- 
 born King, commanding them on their return to 
 let him know where the royal infant lay. Herod 
 and all his courtiers then become silent again, and 
 cease to take part in the play until they shall be 
 once more needed. The Three Kings, bearing 
 their gifts and led by the star, advance toward 
 the altar and meet the Shepherds, who now come 
 into the action again. The Shepherds sing a hymn 
 of praise; and the Three Kings ask them what 
 they have seen. The Shepherds, after declaring 
 that they have beheld the holy child lying in a 
 manger, withdraw; and the Three Kings follow 
 the star to the altar, where the two Women ask 
 them who they are and what they are seeking. 
 
 u8 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 The Three Wise Men reveal the object of their 
 journeying; and the babe is then displayed to 
 them. They adore it, presenting their gifts of 
 gold and frankincense and myrrh. The Angel in 
 the pulpit or gallery above them breaks in, de- 
 claring that the prophecies are fulfilled, and bid- 
 ding the Three Kings go home by another way. 
 Thereupon the Wise Men, chanting a hymn of 
 praise, pass through the assembled multitude and 
 leave the church by a western door. Herod is 
 supposed not to see them take their leave, but 
 just as soon as they are gone, the Messenger in- 
 forms the monarch that they have departed in dis- 
 obedience; thereupon Herod draws his sword 
 and gives it to a Soldier, bidding him go forth 
 and slay all the children. 
 
 Here the play seems to end, altho, as we have 
 also the manuscript of a representation of the 
 Flight into Egypt and of the Slaughter of the In- 
 nocents, it is probable that, in some churches, on 
 some occasions, all the various incidents con- 
 nected with the Nativity were set forth in action, 
 one after the other. What it is most important 
 for us to seize and to fix in our memories is that 
 these episodes of the gospel-story— the Scene of 
 the Shepherds, the Adoration of the Wise Men, 
 the Wrath of Herod, the Slaughter of the Inno- 
 cents—came into existence each by itself, having 
 been put into dramatic form as a more vivid and 
 119 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 impressive illustration of the liturgy; and that 
 possibly a long while elapsed before any one 
 thought to combine these scattered scenes into a 
 sequence. But after the Christmas cycle of the 
 Nativity had knit itself together, following or 
 preceding a similar Easter cycle of the separate 
 scenes of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, it 
 was probably not very long before an attempt 
 was made to link the two cycles together, fill- 
 ing out the gaps by dramatizing the more inter- 
 esting of the intervening episodes of the gospel- 
 story,— the Raising of Lazarus, for instance, and 
 the Driving of the Money-changers from the 
 Temple. Thus the whole story of the life and 
 death and resurrection of Jesus could be presented 
 in dialog in the church by the priests themselves, 
 in Latin, and as part of the service, for the en- 
 lightenment of the ignorant population in those 
 dark ages. 
 
 Altho the priests who put it together had not 
 given a thought to this aspect of it, the story of 
 Jesus is truly dramatic, not only in its humanity, 
 in its color, in its variety, in its infinite pathos, 
 but also and chiefly in its full possession of the 
 prime essential of a true drama— in its having at 
 rthe heart of it a struggle, an exhibition of de- 
 ! termination, a clash of contending desires. In- 
 deed, it is the most dramatic of all struggles, for 
 it is the perpetual conflict of good and evil. To 
 20 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 US moderns the issue is sharply joined ; but in the 
 medieval church it was even more obvious, since 
 in the middle ages no one ever doubted that a 
 personal Devil was forever striving to thwart 
 the will of a personal God. In the passion-play, 
 which showed in action all the leading events of 
 the life of Christ, both of the contestants were 
 set boldly before the spectators— God himself 
 high in Heaven, and the Devil escaping from 
 Hell-mouth to work his evil will among mankind. 
 After all these little scenes, each of them de- 
 vised originally for the special day of the church 
 calendar when the event was commemorated, had 
 been combined into a New Testament cycle, and 
 after there had been prefixed to it certain epi- 
 sodes dramatized from the Old Testament also, 
 and selected because they seemed to prefigure the 
 gospel-story,— after the passion-play had become 
 a mystery, and after it was thus grown to its full 
 length and swollen huge, it was found to be too 
 unwieldy for presentation in the church Mtself, 
 and too burdensome for the clergy tO/ perfornu^ 
 Thrust out of the church, it may have lingerea 
 for a while in the churchyard or in the cloisters 
 or in the great square before the sacred edifice,,^^ 
 As the successive episodes of the gospel-story 
 no longer had an intimate connection with the 
 actual liturgy, the tendency was increased to sub- 
 stitute for the Latin of the priests the language of 
 
 121 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 the people; and this pressure became irresistible 
 when the ecclesiastics gave up to laymen the 
 acting of the several characters. 
 
 The performance of a full-grown mystery, with 
 due regard to the dignity of the theme, was an 
 undertaking of not a little magnitude, requiring 
 both capital and executive ability. The prepara- 
 tion of the text, the adjusting of the music, the 
 making ready of the costumes, the training of the 
 actors,— these things were possible only to an 
 organization of a certain stability. At first the 
 church was the only body having at once the 
 desire and the resources to execute so onerous a 
 task. /But when the gilds arose in time, and 
 when burghers banded together and craftsmen 
 combined, it became possible for the church to 
 relinquish the control of the mysteries to lay or- 
 ganizations. \ 
 
 III 
 
 But altho the evolution of the passion-play from 
 the liturgy is obvious, we find in the mystery, 
 wlien it was presented in the language of the peo- 
 ple by the craftsmen and the burghers, one element 
 which is not of ecclesiastical origin ; —we find the 
 element of humor, of joyous gaiety, of vivacious 
 realism, and often indeed of reckless vulgarity. 
 Even before it was wholly independent of the 
 church the new drama had felt the influence of 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 popular taste, and it had taken over more than 
 one of the accepted devices of the prim'itive 
 comic plays, such as the strolling buffoons were, 
 wont to perform. The brief farces of these wan- 
 dering minstrels may have been mere dramatized 
 anecdotes, practical jokes in dialog, pantomimic 
 horse-play of an elementary type; they were 
 wholly unliterary, and being often even unwrit- 
 ten, they have rarely been preserved. Yet it is 
 perfectly possible that this medieval farce, with 
 its hearty fun and its frankness of speech, is the 
 direct descendant of the rude humor of the Latin 
 rustics, surviving unobserved and neglected 
 through all the centuries of the dark ages, and 
 serving humbly to satisfy, in some measure, the 
 perpetual human desire for a story told in action^ 
 When at last the serious play had been developed 
 out of the services of the church, this folk-drama 
 was ready to supply the comic element, without 
 which any representation of life must needs be 
 one-sided. *^ 
 
 Fortunately chance has saved for our enlighten- 
 ment not a few of the later specimens of this 
 folk-play; and we can see that it was generally 
 as unliterary and as inartistic as one might expect, 
 and that it assumed a great variety of forms. It 
 might be merely a burles que-s ermon satirizing the 
 clergy or the civil authorities; it might be a mon- 
 olog in which, for example, a boastful character 
 123 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 unwillingly admitted his own unworthiness; it 
 might be little more than a comic song with a 
 telling refrain and with illustrative gestures; it 
 might be a dialog of cut-and-thrust repartee not 
 unlike the pungent talk interchanged by the ring- 
 master and the clown in the modern circus; it 
 might even be a lively little play with a simple 
 ingenuity of situation, presenting a scene of 
 every-day life with an abundance of pertinent 
 detail. 
 
 Such, for example, is the French farce of the 
 'Tub,' with its three characters of the Husband, 
 the Wife, and the Mother-in-law. The Husband 
 is henpecked ; and the Wife, aided by the Mother- 
 in-law, has even gone so far as to draw up an 
 agreement for the Husband to sign, in which he 
 has bound himself to do all the work of the 
 household, and in which his several duties are 
 specified, item by item. Then, as it happens, 
 the Wife falls into the tub in which they have 
 been washing the household linen, and she cries 
 to the Husband to help her out. He consults the 
 agreement, and then refuses to assist her, as that 
 is not set down in writing. The Wife insists; 
 and the Husband protests that he is willing to do 
 all that he has agreed to do, but nothing more. 
 The Mother-in-law intervenes, but she cannot ex- 
 tricate the Wife without the Husband's help; and 
 he refers her again to the document. He is ready 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 to bake and to boil and to get up early to make 
 the fire, as he has promised to do ; but as for pull- 
 ing the Wife out of the tub, that is not his duty, 
 since it is not down in the bond. The Wife and 
 the Mother-in-law scold and threaten at first; but 
 at last they appeal. The Husband suggests that 
 if he is to do more than he has bound himself to 
 do in writing, then the agreement is really use- 
 less, and he proposes that it shall be torn up be- 
 fore he rescues the Wife. As her danger is now 
 pressing, the two women agree to this ; the bond 
 is rent in twain, and the Husband extricates the 
 Wife from the tub. The household is once more 
 upon a peace footing; and yet the Husband, 
 warned by experience, remarks to the spectators 
 that he wonders how long it will last. 
 
 This little farce of the * Tub ' is French ; but 
 it has its analogs in the other modern literatures. 
 It has a certain likeness to the dispute between 
 Noah and his Wife in an English mystery— a very 
 amusing scene, indeed, in which the spouse of 
 the patriarch refuses to enter the ark unless she 
 can bring her friends with her, and in which, 
 when she is taken on board by force, she gives 
 her venerable husband a sound box on the ear. 
 
 French, also, is the farce of 'Master Peter 
 Patelin,' by far the most artistic of all the medie- 
 val comic plays. Patelin is a swindling lawyer 
 who is in the depths of poverty. He goes to a 
 125 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 Draper and wheedles him out of six yards of 
 
 woolen cloth ; and when the Draper comes to him 
 for payment, Patelin is in bed, and his Wife pro- 
 tests that he has not been out of the house for 
 weeks. The Draper is almost persuaded that he 
 is the victim of hallucination, and he returns to 
 his shop to see if he has truly lost the cloth. 
 Finding that it is really gone, he rushes again to 
 Patelin's lodging, whereupon the lawyer pretends 
 to be mad, and overwhelms the unfortunate 
 tradesman with a flood of words, first in one of 
 the French dialects, and then in those of another, 
 until at last the Draper withdraws, half believing 
 that it is the devil who has played a trick on him. 
 Then there comes to Patelin the Shepherd of the 
 Draper, whom his master is suing for having 
 stolen some sheep, and the Shepherd engages the 
 lawyer to defend him. Patelin bids the Shep- 
 herd to pretend to be foolish and no matter what 
 question the Judge may put to him, to answer 
 only with the bleat of a lamb, — " Baa-a ! " When 
 the trial comes up before the Judge, Patelin hides 
 himself behind the Shepherd so that the Draper 
 shall not see him. But the shopkeeper does 
 catch sight of the lawyer at last, and he instantly 
 demands payment for his cloth, to the complete 
 astonishment of the Judge, who had supposed 
 that he was trying the Shepherd for sheep-steal- 
 ing. The Draper gets confused also, and accuses 
 126 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 the Shepherd of stealing the cloth and the lawyer 
 of taking the sheep. The puzzled Judge ques- 
 tions the Shepherd, who answers no word but 
 " Baa-a!" and Patelin adroitly pleads that the poor 
 fellow is plainly an idiot. The Draper continues 
 to insist on payment for his cloth, altho the Judge 
 in vain begs him to come back to his sheep. In 
 the end, the magistrate has to acquit the Shepherd 
 for lack of evidence against him. Then the 
 wretched Draper asks Patelin if he is not the 
 lawyer who had been seen in bed only a few 
 minutes before; and Patelin daringly bids him go 
 to the house and look for himself. When the tor- 
 tured tradesman has departed, Patelin turns to 
 the Shepherd and demands his fee for getting the 
 man off from the charge against him. And now 
 are the tables turned: the biter is bit, and the 
 swindler is swindled ; for the Shepherd simply 
 answers, "Baa-a!" The play comes to an end 
 swiftly with the discomfited Patelin trying vainly 
 to catch his deceitful client. 
 
 ' Master Peter Patelin ' is a French farce, to be 
 acted by itself whenever a company of strollers 
 happened to have five performers ; but it is curi- 
 ously like one of the Nativity scenes in an English 
 mystery. When the Shepherds are watching 
 their flocks by night, a neighbor joins them — one 
 Mak, a man of evil repute. To keep him under 
 guard when they go to sleep, the Shepherds 
 127 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 make Mak lie down between them. But the 
 precaution is unavailing, as Mak gets up, and 
 steals a lamb, and takes it to his Wife, and then 
 returns to his place. When the Shepherds wake, 
 there is Mak between them ; but a lamb is miss- 
 ing. Mak is suspected at once, and the Shep- 
 herds go to his house, where Mak's Wife has the 
 lamb swaddled in a cradle like a babe. The 
 Shepherds search everywhere and find nothing, 
 until one of them goes to the cradle and remarks 
 that the babe has a long snout. When the lamb 
 is discovered, Mak's Wife promptly pretends that 
 it is a changeling just left by an elf. The Shep- 
 herds, after punishing Mak by tossing him in a 
 blanket, return to their flock; and almost imme- 
 diately the Angel above sings to them the glad 
 tidings of Christmas morn. Here is a comic 
 action, complete in itself and quite detachable 
 from the mystery, with which, indeed, it has no 
 necessary connection. Perhaps it is even older 
 than the mystery, and was inserted into the text 
 merely to supply what is known nowadays as 
 "comic relief,"— just as the farce of the 'Tub' 
 might have been incorporated into a passion-play 
 without any protest from the public. 
 
 Both in French and in English the comic scenes 
 
 of the mysteries were often wholly irrelevant in 
 
 theme and absolutely incongruous in treatment. 
 
 No reverence for the sacred subject prevented the 
 
 128 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 medieval audience from enjoying a joke, or made 
 it very particular as to the quality of the fun it 
 laughed at. Just as we moderns are surprised by 
 the grinning gargoyles and by the satiric carv- 
 ings of the mighty cathedrals, so in the medieval 
 drama we are often taken aback by the bold vul- 
 garity of the comic scenes. Altho the medieval 
 writers had not found out that brevity is the sou! 
 of wit, they often acted on the belief that breadth, 
 is the body of humor. The authors were plain i 
 of speech and the audiences were never squea^^ 
 mish ; and as we study what was then to be seen 
 on the stage we are reminded of Taine's remark 
 that in the middle ages man lived on a dunghill. 
 It must be noted that the farces are rather more 
 reprehensible than the comic scenes of the mys- 
 teries ; and yet the grossest of these farces might 
 be perf^rftfed sometimes as the prelude to a mira- 
 cle-play ; thus the * Miller ' preceded a very devout 
 dramatization of the legend of Saint Martin. 
 This low humor is indecorous rather than de- 
 moralizing ; it shocks our sense of.propriety some- 
 times, but it is never insidious or seductive. It 
 was intended for the entertainment of the popu- 
 lace, which is often vulgar but which is rarely 
 vicious. In the farces, as in the more serioils 
 scenes of the passion-plays, we can always see the 
 simplicity and the^sincerity which were ever the - 
 two chief characteristics of medieval endeavor* 
 129 
 
 ~c 
 
^ 
 
 THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 IV 
 
 The change from the Latin language to the 
 speech of the people, the transfer of control from 
 the clergy to the laity, the removal from the in- 
 side of the church to the outside, were all made 
 gradually and tentatively, and with no intent to 
 bring about any radical transformation. When 
 the laymen took charge, they desired to do just 
 what the priests had done, no more and no less; 
 and if we seek to understand the circumstances 
 of the performance outside of the church, we 
 must recall what the conditions were originally 
 inside the sacred edifice. In the cycle of the 
 Nativity we saw that the manger was set up near 
 the altar, and that not far distant there was erected 
 a throne for Herod. Each of these places was 
 thus what came to be known as a " statioji " ; and 
 the action of the play went on, not only at the 
 one or the other of the stations, but also in other 
 parts of the church, extending now and again 
 even to the doors. The Easter cycle would also 
 require several stations, —three at least, one with 
 a throne for Pilate, another with the cross, a 
 third with the open grave. The acting of the 
 play was carried on chiefly in the open space be- 
 tween and in front of the several stations, the 
 characters belonging to each of these remaining 
 there, silent and motionless, until the time came 
 130 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 for them to enter with the story. Then they might 
 leave the station for a while, and go out into the 
 open space, only to return to their own places so 
 soon as the progress of the plot called for the 
 characters of some other station. 
 
 When the Christmas cycle and the Easter cycle 
 were combined together, and when the few in- 
 termediate scenes were also cast into dialog, so 
 that the whole earthly life of Jesus might be 
 shown, from his birth to his resurrection, then 
 the nave of the church would be inconveniently 
 crowded with the many stations requisite for the 
 whole gospel-story ; and there would be left be- 
 tween them, and in front, an inadequate area for 
 what might be termed the neutral ground, the 
 open space for the acting of the many scenes 
 which did not call for special stations— such, for 
 instance, as the Entry into Jerusalem, or the Be- 
 trayal at Gethsemane. Those who began to act 
 out the sacred story in the church had no thought 
 of scenery,— which, indeed, was a thing to them 
 not only unknown, but wholly inconceivable. 
 They were seeking to show what had happened 
 on[the very day they were commemorating. Even 
 when the incidents had cohered into a sequence, 
 it was the j ^ion i tself that was all-important, 
 and the glacewhere it came to pass was without 
 significance except when it needed to be specified. 
 So the most of the acting was always in the more 
 »3i 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 open space in the center; and stations were uti- 
 lized only when they were really necessary. 
 Probably as the mysteries increased in length 
 the number of necessary stations became cumber- 
 some, and only in the larger cathedrals would it 
 be possible to avoid an awkward cluttering within 
 the chancel. Quite possibly, this multiplication 
 was an added reason for removing the perform- 
 ance of the mysteries outside the church, to some 
 ampler place, where the several stations might be 
 more widely separated, 
 y' When this removal did take place, and the 
 mysteries were presented in the open air, what 
 the laymen who took charge of them would un- 
 doubtedly seek to do would be to preserve care- 
 fully such traditions as had been established in 
 the course of the performances given by the 
 clergy. These laymen would therefore avail 
 themselves of the device of the stations, modi- 
 fying these as might be required by the new 
 conditions of the performance. In England this 
 modification came in time to be somewhat differ- 
 ent from that obtaining in France; but as the 
 English mystery is derived from French models, 
 the French form demands attention first, the more 
 so as elsewhere in Europe there is a closer resem- 
 blance to French usage than to English. 
 / In France, then, a mystery would be acted 
 /upon a platform put up in some public place, 
 132 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 often in the open square in front of the cathedral. 
 To provide reserved seats for the dignitaries of 
 the church, the officials of the city, and the dis- 
 tinguished strangers invited to attend, grand 
 stands w^ould be erected facing the platform and 
 along the sides, the central area being left free 
 for the populace, who were always eiger to 
 crowd in, while the gaily draped windows of the 
 surrounding houses would be available as private 
 boxes. The platform, intended to serve as a 
 stage, was perhaps a hi^ndred and fifty feet long, 
 and some fifty or sixty feet deep. The front part 
 was generally free and clear, so that the actors 
 could move to and fro, while at the back were 
 ranged the stations— which in France came soon 
 to be known as ''mansions." At the extreme 
 left of the spectators, and raised high on pillars, 
 was Heaven, wherein God sat, often with a^ 
 gilded face, the b'etterTo^uggest the shining glon 
 of his countenance. At the extreme right of th( 
 spectators was Hell-mouth, the fiery cavern where 
 the Devil and all his imps had their abode. Then 
 stretching from Heaven to Hell-mouth was the 
 line of mansions, those earliest in use being on 
 the left. A wall, pierced by a door, might in- 
 dicate Nazareth ; next an altar covered by a canopy 
 and protected by a balustrade would suggest the 
 Temple; and a second wall with its gate could 
 serve to call up the idea of Jerusalem itself. In 
 133 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 the center there might be a more elaborate con- 
 struction, with columns and a throne, intended 
 for the palace of Pontius Pilate. A third wall with 
 two doors might be made to serve as the house 
 of the high-priest and as the Golden Gate; while 
 in front of this and not far from Hell-mouth there 
 mightbe a tank of real water, with a little boat float- 
 ing on it, so as to simulate the Sea of Gennesaret. 
 These are the mansions that are depicted in a 
 miniature on the manuscript of a mystery acted 
 in Valenciennes in the middle of the sixteenth 
 century. In other places, and at other times, 
 there might be more or there might be less, for 
 there was never any uniformity of custom; and 
 even here we see that many of the most impor- 
 tant episodes of the gospel-narrative must have 
 been performed on the front part of the platform 
 and wholly unrelated to any of the mansions 
 ranged at the back. The mansions were employed 
 only when certain portions of the sacred story 
 could, by their use, be made clearer or more 
 striking; and even when they were set up, how- 
 ever elaborate their decoration might be, it was 
 never in any way deceptive. The mansions were 
 not intended actually to represent the special 
 places ; the most they were expected to do was to 
 suggest them so that a few columns would indi- 
 cate a palace or a temple, and so that a wall and a 
 door sufficed to evoke the idea of a city. 
 »34 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 Thus we see that in France the stations used 
 inside the church were set up side by side on the 
 open-air stage outside of the church, where they 
 were known as mansions. In England, when 
 the passion-play was taken out of the sacred edi- 
 fice, another arrangement was adopted: the sta- 
 tions were separated and each was shown by 
 itself, being called a " pageant." Sometimes 
 these were immovable, and sometimes they were 
 ambulatory; and in the latter case, which seems 
 to have been the more frequent, the pageant was 
 apparently not unlike the elaborately decorated 
 *' floats " familiar in modern parades, such as that 
 of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Corpus Christi 
 day was early chosen as the festival most fit for 
 the performance of the mysteries ; and in Great 
 Britain the pageants followed in the wake of the 
 Corpus Christi procession through the town. 
 The first pageant, with its appropriate decorations 
 and its own group of performers, would draw up 
 before the church-door as the end of the proces- 
 sion emerged therefrom ; and the first episode of 
 the play would then be represented there, some- 
 times on the broad platform of the wagon, but 
 often in the street itself,— just as most of the 
 acting in the French mysteries took place not so 
 much in the mansions themselves as in the neutral 
 ground in the front of the stage. One stage- 
 direction in an English manuscript is curiously 
 135 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 significant: "Here Herod shall rage on the pa- 
 geant and in the street." 
 
 When the first episode had been played out, 
 the second pageant appeared; and the first pa- 
 geant was dragged away along the line of march 
 of the Corpus Christi procession to another ap- 
 pointed spot, where the first episode was acted 
 again, while the performers attached to the sec- 
 ond pageant were presenting the second episode 
 before the doors of the church. Then a third pa- 
 geant would take the place of the second; and 
 thus it was that, in the course of the long sum- 
 mer day, the spectator, no matter at which of 
 the chosen spots he might chance to stand, 
 could see all the successive incidents of the 
 mystery represented before him, partly on the 
 pageants, with their elementary attempts to indi- 
 cate the actual place where the action was sup- 
 posed to be passing, and partly in the open street 
 in the space that was kept clear for the actors. 
 For certain of the episodes, such as the Trial of 
 Jesus, for example, two pageants were necessary, 
 and the performers passed from one to the other 
 as the incidents of the narrative might require. 
 
 This use of ambulatory pageants seems to h^ve 
 obtained chiefly in the English towns; and in the 
 rural districts the pageants were not decorated 
 wagons, but platforms set up along the route of 
 the Corpus Christi procession. There was a stage] 
 136 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 for each of the important episodes of the play, thus 
 recalling the original stations devised for the per- 
 formance when it took place inside of the church. 
 The spectators, following the procession, would 
 halt in front of the first platform and witness the 
 acting of the first episode; and when that was 
 concluded they would pass along to the second 
 platform to behold the second episode; and so on 
 until they had seen the entire mystery. The Eng- 
 lish were thus setting up separately the stations 
 which the French had preferred to put side by 
 side upon one very long platform. But these 
 variations of custom between the French and the 
 English are external only, and of no immediate 
 importance, altho they account in part for the 
 divergence to be observed in the development of 
 the later dramatic literatures of the two languages. 
 Essentially the mystery is the same, wherever 
 it is acted, and in whatever language, French or 
 English, German or Italian. It is the same in its \ f 
 long-windedness and in its loose-jointedness, in 
 its homely directness of speech alternating with --O^ 
 turgid bombast, in its occasional touches of gen- *^ 
 
 uine fefiling and of unstrained pathos, in the intro- 
 duction of humorous scenes, in the frank realism 
 of dialog, and, above all, in the simple faith of 
 those who wrote it, of those who acted it, and 
 of those who beheld its performance. The in- 
 fluence of the audience must always be taken 
 137 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 into account: and the medieval spectators for 
 whose edification the mystery was devised were 
 unlearned and without culture; they were igno- 
 rant and even gross ; they had no tincture of let- 
 ters; they were credulous and superstitious and 
 wonder-loving; they were at once devout and 
 irreverent,— or at least they seem so to us; they 
 had a liking for broad fun and for a robust realism 
 of treatment; they were shocked by no vulgarity 
 and they resented no incongruity, for they were 
 wholly devoid of the historic sense (as we mod- 
 erns call it). 
 
 Altho the English mysteries were of Anglo- 
 Norman origin and follow the French tradition in 
 the main, yet the bond of unity was broken when 
 Latin was abandoned for the vernacular; and 
 there are other differences between the perform- 
 ances in French and those in English besides the 
 modification of the station into the mansion in 
 the one country and into the pageant in the other. 
 In England, the entire mystery— shortened now 
 and again by the occasional omission of one epi- 
 sode or another— seems sometimes to have been 
 presented in a single day, the exhibition begin- 
 ning as early as four in the morning. In France 
 the performance was more likely to continue 
 over several successive days, very much as the 
 Wagnerian cycle is now given at Bayreuth,— altho 
 it may be doubted whether any modern audience 
 138 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 could have the patience of the medieval specta- 
 tors of Bourges who in the sixteenth century 
 were entertained by a mystery of the * Acts of 
 the Apostles,' the performance of which took 
 forty days. 
 
 In England, as we have seen, the pageants fol- 
 lowed the religious procession ; whereas in France, 
 where the mansions were immovable on a single 
 platform, it was not unusual for the whole troop 
 of performers to make a street-parade before the 
 acting began, quite in the manner of the modern 
 traveling circus. In France, again, when the 
 church gave up the control of the mysteries, they 
 were turned over to lay organizations of burghers, ^ 
 founded especially to perform the sacred plays; 
 whereas in England this task was assumed by 
 the_^lds, each of which undertook the episode 
 which its craftsmanship best fitted it to carry out, 
 the Carpenters, for instance, being responsible 
 for Noah's Ark, and the Goldsmiths undertaking 
 the Three Kings, because they could best provide 
 the royal diadems. 
 
 Further differences there are also between the 
 mysteries as performed in France or in England 
 and the sacred-representations of the Italians; 
 and again between the dramatizations of the 
 Scriptures as acted in Germany and those to be 
 seen in Spain. But these differences are matters 
 of detail merely; and the line of development was 
 »39 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 everywhere the same throughout those parts of 
 Europe that had been ruled by Rome. Every- 
 where also was the production of a mystery 
 considered as a good deed, as an act pleasing to 
 Heaven, and certain to win favor from the Deity 
 and from the saints. Such performances were 
 often, therefore, given in a season of pesti- 
 lence to placate the wrath of God or to deserve 
 
 sjthe protection of some particular saint. Such an 
 exhibition took place in Constantinople, within 
 Saint Sophia itself, in the middle of the fifteenth 
 century, just before the capture of the capital 
 of the Western Empire by the Turks. Mys- 
 teries were also performed in certain towns after 
 an escape from impending danger and as a testi- 
 mony of gratitude to Heaven for its intervention; 
 and it is to this sentiment that we owe the con- 
 tinued performance of the passion-play^ which is 
 still to be seen every tenth summer at Oberam- 
 
 ' mergau. 
 
 The majority of the mysteries preserved to us 
 in manuscript are anonymous, and of only a 
 few are we acquainted with the exact date 
 of composition. Most of the authors are to be 
 considered rather as compilers; lacking indi- 
 viduality, they were satisfied to accept the play 
 as they found it, modifying the framework but 
 little after it had once been constructed, and 
 satisfying themselves with adding or subtracting 
 140 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 episodes at will. Each of them freely availed 
 himself of the labors of those of his predecessors 
 with which he chanced to be familiar. Some- 
 times he rewrote what he borrowed, and some- 
 times he copied it slavishly, careless of any diver- 
 sity of diction. So there is not often harmony 
 of style in any single mystery ; and yet there is 
 an immense monotony when a number of them 
 are compared together. 
 
 Very closely allied to the mystery was the mira- 
 cle-play, which may have come into being even 
 before the Easter cycle had elaborated itself into 
 a passion-play. ^ sequence of episodes taken 
 from Holy Writ we now call a mystery ji and 
 what we now call a miracle-play is a sequence of 
 episodes taken from the life of some wonder- 
 working saint.) In England the mystery was 
 much the more frequent; but in France the mira- 
 cle-play was perhaps the more popular, as it was 
 probably almost as ancient. Indeed, in the mid- 
 dle ages no one seems ever to have made any dis- 
 tinction between the two kinds of play, as the 
 medieval mind was not trained to discriminate 
 between the canonical books and the Apocrypha, 
 or even between the Scriptures and the legends 
 of the saints. Jn miracle-play, as in mystery, we 
 141 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 find the same naif treatment of life, the same 
 panoramic construction of the story, the same 
 admixture of comic incidents, and the same ap- 
 parent irreverence; and the circumstances of the 
 performance would be the same also. 
 
 The middle ages had an appetite for allegory 
 quite as vigorous as the liking for legend; and 
 after the saintly biographies had been set on the 
 stage as miracle-plays, allegory was also cast into 
 dialog, and thus we have the moral-plays. The 
 r^orality was a medieval forerunner of our mod- 
 ern novel-with-a-purpose, as unconvincingly di- 
 dactic as it is inevitably dull. The morality may 
 even be defined as an attempt to dramatize a 
 sermon,— whereas the mystery is simply a dra- 
 matization of the text. Written to be presented 
 before an audience used to the primitive methods 
 of the passion-play, the authors make free use of 
 the device of the stations, for instance. In one 
 morality, the 'Castle of Constancy,' there were 
 six stations : one was a castellated structure open 
 below to reveal a bed for the chief character, who 
 personified the Human Race; and the other five 
 stations were disposed around this loftier stage, 
 one in the east for God, one in the northeast for 
 Greed, one in the west for the World, one in the 
 south for the Flesh, and one in the north for the 
 Devil. The hero of this string of argumentative 
 conversations. Human Race, appears at first as a 
 142 
 
 (, 
 
 \ 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 child, and the Angels of Good and of Evil come to 
 him. He is tempted off to the World by the Evil 
 Angel; and later, as a young man, he is intro- 
 duced to the Seven De^adly Sins. In time Repen- 
 tance leads him to Confession; and as a man of 
 forty we see him in the Castle of Constancy, sur- 
 rounded by the Seven Most Excellent Virtues. 
 Thereupon the Castle itself is besieged by the 
 three evil powers and the Seven Deadly Sins and 
 their allies. Then at last, as an old man, Human 
 Race backslides again, and the Evil Angel is bear- 
 ing him away, when a formal trial takes place 
 before God, at which Justice and Truth accuse 
 him, while he is defended by Mercy and Peace. 
 
 The morality was an attempt to depict charac-^ 
 ter, but with the aid of violent colors only, and 
 with a harsh juxtaposition of light and darkness. 
 Yet it helped along the development of the drama 
 in that it permitted a freer handling of the action, 
 since the writer of moralities had always to invent 
 his plots, whereas the maker of mysteries had his 
 stories ready-made to his hand. The morality was 
 frankly fiction, while the miracle-play gave itself 
 out for fact. Then, also, the tendency seems 
 irresistible for an author who has any appreciation 
 of human nature to go speedily from the abstract 
 to the concrete and to substitute for the cold 
 figure of Pride itself th^ less frigid portrait of an 
 actual man who is proud. Thus mere allegory, 
 «43 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 barren and chill, is swiftly warmed into social 
 satire, tingling with individuality; and so we have 
 here before us the germ out of which a living 
 comedy was to be evolved. It is to be noted that 
 when the morality had achieved a certain freedom 
 for itself in plot and in character, it seems to have 
 exerted a healthy influence upon the contempo- 
 rary mystery and miracle-playt 
 
 In fact, the medieval mind did not distinguish 
 the three kinds of drama sharply, and we find 
 them commingled in more than one example,— 
 notably in the English 'Mary Magdalene.' We 
 discover the same confusion of species in all un- 
 critical periods, when production is spontaneous 
 and unconscious. In method the mystery and 
 the miracle-play are alike ; and by no certain mark 
 can we set off the morality from the interlude in 
 English or the monolog from the burlesque-ser- 
 mon in French. The more elevated the effort, 
 the more likely was an admixture of the grotesque. 
 Immediately before or after the loftiest moments 
 of a tragic theme, the nimble devils would come 
 capering forth to make the spectator shriek with 
 laughter at their buffoonery as they bore away 
 some evil-doer to be cast into Hell-mouth. 
 
 Popular as these plays were, it is only in a 
 
 chance episode that any one of them is really 
 
 raised into literature. The drama must be thel 
 
 most democratic of all the arts, since its very exis->, ' 
 
 144 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 tence depends on the multitude ; and it is therefore 
 likely always to represent the average intelligence 
 of any era. |' The long period knov^n as the mid- 
 dle ages, whatever its literary unattractiveness, 
 brought about a new birth of the acted drama. 
 It aroused in the people the desire for the plea- 
 sures of the theater; and it began to train actors 
 against the time when acting should once more 
 become a profession. 
 
 In considering the deficiencies of the medieval 
 drama, we must never forget that the actors 
 were all amateurs,— priests at first, and then 
 burghers and craftsmen, students and clerks. 
 They might be paid for their services, or they 
 might choose to perform as a labor of love ; but 
 acting was not their calling, and their opportu- 
 nities for improving themselves in the art were 
 infrequent. The accomplished actor stimulates 
 the dramatist, and the playwright is ever devel- 
 oping the performer; each is necessary to the 
 other, and in the middle ages we find neither. 
 Yet slowly the traditions of a theater were get- 
 ting themselves established. There was acting, 
 such as it was; there were plays, such as they 
 were, not so much dramas as mere panoramas of 
 successive episodes; there were audiences, rude 
 and gross, no doubt, but composed of human 
 beings, after all, and therefore ever ready to be 
 entranced and thrilled by the art of the master- 
 145 
 
THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 
 
 craftsman. But in the medieval drama we seek 
 in vain for a master-craftsman; he is not to be 
 found in France or in England, in Spain, in Italy, 
 or in Germany. The elements oi^-a^ital drama 
 were all there, ready to ttre-Mnd of a true dra- 
 matist who might know how to make use of 
 them; they were awaiting the grasp of a poet- 
 playwright who might be able to present with 
 technical skill and with imaginative insight the 
 perpetual struggle of good and evil, of God and 
 the Devil. 
 
 But in all medieval literature there is no born 
 play wright; and there is no born poet who 
 wrought in dialog and action. The one inde- 
 structible work of art which gives utterance to 
 the intentions of the middle ages, to the ideals of 
 that dark time, and to its aspirations, was not 
 made to be represented within the church or out 
 of it, either by priests or by laymen, even tho it 
 bore the name of the ' Divine Comedy.' 
 
 ^ 
 
V. THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 IN the middle ages a simple sort of drama had 
 been slowly evolved out of the liturgy of the 
 church; it had grown sturdily until in time it 
 was strong enough to stand on its own feet; it 
 took over the primitive farce of the strolling jesters 
 and thus supplied itself with the comic contrast 
 needful in any adequate representation of life; it 
 spoke the language of the people and it embodied 
 their beliefs and their aspirations ; in short, altho 
 it was as yet clumsily inartistic and frankly un- 
 literary, it was at least alive ; and it had won its 
 right to survive. A single brief scene acted in 
 the church, by the priests themselves, and in 
 Latin, had slowly led to the performance of a 
 sequence of scenes, in the vernacular, by laymen, 
 outside of the church. The mystery, which was 
 a sequence of scenes in the life of Jesus, had a rival 
 in the miracle-play, which was a sequence c ^ scenes 
 in the life of some wonder-working saint. Dis- 
 regarding the invisible line that divided the sacred 
 147 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 from the profane, the medieval drama was in time 
 able to take as the central figure of its straggling 
 episodes a hero of secular legend or of romantic 
 narrative, or even of actual fact. So the chronicle- 
 play came into being, and the "history," such as 
 we see it in Shakspere; and while the miracle- 
 play was intended to be exhibited gratuitously, 
 in an open square, by bands of amateurs, upon 
 some special occasion, the later chnoaickrplay 
 was prepared to be performed by professional 
 actors, at regular intervals, in a building set apart 
 for the purpose, before an audience that had paid 
 its way in. 
 
 It was at this moment of the development of 
 the medieval drama that the Renascence arrived, 
 bringing with it the masterpieces of ancient art. 
 Scholars in love with the severe beauty of Greek 
 tragedy turned with disgust from the formless- 
 ness and the vulgarity of the popular performances. 
 They could not know then that the Attic stage 
 had grown out of beginnings quite as humble, 
 and that the medieval drama needed only to be 
 lifted into literature, just as the crude Hellenic 
 dialog and chorus had been elevated by the power 
 of the poet who had accepted the primitive form, 
 filling it with the might of his genius. They did 
 not perceive that the massive simplicity of Soph- 
 ocles was due partly to the conditions undei^ 
 which his tragedies had been performed in the 
 148 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 Theater of Dionysus, — conditions wholly unlike 
 those obtaining in western Europe two thousand 
 years later. Indeed, the scholars of the Rena- 
 scence gave little thought to the actual perform- 
 ance, devoting their attention chiefly to the merely 
 literary merits of the ancient dramatic poets, and 
 accepting as the model to be followed not so much 
 Sophocles, the marvelous playwright, as the un- 
 actable Seaeca. They were impatient to thrust 
 on one side the rude but living drama of their 
 own day, in order to make room for imitations, — 
 and imitations rather of the clever Hispano-Ro- 
 man rhetorician than of the noble Athenian drama- 
 tist. They did not perceive the vigorous vitality 
 of the chronicle-play, which had established itself 
 solidly in conformity with the actual conditions 
 of the medieval theater; and they could not sus- 
 pect that the plain people were right in clinging to 
 the existing drama, shapeless as it was, and in re- 
 sisting all attempts to substitute for it a merely 
 literary exercise. 
 
 The chronicle-play was^rtless enough, but it 
 was exactly suited to its public; it had a stage 
 of its own, and actors to perform it, and audiences 
 to enjoy it; and all that it needed was that the 
 poets should perceive its possibilities, and that 
 they should accept it as it was, biding their time 
 to cleanse it from its vulgarities, to bestow on it 
 the art it lacked, and to give it the harmony and 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 proportion it had neglected. The example of the 
 great dramatists of antiquity could not but be 
 useful to the poets who might attempt this puri- 
 fication of the drama of the middle ages ; and the 
 study not only of Sophocles, but even of Seneca, 
 might be serviceable. And, as a matter of fact, 
 we find that in the several modern languages a 
 dramatic literature has come into existence only 
 when successive poets have taken the popular 
 form as they found it, and tried to give it some- 
 thing of the unity, the propriety, and the dignity 
 which they had admired in the classics of Greece 
 and Rome. 
 
 This is what happened in Spanish, in English, 
 and in French; and in these languages the modern 
 drama is an outgrowth of the medieval, modified 
 more or less by the acceptance of the classic 
 models. This influence of the ancients is most 
 obvious in the French theater and least evident in 
 the Spanish, while in the English it is pervasive 
 rather than paraded. In Italy the scholars were 
 opinionated and intolerant; the poets scorned the 
 medieval drama, both serious and humorous, sa- 
 cred-representations and comedy-of-masks ; they 
 insisted on casting aside all that the middle 
 ages had accomplished and on returning abso- 
 lutely to antiquity./^ The Italian men-of-letters 
 did not firmly grasp the fact that a living drama 
 is always the result of a long partnership between 
 150 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 the audiences and the actors, and that it is always 
 conditioned by the circumstances of its perform- 
 ance, including the traditions of the actual theater. 
 \s a result of this hostile attitude on the part of 
 the leaders of the new culture, we discover that 
 the Italians developed no dramatic literature of 
 their own. We perceive that their efforts resulted 
 in little more than a few lifeless imitations from 
 the antique, acted by main strength now and 
 again, but failing absolutely to establish a new 
 tradition in the theater itself. We observe also 
 that the main body of the Italian public had to 
 satisfy its desire for the drama with the unliternry 
 and semi-acrobaticxom^dy^ofini^sks. 
 
 Perhaps it was this dearth of a living dramatic 
 literature in their own language which helped to 
 lead the Italian critics astray in their ingenious 
 deduction of a code for the control of dramatic 
 poetry. They spurned the only plays they had 
 had occasion to see actually performed ; and with 
 the intellectual subtlety of their race at that epoch, 
 they got together a body of rules, not exactly 
 evolved out of their inner consciousness, but de- 
 rived from their misinterpretation of what Horace 
 and Aristotle had said. Misguided by what they 
 had misread in the Roman lyrist (who had also no 
 acted drama to sustain his theories) and by what 
 they read into the Greek philosopher (who was 
 specifically analyzing the Attic drama only, that 
 >5i 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 being the sole theater he could know anything 
 about), the Italian critics proceeded to set up the 
 standard of the Three Unities, — the Unity of Ac^ 
 tion, the Unity of Tinje, and the Unity of Play, 
 — insisting that a tragedy should have a single 
 story to be completed in a single day and to be 
 shown in a single place^^^ 
 
 They persuaded not only themselves, but also 
 the men-of-letters of all the other countries where 
 the new learning established itself, that an accept- 
 ance of these rigid limitations was obligatory 
 upon all the dramatic poets who might seek to 
 follow in the footsteps of the ancients. But for- 
 tunately they were never able to convince the 
 unlearned public that it was wise to insist on 
 these arbitrary restrictions ; and so it was that the 
 practical playwrights, who were trying to interest 
 the plain people, did not find themselves forced 
 to enter the triple-barred cage of the Unities. The 
 critics might protest shrilly, but the dramatists 
 kept on working in freedom; and when the 
 spectator had been amused by a play he never 
 cared to raise any objection, even if the action did 
 ramble alo^jg for many days and in many places. 
 
 We can see now that the Athenian audiences 
 were in reality not more exacting than the Eng- 
 lish or the Spanish, since the code the Italian 
 critics promulgated had often been violated in 
 anticipation by the Attic dramatists.. Even the 
 152 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 Unity of Action is not always discoverable in a 
 Greek play; and it is due to the accidental con- 
 ditions of the performance in the Theater of 
 Dionysus that the Unity of Time and the Unity 
 of Place may seem generally to be observed. But 
 altho the common sense of the broad public 
 refused to hamper the playwright by needless 
 limitations of his liberty, the plays of the Greeks 
 were not without immediate and abiding influ- 
 ence upon modern dramatic literature. In the 
 course of the years, the severe restraint of the 
 Attic drama and its majestic movement made 
 a profound impression upon the popular play- 
 wrights, who began to choose loft kr themes^ nd 
 to build their plotsmorg^ ^^^nllj^ <^i^*^iy ^^^ 
 string of episodes came to be knit more closely 
 together and the central characters -carpe to be 
 more ver aciously broup^ht ^out. The struggle, 
 which is aPthe core of every go od play^ was 
 more clearlv seized and more b oldly, presen ted. 
 
 any sei ze 
 the m6ZI( 
 
 In all the moaern languages, the lo ftier drama^ 
 is the result_^L£-stimulation of the actual folk-, 
 p la y, as we find it in the middle ages, by the 
 study of a model su ppl ied by the Attic sta^ 
 dir ectly or intlirect ly. VThe modern drama is due* 
 to a fecundation of the medieval by the antique.) 
 Of the new drama'lic literatures thus elaborated 
 from unliterary- begir>nings, one may owe more 
 than Another ^o the example of the great Greeks; 
 »53 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 but all of them owe much, — even the Spanish, 
 in which the influence of the Renascence is least 
 obvious. 
 
 The Renascence hasbeen called thebridge which 
 connects the middle ages with modern life, — a 
 bridge more than one span of which was built 
 out of the relics of antiquity; and altho it would 
 be an overstatement to assert that the most of 
 the Spanish people did not care to go over to the 
 new world of thought explored by the leaders of 
 the Renascence, it is not too much to suggest that 
 tho^P of the Spaniards who did venture across 
 carried over v%h them more medieval character- 
 istics than the Italians or the French burdened 
 themselves with. The Renascence was, above all 
 things else, an emancipation of the human intelli- 
 gence; it was a declaration of independence put 
 at oncejnto deeds ; and this gift of freedom the 
 Spanish people had no wish to accept. In fact, 
 they were glad to reject it, for among them there 
 was no parallel to the questioning curiosity of 
 the Italians, to the speculative liberty of the Ger- 
 mans, and to the mental alertness of the English. 
 Willingly they had accepted the guidance of the 
 Inquisition ; and to them the liberation of man's 
 spirit was not only unwelcome, — it was even 
 abhorrent. The Spaniards had i)p sympathy 
 »54 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 with the sensuous joyousness, the sheer delight 
 in living, which stands out as an essential ele- 
 ment of the Renascence. The Spanish ideals 
 were ever ascetic and mystic, — whatever might 
 be their actual practices. However much they 
 might in fact enjoy life, in theory at least they 
 held it to be only a dark valley of transition ; and 
 here the Madrid of Philip is as opposite as possi- 
 ble to the London of Elizabeth and the Florence 
 of the Medici, as well as to the Athens of Pericles. 
 The evidence of this hostile attitude toward 
 the newer ways of thinking is abundant on every 
 page of Spanish history and in every contribution 
 to Spanish literature; and nowhere is it more 
 clearly visible than in the Spanish drama, which 
 even in its best days is far more closely related 
 to the medieval drama than is the later drama 
 of France or even of England. In the splendid 
 epoch of Lope de Vega and of Calderon and of 
 the throng of inventive playwrights that encom- 
 passes them about, the Spanish drama is strangely 
 similar to the drama of the middk ages. It is 
 loose in its construction, careless of proportion, 
 never afraid of monotony of topic, full of repeti- 
 tions, devoid of concentration. It has always an 
 air of improvisation; and altho it is never quite 
 so unliterary as were most of the mysteries and 
 the miracle-plays, it rarely attains conciseness 
 of speech org|olish of phrase; and very seldom 
 
 ^55 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 indeed does it aspire to a true harmony of plot. 
 It is as reckless in anachronism, and it reveals 
 the same absence of the historic sense which is 
 so distinct a characteristic of the medieval writers, 
 to whom, as it has been well said, "past cen- 
 turies seemed to form only a single and grand 
 epoch in which were united all the celebrities of 
 history." It deals with actions chiefly, but occa- 
 sionally with emotions, and almost never with 
 thought. Its temper is uncritical ; and its tone is 
 sometimes even more superstitious than was 
 common in the medieval plays. Of course, the 
 Spanish playwrights soon attained a technical 
 skill such as no one of the unknown scribes of 
 the middle ages could achieve; and indeed it is 
 this dramaturgic adroitness which saliently dif- 
 ferentiates the brisk Spanish plays from their 
 lumbering medieval predecessors. 
 
 The rise of the theater in Spain was aided by 
 two circumstances which were lacking in Italy. 
 The Spanish had achieved their unity as the re- 
 sult of a strenuous effort sustained for years, — an 
 effort which had stiffened the national will and 
 aroused the national consciousness; and they had 
 found at last a focus of national life in their new 
 capital, where the dramatist could make sure of 
 all sorts of spectators. The Spaniards also shared 
 with the English a gift not bestowed on the Ital- 
 ians, — th ey were makers of balla d|; and they 
 156 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 had thus supplied themselves with an abundance 
 of the material most fit for the playwright to 
 handle, while the making of the ballads had 
 helped to train their poets to deal directly and 
 simply with situation and with character. 
 
 Throughout western Europe the folk-theater 
 of the middle ages is very much the same every- 
 where; and i n France as in England, in Italy as 
 in Spain, we are shocked by the same irrever ent 
 c ommingling ofThe sacred and the profa ne, 'and 
 by the same obtrusion of realistic farce into plays 
 intended for edification. For a while this gross 
 incongruity was accepted with only slight pro- 
 test; but after heroes from history and from 
 romance had been substituted for the saints, and 
 after the humor of the comic episodes had been 
 broadened beyond the borders of decency, the 
 ecclesiastical authorities sometimes became aware 
 of the objectionable features. In Spain, for ex- 
 ample, a formal law forbade a priest from taking 
 part in "scornful plays " or from attending them ; 
 and it declared that such plays should not be 
 performed in the churches. But the same law 
 specifically authorized a priest to act in represen- 
 tations of the Nativity and of the Resurrection. 
 "Such things as these move men to do well and 
 be devout in the faith, and may be done in order 
 to remind them that they really happened. But 
 they must be performed with great decency and 
 157 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 devotion in the large cities, where there are arch- 
 bishops and bishops who may order them, and 
 they must not be represented in villages nor poor 
 places, or for the purpose of gain." 
 
 If this law was actually enforced, the villages 
 and poor places could have had no other theatri- 
 cal entertainment than that supplied by little 
 bands of strolling players. These were probably 
 as prevalent in Spain as in Italy and in France; 
 and their repertory was as primitive. The leader 
 of one such company was Lope de Rueda, who 
 is hailed as the founder of the Spanish theater,— 
 very much as Thespis is held to be the beginner 
 of the Greek drama. He was at once sole play- 
 wright and chief performer. Cervantes tells us 
 that "in the time of this celebrated Spaniard, all 
 the apparatus of a manager was contained in a 
 bag, and consisted of four white shepherd's 
 jackets, bordered with gilt leather, four beards 
 and wigs, and four shepherd's crooks, more or 
 less. . . . The stage was merely composed of 
 four square blocks of wood, upon which rested 
 five or six boards, that were thus raised about 
 four^Tpalms from the ground. . . . The furniture 
 was an old blanket hung on two cords, making 
 what they call the dressing-room, behind which 
 were the musicians, who sang old ballads with- 
 out a guitar." Here we find in Spain, just as we 
 can find also in Greece a score of centuries earlier, 
 158 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAI^f^.---' 
 
 one important actor accompanied by a few singers, 
 performing upon a platform set up in the market- 
 place with an improvised dressing-tent behind it. 
 Exactly what kind of play it was that Thespis 
 was wont to act in his wanderings we can now 
 only guess; but by good fortune certain of the 
 simple pieces of Lope jk Rueda have been pre- 
 served. They are very simple indeed; but they 
 have the same open fidelity to the facts of life 
 that we find in the English scene of Mak and the 
 Shepherds and in the French farce of the ' Tub ' ; 
 and they are sustained by the same humorous 
 observation of human nature. One of them, en- 
 titled the 'Olives,' begins with the stepping up 
 upon the stage of a Peasant, who calls his Wife. 
 His Daughter it is who comes out from behind 
 the dressing-room curtain, to say that her mother 
 is at a neighbor's. While the Peasant scolds, the 
 Wife returns, and bids her Daughter cook the 
 father's supper. Then she asks if the Peasant 
 has done as he promised, — if he has planted the 
 olive-tree ? When she learns that this has been 
 attended to; she foresees that in six or seven 
 years the tree will yield them several measures 
 of olives and that by planting the branches from 
 time to time they will have a field of olives in a 
 score of years ; and then the Daughter will sell 
 them for two reals a peck. At this the Peasant 
 protests; the olives are not worth such a price. 
 159 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 The Wife declares that they are, the tree being 
 from Cordova; and in spite of her husband's ob- 
 jections, she turns to the Daughter and orders 
 the girl to charge two reals. The Peasant calls 
 the Daughter and bids her obey her father and 
 not ask so much. The Wife insists on the girl's 
 selling the olives for two reals. The Peasant 
 furiously threatens to beat the child if she does 
 not do as he tells her; and thereupon the Wife, 
 also moved to anger, begins actually to beat the 
 girl for disobedience. While the Daughter is 
 beseeching both father and mother not to kill 
 her, a Neighbor steps up on the stage to ask the 
 reason of the outcry. The Peasant explains that 
 the cause of dispute is the price to be asked for 
 certain olives, and the Neighbor naturally asks to 
 see them that he may judge for himself. When 
 he is told that the tree is only that day planted 
 and that the fruit they are quarreling about will 
 not be gathered for many years, he laughs at 
 them all, crying, * ' What an absurd quarrel ! Who 
 ever saw the like? The olives are scarcely 
 planted — and yet they cause the poof girl to cry. " 
 Nothing could be more unpretending than 
 this little scene; and its most valuable quality 
 was that it was perfectly portable, and that it 
 called for neither scenery nor costumes. It could 
 be acted wherever and whenever four performers 
 happened to be banded together. Quite as ele- 
 
 i6o 
 
€rHE DRAMA IN SPAIIJ^ 
 
 mentary as the ' Olives ' is the * Blind Beggars 
 and the Boy/ written by a friend and follower of 
 Lope de Rueda's, Juan de Timoneda. One Blind 
 Beggar enters and whines forth his customary 
 chant of entreaty. The other Blind Beggar comes 
 on from the opposite side and also intones his 
 prayer for alms. A Boy crosses the stage, and 
 as he sees the first Blind Beggar he is about to 
 flee, recognizing the master he has robbed and 
 deserted. Then the urchin remembers that, since 
 his master cannot see him, he is safe so long as 
 he keeps quiet. After a time, the two Blind Beg- 
 gars drop into chat with each other, while the 
 Boy listens. Believing themselves to be alone, 
 the two Blind Beggars discuss the advantages and 
 disadvantages of their calling; and at last the first 
 tells the second how he has been robbed by his 
 rascally boy. The second then explains how he 
 protects himself by always carrying his ducats 
 sewed in his cap, — whereupon the Boy steals 
 forward, knocks off the precious cap, and escapes 
 with it. The owner naturally supposes that it is 
 the man he has been speaking with who has taken 
 the cap, and he asks for its return ; but of course 
 the other at once denies all knowledge of it. Here 
 is matter for a swift quarrel; and the little play 
 ends with the two Blind Beggars engaged in an 
 angry fight. 
 Even before the populace had been easily 
 i6i 
 
^iV ^^ ( ^ "^ '^PA^ 
 
 amused by lively trifles like these, and while the 
 mystery was still at the hight of its vogue, pro- 
 fessed poets had sought to imitate the more 
 scholarly attempts of the Italian men-of-letters. 
 They had devised pastoral-plays, of varying 
 poetic merit but always of a hopeless artificiality. 
 If any of these pastoral-plays happened to be 
 actually performed, it was always by amateurs, 
 for they were written to delight a noble or a 
 royal patron, much as masques were in England 
 not long after and the later mythological ballets 
 of the French court. They were none of them 
 composed to please a real public that had paid 
 its money to see a genuine play; and, as might 
 be expected, they seem to have had little or no 
 influence on the growth of the acted drama. 
 Until Lope de Rueda was followed by Lope de 
 Vega, the literary play was not popular and the 
 popular play was not literary. It was Lope de_- 
 Vega who accepted the popular drama, such as 
 it was, and gave it the art it lacked. ~~^ 
 
 It is to be noted that one great figure inter- 
 venes between Lope de Rueda and Lope de Vega — 
 the figure of Cervantes, the greatest in all Spanish 
 literature. A score or more plays did Cervantes 
 write; and they were actually acted with some 
 small measure of success or — to use the words 
 of the author himself — "without their receiving 
 tribute of cucumbers or other missiles. " Of those 
 162 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 ♦ 
 
 early attempts two survive to show that Cer- 
 vantes, like Balzac and like Tolstoi, had only a 
 moderate share of play-making ability. They are 
 not without merit, of course, for they came from 
 the pen of Cervantes; but they are cumbrous, 
 and sluggish, and almost as ill proportioned as 
 the mysteries upon which they are modeled; 
 they are wholly without the briskness and the 
 pleasant inventiveness which Lope de Vega was 
 soon to bestow on the Spanish drama. That Cer- 
 vantes was lacking in the dramaturgic faculty is 
 made evident again by the plays which he pub- 
 lished later in life, after Lope had set up a new 
 standard. Indisputable is it that Cervantes was 
 far more richly endowed than Lope, and also 
 that his single splendid achievement in fiction 
 outweighs all that Lope ever accomplished in all 
 the departments of literature; but equally unde- 
 niable is it that Lope had the one thing needful 
 for success upon the stage, and that this was pre- 
 cisely the qualification which Cervantes wanted. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Lope molded the Spanish drama to suit his 
 own gifts; he stamped it forever with the impress 
 of his own personality ; and even if we must admit 
 that Calderon, who came after, also rose higher, 
 and that the younger poet surpassed the elder in 
 163 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 lyrical elevation of several of his plays, none 
 e less must we remember always that the 
 greatest dramas of Calderon are examples of a 
 class of which Lope had set the first model. If 
 we acknowledge, as we may, that even Calderon 
 trod only where Lope had first broken the path, 
 we must record that all the other dramatists of 
 Spain were also followers in his footsteps. From 
 out the numerous mass of Lope de Vega's works, 
 it would be possible to select a satisfactory speci- 
 men of every species of the drama as it has existed 
 in Spain. What Lope was, so was the Spanish 
 drama. He came first, and he was the most 
 original of all, the most fertile, the most indefati- 
 gable, the most various, the most multifarious. 
 
 His influence on the stage of Spain was far 
 more potent and more durable than that of 
 Sopho des on the theater of Gr eeceor^ of Shak spere 
 onj he drarna of England . It was Lope who 
 earliest discovered how to hold thejnterest of a 
 modern audience by the ea sv_ intricacy of his 
 story and by_Jhe_surpnsing_iiaiiet^^ 
 cessive situations, each artfully prepared for by 
 its pre'de cess^ r. If Schlegel found an ingenious 
 felicity of plot-making to be so characteristic of 
 the Spanish drama that he was led to suspect a 
 Spanish origin for any play in which he observed 
 this quality, it was to the practice and to the pre- 
 cept of Lope de Vega that his fellow-dramatists 
 164 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 owed their possession of this merit. One of 
 these fellow-dramatists it was who summed up 
 the good points of the Spanish drama in lines 
 which have been th us Englished by G. H. Lewes : 
 
 Invention, interest, sprightly turns in plays, 
 Say what they will, are Spain's peculiar praise ; 
 Hers are the plots which strict attention seize, 
 Full of intrigue and yet disclosed wilke-ise : 
 Hence scenes and acts her fertile stage affords 
 Unknown, unrivaled on the foreign boards. 
 
 It was the lack of a metropolis which had helped 
 to deprive the Italians of a drama worthy of their 
 intellectual supremacy in the early Renascence^/ 
 and it was the choice of Madrid as the capital 
 which made possible the sudden outflowering of 
 the Spanish dramatic literdture.. The many little 
 bands of strolling players, sirfiilar to the company 
 Lope de Rueda had directed,*and containing per- 
 formers of both sexes, looked longingly toward 
 the court; and two of them were in time allowed 
 to settle in the royal city, bringing with them 
 their elementary repertory of songs and dances, 
 of simple interludes and of lumbering chronicle- 
 plays. The theater assigned to each of these 
 companies was as primitive as the entertainment 
 they proffered, for it was no more than the court- 
 yard of a house. At the farther end of this court- 
 yard was the shallow platform, which served as 
 165 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 a Stage, and which was shielded by a sloping 
 roof. Near to the stage were a few benches, and 
 then came the space where the main body of the 
 rude public stood throughout the performance, 
 unprotected from the weather. Behind them 
 rose several tiers of seats, stretching back almost 
 to the house, and affording accommodation for 
 the women^ho were kept apart from the men. 
 ■J Then the ro*oms of the house itself served as pri- 
 vate boxes ; and in time these came to be so highly 
 valued that the right to one passed as an heirloom. 
 A few privileged spectators were allowed seats 
 on the sides of the stage. There was neither 
 curtain nor scenery. 
 
 The performance took place by daylight in the 
 early afternoon, so there was no need of artificial 
 illumination. It began with the appearance of 
 the musicians upon the stage itself, where they 
 played on the guitar and sang popular ballads 
 until an acceptable audience had gathered or until 
 the boisterous impatience of those who had 
 arrived compelled the actors to commence. Then 
 the musicians withdrew; and a chief performer, 
 often the manager himself, appeared to speak a 
 prolog, amusing in itself and abounding in com- 
 pliments to the audience. When at last he left 
 the stage free, the actors who were to open the 
 play came out and the first act was performed. 
 Simple as was the medieval stage with its neu- 
 166 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 tral ground backed by the stations, which became 
 mansions in France and pageants in England, 
 the Spanish stage_was simpler still, since the 
 stations were abolished and there remained only 
 the neutral ground ;;^^-Jhe bare platform. Neither 
 authors nor spectators ever bothered themselves 
 about the place where the characters were at any 
 moment supposed to be. The actors then en- 
 gaged in carrying on the story were standing in 
 sight of the audience; and this was the sole 
 essential, the background being merely acci- 
 dental. If by chance it became necessary for the 
 audience to know just where the action was 
 about to take place, then this information was 
 furnished by the dialog itself, without any change 
 of the stage-setting, the platform remaining bare 
 of all scenery. Thus the dramatist was at liberty 
 to select such incidents of his fable as he saw fit, 
 not having to consider the difficulty of making 
 the successive places visible in the eyes of the 
 spectators. 
 
 When the first act was ended the actors left 
 the stage; the musicians came forward again ; and 
 there followed a song and dance or even a little 
 ballad-farce 'to fill the interval between the acts 
 of the chief play. Then the second act was pre- 
 sented in its turn ; and after it there came another 
 song and dance or another comical interlude. 
 The third act of the play was always the last, for 
 167 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 the Spanish dramatists early accepted a division 
 into three parts. When the chief play was finally 
 concluded, it was at once followed by a farce, 
 and often also by one of the national dances; and 
 then at last the entertainment came to an end, 
 and the noisy and turbulent spectators withdrew, 
 having applauded boisterously if they thought 
 they had had^ their money's worth, and having 
 with equal freedom made vocal their dissatisfac- 
 tion if they did not happen to think so. 
 
 These were the apparently unfavorable condi- 
 tions under which were represented the works 
 of the dramatic poets of Spain at the moment 
 when the drama flourished most exuberantly; 
 and no one who knows the circumstances of the 
 contemporary theater in England under Elizabeth 
 can fail to perceive the striking similarity. The 
 dramatic poets of England, like the dramatic poets 
 of Spain, saw their plays produced by daylight, 
 on an unadorned platform, set up in what was no 
 more than the courtyard of an inn, open to the 
 sky. The English plays, like the Spanish, were 
 acted without scenery, before a noisy throng of 
 groundlings who stood in the pit; and in Eng- 
 land also there were what were called "jigs." by 
 the clown between the acts. The English plays, 
 like the Spanish, were devised to please the public 
 as a whole and not to delight only a special class. 
 Such differences as there are between the Spanish 
 168 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 drama and the English are due not to the condi- 
 tions of the performance, but directly to the cha- 
 racteristics of the two peoples ; and Shakspere is 
 not more representative of the Elizabethan Eng- 
 lishman than is Calderon of the contemporary 
 Spaniard. 
 
 In Spain, as in England, the people had given 
 proof that they possessed the first requisite of a 
 truly national drama, —a steadfast determination, 
 steeled for instant action. The Spanish kingdom 
 was then seemingly at the very climax of its 
 might; and having compacted the monarchy and 
 driven out the Moors, having overrun half Europe 
 and taken all America as their own, the Span- 
 iards had the pride of a chosen people. They 
 thrilled with a consciousness of a lofty destiny, 
 while at the same time they accepted with enthu- 
 siasm feudal and chivalrous ideals of fidelity and 
 loyalty and honor. Men of very varied individu- 
 ality, they were united in their devotion to the 
 church, in which they had an unquestioning 
 faith, and to the King, who ruled by divine right 
 and who could do no wrong. Lope de Vega, 
 for example, had been in his youth a soldier on 
 the Invincible Armada; and later he became a 
 familiar of the Holy Inquisition. It is true that 
 the religious fervor of the Spaniards was often 
 only empty superstition ; and that it was in no 
 wise incompatible with a strangely contorted 
 169 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 ethical code which approved of vengeance as a 
 duty and justified murder to remove a stain from 
 honor. 
 
 The Spanish language is a rich and sonorous 
 tongue, as characteristic of the race that speaks it 
 as is English or French; and in the hands of the 
 dramatic poets Spanish lends itself readily to the 
 display of an eloquence which only too often sinks 
 into facile grandiloquence. One of the most 
 marked peculiarities of these plays is a rhetorical 
 redundancy which often rises into a lyrical copi- 
 ousness, but which not infrequently also con- 
 denses itself into a sententious apothegm. The 
 personages taking part are as likely to reveal a 
 vehement luxuriance of phrase as they are to dis- 
 close a perverse subtlety of intellect. Formal 
 and pompous their speech is on occasion; and at 
 other times it is easy and natural, refreshing in its 
 humorous lightness, sparkling with unpremedi- 
 tated wit, and bristling with pungent proverbs. 
 As we read these plays we are constantly re- 
 minded that Seneca and Lucan and Marcus Au- 
 relius were all of them Spaniards. 
 
 IV 
 
 These characteristics of the language itself, and 
 of the people that spoke the language, are familiar 
 to all who know * Don Quixote ' ; and they are 
 170 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 made visible in the plays of every Spanish drama- 
 tist, especially in those of Lope de Vega, because 
 there is scarcely any kind of drama which he 
 was not the first to attempt. He has left us 
 farces as slight in texture as those of Lope de 
 Rueda; mysteries more artfully put together than 
 those of the medieval scribes; chronicle-plays not 
 unlike those of his immediate predecessors, but 
 with a hightened dramatic interest; dramatized 
 ballads and romances far more skilfully wrought 
 than any seen on the stage before he took it for 
 his own. He gave a lyric grace to the briefer 
 religious plays, which were called sacramental- 
 acts; and he himself invented the play of plot 
 and intrigue and mystery which is known as the 
 comedy-of-cloak-and-sword. He showed the 
 same fertility of ingenuity in devising comedies 
 of incident and of character. He solidly con- 
 structed somber tragedies of honor and revenge. 
 (He seems to have written hundreds of plays of 
 every kind and description ; and scores of them 
 are still preserved in print.^ They vary greatly in 
 merit; many of them are mere improvisations; 
 but very few of them fail to display his dexterity, 
 his perfect understanding of the theater, his mas- 
 tery of stagecraft. 
 
 The art of the playwright is a finer art to-day, 
 no doubt; it is at once firmer and more delicate 
 than was possible in the Spain which was just 
 171 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 emerging from the middle ages; but the drama- 
 tists of every modern language are greatly in- 
 debted to the models set by LQp£L.de Vega, — 
 and none the less because the most of these later 
 writers are unconscious of their obligation. No- 
 where has modern dramaturgic craftsmanship 
 been carried to a higher pitch of perfection than 
 in France; and it must never be forgotten that 
 the *Cid,' the first of French tragedies, and the 
 * Liar,' the first of French comedies, were both of 
 them borrowed by Corneille from Spanish plays 
 written by contemporary disciples of Lope de 
 Vega's. 
 
 From out the immense mass of Lope de Vega's 
 dramatic works it is not easy to make choice of 
 any single play as truly typical. The selection is 
 indeed difficult when we have before us pieces 
 of so many different classes, from the sacramen- 
 tal-acts and from mere dramatized anecdotes 
 to comedies sometimes perfervidly lyrical and 
 sometimes frankly prosaic, from chronicle-plays 
 loosely epic in their structure to true tragedies 
 with an ever-increasing tensity of emotion. But 
 one of his most famous plays is the 'Star of 
 Seville,' and perhaps this will serve as well as 
 any to suggest his method of handling a story on 
 the stage. 
 
 The first act begins with the King of Castile 
 and his evil counselor, Arias, coming upon the 
 172 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 stage with two of the Alcaldes of Seville, who 
 compliment the monarch on his arrival. After 
 they withdraw, the King asks eagerly about a 
 beautiful girl he had remarked as he entered the 
 city. Arias tells him that she is Estrella, known 
 as the Star of Seville because of her loveliness, 
 and that she is a sister of Bustos Tabera. The 
 King confesses his sudden passion, and sends 
 Arias to fetch Bustos to him, hoping through the 
 brother to get at the sister. Then two Officers 
 enter in turn, each asking the King for a vacant 
 governorship; but he dismisses them without 
 deciding. Arias returns with Bustos, a man of 
 blunt honesty, who is surprised when the King 
 proffers the governorship to him. He con- 
 ceals his suspicions when the King flatters him, 
 asks about his family, and finally promises to 
 provide a proper husband for his sister. After 
 the men have left the stage Estrella enters, so 
 that the spectators are supposed now to be wit- 
 nesses of a scene in her home. Accompanying 
 her is Don Sancho, to whom she is betrothed and 
 with whom she exchanges protestations of love. 
 Bustos appears and tells his friend of the King's 
 intention of finding a fit husband for his sister; 
 whereupon Don Sancho reproaches him for not 
 having informed the monarch that their marriage 
 had been agreed upon. When they depart, the 
 King and Arias enter, and the dialog makes it 
 173 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 clear that they are now to be imagined as stand- 
 ing at the door of Estrella's dwelling. The King 
 has come to visit the brother in hope of getting 
 speech with the sister: but Bustos, when he 
 appears, finds excuses for not asking the King 
 to enter the house. So the monarch takes the 
 brother off with him, leaving Arias behind to 
 corrupt the sister. When the stage is again left 
 empty, Estrella enters with her maid-servant; 
 and therefore the audience perceives that they 
 are within the house as before. Arias presents 
 himself to tell Estrella of the King's passion for 
 her; but her sole answer is to turn her back on 
 him and walk out of the room. Thereupon 
 Arias promptly bribes the servant to admit the 
 King that night. After they depart, there is a 
 scene at the palace; Arias comes in to report, and 
 the delighted monarch bids him see that the ser- 
 vant is well rewarded. Then the King and his 
 evil counselor leave the stage empty and bring 
 to an end the first act, — an act of swift and 
 spirited exposition, taking the spectator at once 
 into the heart of the situation and exciting the 
 interest of expectancy. 
 
 The second act opens with the admission of 
 the King into Estrella's house, and with the unex- 
 pected return of Bustos, who confronts the in- 
 truder in the dark and demands his name. The 
 King has to declare himself; but the sturdy fellow 
 «74 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 pretends not to believe this, asserting that the 
 monarch, being the fountain of honor, would 
 never have come there to bring dishonor. The 
 King is thus forced to cross swords with the sub- 
 ject, but he escapes unhurt as soon as the ser- 
 vants bring lights. Bustos hangs the treacherous 
 maid-servant, and bids his sister prepare for her 
 immediate wedding with Don Sancho. In the 
 later scenes the King, resolved on a private ven- 
 geance for a private affront, decides to have 
 Bustos made away with by some devoted soldier; 
 and at the suggestion of Arias he sends for Don 
 Sancho. The monarch explains that he needs 
 to have a guilty man slain, and gives Don Sancho 
 a written warrant for the deed; but the loyal 
 subject prefers to rely on the royal word, and 
 destroys the authorization, agreeing to slay the 
 man whose name is written in the sealed paper 
 given to him by the King. Don Sancho, left alone, 
 receives a letter from Estrella, telling him that 
 her brother desires them to be married that very 
 day. The soldier is doubly overjoyed, for this is 
 now his wedding morn, and the King has just 
 confided to him a dangerous task. Then he 
 opens the paper to find that the name of the man 
 he is to kill is Bustos Tabera. Horror-stricken, 
 he debates his duty, only to decide at last that 
 he must obey the King's command, kill his 
 best friend and thereby give up his bride. At 
 »75 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 this moment Estrella's brother enters, and, to his 
 astonishment, Don Sancho forces a quarrel on 
 him. They draw ; Bustos is slain ; and Don Sancho 
 is led away to prison. Next the spectators are 
 shown Estrella's happiness as she is decking 
 herself for the bridal. But all too soon come the 
 Alcaldes, bearing the body of Bustos, and telling 
 her that the murderer of her brother is the 
 bridegroom she is awaiting. And here ends 
 the second act, wrought to a high pitch of in- 
 tensity, with sudden alternations of hope and 
 despair. 
 
 What happens in the third act may be more 
 briefly indicated. Estrella comes to the King and 
 claims vengeance on the murderer of her brother, 
 — the man whom she herself loves. The mon- 
 arch (whose passion has now faded as quickly as 
 it had blazed up) gives her the key of Don San- 
 cho's cell, and with it the power of disposing 
 of the murderer as she pleases. Thickly veiled, 
 she goes to the prison, leads her lover forth, and 
 bids him go free. But when he discovers who 
 it is has released him, he rejects his freedom at 
 the hands of the sister of his victim. He returns 
 to his cell, and as he refuses to give any motive 
 for the murder, the civil authorities condemn him 
 to death — altho the King tries to influence the 
 sentence of the Alcaldes, and even thinks he has 
 succeeded, only to be taken aback by their official 
 176 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 4 
 
 independence. So the monarch has at last to 
 declare that he himself gave Don Sancho the fatal 
 order. With the fanatical loyalty of the time, 
 one of the Alcaldes remarks that no doubt his 
 Majesty had a good reason for this command. 
 But none the less does the blood of Bustos sepa- 
 rate the two lovers, and they bid each other fare- 
 well forever, to the astonishment and admiration 
 of the sovran. The comic servant of Don Sancho 
 has the last word, addressed straight to the audi- 
 ence: **You have heard the tragedy Lope has 
 written for you, and never can you forget the 
 Star of Seville." 
 
 Here we have a painting of the passions by 
 means of the primary colors only and with the 
 boldest contrasts. Here we have a rapid succes- 
 sion of surprisingsituations, following one another 
 so closely that we have scarce time to grasp their 
 full meaning. But whatever defects the drama 
 may disclose when dissected critically in the 
 library, there can be no doubt that it would 
 always be interesting in the theater itself, before 
 Spanish spectators in absolute sympathy with 
 the high-strung magnanimity of the hero and the 
 heroine. It is like a dramatized ballad; and not 
 a little lyrical hyperbole lingers in the dialog, side 
 by side with the homeliest directness of speech. 
 Th is admixture of th^ toplofty ^ ;^nd of thpjri^ttpr^ 
 of-fact is most characteristic of the Spanish drama, 
 177 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 » 
 
 which made no formal distinction between tra- 
 gedy and comedy, — following the medieval prac- 
 tice rather than the doctrine of the Renascence. 
 A play with a tragic climax might have comic 
 incidents and comic characters, just as a play of 
 humorous intention was likely to contain at least 
 one duel with a possibly fatal termination. 
 
 In almost every piece we find the gracioso, as 
 the Spaniards call the conventional comic ser- 
 vant of the hero, whose task it is to supply fun 
 at intervals and to relax by a laugh the tension 
 of the overwrought situations. Like the modern 
 melodramatists, the Spanish playwrights under- 
 stood the value of "comic relief," as it is termed 
 to-day. The gracioso has a part of varying im- 
 portance; sometimes he is a mere clown always 
 trying to be funny and yet having but little to do 
 with the plot; sometimes he is a clever fellow, 
 quick-witted and sharp-tongued and therefore a 
 chief factor in the intrigue; sometimes he serves 
 as a chorus to voice a common-sense opinion as 
 to the superfine heroics of his master, — and this 
 he does at the end of the ' Star of Seville,' for in- 
 stance; and sometimes, with the assistance of a 
 female partner, he provides in the underplot a 
 parody of the main story of the play. The rela- 
 tion of Sancho Panza to Don Quixote is that 'of 
 the gracioso to the hero; and indeed there is no 
 better example of the gracioso anywhere than 
 Sancho, — except that the hasty playwrights 
 178 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 never gave the gracioso the vital individuality 
 which the genius of the novelist bestowed on 
 Don Quixote's squire. The gracioso is plain- 
 spoken at times, but he is never so foul-mouthed 
 as are not a few of the comic personages in the 
 Elizabethan plays. Indeed, the Spanish drama 
 is distinctly more decent, both in word and in 
 deed, than the English drama which was con- 
 temporary with it. 
 
 In Lope's hands the gracioso was more easily 
 witty than in Calderon's, just as Lope's lighter 
 pieces were more gracefully humorous than were 
 those of his great follower. Lope was naturally 
 gay and seemed to improvise laughter-provoking 
 intrigues, whereas Calderon laboriously con- 
 structed his humorous situations, with skilful 
 certainty, no doubt, but with little spontaneity. 
 The fun of Calderon's ' House with Two Doors' 
 is indisputable, but it is rather mechanical when 
 contrasted with Lope's playful comedy, the title 
 of which in English would be the ' Dog in the 
 Manger.' Here Lope revealed a delicacy of per- 
 ception into feminine psychology; his heroine is 
 a true woman, whereas his hero is a pitiful crea- 
 ture, finding a father by fraud; and in the author's 
 bringing about the marriage which ends the 
 play, we have another instance of the careless 
 cynicism and of the moral obtuseness which 
 accompanied the religious enthusiasm of the 
 Spaniards. 
 
 »79 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 Calderon accepted the several dramatic spe- 
 cies which Lope de Vega had devised for his own 
 use, — just as Shakspere took over Marlowe's 
 formula in his youth and in his maturity bor- 
 rowed Fletcher's also. But Calderon modified 
 scarcely at all the framework his predecessor had 
 prepared. In general his craftsmanship is more 
 careful than/ Lope's, — altho his expositions are 
 inferior, being often huddled into a long speech 
 or two, as artificial almost as the prologs of 
 Euripides or Plautus, whereas Lope's opening 
 scenes are marvels of clever presentation, taking 
 the spectators immediately into the center of the 
 action. 
 
 After the plot is once set in motion Calderon 
 has a more vigorous grasp of his situations than 
 Lope, and a stronger determination to get out of 
 them all they contain of effect. Not only is his 
 technic more conscious and more artful, but also 
 his nature is richer, whereby he is enabled to 
 pierce deeper into his subject; he is more of a 
 poet than Lope. Inferior in comedy, he is supe- 
 rior in tragedy, in his vigorous handling of themes 
 of terror and horror, of supernatural fontasy and 
 of ghastly gloom. Incomparable in his invention 
 of somber situations, he is ever what Lowell 
 called him, an "Arab soul in Spanish feathers." 
 i8b 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 His plots are unfailingly romantic, even tho there 
 are realistic touches here and there in his drawing 
 of character, — as, for example, in that fine, bold 
 drama of the 'Alcalde of Zalamea,' in which the 
 peasant-judge has a grim humor of his own. 
 
 Calderon's acceptance of the tenets of his church 
 was quite as unhesitating as Lope's, and his 
 religion was even more ardent. But his faith 
 was medieval in its narrowness; and this sadly 
 lessens the final value of the plays in which he 
 sought to embody spiritual themes. Altho he 
 reveled in the supernatural, his views of the 
 other world seem now as childish as Marlowe's; 
 and the mind of the Spanish playwright was in- 
 capable of any such philosophic speculation as 
 we find more than once in the English poet's 
 'Doctor Faustus.' Even in his ecclesiastical 
 dramas intended to be performed in the streets 
 on Corpus Christi day, the so-called sacramental- 
 acts, — which were religious masques, descended 
 from the medieval miracles and moralities, — 
 Calderon inclines to make the allegory unspeak- 
 ably obvious, to bring the mysteries of religion 
 down to plain matter-of-fact, and in short to 
 produce the concrete out of the abstract. 
 
 Yet his spectral muse inspired him in the com- 
 position of more than one very striking play, on 
 subjects charged with spiritual suggestion. One 
 of these is the * Devotion of the Cross ' ; and an- 
 i8i 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 Other, quite as direct in its disclosure of the 
 medievalism of the Spanish, is the 'Wonder- 
 working Magician.' In this latter we are made 
 acquainted with Cyprian, a young student of 
 Antioch, who burns with unholy passion for a 
 Christian maid, Justina. To possess her he sells 
 his soul to the Devil, writing the dire compact 
 with his own blood. The Devil gives the stu- 
 dent a year's instruction in necromancy; and he 
 also sets the powers of darkness at work to 
 seduce the girl. But when at length the Evil 
 Spirit tries to carry off the maid, she proclaims 
 her faith and he has to release her. Baffled by 
 her resistance, the Devil seeks to deceive the stu- 
 dent by a phantom. A cloaked figure enters and 
 bids Cyprian follow; but when, supposing he 
 has Justina in his arms at last, he joyfully takes 
 off the cloak, he discovers, to his horror, that he is 
 clasping a fleshless skeleton, — who tells him 
 that *'such are the glories of the world!" The 
 student insists on an explanation; and the Evil 
 One has to admit that he cannot keep his bar- 
 gain since Justina is under the protection of a 
 superior power. It is to this power, therefore, 
 that Cyprian appeals when the Devil tries to bear 
 him away. So the student also becomes a Chris- 
 tian; and he and Justina are united in death, both 
 being burnt as martyrs to their faith. 
 
 In these plays Calderon shows himself a true 
 182 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAII^ 
 
 Spaniard, as Lope was also, of a temperament not 
 reflective but essentially sensuous, satisfied to 
 deal with the externals of the mystery of life and 
 not craving an internal solution. What inter- 
 ested him in a plot was what the personages did 
 rather than what they were; and here we see 
 that the difference between Calderon and Lope 
 de Vega is not in kind but in degree. Both 
 of them deal with situation rather than with 
 character. The fiery young adventurers who 
 woo and seek revenge in Calderon's plays, as in 
 Lope's, are all closely akin ; they are first cousins 
 to one another, with a strong family likeness; 
 they are, as Goethe called them, *' all bullets cast 
 in one mold," with the same unreflecting bravery 
 and the same sense of honor as something out- 
 side of themselves and wholly unrelated to con- 
 duct, — *' a matter of form rather than of feeling," 
 as Lewes said. 
 
 VI 
 
 Calderon is a great playwright, no doubt, and 
 so is Lope also ; but it may be doubted whether 
 either of them is truly to be considered as a great 
 dramatist. , Striking as are their best plays, loftily 
 lyrical as the language may be on occasion, start- 
 lingly effective as the successive situations are, 
 we do not find in them an exquisite harmony 
 and a beautiful proportion of the parts to the 
 183 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 whole; we do not thrill with an irresistible ap- 
 peal to our common humanity; we cannot but be 
 conscious that now and again the story has been 
 twisted arbitrarily for the sake of the incidents; 
 and we fail to feel ourselves swept forward by an 
 inexorable movement toward an inevitable end. 
 /Lope de Vega was the earliest of the host of 
 Spanish playwrights, and Calderon was almost 
 the latest, outliving most of the other dramatic 
 poets who had also revealed surpassing fertil- 
 ity of invention,— G_uiUen_dje.. Castro, to whom 
 Corneille owed the *Cid,' Alarcon, from whom 
 he borrowed the * Liar, ' and Tirso de Molina, to 
 whom Moliere was indebted for the imperishable 
 figure of Don Juan. There had been only two 
 playhouses in Madrid when Lope de Vega began 
 to write for the theater; and before Calderon 
 closed his career there were twoscore. The 
 simple platform which had served at first as a 
 stage had got itself in time some sort of scenery; 
 and it was capable at last of some sort of me- 
 chanical effects. In the 'Wonder-working Ma- 
 gician,' for example, the Devil flees away finally 
 on the back of a fiery serpent, — just as Medea at 
 the end of the drama of Euripides is borne off by a 
 dragon; and probably the device whereby this 
 spectacular marvel was accomplished was as 
 elementary and as obvious in Madrid as it had 
 been in Athens. 
 
 184 
 
THE DRAMA IN SPAIN 
 
 4.0|2e^de Vega was a contemporary of Shak- 
 spere; and Calderon survived Moliere, who may 
 be called the real molder of the modern drama. 
 Before Calderon's death, Racine had elaborated a 
 tragedy as severe as that of the Greek ; but there 
 is no trace of any immediate influence of the 
 French stage upon the Spanish. Even the dra- 
 matists of England under Elizabeth responded to 
 the Renascence and profited by it far more than 
 the playwrights of Spain, who refused absolutely 
 to avail themselves of the marvelous model 
 which the drama of the Greeks provided, just as 
 they had rejected also the intellectual liberty 
 which was the. precious gift that accompanied 
 the revival of learning. In this refusal and in this 
 rejection we see the reasons why the playwrights 
 of Spain, with all their lyric affluence and all their 
 luxuriance of invention, have left us plays which 
 are almost as medieval in their handling of the 
 larger problems of life as they are in their form. 
 
 i8^ 
 
f\ 
 
 VI. THE DRAIV^ IN ENGLAND 
 
 WHILE the Spaniards were thrusting out the 
 Moors and achieving the national unity 
 which had to precede the extension of their rule 
 over much of Europe and most of America, the 
 English were slowly making ready for that sharp 
 contest with Spain the winning of which was to 
 permit them to expand in their turny The inhabi- 
 tants of the British Isles, dissimilar in so many 
 ways from the people of the Il^erian^ peninsula, 
 were like them in their strenuous individuality, 
 in their clear knowledge of what they wanted, 
 and in their unbending determination to achieve 
 the object of their desires; and therefore they 
 also were ripe for an outflowering of the drama. 
 ^\n both countries wide popularity had been at- 
 
 tained by the miracle-plays and the moralities, 
 even tho these were often narrative and spec- 
 tacular rather than truly dramatic — even tho 
 thfi^ writers preferred to present the successive 
 incidents of a hero's existence rather than to deal 
 186 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 more adequately with the crisis of his career. 
 In both countries the first task of the professional , 
 playwrights, when they should come into posses- 
 sion of the theater, would be to compact the ram - 
 bling story and to concentrate attention upon the 
 more significant incidents. In both countries'" ! 
 again, the professional playwrights' did not hastily \ 
 discard the dramatic form which had been devised 
 in the middle ages; they accepted it willingly, ^ 
 and modified it only so far as might be necessary. 
 That in England more modification was found 
 needful than in Spain was due in part to the dif- 
 ferent reception accorded to the revival of learn- 
 ing. While the Spanish people had little sym- 
 pathy with the Renascence and strove to reject 
 it, preferring to cherish the ideals they had in- 
 herited from the middle ages, the English peopJe_ 
 felt the influence of the ne\^ movement pro-^« 
 foundly; in their own fashion they profited by 
 it; and by it they were made ready for the Re- ^ 
 formation, which was as welcome to the stalwart •' 
 Englishmen as it was abhorrent to the devout 
 Spaniards. Even in the drama the Spanish atti- 
 tude toward the new learning was almost hostile"; 
 and Lope de Vega tells us frankly that, as he 
 wrote solely to please the populace, he locked up 
 Plautus and Terence out of sight while he was at 
 work on a play. But the English attitude, stur- --^ 
 dily independent as it was, cannot be called un- — 
 187 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 friendly. The London play-maker, unawed by 
 any authority and always testing the treasures of 
 antiquity before he took them for his own, was 
 yet ready enough — if he found they had any- 
 thing to teach him — to learn from the ancients 
 or even from the sophisticated Italians, whom 
 he accepted as true interpreters of the classics. 
 What he borrowed at first might be of little 
 value, — like the ghosts who stalked out of Sen- 
 eca's sonorous pages to thrill the nerves of the 
 Elizabethans; but in the course of time, not a 
 few of the English playwrights came to appre- 
 ciate the weight and mass which give dignity 
 and power to the Attic drama. We can discover 
 in several of the most gifted of the dramatic poets 
 who made the reign of Elizabeth so glorious, a 
 readiness to accept a Greek play, not as a model 
 
 -to be copied slavishly, but rather as an example 
 to stimulate nobly, j They refused always to sub- 
 mit themselves absolutely to the rigid rules drawn 
 up by the Italian critics ; but none the less were 
 they inspired now and again to emulate the 
 direct movement and the harmonious proportion 
 of the Athenian masterpieces. 
 
 / In England the religious drama had about ex- 
 hausted its vitality when the secular drama was 
 most abundantly flourishing; and of a truth its 
 work was then accomplished in that it had shown 
 how a narrative could be presented in dialog and 
 
 i88 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 in that it had encouraged a wide-spread love of 
 acting, which was likely to call into existence a 
 body of professional players, ready to support 
 properly the performance of a more artistic drama, 
 whenever this :.'hould be developed. There was 
 acting everywhere throughout England, under 
 the rule of the Tudors, — acting of miracle-plays 
 by the gilds on Corpus Christi day, acting of 
 moralities in the grammar-schools, acting of --Z 
 comic and legendary episodes on the village- 
 greens. From the amateurs who were thus 
 proving themselves, there were in time recruited 
 little bands of professional performers dependent 
 for their livelihood on their technical skill. 
 
 These companies of strollers)— like the group 
 -0f players who came to Elsinore at Hamlet's in- 
 vitation — had no rich repertory to reward the at- 
 tention of the audiences that came flocking to see 
 them perform in the town-hall, in the courtyard 
 of the village-inn, or in the open market-place. 
 They may have had a chance scene or two of 
 farcical briskness, perhaps elaborated from a hu- 
 morous episode in some forgotten miracle-play ; 
 and they may have had a fragmentary chronicle- 
 play or a dramatized ballad-tale, like that which 
 Hamlet caused to be acted l5efore the King. They v\ 
 did have certainly what were culled interludes^ i^^ 
 often as didactically dull as the moralities from 
 which these interludes had been derived. One 
 189 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLANr/ 
 
 contemporary of Shakspere's has left us the 
 record of a stage-play which, w'.^en he was a 
 child, he had seen acted by wandering performers 
 before the mayor and the aldermein of the town. 
 " The play was called the * Cr/idle of Security,' 
 wherein was personated a king . . . with his 
 courtiers of several kinds, amongst which three 
 ladies were in special grace with him ; and they, 
 keeping him in delight and pleasures, drew him 
 from his graver consellors . . . that, in the end, 
 they got him to lie down in a cradle upon the 
 stage, where these three ladies, joining in a sweet 
 song, rocked him asleep that he snorted again ; 
 and in the meantime conveyed under the clothes 
 wherewithal! he was covered, a vizard, like a 
 swine's snout, upon his face, with three wire 
 chains fastened thereunto, the other ends thereof 
 being holden severally by these three ladies who 
 fall to singing again, and then discovered his face 
 that the spectators might see how they had 
 transformed him, going on with their singing. 
 Whilst all this was acting, there came forth . . . 
 two old men, the one in blue with ... his 
 mace on his shoulder, the other in red with a 
 drawn sword in his hand . . . ; and so they 
 two went along in a soft pace . . . till at last 
 they came to the cradle when all the court was 
 in the greatest jollity ; and then the foremost old 
 man with his mace stroke a fearful blow upon 
 190 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 the cradle, whereat all the courtiers, with the 
 three ladies and the vizard, all vanished ; and the 
 desolate prince starting up barefaced ... made 
 a lamentable complaint of his miserable case, and 
 so was carried away by wicked spirits. This 
 prince did personate . . . the Wicked of the 
 World; the three ladies, Pride, Covetousness 
 and Luxury; the two old men the End of the 
 World and the Last Judgment." 
 
 It was with such barren stuff as this that the 
 strolling actors were trying to amuse the country- 
 folk, altho many plays of a solider substance 
 may have been available, some broader in humor 
 and some more direct in action. Yet even in the 
 performance of so primitive a play as this, there 
 was some scope for acting. The performers 
 were slowly training themselves as best they 
 could, making ready for the personation of cha- 
 racters deeper and subtler than any that had yet 
 spoken English ; and thus they were rediscover- 
 ing the principles of the histrionic art. 
 
 II 
 
 r 
 
 Actors fit for their purpose and audiences both 
 abundant and expectant, — these were awaiting 
 the English poets who, not despising the acted 
 drama, rude as it was, should perceive the possi- 
 bility of improving it, and who should therefore 
 191 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 make themselves masters of it, so that they might 
 slowly lift it to the level of literature. But the 
 A earlier dramatic efforts of the men-of-letters were 
 academic rather than popular; and they can have 
 had but small direct influence upon the acted 
 drama. A schoolmaster, for example, familiar 
 with the plots of Plautus, rimed an amusing imi- 
 tation to be performed by his clever boys in the 
 great hall of the school; and yet this 'Ralph 
 Roister Doister,' despite its copying from the 
 antique, is not without a certain English vivacity 
 of its own. Another scholar, a bishop this time, — 
 if indeed the author of 'Gammer Gurton's Needle' 
 was a bishop, — was responsible for a farce, frank 
 of speech, rank with the flavor of the soil, and full 
 of hearty fun, but not unlike the farces of the 
 middle ages and the broader scenes of the mys- 
 teries, that of Mak and the Shepherds, for exam- 
 ple. A poet of culture, George Gascoigne, freely 
 En glish ed a prose farce, the * Supposes,' which 
 the Italian Ariosto had combined out of Latin 
 material. Two courtiers collaborated in writing 
 'Gorboduc,' an alleged tragedy of mortal tedium, 
 in which everything that might be of interest is 
 merely narrated and never once shown in action. 
 This undramatic attempt of Norton and Sackville 
 was devised in obvious imitation of Seneca; and 
 it possessed elaborate choruses, preliminary dumb- 
 shows, and rhetorical disquisitions. Nevertheless, 
 192 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 unfitted as it was for any stage, it was actually 
 acted — but only in what we may term private 
 theatricals. It was even approved by Sir Philip 
 Sidney, who held it up as a model, altho he was 
 forced to regret that it did not observe the Unities 
 of Time and Place. 'Gorboduc' was distributed 
 into five acts, perhaps because Horace had de- 
 clared this to be the only proper division — but 
 more probably because Seneca had set the exam- 
 ple ; and it was written in unrimed iambic pen- 
 tameter, — in what we know now as blank verse, — 
 which, in the hands of later dramatic poets, was 
 to reveal itself as an instrument of unsurpassable 
 vigor, delicacy, and variety. However poor a 
 thing * Gorboduc ' is in itself, it deserved well in 
 that it bequeathed to us the large framework of 
 five acts and the infinite possibilities of blank 
 verse. 
 
 While scholars thus vainly amused themselves 
 with dramatic efforts which were never intended 
 to be performed except by a group of amateurs 
 before an audience of dilettants, the professional 
 actors, banded into little companies, had called 
 into being professional playwrights able to drama- 
 tize the stories of the Italian novelists and the 
 themes of the Latin poets, then being translated 
 in quick succession. These theatrical compiler^ 
 whose names are mostly unknown to us now 
 and whose pieces have rarely been preserved, 
 ^9} 
 
u 
 
 THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 cared no more for the rules of the Renascence 
 critics, or for the strict imitation of the ancient 
 dramatists, than did the ignorant spectators before 
 whom their hasty dialogs were to be performed. 
 They gave no thought to theory; they took the 
 theater as they found it; and what they tried to 
 do was to get new subjects to treat in the old way, 
 in the way with which the play-going public had 
 already been pleased. That is to say, these pro- 
 fessional playwrights, having no marked drama- 
 turgic capacity, followed the later tradition of 
 the medieval drama, setting on the stage all the 
 incidents of a prolonged fiction, just as the whole 
 story of a saint's life had been shown in a miracle- 
 play. Altho the subjects were no longer religious 
 and altho the performers had no longer any con- 
 nection with the church, or even with the gilds 
 of craftsmen to whom the church had yielded the 
 acting of the mysteries, the j)lays__performed by 
 the strollers were novel only in their subjects; — 
 they were still medieval in their structure. 
 
 But as these wandering performers could not 
 avail themselves of the various spectacular devices 
 which were so helpful in retaining the interest of 
 the medieval spectator, they were thus forced to 
 lay stress especially upon those incidents of the 
 story in which the attention of the audience could 
 be aroused by sheer force of acting. The sudden 
 development of the drama in this period is due 
 »94 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 in part at least to the growth of a class of profes- 
 sional actors, replacing the amateurs of the gilds. 
 These professional actors would soon find the 
 placid dialog of the medieval theater unworthy 
 of their growing histrionic ability ; and they would 
 not long be content unless they had expressive 
 characters to personate and absorbing passions 
 to portray. As it is in the conflict of duty and 
 desire that actors find most scope for the 
 exhibition of their powers, any increase in the 
 technical skill of the performers would tend at 
 once to make the plays written for them more 
 truly dramatic. 
 
 There is always a close connection between 
 the dramaturgic art and the histrionic. (The player 
 is ever urging the playwright to provide him with 
 the opportunity for new triumphs; and the dra- 
 matist can ever be confident that the actor will 
 loyally do all he can to express whatever hight 
 of emotion the situation may evoke\ One reason 
 why the medieval drama is as dull as it is, and 
 as uninteresting, is because the mysteries were 
 both written and performed* by casual amateurs, 
 deprived even of the example which our profes- 
 sional authors and our professional actors supply 
 to the amateurs of to-day. A condition precedent 
 to the growth of a living dramatic literature is the 
 specialization of professional playwrights and of 
 professional actors, dependent for their livelihood 
 195 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 on their mastery of their art, and exercising their 
 craftsmanship in wholesome rivalry with one 
 another. 
 
 HI 
 
 In England j when Elizabeth was queen the 
 little companies of wandering actors were greatly 
 increased in number. They had placed them- 
 selves under the protection of rich nobles or high 
 officials, whose servants they declared them- 
 selves to be. Their membership was as limited 
 as their repertory ; and four or five players were 
 sufficient to produce such simple pieces as were 
 then available, each of the performers assuming 
 more than one character, if need be, — very much 
 as all the parts in a Greek play had to be divided 
 among three actors. A slim youth might have 
 to impersonate all the female characters, — and 
 here the English, oddly enough, were more 
 medieval than the Spanish, who had already 
 admitted women upon the stage. ;They carried 
 no scenery with them, for it is scarcely too much 
 to say that scenery had not then been invented. 
 They took with them only the most obvious 
 properties, perhaps a crown for the king and a 
 couple of swords for a combat, and the like. 
 They wore as rich apparel as they could get, 
 with no thought of its propriety to the time and 
 place of the play itself Thus lightly encum- 
 196 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 bered they could rove at will, ready to-day to 
 amuse the guests of a noble gathered in the great 
 hall of the castle, and prepared to-morrow to 
 please the humbler audience that might come 
 together in the village. 
 
 In those days the English inn was often a 
 hollow square, with a central courtyard girt 
 with galleries; and here, with the permission of 
 the innkeeper, the strollers would put up a hasty 
 platform around which the country-folk might 
 stand, while the persons of quality could look 
 down from the galleries. In London the per- 
 formances in places of public entertainment drew 
 such concourses of people that the city authorities 
 were scandalized and strove to forbid them ; and 
 as a result the players — who had been wanderers 
 hitherto — were forced to build houses of their 
 own just outside of the municipal limits and to 
 establish themselves permanently. They had no 
 models to go by, and in planning their theaters 
 they gave no thought to the sumptuous edifices 
 that had adorned the chief towns of Greece and 
 Rome. They were used to performing in the 
 courtyard of an inn; and therefore the first 
 theater that they built for themselves was appa- 
 rently no more and no less than the courtyard of 
 an inn — without the inn itself. 
 
 The new building was but a hollow square of 
 about eighty feet each way, open to the sky in 
 197 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 the center, and consisting of little more than a 
 quadrangle of galleries, to be divided into "rooms^ 
 as they were then called, private boxes as we 
 should now term them, for the accommodation of 
 the more particular playgoers. The whole ground 
 floor was the yard, wherein the solid body of 
 the more vulgar spectators had to stand; and 
 into this yard there was thrust out the stage, a 
 platform perhaps forty feet square. Where the rear 
 gallery ran across the stage there hung an arras, 
 a heavy tapestry curtain, to cut off the space 
 behind, which might be used as a dressing-room. 
 The rear gallery itself, just over the platform, was ^ 
 also made useful, serving as a balcony, a pulpit, ^ 
 a roof, or whatever upper chamber might be 
 called for in the progress of the play. The stage 
 was so spacious that some of the spectators were 
 allowed to sit to the right and to the left, on 
 stools to be hired. There was no curtain to pull 
 up or to pull aside ; and there was absolutely no 
 scenery of any kind. 
 
 The simplicity of the projecting platform, with 
 its pendent arras at the back and its room in the 
 gallery above available on occasion, the absence 
 of all decoration, leaving the space between the 
 spectators on the stage to represent whatsoever 
 strange sequence of places the playwright might 
 need, — all this was perfectly acceptable to most of 
 the uncritical subjects of Elizabeth. It was not 
 198 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 acceptable to the critical Sidney, enamored of 
 antiquity and nourished on the Italian theorists. 
 He protested against a stage on which the scene 
 could seem to change continually simply because 
 there was no scenery to be changed. 
 
 Sidney was annoyed that "the player when 
 he comes in, must ever begin with' telling where 
 he is; or else the tale will not be conceived. 
 Now shall you have three ladies walk to gather 
 flowers, and then we must believe the stage to 
 be a garden. By and by, we hear news of ship- 
 wreck in the same place; then we are to blame 
 if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of 
 that comes out a hideous monster with fire and 
 smoke, and then the miserable beholders are 
 bound to take it for a cave; while, in the mean- 
 time, two armies fly in, represented with four 
 swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart 
 will not receive it for a pitched field." Sidney's 
 contemporaries were not hard-hearted; and they 
 were ever willing to accept a bare stage as a 
 battle-field and as a cave, as a rock and as a 
 garden, as the castle of Elsinore, as the forest of 
 Arden and as the forum of Rome. 
 
 As sharp as Sidney's protest against this viola- 
 tion of the alleged Unity of Place is his protest 
 against the equally flagrant violation of the 
 alleged Unity of Time, when the dramatist un- 
 hesitatingly shows us a young couple courting, 
 199 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 and then married, and parents of children, who 
 grow to manhood, and who are ready themselves 
 to court and to marry, "and all this in two hours' 
 space." Here again, as in the imaginary changes 
 of scene, we see in the Elizabethan drama the 
 survival of the tradition of the middle ages, with 
 the miracle-play ready to unroll before us the 
 long panorama of a saint's existence. And it is 
 an unfortunate fact that the form of the Eliza- 
 V " bethan drama, even in the hands of its master- 
 spirits, is often neither truly ancient in its direct- 
 ness nor really modern in its swiftness; it is 
 medieval rather in its absence of restraint. The 
 form was in fact too loose and too flexible to 
 keep those who made use of it up to a high 
 standard; as Huxley pithily put it, "a. man's 
 worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as 
 he likes." In the English drama we cannot but 
 remark a certain jerjun ess of the action as the 
 place jumps from one countryTo~another, only to 
 spring back again as suddenly; and we cannot 
 but regret a certain lumbering looseness of struc- 
 ture as the episodes lazily follow one another 
 down through the years. The sprawling story 
 of ' A Winter's Tale ' is far more characteristi- 
 cally Elizabethan than the artful concentration of 
 'Othello' and 'Macbeth.' 
 
 But the playwrights of those days, like the play- 
 wrights of every period when the drama has had 
 
 r 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 a vigorous vitality, were intent on pleasing the 
 contemporary playgoers, and they wasted no 
 thought in vain anticipation of the critical judg- 
 ment of posterity. If a tragedy or a comedy won 
 the boisterous approval of those who had paid 
 to see it, the dramatists asked no more. They 
 lived in the present; and they were in a hurry, for 
 the demand for new plays far exceeded the sup- 
 ply. f^So long as the companies of actors were 
 strollers, a very limited repertory had sufficed, 
 and a play might be performed again and again 
 in different parts of the island; but just as soon 
 as the actors were established in London perma- 
 nently, then there was need of novelty; and if 
 the theaters were to be kept open, a constant 
 succession of new plays was imperative. 
 
 The acted drama was scarcely considered as 
 belonging to literature,— indeed, it was held in 
 contempt by many critics. But to write for the 
 theater was almost the only means whereby a 
 man-of-letters could make a living — unless he 
 chose to turn actor also. So it is that we see the 
 clever young fellows, eager to push their fortunes, 
 the fledgling poets, the scholars just out of the 
 universities, joining themselves to the players, 
 some of them becoming actors, but most of 
 them being satisfied merely to furnish the new 
 plays required by the quick rivalry of the London 
 playhouses. They plied as hacks, doing what- 
 
 201 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 ever odd jobs they were asked to undertake, now 
 polishing up an old play, then dramatizing a tale 
 from the latest translation, and next collaborating, 
 two or three of them, in a hasty effort to build a 
 gruesome tragedy out of the last murder that 
 had got itself sung in a ballad. Not many of 
 these prentice play-makers were endowed with 
 the dramaturgic instinct, but the few who had 
 the native gift soon had opportunity and practice 
 to attain skill. No doubt the youthful dramatists 
 were aided also by the practical advice of the 
 actors themselves, who knew what they wanted 
 and who were then in a position to insist on get- 
 ^ y vu^^"S it. In England under Elizabeth the actors 
 51^ «^ were also thejrianagers of the theaters, or at 
 \l^ ^ least the foremost of them were controllers of 
 the enterprise and sharers of the profits, dividing 
 the best parts among themselves and paying 
 ^ .. wages to their humbler associates. \ One reason 
 
 fyP^ for the extraordinary productivity of the drama 
 
 just then may be found in this fact, that the man- 
 agement of the several playhouses was chiefly 
 in the hands of the actors ; and another cause, 
 even more obvious, can be seen in the sharp 
 competition between the several playhouses. 
 
 Within a short time after the opening of these 
 
 theaters just outside the limits of London, the 
 
 needful conditions of a national drama were 
 
 present. There were the playhouses themselves, 
 
 202 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 primitive indeed according to our notions, but 
 perfectly satisfactory to those who attended 
 them. There were the companies of actors, 
 accomplished in their art and ardent for fresh 
 triumphs. There was also the varying popula- 
 tion of the capital to supply an unending succes- 
 sion of playgoers of all classes, nobles and gentry, 
 students from the universities, townsfolk, rustic 
 visitors, and seafarers just home from perilous 
 voyages. The English people were never more 
 healthy in mind and in body than they were 
 then, never more adventurous in spirit, never 
 more wilful and self-assertive. These character- 
 istics are favorable for the growth of the drama; 
 and these characteristics are all of them abun- 
 dantly displayed in the drama that soon sprang 
 up luxuriantly. 
 
 IV 
 
 The new play-makers were men of far more 
 al5ility\than the unknown writers in whose foot- 
 steps tney were following; but they never set 
 themselves up as innovators. They worked in 
 the old tradition cheerfully, trying to provide the 
 players with the kind of play that they knew the 
 playgoers liked. No doubt they wished to bet- 
 ter theiTcopy if they could, but they were scarcely 
 conscious that theywere really making over anew 
 the art they had inherited from their forgotten 
 203 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 predecessors. Like these predecessors, they wrote 
 especially to please the groundlings who stood in 
 the yard, but they sought also not to displease the 
 gallants who sat on the stage. They were better 
 educated, and therefore they could go farther afield, 
 not only for material, but also for effects. From 
 Seneca, — whose Latin plays, never really acted, 
 altho possibly sometimes recited, were the earliest 
 specimens of a persistent and pestilent type, the 
 so-called "drama for the closet," the play not 
 intended to be played (an obvious contradiction 
 in terms), — from the Hispano-Roman rhetorician, 
 they borrowed the practice of frequent mur- 
 der and the evocation of frequent ghosts. In 
 their heaping up of horrors they were probably 
 encouraged by the contemporary popularity of 
 the Italian novelist, with his constant commin- 
 gling of lust and gore. The laxly knit chronicle- 
 play was soon stiffened into the so-called 
 tragedy-of-blood, a dramatic form which w^s 
 very pleasing to the Elizabethan audiences and 
 which was tempting even to Shakspere himself.. 
 While a true tragedy should purge the soul 
 with terror, the trag£dy.-of-blood was satisfied to 
 thrill the nerves with -horror". A necessary figure 
 in the conduct of such a play was a ghos t who 
 proclaimed the duty of r eveng e and who, in 
 anficip ation, gloated over every bloqdy_^trDk«- 
 " _vengeance. The author charmed the eyes of 
 204 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 the spectators with comj ^s, han gings^ tortures, 
 dumb-shows, and masques, while also he ffcined 
 the ears of the audience with vehement phrases 
 and high-sounding bombast. And yet, however 
 coarse may seem the art of this tragedy-of- 
 blood, it was at least alive, which could be said 
 of very few of the miracle-plays. As it dealt 
 with the clash of passion against passion it was 
 essentially dramatic, which the chronicle-plays 
 at first were not. However violent the crudities 
 in the early ' Spanish Tragedy ' of Kyd, and what- 
 ever the flagrant faults of taste and structure in 
 the later ' Duchess of Malfi ' of Webster, there 
 is no denying the vigor of these plays nor their 
 exceeding vitality. They were planned to be 
 acted then and with no thought that they would 
 ever be read now. They were devised to^hit 
 the taste of the London playgoer of those unset- 
 tled days, and they achieved this purpose amply. 
 In so doing the tragedy^of-blood helped and has- 
 tened the coming of the true tragedy which was 
 to supersede it. 
 
 Thomas Kyd was not the only predecessor of ' 
 Shakspere by whose labors the great dramatist* 
 was to profit. While Kyd was showing how to 
 knit a plot and how to-heapup situations tempt-. 
 ing to energetic actors, his friend Christopher 
 Marlowe was helping to transform the shapeless 
 chronicle-play. If in ' Hamlet ' Shakspere was 
 205 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 at first following Kyd's lead, in * Richard 111 ' he 
 was treading in the footprints of Marlowe. Kyd 
 is the more dextrous playwright, no doubt; but 
 Marlowe is the more gifted poet, with a deeper 
 insight into human motive. >Marlowe it was in 
 whose hands blank verse revealed itself as an in- 
 comparable instrument for the dramatic poet; and 
 Marlowe it was who showed how to search the 
 soul of man in more than one notable passage in 
 more than one of his pieces. J 
 
 But his best-known play, {Doctor Faustus^l, 
 proves that he was not a bornpTay-maker, in- 
 stinctively grasping the essential struggle and 
 unfailingly presenting it in the necessary scenes. 
 The play was little more than the mere slicing 
 into dialog of the old story-book ; and only in a 
 chance speech here and there did Marlowe appear 
 to apprehend the full philosophic value of the 
 suggestive theme he had chosen to treat. Now 
 and again he seemed to get to the heart of the 
 matter and to voice his vision with unfailing feli- 
 city of phrase; but for the most part he was con- 
 tent to make a use of the supernatural which is 
 not unfairly to be called puerile, just as the comic 
 passages are almost childish. Among the cha- 
 racters were the Good Angel and the Evil Angel 
 and the Seveg_>S[rig. "alTsurvivals from the earlier 
 
 moralities, and serving to show how close the 
 
 coTTTTection was between the medieval drama and 
 
 206 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 the Elizabethan. As a h umoris t Marlowe is piti- 
 ful; as a playwright he is f req uehtly fp-p>) le ; as a 
 creator of c haracter he i^ _ gften defic ient; .but as a 
 poet he holds his ow n with the be^ t. As a poet, 
 indeed, henTay^v^n ^oast that he had Shakspere 
 for a pupilv Justly has his mighty line been 
 praised for its power and its nobility, for its deli- 
 cacy and its exquisite modulation. 
 
 While Marh& we with his * Edward I I ' was set- 
 ting a model for the splendid series of Shakspere's 
 histories, and while Kyd was complicating the 
 ghastly plot of th e * Spanish Trage dy,' which 
 was to serve as a stepping-stone to the great 
 tragedies of Shakspere,^ other young spirits were 
 lighting up the path l eading to the realm of f an- 
 t^SJL-Where roma^ ntic- comedv best could flo urish. 
 In the medieval drama the scenes intended to be 
 a mqsing weje sometimes truly humorous , with a 
 shrewd homeliness of phrase and a dire ct reali sm 
 o f char act er-drawin g; but most of them were 
 trivial ancTcoarse and dependent for their imme- 
 diate effectiveness rather up on horse-pla^g than 
 upon gen uine humor. The free adaptations 
 whichTater scholars had made from the Latin 
 and from the Italian possessed plots more artfully 
 put together; and sometimes the plays had ac- 
 quired a certain simple flavor of the soil to which 
 they had been transplanted. But not in the 
 boisterous scenes of the miracle-plays, not in the 
 207 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 ingenious imbroglios of the Italian or of the Latin, 
 was there any worthy model for a truly English 
 comedy; and yet in the earlier attempts at 
 romantic-comedy the influence of all three of 
 these can be traced, accompanied by a large 
 contribution from the contemporary English 
 novel, itself derived indirectly from the pastoral- 
 romance of the Continent. 
 
 The comedies of John Lyly, * Endymion ' and 
 its fellows, seem to us to have literary merit 
 rather than dramaturgic effectiveness. They ap- 
 pear to us too artificial to hit the taste of the 
 town, too distended with labored allusiveness; 
 but before an audience of courtiers they were 
 performed more than once and with some mea- 
 sure of approval. In these contemporary alle- 
 gories ingenious equivoke brought about plea- 
 santly playful situation, characters were sketched 
 lightly yet with piquancy and freshness. The 
 dialog with all its insistent antithesis was often 
 witty — altho not quite so often as the author 
 labored to make it. There was a gentle sugges- 
 tion of gracious courtliness in the atmosphere of 
 these comedies of Lyly's not to be perceived in 
 any earlier plays — a gracious courtliness which 
 is to be found later in full flower in * As You Like 
 It' and 'Twelfth Night.' 
 ' In its main theme Robert Greene's ' Friar Ba- 
 con and Friar Bungay ' recalls Marlowe's * Doc- 
 208 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 -r' 
 
 tor Faustus' with its naif handling of the super- 
 natural ; but the underplot sets forth a story of 
 young love triumphant over circumstance; and 
 we have here another source of romantic-comedy ,Ji 
 with its fresh love-making in the open air, as 
 prettily pastoral as one could wish, tho it was 
 also only doubtfully dramatic. Indeed, even in 
 his plays Greene revealed himself rather as a 
 novelist, with a graceful lyric note of his own. ^ 
 None the less he had advanced a step beyond the 
 courtly Lyly, a step nearer to that kingdom of 
 romance which was to call itself Verona or Illyria 
 or Bohemia, a desert country by the sea, where 
 exiled dukes were to roam the lonely forest and 
 where lovely heroines were to disguise themselves 
 as lads. ' In his treatment of English rural life, 
 with its plain-spoken and free-handed English 
 foIkjHn his contrasting of fantasy and reality, in 
 his cohimingling of quaintly humorous characters 
 with figures of pure imagination, Greene is a pre- 
 cursor of Shakspere,^|to be held in remembrance 
 not so much for what he actually accomplished 
 himself as for what he prepared and made pos- 
 sible.!! 
 
 Greene and Lyly, Marlowe and Kyd, had all of 
 them aided the advance of the English drama 
 from out the monotonous formlessness of the 
 
 209 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 medieval pieces; and they had all striven to de- 
 vise the kind of play most likely to hit the tast e 
 of the Elizabethan playgoer, with his sturdy 
 body, his free spirit, and his alert mind. TReh 
 a dramatist more gifted than any of the four 
 came forward to profit by what they had done. 
 This newcomer was no theoretic reformer; he 
 had no artistic code_already formulated; he was 
 simply a pra ctical p laywright who happened also 
 to be a great poet. \Shakspere's first labors were 
 humble enough, merely the patching of oM^ieces, 
 whereby he learned the secrets of thecraft./ 
 Even when he started to write plays of his own 
 there was no overt effort for novelty. He began 
 where the others had left off, as might have been 
 expected from a capable young fellow who sought 
 to earn his daily bread by preparing plays to suit 
 the existing conditions of the theatrical market, — 
 plays intended first to tempt the actors tb perform 
 them and then to tempt the spectators to applaud 
 and to come again the next time the comedy or 
 the tragedy or the history might be announced 
 for repetition. 
 
 But even in this prentice work there was evi- 
 dence that the young hack-writer had an individ- 
 uality of his own. Better than any of his groping 
 predecessors could he use situation, to reveal 
 character and find fit expression for feeling and 
 for thought at the moment of crisis. His earliest 
 210 
 
g> 
 
 , .THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 plays were little more than imitations; and in 
 * Love's Labor's Lost ' he was almost as artificial 
 as Lyly, altho he was at once closer to life and 
 far cleverer. * Titus Andronicus,' wherein horrors 
 on ho rrors' head accumulate, was simply a tra- 
 gedy-of-blood on the model of Kyd's most popu- 
 lar play. The 'Comedy of Errors' was only a 
 ^ce with an ingeniously mechanical plot, and 
 yet redeemed by more than one character of a 
 true humanity. In * Richard III ' the disconnected 
 episodes of a history were artfully knit into a 
 certain unity by the incisive presentation of the 
 royal villain. In few of these earliest plays was 
 there any hint of audacious ambition; — indeed, 
 all that the author was aiming at was a chance 
 to earn his living while learning his trade. He 
 was not yet sure of himself or of his audiences^ 
 "Steeped in humor and fantasticality up to its 
 very lipS; the Elizabethan age," so Matthew Ar- 
 nold tells us, "newly arrived at the free use 
 of the human faculties after their long term of 
 bondage, and delighting to exercise them freely, 
 suffers from its own extravagance in this first 
 exercise of them, can hardly bring itself to see an 
 object quietly or to describe it temperately." 
 Shakspere was a true Elizabethan and he had 
 his full share of this fantasticality and of this 
 intemperance. These characteristics are most 
 paraded in the earliest plays, but they are not 
 
 211 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 absent from the latest, in not a few of which we 
 cannot but note a careless playfulness at times 
 and a reluctance to be bound by any restraint 
 that irked him. The austere perfection of Sopho- 
 cles was not his ideal; yet when he chose and 
 when the theme he had chanced upon happened 
 to arouse all his powers, he revealed the posses- 
 sion of a constructive faculty not inferior to the 
 great Greek's. When his interest flagged, as 
 for example in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' he 
 might let his story loiter as languidly as it was 
 wont to do in the old chronicle-plays ; or when 
 his subject might be unworthy of him, as hap- 
 pened now and again, notably in 'Measure for 
 Measure,' he failed to exert himself 
 
 But when his imagination kindled at his theme 
 and he put forth all his strength, it was with un- 
 erring certainty that he pierced to the center of the 
 subject and that he presented in action one after 
 another the needful scenes, — the scenes a f aire. 
 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'Julius Caesar,' 'Mac- 
 beth 'and 'Othello,' are plotted with conscious 
 art and consummate skill. They are each of 
 them plays of a wonderful unity of construction. 
 Each has a marvelous beauty of form, being ex- 
 quisitely proportioned as a whole and carefully 
 wrought in all its parts. ' These plays, conceived 
 for performance in the little cockpit, which the 
 Elizabethan theater was, with a bare platform 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 projecting into the yard, with no scenery and no 
 propriety of costume, with the women's cha- 
 racters impersonated by shaven boys, with the 
 gallants smoking on the stage, and with the 
 groundlings restless in the yard, — this 'Othello' 
 and this * Macbeth ' are truly as architectonic as 
 the stately Attic tragedies, which were performed 
 in the spacious Theater of Dionysus before the 
 cultivated Greeks. These English tragedies have / 
 a solid simplicity of their own ^notGreek indeed, 
 but of a kind which the open-minded Greek 
 would have been able to appreciate. They meet 
 the requirements laid down by_j^xistotle^c[ujte as 
 well as the best plays of the Athenian tragic 
 writers — altho not quite in the same wayr) The 
 Greek perfection has been defined as "fit details, 
 strictly combined, in view of a large general re- 
 sult nobly conceived " ; and even this perfection 
 Shakspere attained now and again. He attained 
 it, indeed, whenever he took the trouble to do his 
 best. He attained it in 'Hamlet,' which is out- 
 wardly a mere tragedy-of-blood, with its revenge 
 and its ghost and its final massacre, but which is 
 inwardly the eternal tragedy of the human soul 
 at war with inexorable circumstance. 
 
 The absence of the chorus and the consequent 
 
 removal of any limitation of time allowed the 
 
 English dramatist to avoid the fixity of character 
 
 imposed upon the Greek, who could deal only 
 
 213 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 with the culmination of his action. 1^ Shakspere 
 achieved almost his highest triumph in the reve- 
 lation of character as it slowly disintegrated under 
 stress of repeated temptation.; We can behold 
 the virus of ambition working in Macbeth, and 
 we are made witnesses of the persistent solicita- 
 tion of his wife. We are shown how the poison 
 of jealousy slowly destroyed the nobility of 
 Othello's nature. The conditions of the Greek 
 theater made it impossible for Sophocles to 
 attempt this; and he had no time allowed him 
 even to suggest the certain change in the cha- 
 racter of Oedipus after the hideous catastrophe. 
 
 Here at least the later poet could profit by his 
 larger liberty, altho the absence of all restriction 
 permitted him the unduly distended action of 
 *A Winter's Tale,' and the slovenly huddling 
 together of incidents in *Cymbeline.' Rarely 
 indeed does even the foremost of the English 
 dramatists take the trouble to seek the simplicity 
 of form and the solidity of structure which even 
 the least of the Greek dramatists was ever striv- 
 ing for, altho without always achieving. Here 
 we see how the highly trained Athenian audi- 
 ences helped to hold the Greek dramatic poet up to 
 a lofty standard; whereas the London audiences, 
 eager and tumultuous and uncultivated, exacted 
 nothing from the English dramatic poet, except 
 that he should deal with life directly and forcibly. 
 214 
 
^ 
 
 THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 Shakspere was not only the foremost of English 
 dramatists : he was also a practical man of affairs, 
 clear-headed and self-possessed; and it is not to 
 be wondered at that he did not often exert him- 
 self more than was needful. He did not write 
 his plays for publication and for posterity: he 
 wrote them to be acted in the theater in which 
 he was a sharer; and for the most part he seems 
 to have been satisfied when they pleased the 
 playgoers and brought in large audiences. But 
 he was also a great artist, with the great artist's 
 sensual enjoyment of the dextrous exercise of his 
 technical skill ; and thus it was that from time to 
 time a rich theme would waken his ambition to 
 go far beyond any demands of the Elizabethan 
 spectators and to work out an imperishable 
 masterpiece, which would move his contempo- 
 raries, no doubt, but which would also carry a 
 message to later generations — a message his 
 contemporaries may not even have suspected. 
 
 But it was on the audience of his own day that 
 he kept his eye steadily ; and he gave them what 
 he knew they relished, the coronations and pro- 
 cessions and stately spectacled they were amused 
 by, the combats and battles they delighted in, 
 the ghosts and the witches they believed in, even 
 if he himself did not. ( He had imagination be- 
 yond other men, but he had also common sense 
 in the same superlative degree^ He had his head 
 215 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 in the clouds at times, but he always kept his feet 
 firm on the ground. An idealist, as a poet must 
 be, he was a realist, as a successful playwright 
 always is. He was never remote or unfriendly 
 or retiring; indeed, all the records remind us that 
 he was hearty in his friendships and that he gave 
 himself freely to his associates. He had broad 
 human sympathy; and, altho apparently rather 
 aristocratic in his political opinions, he could fel- 
 lowship with common men; and perhaps this is 
 why common men did not fail to understand him 
 then, and indeed often understand him now bet- 
 ter than the more dainty and the supersubtle. 
 
 He was not over-squeamish, and he never 
 shrank from plain speech. But he was clean- 
 minded beyond most of his fellow-playwrights 
 of those spacious days ; and in his attitude toward 
 women he was a gentleman, even in his come- 
 dies, — whereas men of far better breeding, Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher, for example, were frequently 
 dirty in thought and often foul in phrase. His 
 manners were better than those of the contem- 
 porary men-of-letters, and so also were his 
 morals. There was in his plays no silly practice 
 of so-called ** poetic justice"; for anything so 
 petty Shakspere's vision was too broad and his 
 insight too piercing. But neither was there any 
 paltering with the law of life nor any extenuation 
 of wrong-doing. The sinner has ever to pay the 
 216 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 dread reckoning at last, even tho it is only by 
 himself that he is called to account. [■ Shakspere's 
 philosophy was sound all through, and so was 
 his ethical code, even tho it is unformulated. The 
 moral might not be tagged to the fable, but only 
 the wilfully blind could fail to find the lesson. 
 / Shakspere did not think it wise to crystallize his 
 ^morals; rather were they held in solution, to be 
 tasted and felt, not seen or measured. 
 
 Perhaps this was specially evident in the his- 
 tories, that grand gallery of full-length portraits, 
 in which the long line of English kings step one 
 by one from out the dull annals and start into life, 
 illumined by the inner light of imagination. But 
 it was evident also in the joyous group of poetic 
 comedies, creations of airy and capricious fantasy, 
 in which the poet peopled a world of exquisite 
 unreality with figures of eternal truth and beauty. 
 What were 'As You Like It' and 'Twelfth Night' 
 but pure romances shown in action with young 
 lovers wooing wittily, moved rather by pretty 
 sentiment than by any unplumbed depth of pas- 
 sion.^ Just as other dramatists had relieved a 
 story of terror with scenes of lively humor, so 
 Shakspere, in 'Much Ado about Nothing' and in 
 the 'Merchant of Venice,' sustained the comedy, 
 which was his chief interest here, by underplots 
 so serious that they might seem almost tragic. 
 For these delightful fantasies we have no other 
 217 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 term than comedy ; and yet nothing can be more 
 remote from what we ordinarily understand by 
 the word. "Romantic-comedy" we must call 
 it, and of this romantic-comedy Shakspere was 
 the undisputed master. Contemporary life is the 
 stuff out of which the comedy-of-manners is 
 wrought; and to contemporary life Shakspere 
 seems scarcely to have given a thought. The 
 only play of his in which he dealt avowedly with 
 the men and women of his own time and of his 
 own country was the * Merry Wives of Windsor,' 
 which was, in effect, only a farce, since the s itu- 
 ati ons of the st or y fjp.t^^rrpined the cha racters. 
 Yet altho Shakspere gave no thought to con- 
 T temporary life, it is true also that he never sought 
 to represent anything else. He was no historical 
 novelist to attempt the impossible ; and the lovers 
 of the 'Merchant of Venice,' the men of the 
 watch of 'Much Ado about Nothing,' the mob 
 of * Julius 1 Caesar,' and the courtiers of 'Hamlet,' 
 are all of them English, and all subjects of the 
 Virgin Queen. They were first of all human 
 beings, set in special circdmstances of time and 
 place; and then they were also Elizabethans, with 
 all the vigor, the humor, and the whim of the 
 men and women whom Shakspere knew as boy 
 and man in country and in town. Because 
 Shakspere neglected the comedy-of-manners, 
 his fellow-playwrights could not climb unaided 
 to the lofty level of high comedy. For romantic- 
 218 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 comedy, as for tragedy and for history, he had 
 set a pattern, and the others were able to work in 
 accordance therewith. But for the modern com- 
 edy-of-manners men hadto wait for Moliere to sup- 
 ply a model which should endure for centuries. 
 
 VI 
 
 Yet the foremost of Shakspere's fellow-play- 
 wrights was also a master of the comic. Real- 
 istic as was the humor of Ben Jonson, and some- 
 times almost sordid in its details, it could on 
 occasion rise splendidly on the wings of imagi- 
 nation — like the humor of Aristophanes, of Rab- 
 elais, of Mark Twain, all of them interpretative 
 realists. Often, indeed, the humor of Ben Jonson 
 strikes us m>w^-as_arhiti:ary--and as adamantine. 
 The characters he brought forth on the Eliza- V 
 bethan stage were richly realized and unforget- 
 tably individualized; but they were freouently as 
 rigid as a Greek masque. They lacked the flexi- 
 bility and the moderation of human nature. If 
 the comedy-of-manners is the result of the clash 
 of character on character, the comedy-of-humors 
 is rather the result of the clash of caricature on 
 caricature.' But however exaggerated their cha- 
 racteristics, — and this very exaggeration was an 
 integral element of Ben Jonson's comic power, as 
 it was also of Smollett's and Dickens's, -r- the per- 
 sons of his plays had indisputable vitality. 
 219 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 They took part in ja plot built as solidly as the 
 Pyramids, and as massively planned. ; Coleridge 
 was right in likening the framework of the 
 'Alchemist' to the structure of the 'Oedipus,' 
 for Jonson's comedy, like the tragedy of Sopho- 
 cles, had a beginning, a middle, and an end; and 
 it was wholly devoid of everything which did 
 not help to bring about the ultimate recoil of the 
 intrigue. There was conscious art here, a tech- 
 nical mastery of which the stalwart poet was 
 openly proud. And proud he was also of his 
 scholarship, of the immense variety of his infor- 
 mation, of the load of learning he could carry 
 with ease, even making it serviceable in his 
 comedies. In his tragedies this scholarship 
 weighed him down and stiffened his muscles. 
 In his more serious plays he was less felicitous 
 and less fortunate than in his comic dramas. 
 His tragedies were put together with the same 
 integrity of workmanship; but they seemed to 
 lack something, some sweep of passion to stir 
 the blood, or some touch of elemental simplicity 
 to move the heart. Jonson knew books as well 
 as any of his contemporaries; and his comedies 
 proved that he knew men also. Women he did 
 not know so well, — or else, like other broad 
 humorists, he did not greatly care to portray their 
 pettier frailties. 
 
 Women are more important in the plays of 
 220 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, poets of a lighter weight 
 and of a more romantic temperament^ Many of 
 their pieces can scarcely be classed as comedies, 
 since they contained scenes of searching emotion 
 and scenes of boisterous humor, often so loosely 
 conjoined that there is no saying whether the 
 serious or the comic plot is the more important. 
 In more than one of their dramas it would be 
 very difficult to discover any real unity of action. 
 But laxly as Beaumont and Fletcher may have 
 put their plots together, they had not a little dra- ^ 
 maturgic dexterity. (They had caught the knack of r 
 story-telling on the stage; they had an instinct \ 
 for an effective situation ; and they could sketch 
 a daring character likely to take with the spec- 
 tators. Altho far inferior to Ben Jonson in comic ^ 
 force, they had a pleasant sense of humor and a 
 pretty turn of wit. They rarely rose to any 
 hi^hLo f passion or even of pathos, yet they had 
 sentiment at least and lyric grace/ 
 
 They could be courtly, as became men of good 
 breeding; but they sometimes sank into blatant .:^ 
 vulgarity not only of phrase but of thought. 
 Here they were on the level of their contempo- 
 raries, a level to which Shakspere rarely de- 
 scended. Perhaps it was due to the fact that all 
 the women's parts were acted by young men 
 that the Elizabethan playwrights delighted in un- 
 clean innuendo ; and yet this was a temptation that 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 Shakspere rarely felt Shakspere's women are 
 ever womanly; they are eternally feminine; and 
 altho not without a frankness no longer in fash- 
 ion, they are essentially pure-minded. But if 
 Shakspere is cleaner than his contemporaries, 
 Beaumont and Fletcher are not worse sinners 
 than the other playwrights, the most of whom 
 were ready enough to pander to the baser por- 
 tion of the Elizabethan audience. It was to the 
 better element of this Elizabethan audience that 
 Beaumont and Fletcher more often appealed. 
 They deserved the favor that they received by a 
 succession of lively plays, cleverly calculated to 
 please the prevailing taste, plays with picturesque 
 action, with abundant fun, with ingenious epi- 
 sodes, and with occasional scenes of genuine 
 force. 
 
 Other playwrights there were a-plenty in the 
 later days of Elizabeth and the earlier days of 
 James; some of them were merely poets, who 
 wrote for the stage because the theater then 
 offered the best chance of self-expression, and 
 some of them were true playwrights, gifted with 
 a genuine dramaturgic instinct. Ford and Web- 
 ster were gloomy souls in revolt, combining hor- 
 rors wilfully; they were poets of strange power, 
 rather than playwrights; and they turned to the 
 dramatic form, not from any native impulse, but 
 rather because the demand for plays coincided 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 with their own pecuniary needs. Heywood, on 
 the other hand, was a born play-maker, and his 
 * Woman Killed with Kindness ' remains a jewel 
 of simple pathos^ Mas&inger was another, a 
 master of flexible blank verse ; and in his power- 
 ful comedy, 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts,' 
 there was a bold etching of a malevolent charac- 
 ter. Sir Giles Overreach, so actable that it kept 
 the stage for more than two centuries. Middle- 
 ton, again, and Dekker had their share of success, 
 altho much of their humor is made according to 
 the accepted stage-formula of the Elizabethan 
 theater. Shirley also, the latest of them all, had 
 his full share of strength, altho he lacked sympa- 
 thy and tolerance, and altho his humor is with- 
 Qut ease or unction. 
 
 'Genius is mainly an affair of energy," said 
 Matthew Arnold, "and poetry is mainly an affair 
 of genius." /^Energy the Elizabethan dramatic 
 poets had in superabundance; and what they 
 lacked, many of them, was restraint and order 
 and harmony^ Shakspere towered above them 
 all in power, in genius, in poetry, — and also in 
 art, in self-control, in elevation of purpose, and 
 in dramaturgic craftsmanship. And they and he 
 were closely akin ; all were children of the race and 
 of the time. "There are the same characters in 
 their dramas as in Shakspere's," so Taine de- 
 clared, "the same violent and terrible characters, 
 223 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 the same murderous and unforeseen occurrences, 
 the same sudden and frenzied passions, the same 
 irregular, capricious, turgid, magnificent style, 
 the same exquisite poetic feeling for rural life and 
 landscape, and the same delicate, tender, affec- 
 tionate ideals of woman." 
 
 vn 
 
 No epoch in all the long history of the drama 
 is emblazoned with more glorious ^names, not 
 even that which was made respondent by 
 Aeschylus, Sophocles, andx Euripides, by Aristo- 
 phanes and Menander. In sheer force, even the 
 Greek drama might be held inferior to the Eng- 
 lish, /where the Athenians regained their supe- 
 riority over the Elizabethans was in art^^in the 
 coQsci^US-piUpose held steadily until its accoror 
 
 p lishmg nt, in the <tiibnrrlinatinn nf p^rts tO the 
 whole, in the <;nhHnmpr of individual frp^dnm tO 
 
 a lar ger symmet ry. Some of Shakspere's plays, 
 But only too few of them, were wrought with 
 consummate care; and so were many of Ben 
 Jonson's; but for the rest whaf is often most 
 evident now is the waste and misdirection of 
 energy, the unwillingness to husband genius, 
 the wilfulness that is almost freakishness. 
 
 Behind these wantond^iects^was a medieva l 
 u ncertainty of fonT TT^ 'and her e_was the chief 
 cause of the deficiencies of the English drama at 
 
 2X| 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 the moment of its most splendid expansion. Its 
 form was ina dequat e, largely because the Eliza- 
 bethan theater had advanced so little beyond the 
 theater of the middle ages. The English drama 
 was less medieval than the Spanish drama, which 
 was its brilliant contemporary; for it had freed 
 its spirit, at least, and it had an open mind It 
 had even been aided in its development by the 
 influence of the Greek masters, altho mainly 
 through their Roman imitators — an influence 
 far less felt in Spain. None the less was the 
 presentation of a play of Shakspere's quite as 
 medieval as the presentation of a play of Lope de 
 Vega's; it was almost as primitive as the presen- 
 tation of a mystery just before the Renascence. 
 The performance took place on a mere platform, 
 in the open air, with most of the turbulent spec- 
 tators standing on three sides; and the large 
 majority of these spectators were likely always 
 to be men of low breeding and of coarse tastes. 
 Altho a dramaist must needs appeal to the plain 
 people, to his contemporaries as a whole, and 
 not to any upper class or cultivated caste alone, 
 yet he is unfortunate if there is not among the 
 spectators enough education to leaven the mass. 
 It was a misfortune that the Elizabethan theater 
 was so rude a thing; it is to be regretted that 
 public opinion allowed the dramatist not merely 
 needful liberty of form but also unlimited license 
 of structure; and it was doubly unfortunate that 
 225 
 
THE DRAMA IN ENGLAND 
 
 the audiences could bring to bear no restraining 
 influence. 
 
 In the past three centuries the theater has been 
 greatly modified; and the circumstances of the 
 playhouse itself have so materially changed that 
 an Elizabethan play is now almost^^s remote 
 from us as an Athenian^ No one oi Shakspere's 
 tragedies or comedtescan be acted on the modern 
 stage without a thorough readjustment to suit 
 the later conditions of representation — a readjust- 
 ment which is sometimes destructive of Shak- 
 spere's artful preparation in his earlier acts for 
 what is to be brought about in the later. The 
 'Oedipus the King' of Sophocles is now occa- 
 sionally acted in Paris, just as the 'Hamlet' of 
 Shakspere is often acted in London and in New 
 York; and so straightforward and simple is the 
 form of the Greek tragedy that the rearrangement 
 of its episodes to suit the exigencies of the stage 
 of to-day is far less than the transposition to 
 which the English tragedy has ID be subjected 
 before it can be represented in our theaters. This 
 is one reason why all the efforts of later poets to 
 model themselves upon Shakspere have resulted 
 in immediate disaster. His form they could imi- 
 tate; and often his form is careless enough. His 
 genius was incommunicable, — the genius which 
 made him the for emo st dr amatis t of all time , 
 equally great as poet and as playwright. 
 226 
 
VII. THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 WHEN the church gave up to the laity the 
 control of the mysteries, and the vernacu- 
 lar of each of the several peoples was substituted 
 for the uniform speech of the clergy, then there 
 began to be a divergence which did not cease until 
 the drama in each of the modern languages was 
 strikingly representative of the racial character- 
 istics of those who spoke that tongue. Indeed, 
 there is no art in which national traits are more 
 clearly revealed than in the drama, — not only in 
 what is said aqd done on the stage, but also in 
 the very form of the play itself.' 
 L From the common stock of the mystery, 
 universal throughout medieval Europe^ Spain 
 evolved a type of drama quite different from that 
 evolved in England during the same centuries; 
 and the Spanish play with its ingenious sur- 
 prises, and the English play with its energetic 
 directness, are not more sharply differentiated 
 from each other than each of them is from the 
 227 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 \ French play with its decorous reserve and its 
 
 psychologic subtlety-HtThe French followed the 
 
 bent of llieif own geniu$, just as the Spanish 
 
 had done, and the English; and this(led them in 
 
 /^ ] time to a drama not so en^rggtic as the English 
 
 ' and not so full of surprises as the Spanish, but 
 surpassing them both in the symmetry of its 
 structure and in the logic with which its action 
 was conducted. The narrowness of formjwhich 
 became in time one of the most marked peculi- 
 arities of the French drama /was no doubt due 
 mainly to the French liking for restraint, to a 
 hereditary preference for rules of guidance; but 
 it was also caused, in some measure, by the cir- 
 cumstances of the evolution of tragedy in France 
 out of the miracle-play. 
 
 When the mystery was turned out of the 
 French churches, it erected out of doors and in 
 the public square its long platform, with a row 
 of mansions at the back to suggest the more 
 necessary of the successive places where the 
 episodes of the gospel-narrative were to be 
 shown in action. In Paris, the miracle-plays 
 being at last intrusted to the control of the 
 Brotherhood of the Passion, a band of burghers 
 united for this special purpose, there was no 
 change in the method of representation when 
 the performances were taken indoors once more 
 and established in the Hotel de Bourgogne. 
 228 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 Just as the earliest English theater was copied 
 from the courtyard of an inn, because the stroll- 
 ing actors were accustomed to that, so in France, 
 and .for a like reason, the earliest theater was 
 modeled on a tennis-court. It was long and 
 narrow; and it had a shallow platform at one 
 end. This stage was decorated with such unre- 
 lated mansions as the play might require; and 
 its limited space must have been as badly 
 crowded as the chancel of the church had been 
 when the original stations began to multiply in 
 number. 
 
 \The disadvantage of this massing of many 
 places all at once on the stage would be greatly 
 increased when the well-known Bible story and 
 the legends of the saints, almost equally familiar 
 even to the spectators who might see them for 
 the first time, ceased to supply the sole material 
 for the anonymous dramatists, and when chron- 
 icle-plays began to be made out of the^ semi- 
 legendary lives of heroes and out of the wholly 
 fictitious romances 'Of chivalry.^ A throne under 
 a canopy was enotigh to suggest the palace of 
 Herod, if the playgoer already knew that such a 
 king had once reigned ; and so a gate in a wall 
 would serve for Jerusalem if the audience was 
 already aware that a part of the action would 
 take place in that city. But when fictitious he- 
 roes- absolutely unknown to the public, had un- 
 229 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 heard-of adventures in wholly imaginary castles 
 and cities and forests, and when these unfamiliar 
 castles and cities and forests were all huddled upon 
 the stage at once, each of them not actually rep- 
 resented but merely hinted at, — a tower for 
 the castle, a gate for the city, a tree or two for 
 the forest^ — then was chaos come again. 
 
 It was (in the neutral ground surrounded by 
 these emblems of various places^ that the actors 
 played their parts, the castle or the city or the 
 forest, each in its turn, being used for their 
 entrances upon the stage; and yet it seems as 
 if these shorthand indications of the several 
 localities would be more likely to confuse the 
 spectator than to aid him in realizing the succes- 
 sive scenes. Awkward as this arrangement 
 may have been, it was an inheritance from the 
 medieval theater; and the tradition was so firmly 
 rooted that(this composite set was the only stage- 
 setting familiar to the French playwrights until the 
 middle of the seventeenth century/, Not only did 
 the earliest of French dramatists. Hardy, conform 
 to it; but even the first plays of Corneille were 
 conceived in accord with its conditions. 
 
 Only the more serious drama was thus en- 
 cumbered with a complicated stage-setting. 
 The comic drama was free from any vain effort 
 of this sort; its action took place ^ in the neutral 
 ground, — that is to sayi on the bare stage, with 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 only a curtain at the back, for so the strolling 
 players had been accustomed to present a farce 
 on an improvised platform in the market-place.) 
 Even during the Renascence' personal and politi- J 2) 
 cal satires got themselves acted now and again ^i 
 but ^he staple of the humorous stage was still 
 the larce with its sturdy fun and its practical 
 joking. ) Not a little of the national ingenuity in 
 handling a situation logically, and in extracting 
 from it the utmost of its theatrical effect, is already 
 revealed by these early comic dramatists of 
 France, unknown for the most part, writing 
 directly for the common people, ( often vulgar, V 
 never squeamish, and liberal of Gallic salt rather 
 than of Attic wit. Comedy of a high elevation 
 the French were to wait for, till their native stock 
 had been cross-fertilized by Spanish example. 
 For many years after the Renascence had brought 
 about a new birth of the other arts in France, 
 ^the drama^ serious as well as comic, did not re- 
 spond to its influence, and remained medieval 
 both in its manner and in its matter. / 
 
 In these days of dawning promise, (the French 
 men-of-letters, like the Italian men-of-letters a 
 little earlier, detested the medieval theater and 
 despised it. (They admired antiquity; and they 
 sought to imitate the dramatists of Athens and of 
 Rome, altho they really preferred Seneca to 
 Sophocles. They persuaded themselves that one 
 231 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 of their number had written a play when he 
 had merely prepared a poem in dialog, often 
 protracted by the needless introduction of a cho- 
 rus in the manner of the Greeks. But/no one 
 of these French men-of-letters, whatever his 
 value as a poet, was in fact a playwright ; and 
 in these poems in dialog there was little or no- 
 thing of the truly dramatic. There were no 
 contending passions, no character in the fell 
 clutch of fate, no struggle firmly set forth, no 
 scene a faire. Declamation there was in abun- 
 dance—words, words, words; and indeed what 
 plot there might be served chiefly to bring in a 
 variety of topics for rhetorical treatment or for 
 lyrical expansion. A monolog sometimes filled 
 almost a whole act; and the personages did not 
 converse together, — they delivered lectures to 
 one another. 
 
 In these frigid specimens of oratorical verse there 
 was neither character nor action to reward the ef- 
 fort of professional actors; and this is an added 
 reason why they were performed only by ama- 
 teurs, by the poets themselves and their com- 
 rades, before audiences of their friends and 
 admirers. These chilly imitations have a cer- 
 tain importance in the history of French litera- 
 ture; but they are quite insignificant in the 
 history of the French drama. Mere poems in 
 dialog, presented by amateurs before dilettants 
 2y% 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 on chance occasion^ could have little influence V 
 upon the actual theater of the time^ and it is 
 only in the actual theater of the time, however 
 primitive and rude it may be, that any advance 
 in dramaturgic art can be made. The develop- 
 ment of a dramatic literature is alv^ays dependent 
 upon an already existing organization of players 
 in a playhouse with playgoers accustomed to a 
 certain traditional way of presenting plays. Just 
 as the practice of building houses of some sort 
 necessarily goes before any growth in the art of 
 architecture, so an actual theater is a condition 
 precedent to a living dramatic literature. 
 
 No improvement of the drama, no refining of 
 its art, has ever been accomplished by a poet, 
 however gifted, who scorned the actual theater 
 of his own time and failed to master its methods. 
 Improvements are wrought only by those who 
 are intimate with all the conditions of the object 
 to be perfected. But pressure from the outside 
 has often been beneficial to the theater; and by 
 merely literary criticism the professional play- 
 wright has sometimes been stimulated to a 
 loftier ambition. Perhaps the professional play- 
 wright may even have found his profit in a 
 study of the alleged plays in which the poets 
 failed to carry out adequately the ideas they ad- 
 vocated. And this is what seems to have hap- -^ 
 pened in France toward the end of the sixteenth 
 233 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 century, when the Brotherhood of the Passion 
 leased their theater in Paris to a company of profes- 
 sional actors who had been performing in the 
 provinces in plays written for them by their 
 own hack-dramatist. Hardy. 
 
 The Parisian playgoers were accustomed to 
 the long-drawn action and to the plain-spoken 
 humor of the miracle-plays and of the drama- 
 tized romances devised according to the same 
 formula. Hardy accepted this formula fully, 
 composing his plays to suit a stage decorated 
 with as many mansions as his story might call 
 for. But he was a born playwright; and he had 
 learned by long experience in the provinces how 
 to hold the interest of an audience. He had more 
 of the dramaturgic faculty than any of his prede- 
 cessors, the most of whom, indeed, had had very 
 little. In his hands the loose chronicle-play was 
 stiffened into consistency and its action was con- 
 centrated to bring out more boldly the dramatic 
 passages in which the actors who employed him 
 could most forcibly display their ability. He 
 could evoke character out of situation, altho, for 
 the most part, his psychology was but sum- 
 mary. For situation itself he had an instinctive 
 feeling like that of his English contemporary 
 234 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 Kyd ; but he lacked Kyd's rhetorical fervor. He 
 was not a poet himself, yet he was prompt to 
 profit by what the poets had written, both by 
 their precepts and their practice. Like Kyd 
 again, he put his plays in five acts, in accordance ^ 
 with the example of Seneca and the advice of 
 Horace. He was led in time to; devise the spe- 
 cies of play which came to be known as tragi- 
 comedy and which kept its popularity through 
 the first half of the seventeenth century. 
 /This tragi-comedy of Hardy's served as the i 
 connecting-link between the medieval drama and \ V 
 
 the true tragedy which was later to be illustrated 
 in France by Corneille and Racine." This true 
 tragedy was slowly evolved out of tragi-comedy, 
 as tragi-comedy had been slowly evolved out of 
 the chronicle-play. Hardy availed himself of the 
 rimed alexandrines, which he had found in the 
 unactable plays of the poets, who had vainly es- 
 sayed to revive the classic drama, —just as Kyd 
 and Marlowe had accepted the unrimed iambic 
 pentameter of * Gorboduc ' ; and thus Hardy 
 helped to establish the rimed alexandrine as the 
 verse to be employed thereafter by French dra- 
 matic poets. Hardy's own poetry deserved no 
 high praise; but it was more pretentious than 
 any yet spoken in the actual theater. [ His plays \|. 
 appeared to have a certain literary flavor because 
 he drew freely upon the ancients for his plots, 
 
 235 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 upon Vergil, for example, and more particularly 
 upon Plutarch; and this may have made some 
 of his pieces seem almost classic, in spite of the 
 fact that his treatment of these stories was frankly 
 contemporary. | 
 
 it was probably due to Hardy that people of 
 culture became interested in the drama of the day, 
 and that men-of-letters started to write for the 
 actual theater! accepting its conditions unhesitat- 
 ingly, and striving to give it a more literary atmo- 
 sphere. More than one court-poet ventured to 
 prepare plays to be acted by the company of the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne; and the upper circles of so- 
 ciety were led to attend the performances, altho 
 until then ladies had absented themselves from 
 the theater, in consequence of the coarseness and 
 the vulgarity of the customary entertainment. 
 The frequent presence of women of rank in the 
 playhouse helped along the purifying of the con- 
 temporary drama in which the younger poets 
 were engaged. Society was settling down after 
 long years filled with feuds and factional in- 
 trigues; and, with stability and peace, manners 
 were softened and taste was improved. The 
 theater began to be recognized as an important 
 element of social life even before Richelieu took 
 it under his high protection, ambitious himself to 
 win acceptance as a dramatist. In time a second 
 playhouse was opened in the Marais; and the 
 536 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 actors who managed this were eager to wel- 
 come any novelty which would aid them in their 
 rivalry with the older company. 
 
 To supply these two playhouses there sprang 
 up a generation of dramatic poets, following in 
 the footsteps of Hardy, altho they possessed less 
 of the native play-making gift. They were more 
 declamatory than he had been, and not so direct; 
 they were more affected in the conduct of their sto- 
 ries and in the suggestion of the motives of their 
 characters. No one of them equaled Hardy in 
 sturdy common sense or in ingenious construc- 
 tion. ( And while he had invented his plays him- 
 self, making use,, of materials supplied by epic 
 and by history, ^hey began to borrow their plots ^ 
 ready-made from the dramatists of Spain and 
 Italy. At the same time they imported also the 
 so-called ''rules of the theater,'/ which had been 
 elaborated in Italy by the critics of the Rena- 
 scence, and which had been rejected by the 
 practical playwrights of Spain and England. /^In 
 France these rules met with a different fortune ; 
 they slowly established themselves in the literary n^ 
 drama; and they shackled the French stage until 
 early in the nineteenth century. 
 / In Spain and in England the playwright had 
 seen no advantage in fastening these fetters on 
 his limbs; and in neither country did the play- 
 goers puzzle themselves about any theory of art 
 237 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 or any code of rules so long as the playwright 
 was able to hold their interest, to amuse their 
 eyes, and to startle their nerves. They made 
 no cavil at any license the dramatist might take, so 
 long as he gave them the special pleasure which 
 they expected from the theater. It is a neces- 
 sary condition of this enjoyment in the play- 
 house that the spectators shall understand at 
 all times what is shown before them on the 
 stage; and here we have an explanation of the 
 apparent anomaly that the Three Unities were 
 welcomed by the play-going public of Paris, altho 
 the play-going public of Madrid and of London 
 had been wholly indifferent. In Paris the adopt- 
 ing of the Unity of Place would abolish the clut- 
 ter of incongruous mansions which the stage of 
 the Hotel de Bourgogne had taken over from the 
 outdoor platform of the miracle-plays. These 
 mansions must have been difficult to distinguish 
 one from the other on the dimly lighted stage; 
 and, so far from aiding the imagination of the 
 audience, they may have kept the attention dis- 
 tracted during the earlier passages of the play. 
 
 How confusing this medieval scenic device^ 
 might be may be guessed when we learn that in 
 one play of Hardy's the stage was set with a 
 palace at the back ; while on one side there was 
 the sea, with a ship having masts, on which a 
 woman appeared, and from which she threw 
 238 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 herself into the water; and on the other side 
 there was a fine room having in it a bed decked 
 with its sheets. Almost as complicated was the 
 stage-setting requisite for one of the early plays 
 of Corneille, the * Illusion Comique,' where a 
 richly decorated palace was in the center, with 
 a park on one hand, and on the other a cave for a 
 magician on the top of a mountain. It is small 
 wonder that the audience would welcome a sim- 
 plification of such a stage-setting as this, and 
 would gladly advocate any theory the application 
 of which would result in getting rid of a com- 
 plexity so bewildering. 
 
 / Also to be allowed full weight is the fact that 
 the French are not so individual as the Spaniards, 
 nor so self-willed as the English. Rather are 
 they governed by the social instinct, relishing 
 strict order, not to say restraint. Inheritors of 
 the Latin tradition of decorum, the French do not 
 dislike rules, nor do they really object to what 
 might seem to the English to be restrictions. 
 Above all are they fond of logic, and of the sim- 
 plicity which comes of having a single aim ; and 
 so far as the acceptance of the rules of the thea- 
 ter and the adoption of the Three Unities helped 
 their playwrights to attain this end, it was bene- 
 ficial to their dramatic literature. But if we may 
 judge by the history of the theater elsewhere, we 
 can be certain that the French play-going public 
 239 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 1 
 
 would never have approved of the demand of the 
 literary critics for the Three Unities, if the under- 
 lying principle of the rules had not been accept- 
 able to the genius of the race. 
 
 Ill 
 
 CoRNEiLLE, the first of French dramatic poets, 
 possessed his full share of this national character- 
 istic; and he displayed it plainly in the earliest 
 of his more important plays— in the * Cid,' which 
 was derived from a Spanish drama written by 
 one of the followers of Lope de Vega. Hardy 
 had already shown him the way of condensing 
 the ordinary medieval narrative in dialog into a 
 succession of striking adventures ; and Corneille 
 in turn concentrated all his effort on a single 
 main situation, the very climax of a struggle be- 
 tween desire and duty. Hp cut out :of his Span- 
 ish original, and cast away^ all that did not serve 
 to throw into higher relief this final exercise of 
 the human will, always the dominating element 
 of a true drama; and thus it was that he fixed 
 once for all the form and the content of French 
 tragedy. 
 
 The popularity of the ' Cid ' with the play- 
 goers of France was immediate; and it has been 
 enduring. No tragedy is more attractive in 
 Paris to-day after almost three centuries; and in 
 240 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 the first flush of its novelty the rush to see it was 
 so insistent that( seats were set upon the stage. ' 
 The custom thus introduced into France was al- 
 ready established in England ; and it must have 
 increased the tendency toward scenic simplicity, 'n 
 since the sides of the stage were not thereafter 
 serviceable. Yet the ' Cid ' itself had been de- 
 vised in accord with the conditions prevailing at 
 the time it was written ; arid when it was origi- 
 nally produced at the theater in the Marais the 
 stage was arranged to represent simultaneously 
 the dwelling of Chimene, the apartment of the 
 Infanta, a public square, and the council-chamber 
 of the King. Half a century later this cumbrous 
 complication had disappeared, and the play was 
 performed in a room with four doors,— that is to 
 say, in a neutral ground, perhaps suggesting the 
 public square, but having immediate access to 
 the quarters of the King, of the Infanta, and of 
 Chimene. 
 
 Founded on a loosely constructed Spanish drama, 
 and written to suit the conditions of the French 
 theater as Hardy had modified them, the * Cid ' did 
 not exhibit the Three Unities ; and for this derelic- 
 tion it was censured at Richelieu's command by 
 the French Academy, which he had founded to be 
 the custodian and the controller of taste. Corneille 
 defended himself as best he could; and in his 
 later plays he sought to avoid giving to the parti- 
 241 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 sans of the Italian theories any occasion to find 
 fault with him. The final establishment of the 
 rules was really due to Corneille's avowed adhe- 
 sion to them and to his obvious effort to con- 
 form. But he himself was never at ease within 
 the limitations which he had felt himself forced 
 to accept. They irked him painfully; they 
 cramped his bold spirit; and he was continually 
 striving to argue himself out of them or to inter- 
 pret them into harmlessness. Sometimes, it may 
 be, the necessity of wrestling with the difficulty 
 helped him to a more concise and a more vigor- 
 ous expression;— the history of every art abounds 
 in instances of an obstacle which the artist, after 
 trying in vain to get around, has at last been able 
 to use as a stepping-stone to a higher achievement. 
 Quite possibly this was the case with his 
 tragedy of 'Horace,' in which his power as a 
 dramatic poet is displayed amply and character- 
 istically. The theme was tempting to a man of 
 his temper; it was the conflict between family 
 affection and fervid patriotism. The play was as 
 simple in plot as it was swift in action, the poet 
 presenting only the naked climax, stripped of all 
 accessory episodes. In this directness of move- 
 ment he was aided by his submission to the rules ; 
 and on this occasion the observation of the Three 
 Unities called for no sacrifice. The single plot is 
 presented at its culmination in a single day ; and 
 242 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 the stage represents a single place,— a room in 
 the house of old Horatius in Rome. The first 
 act begins with the entrance of Sabina, with her 
 friend Julia; Sabina is an Alban; and Alba is at 
 war with Rome. She is at once the sister of the 
 three Curiatii and the wife of one of the Horatii. 
 She declares her divided feelings, and then de- 
 parts, after Camilla enters. Camilla is a Roman ; 
 she is the sister of the three Horatii ; and she is be- 
 loved by one of the Curiatii. She has been to 
 consult an oracle ; and she has been told that the 
 war will end this very day, and that she and her 
 lover will then be united, never to part. Then 
 the Curiatius she loves enters, to inform her of a 
 truce and of a proposal to leave the war between 
 the two cities to be decided by a combat of three 
 champions chosen from each side. Elated by 
 this good news, they depart,— and the leaving of 
 the stage without any actors was taken by the 
 audience as notice that the act was ended. As 
 there were spectators seated at the sides of the 
 stage, it is probable that no curtain was lowered. 
 The second act opens with the entrance of 
 Curiatius and Horatius, and the former congratu- 
 lates the latter that the three Horatii have been 
 chosen as the Roman champions. Then a friend 
 appears to announce that the Albans have named 
 the three Curiatii to defend their cause. Horror- 
 stricken as they are, the young men do not 
 243 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 shrink from the deadly duty, altho Camilla comes 
 on to beg her lover to withdraw as best he can. 
 Soon Sabina appears to urge her brother not to 
 flinch, even tho his hand is armed against her 
 husband's life. Finally the father of the Horatii 
 steps forward to reveal himself also as a model 
 of noble austerity. He has the last word, bidding 
 the young men do their duty and leave the rest 
 to the gods. In the third act we are made sym- 
 pathizers with the suspense in the Roman house- 
 hold while the brothers are fighting three against 
 three in front of the hostile armies. Sabina 
 wishes for the success of her brothers, while Ca- 
 milla is ardent for the triumph of her lover. The 
 elder Horatius enters to attest again that honoris 
 ever to be held dearer than life; and when Julia 
 brings the dread news that two of his sons have 
 been killed, while the third has saved himself by 
 flight, the father grieves not at the deaths of the 
 two but only at the cowardice of the one. In 
 the fourth act the old man's shame is turned to 
 pride when he is told that the flight of his sur- 
 viving son was only a device to separate the three 
 opponents, whereby the Roman was able to face 
 them singly and to slay them one by one. Ca- 
 milla hears the fatal news in silence, but when 
 her brother returns, glorying in his victory, she 
 breaks forth in violent imprecations against 
 Rome, the cause of her lover's death,— where- 
 upon her outraged brother pursues her off the 
 244 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 Stage and slays her with the sword that slew 
 the man she loved. In the fifth act he is accused 
 before the King; and it is her father who justi- 
 fies his deed. At last the monarch pardons the 
 murder because of the victory that went before. 
 The dramatic interest of * Horace ' is as indis- 
 putable as that of the *Cid.' Indeed, we have 
 here the drama reduced to its essence, the stark 
 assertion of the human will, the shock of con- 
 tending passions, the collision of conflicting 
 duties. The situation at the center of the story 
 is very unusual, not to say most extraordinary; 
 and this is one reason why Corneille liked it. 
 But when once it was granted, he made little 
 further demand upon the indulgence of the spec- 
 tators; he proceeded to handle his theme with 
 sober logjc and to extract from it both pity and 
 terror. /Corneille's characters are larger than 
 life; thejrare of heroic size, all of them, men and 
 women ; and they breathe a rarer air than every- 
 day mortals. But they are consistent with them- 
 selves and with one another. Their exaltation 
 of sentiment may seem to some of us a little too 
 high-strung, yet it was to them perfectly natural; 
 and to the French audiences of the seventeenth 
 century it was more than acceptable : it was stim- 
 ulating and satisfying. The Parisian playgoers 
 thrilled with pleasure then, as they do now, when 
 the characters vied one with another in voi- 
 cing noble sentiments always perfectly phrased. 
 245 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 For Corneille was no jnere playwright, skilled 
 in building up a plot: (he was also a true poetA' 
 altho very unequal ; and he was a passed master 
 of versification. His lines have the double merit 
 of polish and vigor! He could compact the ex- 
 pression of his emotion into a pregnant word or 
 two; or, when he preferred, he could express it 
 at length in stately and sonorous couplets, over- 
 emphatic at times, no doubt, but rarely open to 
 the reproach of pomposity. 
 
 IV 
 
 Racine, who followed Corneille as Euripides 
 followed Sophocles, took over the form of tragedy 
 which the elder poet had marked with his own 
 image and superscription, altho the younger poet 
 modified it in some slight measure to suit his 
 own powers and his own preferences. Cor- 
 neille had been over-lyric at times, altho he had 
 been far less epic than any of his predecessors as 
 a playwright; (Racine was more rigorously dra- 
 matic. Accepting the limitation imposed by the 
 Three Unities, which were in accord with his 
 temperament, Racine condensed still further the 
 themes he treated. He focused the attention 
 upon fewer figures; and he simplified again the 
 action until English critics are wont to deem 
 his plays bare and cold, altho in fact a fire of 
 246 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 passion is ever glowing within themi He was 
 an adept in construction ;( and; his plots, narrow y 
 as they may be, are exquisitely ^'proportioned, re- 
 vealing consummate art in the conduct of the 
 story. He avoided scrupulously all digressions 
 and underpIot$ and parasitic episodes. 
 
 The extraordinary situations that Corneille had 
 been delighted to discover in history,, Racine re- 
 jected altogether, choosing rather to deal with 
 what was less extravagant, — the growth of a 
 man's love for a woman who loved another, or 
 the consequences of a woman's mad passion for 
 a youth who cared nothing for her. In his plays, 
 as often in Corneille's, the action is internal rather 
 than external^, and the moral debate within the 
 heart of man is not always accompanied by 
 mere physical movement, visible to the heedless 
 spectator, j Racine did not seek to interest the 
 audience in what his characters were doing be- 
 fore its eyes, but rather in what these charac- 
 ters were in themselves, and in what they were 
 feeling and suffering^; He was an expert play- 
 wright, as well as a master of psychologic analy- 
 sis; and this is why he was able to accomplish 
 the difficult feat of making his study of the inner 
 secrets of the human soul effective on the stage. ^ 
 His story might be slight, but in his hands it was 
 always sufficient to express tensity of emotion 
 and to command abundant sympathy. 
 247 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 In the tragedy of * Andromaque ' the spectator 
 is made to see how Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, is 
 about to abandon his promised bride Hermione, 
 daughter of Helen, because he is desperately 
 enamored of Andromache, widow of Hector. 
 On behalf of the Grecian chiefs, Orestes, son of 
 Agamemnon, appears to demand of Pyrrhus the 
 sacrifice of the son of Hector and Andromache. 
 Orestes loves Hermione, who loves the faithless 
 Pyrrhus, who longs for Andromache, who is de- 
 voted to her husband's memory. To save her 
 son, Andromache weds Pyrrhus, resolved to 
 slay herself as soon as the boy's safety is assured. 
 In the agony of her jealousy, Hermione hints to 
 Orestes that she will be his, if he will slay Pyr- 
 rhus before the wedding with Andromache. 
 But when Pyrrhus is killed and Orestes comes 
 to claim his reward, Hermione recoils with hor- 
 ror and reproaches him for his evil deed; and 
 then she rushes forth to put an end to her own 
 life upon the bier of the man she had loved in 
 vain. The death-dealing blows are never given 
 before the eyes of the spectators; and yet this 
 artistic reticence results in no loss of interest, 
 since the attention of the audience is directed, 
 not to the mere doings of the characters, but to 
 the effect of these doings, first upon Hermione 
 and then on Orestes. 
 
 Racine's conscious possession of the power of 
 248 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 arousing and retaining the interest of the play- 
 goers of his own nation in his minute discrim- 
 ination between motives and emotions, may be 
 one of the reasons why he was prone to choose 
 a woman as the central figure in most of his 
 plays; and here again is a point of resemblance 
 to Euripides. / Racine was led also to make use 
 of love as the mainspring of his action, partly, 
 perhaps, because the passion of man for woman 
 had not often been considered by Corneille, 
 and partly because this was of all the passions 
 the one he himself best understood. A loving 
 woman Racine could always delineate with deli- 
 cate appreciation and with illuminating insight. 
 His touch was caressingly feminine; whereas the 
 tone of Corneille was not only manly but ever 
 stalwartly masculine. Corneille, argumentative 
 as he was at times and even declamatory, was 
 forever striving to fortify the soul of man, while 
 Racine, with a softer suavity, was seeking rather 
 to reveal the heart of woman, to lay it bare be- 
 fore us, palpitating at the very crisis of passion. 
 As we gaze along the gallery of Racine's fasci- 
 nating heroines, we observe that desire often 
 conquers duty; but when we call the roll of 
 Corneille's heroes, we behold men curbing their 
 inclinations and strong to do what they ought. 
 
 Thus it may be that Racine was the nearer to 
 nature, since it is often a strain upon the spectator 
 249 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 to climb up to the table-land of Corneille's exal- 
 tation. Racine's language also was more familiar 
 than Corneille's, easier, homelier, and therefore 
 less open to the accusation of being stilted. Not 
 only had Corneille a lyric fervor, but he was also a 
 maker of resonant phrases ; Racine sought rather 
 to be simple, and rarely strove for sententious- 
 ness, which is not a feminine characteristic. On 
 the other hand, the younger poet had a gift of 
 pictorial evocation; and his verse had often an 
 insinuating and serpentine grace. It was admi- 
 rably adjusted to the organs of speech; it lent 
 itself to delivery on the stage: and yet there 
 were few purple patches in Racine's plays and 
 scarcely a bravura passage existing for its own 
 sake. The poetry was not something applied 
 from the outside: it was the result rather of a 
 perfect accord between the sentiment and its ex- 
 pression. Racine's melodious verse is evidence 
 that French is not so un poetical a language as 
 those have said who cannot feel its music or who 
 dislike its nasal tone. 
 
 But even in Racine's hands the rimed alexan- 
 drine seems to us distended and monotonous. 
 As a dramatic meter it is inferior to the dignified 
 iambic of the Greeks and to our own varied 
 blank-verse; and even if rime is really needed in 
 a language as unrhythmic as French, it cannot 
 but appear artificial to those who happen to be 
 250 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 unaccustomed to it. This impression of artifi- 
 ciality is deepened by Racine's enforced employ- 
 ment of the conventional vocabulary of gallantry 
 to express sincere and genuine emotion. It was 
 the misfortune of Corneille also that he had to 
 deal with the universal in terms of the particular, 
 and that his plays, like Racine's, were conditioned 
 by the sophisticated taste of the playgoers be- 
 fore whom they were performed. If we contrast 
 the courtly audiences of Racine with the gather- 
 ing of Athenian citizens to judge a drama of 
 Sophocles, and with the spectators of all sorts 
 thronging to applaud the plays of Shakspere, 
 we can see one reason why French tragedy lacks 
 the depth and the sweep of the Greek, and why 
 it has not the force and the variety of the Eng- 
 lish. French tragedy appeared, as Taine has told 
 us, "when a noble and well-regulated monarchy, 
 under Louis XIV, established the empire of de- 
 corum, the life of the court, the pomp and circum- 
 stance of society, and the elegant domestic phases 
 of aristocracy " ; and French tragedy could not but 
 disappear ** when the social rule of nobles and the 
 manners of the antechamber were abolished by 
 the Revolution." 
 
 If the manners of the antechamber were the 
 cause of the self-consciousness we cannot but 
 251 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 remark in French tragedy, on the other hand 
 the empire of decorum was a government under 
 which French comedy could come to its fullest 
 perfection. Moliere, younger than Corneille and 
 older than Racine, is greater than either, partly 
 because of his own superior genius and partly 
 because the racial characteristics of the French 
 can find their fullest expression rather in comedy 
 than in tragedy. Indeed, Moliere is not only the 
 foremost figure in all French literature : he is also 
 one of the three great masters of the drama, 
 worthy to be set by the side of Sophocles and 
 of Shakspere. 
 
 Altho Moliere came at the moment of matu- 
 rity, when the methods of the medieval theater 
 were modified finally in conformity with modern 
 conditions, it was only very slowly that he at- 
 tained to a complete understanding of his genius 
 or to a recognition of its limitations. He was 
 an actor, like Shakspere, and the manager of a 
 company of comedians who had wandered for 
 years about the provinces and who had settled 
 themselves at last in Paris. His earliest attempts 
 were but trifles, brisk and broad, in the manner 
 of the Italian comedy-of-masks, mere comic im- 
 broglios with no pretense of literature to sustain 
 their very practical joking. Even the brilliantly 
 written comedy of the * Etourdi ' is as fantastic 
 as these farces of the Italians, and almost as me- 
 252 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 chanical in the ingenuity of its expedients. Not 
 until after he had established himself in Paris 
 did he bring out the ' Precieuses Ridicules,' in 
 which he first touched the real life of his own 
 time. It was only a comedietta, but it was 
 /based on a solid observation of his contempora- 
 ries; and its success encouraged him to seek 
 subjects in the society he saw about him. This 
 is the very material that Shakspere never cared 
 to deal with ; and Moliere made it the staple of 
 his work. 
 
 Altho his position as the manager of a com- 
 pany of actors led him to return frequently to 
 the Italian formula with its easy extravagance 
 and its liberality of laughter, Moliere slowly en- 
 larged his manner as he felt his footing firmer. 
 He brought forth a series of comedies of a stea- 
 dily increasing depth; and as he became more 
 accustomed to/ handling the realities of life, his 
 characters were more boldly drawn, his plots 
 were less arbitrary, and his themes took on a 
 profounder meaning. But he was no mere man- 
 of-letters with a purely theoretic philosophy of 
 life: he was a practical playwright, master of> 
 all the resources of the theater of his own time.y 
 As a school-boy he had studied Latin comedy, 
 and he knew all that Plautus and Terence could 
 teach. He was nourished on the succulent hu- 
 mor of the old French farces, with their hearty 
 253 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 fun and their pertinent sketches of character. 
 He had spied out the secrets of the Spanish play- 
 wrights, fertile inventors of amusing situations. 
 He had absorbed every device of the Italian 
 
 I comedy-of-masks with its incessant liveliness 
 
 i and its ingenuity of intrigue. 
 
 By years of acting as a stroller in the provinces 
 he had taught himself how to hold the attention 
 of the illiterate audience while he was unfolding 
 his plot and while he was carrying on his story. 
 By bitter experience he learned that a play, how- 
 ever lofty in design or however poetic in expres- 
 sion, is nothing, and less than nothing, if it cannot 
 please contemporary playgoers. Timidly at first 
 and tentatively, he began to put something more 
 into his plays than mere amusement. He began 
 to impart a serious meaning to the comic drama. 
 He began to use his comedies to express his own 
 
 /( feelings and his own opinions about the struc- 
 
 ' ture of society and the conduct of life. He recog- 
 nized that as a comic dramatist it was his duty, 
 first of all, to make the spectators laugh ; but he 
 was able skilfully to enlarge his manner so that 
 he could also make them think even while they 
 were laughing. He had an imaginative insight 
 into the absurdities, the frailties, the petty faults, 
 and the lesser vices of human nature. What he 
 observed he reflected upon ; and he related it to 
 the larger outlook on human nature which was 
 254 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 his also; and when he reproduced upon the 
 stage what he had seen in the world his social 
 satire was informed with the shrewdest com- 
 mon sense, and it was sustained by abundant 
 and exuberant humor, by a power of compelling 
 laughter unequaled among all the moderns. 
 
 \It was this penetration of Moliere's humor into 
 th^ secrets of our common humanity, combined 
 with his mastery of the technic of the theater, 
 so that there was ever a perfect adaption of the 
 means to the end, which has made his comedies 
 the final model of that " picture of life which is 
 also a judgment." The humorist was a moral- 
 ist, as all great humbrists have been ; and he had, 
 moreover, the melancholy which is ever the ac- 
 companiment of a profound humor. His nature 
 was really richer than Racine's and deeper than 
 Corneille's, and his vision of life. was more pier- 
 cing; and therefore the range of his comedy was 
 far wider than the range of their tragedy. Indeed, 
 he exercised himself in more different species 
 of the drama than any other of the great dra- 
 matists. Shakspere is versatile enough, with his 
 histories and tragedies and romantic-comedies and 
 farces. But Moliere is even more multifarious. 
 He attempted pure farce, the * Medecin Malgre 
 Lui ' ; the comedy-of-intrigue, the ' Etourdi ' ; the 
 comedy-of-manners, the ' ficole des Femmes'; 
 the comedy-of-character, the * Avare ' ; romantic- 
 255 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 comedy, the * Amphitryon ' ; tragi-comedy, * Don 
 Garcie'; comedy-ballet, 'Monsieur de Pour- 
 ceaugnac ' ; criticism in dialog, the ' Critique de 
 I'Ecole des Femmes ' ; satiric interlude, the * Im- 
 promptu de Versailles ' ; legendary drama, ' Don 
 Juan.' No one has ever handled comedy in its 
 various aspects so brilliantly and so broadly as 
 Moliere; and he has left us in the 'Femmes Sa- 
 vantes ' the incomparable model of pure comedy 
 at its highest and best, v^hile he presented us 
 also with the type of comedy sustained by phi- 
 losophy in the 'Misanthrope,' of comedy gently 
 relaxing into farce in the ' Bourgeois Gentil- 
 homme,' and of comedy almost stiffening into 
 drama in 'Tartuffe.' 
 
 No one of Moliere's comedies is more charac- 
 teristic than 'Tartuffe,' more liberal in its treat- 
 ment of our common humanity, braver in its 
 assault upon hypocrisy, or more masterly in its 
 technic. And the technical problem was as diffi- 
 cult as the theme was daring. Bringing before 
 us a man who uses the language of religion as a 
 cloak for the basest self-seeking, Moliere devised 
 his situations so artfully that the spectators can 
 discount the villain's fair words, and that they 
 know him for what he is, even before he makes 
 his first appearance. The opening scenes de- 
 serve the high praise of Goethe; and indeed 
 there is no more adroit exposition in the history 
 256 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 of the drama. Two acts are employed to set 
 before us the family relations of the credulous 
 Orgon, into whose confidence the unscrupulous 
 Tartuffe has wormed himself. We are made 
 acquainted with Orgon's second wife, with his 
 old mother, with his son and his daughter, and 
 with the whole household. 
 
 Tartuffe does not appear until the third of the 
 five acts ; and by that time the audience is ready 
 for him and able to see through him at once. 
 His projects are plain, even if they are some- 
 what contradictory— as the plans of a villain often 
 are. He is seeking to capture Orgon's wealth 
 for himself, to marry Orgon's daughter, and at 
 the same time to seduce Orgon's young wife. 
 However he may disguise his foul purpose be- 
 neath pious phrases, the spectators are never in 
 doubt as to his true character; and he has no need 
 of any aside to elucidate his motives. Never 
 does he lower the mask, as lago so often does, 
 or lay his soul bare'in soliloquy. Once we think 
 he has been caught and is about to be exposed; 
 but again he wins over Orgon by the very ex- 
 travagance of his self-accusation. Once more 
 he is led actually to betray himself, making love 
 to Orgon's wife with Orgon concealed under the 
 table. And then when he sees that he is found 
 out at last he stands forth brutally and claims the 
 house as his under a deed of gift. Furthermore, 
 257 
 
i 
 
 THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 he denounces his benefactor as implicated in a 
 political intrigue; and Orgon finds himself in a 
 pitiful situation with total ruin impending. At 
 the very end of the play, when there seems to 
 be no way out of the difficulty, Moliere most 
 artfully unties the knot by the intervention of 
 the King, Louis XIV himself, who is made to 
 exert his arbitrary power to free the foolish Orgon 
 and to send Tartuffe to prison. 
 
 Before Moliere wrote, French comedy had been 
 excessively romantic in manner, with its plots 
 fabricated out of adventures and accidents, and 
 
 l» with its personages of tradition and fantasy. 
 
 ((^Moliere brought comedy back to reality. He 
 pdealt directly with life as he beheld it about 
 ; him. He set upon the stage the men and women 
 of his own time, a wonderful collection of por- 
 traits, —vital, vigorous, and undeniable in their 
 veracity. In this splendid series of comedies 
 the age of Louis XIV starts again into life, with 
 all its decorum, its social ease, its hardness of 
 heart; we are permitted to visit the court and 
 the town, and to make acquaintance with the 
 nobles, the burghers, the physicians, the actors, 
 and the men-of-letters, with the lackeys, the 
 serving-maids, the young girls, the prudes, and 
 the coquettes. 
 
 We can see Moliere's wholesome sympathy 
 with youth and love; we can note his kindli- 
 258 . 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 ness and his common sense; and we cannot 
 help remarking his ever-growing detestation of | , 
 affectation and of pretense. In all his larger 
 comedies the dominant note is sincerity, a 
 scorching scorn for sham and humbug, a burning 
 hatred of hypocrisy. ' He is honest himself and 
 frank; his satire is never mean or malevolent; 
 his attack is always open and direct. His hearty 
 laughter clears the air; and we love him for 
 the enemies he made. Now and again, it may 
 be admitted, his tone is hard; and it must be 
 acknowledged further that he rarely softens into 
 pathos. Indeed, of pathos, which is generally 
 the inseparable accompaniment of humor, Mo- 
 liere had almost as little as Aristophanes. What 
 he had instead of pathos was melancholy,— a 
 puissant and a searching melancholy, which 
 strangely sustains his inexhaustible mirth and 
 his triumphant gaiety. Sometimes, while we 
 are laughing at the sheer fun which envelops 
 his broader comedies, we are allowed to catch 
 a glimpse of his inexpressible sadness which is 
 at the core of his humor. 
 
 / IVloliere is superior to Corneille and to Racine 
 
 /in the variety of his themes, in the breadth of 
 
 l^his philosophy, in the ingenuity of his technic; v, 
 
 and in spite of the fact that he is a writer of 
 
 comedies while they both wrote tragedies, and 
 
 that he did not always use verse, he can be 
 
 259 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 called a greater poet than either of them,— if we 
 may give to the word poet its larger meaning. 
 To us who speak English the rimed alexandrine 
 is a rhythm too artificial and too complicated to 
 be perfectly satisfactory in the drama; and to 
 many of us French itself is not a poetic language. 
 But even if the French are somewhat lacking 
 in the energetic imagination which ought to in- 
 form tragedy, they have special qualifications for 
 comedy. They are easily witty; they are in- 
 ventively humorous; they have a sharp sense of 
 the ridiculous; they are governed by the social 
 instinct. It is natural enough that the greatest 
 of comic dramatists should be a Frenchman, and 
 that we should owe to Moliere the final form of 
 comedy. Quite possibly the form of comedy 
 which Moliere established in French is very like 
 that which Menander had devised for his own 
 use in Greece two thousand years earlier; but 
 however probable the suggestion may be and 
 however alluring, there is no proof of it avail- 
 able now, since the plays of Menander are lost to 
 us forever. 
 
 Not with Menander is Moliere to be measured, 
 and not with Corneille and Racine; his place is 
 rather with the supreme masters of the drama, 
 with Sophocles and with Shakspere. In pure 
 comedy his supremacy is as indisputable as that 
 of Shakspere both in romantic-comedy and in 
 260 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 tragedy, and as that of Sophocles in tragedy 
 alone. He may be the least of the three, perhaps ; 
 but he is the latest also. He has this one ad- 
 vantage over his predecessors: he is not so far// 
 distant from us as they are. The society heH 
 has depicted is more like the world we are fa- 
 miliar with. Above all, the theater for which 
 he wrote is almost the same as ours. 
 
 It was the special good fortune of Moliere that 
 he came forward as a dramatist at the very mo- 
 ment when the circumstances of a theatrical 
 performance had already assumed the aspect* to 
 which we are nowadays accustomed. Whereas 
 the plays of the great Greek dramatist were pre- 
 pared to be performed outdoors in a hollow of 
 the hills without either stage or scenery, and 
 whereas the plays of the great English dramatist 
 were intended to be produced in a theater with- 
 out a roof and on a stage without scenery, the 
 plays of the great French dramatist were written 
 to be acted in a theater properly roofed and [ I 
 illuminated by artificial light, and having a stage 
 supplied with scenery. In the masterpieces of 
 Sophocles we can see the ancient form in its 
 most consummate perfection, strange and re- 
 mote as that may seem to us to-day; and in the 
 masterpieces of Shakspere, mighty as was his 
 genius, we cannot but perceive the disadvan- 
 tage of the form he had to use, a form which 
 261 
 
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 
 
 was almost medieval and which was disesta- 
 blished even in England only a few years after he 
 withdrew from active labor as a playwright. 
 But in the masterpieces of Moliere we have a, 
 form which is indisputably modern and per- 
 fectly in accord with the conditions of the theater 
 at the beginning of the twentieth century. The 
 plays of Sophocles and of Shakspere cannot be 
 shown on the stage of to-day without many 
 suppressions and modifications; but the plays 
 of Moliere can be performed now anywhere 
 without change or excision, absolutely as they 
 were acted by their author and his comrades 
 nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. So far 
 as the external form of their dramas is con- 
 cerned, Sophocles is ancient, Shakspere is medi- 
 eval, Moliere is modern; and the large frame- 
 work of his ampler comedies has supplied a 
 model for the dramatists of every living language. 
 
 362 
 
VIII. THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH 
 CENTURY 
 
 EVERYWHERE in Europe the modern di^ma 
 has been evolved from out the drama of the 
 middle ages; but the development had been 
 slower in France than in Spain and in England; 
 and this retarding of its evolution was fortunate 
 for the French, since the golden days of their 
 dramatic literature arrived only after the condi- 
 tions of the theater had become far less medieval 
 than they had been during the golden days of 
 the Spanish and of the English dramatic litera- 
 tures. It was natural that the more modern 
 form of play should be taken as a model by the 
 poets of the other countries, the more especially 
 at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when 
 the French were everywhere accepted as the ar- 
 biters of art, the custodians of taste, and the 
 guardians of the laws by which genius was to 
 be gaged. In England the Puritans had closed 
 the places of amusement and had thus broken 
 263 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 off the theatrical traditions that ran far back 
 into the middle ages ; and when the playhouses 
 opened again after the Restoration, the mana- 
 gers had to gratify new likings which king and 
 courtiers had brought back with them from 
 France. Even tho the plain people in London 
 continued to prefer the plays of Shakspere to 
 belauded adaptations from Corneille or Racine 
 and to icily decorous imitations like the * Cato ' 
 of Addison, and even tho the plebeian folk in 
 Madrid still relished the plays of Lope de Vega 
 and Calderon, the English men-of-letters and the 
 Spanish men-of-letters were united in taking an 
 apologetic tone toward the earlier dramas which 
 had pleased their less cultivated forefathers. In 
 England as in Spain the learned critic was will- 
 ing to admit that these earlier dramas had a 
 certain rough power which might move the un- 
 educated, but he had no desire to deny that they 
 wanted art. For instance. Doctor Johnson, 
 when he brought out his edition of Shakspere in 
 the middle of the eighteenth century and when 
 he ventured a timid suggestion that possibly the 
 so-called rules of the theater were not abso- 
 lutely infallible, seems to have felt almost as tho 
 he was taking his life in his hands. 
 
 In Italy and in Germany, as in England and in 
 Spain, the men-of-letters maintained the neces- 
 sity of conforming to the theatrical theory of the 
 264 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 French, because they believed the French to be 
 the only true exponents of the Greek tradition, 
 which it was the bounden duty of every dra- 
 matic poet to follow blindly. The rules of the 
 theater as the French declared them had only a 
 remote connection with the Greek tradition; and 
 they consisted mainly of purely negative re- 
 strictions. They told the dramatic poet what he 
 was forbidden to do, and they declared what a 
 tragedy must not be. To accord with the de- 
 mands of the French theory a tragedy should 
 not have more or less than five acts and it should 
 not be in prose ; it should deal only with a lofty 
 theme, having queens and kings for its chief fig- 
 ures, and avoiding all visible violence of action or 
 of speech, and all other breaches of decorum ; it 
 should eschew humor, keeping feelf ever serious 
 and stately, and never allowing any underplot; 
 and, above all, it should permit no change of 
 scene during the whole play, and it should not 
 allow the time taken by the story to extend over 
 more than twenty-four hours. 
 
 These were the rules to conform to which 
 Corneille cramped himself and curbed his indis- 
 putable genius, with the result that he is to 
 Shakspere " as a clipped hedge is to a forest," — 
 to quote an unsympathetic British critic. A cer- 
 tain likeness to the virgin woods is discoverable 
 in the Elizabethan drama, whereas the drama of 
 265 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Louis XIV resembles rather a pleasure-park laid 
 out by some such architect as Lenotre. French 
 tragedy had a graceful symmetry of its own, but 
 it was lacking in bold variety and in imaginative 
 energy. Here is an added reason why it was 
 widely acceptable in the eighteenth century, 
 which has been termed " an age whose poetry 
 was without romance " and " whose philosophy 
 was without insight." The century itself, rather 
 than the French example, is to blame if it has 
 left so few poetic plays deserving to survive. 
 What Lowell called " its inefficacy for the higher 
 reaches of poetry, its very good breeding that 
 made it shy of the raised voice and the flushed 
 features of enthusiasm," enabled the century to 
 make its prose supple for the elegancies of the 
 social circle and for the literature which sought 
 to reflect these elegancies. " Inevitably, as human 
 intercourse in cities grows more refined, comedy 
 will grow more subtle," so De Quincey declared; 
 " it will build itself on distinctions of character 
 less grossly defined and on features of manners 
 more delicate and impalpable." 
 
 A FLEXIBLE prose is plainly the fittest instru- 
 ment for the comedy-of-manners ; and the com- 
 edy-of-manners is as plainly the kind of drama 
 266 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH 
 
 ^W ^ 
 
 %^^ 
 
 best suited to the limitations of the eighteenth 
 century. By their comedies rather than by their 
 tragedies are the dramatists of that century now 
 remembered. Their comedies, like their trage- 
 dies, were composed in imitation of French 
 models; but the influence of Moliere was as 
 stimulating as the influence of Corneille and 
 Racine had been stifling. Within a few years 
 after Moliere's death the type of comedy which 
 he had elaborated to suit his own needs and to 
 contain his own veracious portrayal of life as he 
 saw it, had been taken across to England by the 
 comic dramatists of the Restoration, some of 
 whom had borrowed plots from him and all of 
 whom had tried to absorb his method. No one 
 of the English dramatists had Moliere's insight 
 into character, or his sturdy morality. Con- 
 greve and Wycherley, Farquhar and Vanbrugh 
 helped themselves to Moliere's framework only 
 to hang it about with dirty linen. At times Mo- 
 liere had been plain of speech, but he was ever 
 clean-minded; whereas the English dramatists 
 of the Restoration were often foul in phrase and 
 frequently filthy in thought also. 
 
 Clever as these Restoration comedies were 
 and brilliant in their reflection of glittering im- 
 morality, their tone was too offensive for our 
 modern taste, and scarcely one of them now 
 survives on the stage. Yet the form they had 
 267 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 copied from Moliere they firmly established in 
 England, where the conditions of the theater 
 had come to be like those in France; and this 
 form has been accepted by all the later comic 
 dramatists of our language, who have never 
 cared to return to the looser and more medieval 
 form which had to satisfy the humorous play- 
 wrights under Elizabeth. Steele and Fielding 
 and, later in the century, Goldsmith and Sheridan 
 continue in English comedy the tradition esta- 
 blished by Moliere. In ' She Stoops to Conquer ' 
 and in the * Rivals ' there is an element of rol- 
 licking farce not quite in keeping with the ele- 
 vation of high comedy but not unlike the joyous 
 gaiety which laughs all through the ' Bourgeois 
 Gentilhomme.' In the * School for Scandal ' we 
 have an English comedy with something like the 
 solid structure of the 'Femmes Savantes,' but 
 narrower in its outlook, not so piercing in il;^ 
 insight, and far more metallic in its luster. 
 
 The English followers of Moliere are many, 
 but they are not more numerous or more amus- 
 ing than those who in his own country profited 
 by the example he had left. Regnard is almost 
 the equal of his master in adroitness of versifica- 
 tion and even in comic force, in the power of 
 compelling laughter. * Monsieur de Pourceau- 
 gnac ' has hardly added more to the mirth of the 
 French than has the ' Legataire Universel.' But 
 
 2^ 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Regnard is fantastic and arbitrary in the conduct ^ 
 of his plots; and he lacks the truth to life and 
 the penetration which characterize Moliere. Le- 
 sage comes nearer, in his knowledge of human 
 nature and in his appreciation of its frailties, 
 altho it is in his novels rather than in his plays 
 that he reveals himself most fully as a disciple 
 of Moliere. Like Fielding in England, Lesage 
 in France carried over into prose-fiction ^ev., 
 method of character-drawing which he hadilt:^:^ 
 quired from the greatest of all comic dramatists. '^ 
 In the ' Depit Amoureux ' and in the ' Eeolfe •' 
 des Femmes ' Moliere had shown how to set on 
 the stage certain more delicate phases of femi- 
 nine personality; Marivaux pushed the analysis 
 still further, thereby enriching French comedy 
 with a series of studies of women in love,— 
 women at once ethereal, sophisticated, and fas- 
 cinating. Broader than Marivaux was Beaumar- 
 chais, broader and franker; his psychology was 
 swifter, his action was more direct, and his 
 stagecraft was more obvious. It was *Tar- 
 tufife ' and the * Etourdi ' that he had taken as 
 his models, but he was only clever and wily 
 where Moliere was transparently sincere; and 
 instead of the large liberality of the dramatist 
 under Louis XIV the dramatist under Louis XVI 
 had a caustic skepticism. The career of Beau- 
 marchais was as varied in its vicissitudes as that 
 269 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of his own Figaro; he was an adventurer him- 
 self, like Sheridan, his contemporary on the other 
 side of the Channel. The * Barber of Seville ' 
 was as lively and as vivacious as the * Rivals ' ; 
 and the * Marriage of Figaro ' was as scintillating 
 and as hard as the ' School for Scandal.' 
 
 There was a disintegrating satire in these 
 comedies of Beaumarchais, a daring bitterness 
 of attack like that of a reckless journalist who 
 might happen also to be an ingenious and witty 
 playwright. Where Moliere had assaulted hy- 
 pocrisy in religion and humbug in medicine, 
 Beaumarchais made an onslaught on the Ancient 
 Regime as a whole. No doubt a portion of the 
 vogue Beaumarchais enjoyed among his con- 
 temporaries was due to their covert sympathy 
 with the thesis he was so cleverly sustaining on 
 the stage. He knew how to profit by the scan- 
 dal aroused by his scathing insinuations against 
 the established order. Yet he was not depen- 
 dent on these factitious aids, and his solidly con- 
 structed comedies reveal remarkable dramaturgic 
 felicity. They have established themselves 
 firmly on the French stage, where they are still 
 seen with pleasure, altho certain polemic pas- 
 sages here and there strike us now as extrane- 
 ous and as over-vehement. Beaumarchais is the 
 connecting-link between the French comedy of 
 the seventeenth century and that of the nine- 
 teenth, between Moliere and Augier. 
 270 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 III 
 
 Altho the French theorists insisted on a com- 
 plete separation of the comic and the tragic, dis- 
 approving fiercely of any humorous relief in a 
 tragedy, they also maintained that comedy should 
 hold itself aloof from vulgar subjects, that it 
 should ever be genteel; and there were some 
 who held that it ought to be unfailingly digni- 
 fied. Even in England Goldsmith was reproached 
 for having disfigured 'She Stoops to Conquer' 
 with scenes of broad humor ** too low even for 
 farce"; and Sheridan in the prolog of the 
 * Rivals ' felt forced to make a plea for laughter 
 as a not unnatural accompaniment of comedy. 
 Without asserting categorically that the drama 
 should be strenuously didactic, many critics con- 
 sidered that it was the duty of comedy, not first 
 of all to depict human nature as it is with its 
 foibles and its failings, and not to clear the air 
 with hearty laughter wholesome in itself, but 
 chiefly to teach, to set a good example, to hold 
 aloft the standard of manners and of morals. 
 Dryden had declared that the general end of all 
 poetry was " to instruct delightfully " ; and not a 
 few later writers of less authority were willing 
 enough to waive the delight if only they could 
 make sure of the instruction. 
 
 Thus there came into existence a new dramatic 
 species, which flourished for a little space on both 
 271 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sides of the English Channel and which was 
 known in London as sentimental-comedy and in 
 Paris as tearful-comedy, comedie larmoyante. The 
 most obvious characteristic of this comedy was 
 that it was not comic; and in fact it was not in- 
 tended to be comic, but pathetic. It was a mis- 
 take that a play of this new class should call 
 itself comedy, which was precisely what it was 
 not, and that by this false claim it should hinder 
 the healthy growth of true comedy with its 
 ampler pictures of life and its contagious gaiety. 
 But the new species, however miscalled, re- 
 sponded to a new need of the times. It was the 
 result of that awakening sensibility of the soul, 
 of that growing tenderness of spirit, of that ex- 
 pansion of sympathy, which was after a while 
 to bring about the Romanticist upheaval. 
 
 In England this sentimental-comedy never 
 amounted to much, even tho it had for one of 
 its earliest practitioners Steele, who claimed that 
 a certain play of his had been '' damned for its 
 piety." But Steele, undeniable humorist as he 
 was, lacked the instinctive touch of the born 
 playwright, and his humor was too delicate to 
 adjust itself easily to the huge theaters of Lon- 
 don. Steele's is the only interesting name in all 
 the list of writers for the English stage who in- 
 tended to edify rather than to amuse and who 
 did not regret that their comedies called for tears 
 272 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 rather than laughter. That the liking for senti- 
 mental-comedy was more transient in England 
 than in France perhaps was due to the fact that 
 the Londoners had already wept abundantly over 
 dramas of an irregular species, not comedies of 
 course, nor yet true tragedies, but dealing 
 pathetically with the humbler sort of people. 
 Of this irregular species Lillo's 'George Barn- 
 well ' and Moore's * Gamester ' may serve as 
 specimens. Difficult to classify as these plays 
 may have been, they were moving in their ap- 
 peal to the emotions of the London citizens ; and 
 they must be accepted as spontaneous attempts 
 at a kind of play which the French later in the 
 century were to strive for under the name of 
 tragtdie bourgeoise, the tragedy of common life, 
 with no vain tinsel of royalty and no false per- 
 spective of antiquity. 
 
 In France, where comedy and tragedy were 
 more rigorously restricted than in England, the 
 vogue of sentimental-comedy was less fleeting, 
 sustained as it was by the sudden success of the 
 pathetic plays of La Chaussee and by the ardent 
 proclamations of Diderot. With all his intelli- 
 gence, Diderot failed to write a single good play 
 of his own; but he was swift to see that the 
 prescribed molds of tragedy and comedy, as the 
 French theorists had established them, were not 
 only too narrow but above all too few for a 
 273 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 proper representation of the infinite variety of 
 human life. Envying the larger liberty of the 
 English theater and approving of the comidie lar- 
 moyante and the tragedie bourgeoise, he demanded 
 a frank recognition of the right of these new 
 species not only to exist but also to be received 
 as the equals of tragedy and comedy. Unfortu- 
 nately Diderot could not sustain precept by 
 example; his own attempts at play-writing were 
 painfully unsatisfactory, and the tearful-comedies 
 of La Chaussee were poor things at best, even 
 tho they had won favor for a little while. Per- 
 haps the most pleasing example of French sen- 
 timental-comedy was Sedaine's ' Philosophe sans 
 le savoir ' ; and in spite of its amiable optimism 
 and its touching situations, the tone of this inno- 
 cent little play was thin, and its manner was 
 rather argumentative than appealing. 
 
 IV 
 
 If we needed proof of the temporary popular- 
 ity of the ingenuous domestic drama which pre- 
 tended to be comedy, altho it preferred tears to 
 laughter, we could find this in the fact that it 
 tempted even Voltaire to essay it. Yet for sen- 
 timental-comedy it would seem as tho Voltaire 
 had few natural qualifications, since he was defi- 
 cient in sentiment, in pathos, and in humor. 
 274 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Wit he had in profusion,— indeed, he was the 
 arch-wit of the century; and he was so amaz- 
 ingly clever that when he attempted tragedy he 
 was able to make his wit masquerade even as 
 poetry. In the drama, as in almost every other 
 department of literature, Voltaire is the domi- 
 nating figure of his time. He was very fond 
 of the theater, and he had possessed himself pi 
 some of the secrets of the dramaturgic art. (^He 
 could devise an ingenious story; but he had no 
 firm mastery of human motive.^ However art- 
 fully his plots might be put together, they were 
 generally improbable in the main theme and 
 arbitrary in the several episodes. 
 
 Even his best tragedy, 'Zaire,' which is less 
 of an improvisation than most of his other plays, 
 and which still has an intermittent vitality on 
 the French stage, was little more than a melo- 
 drama, as the characters existed solely for the 
 situations by which they were created. Altho his 
 versification was feeble, and altho he was never 
 truly a poet, he was sometimes really eloquent. 
 As a dramatist he was often self-conscious, not 
 to say insincere; his mind was on the minor 
 effects of the stage and not on the larger prob- 
 lems of the soul. His conception of tragedy 
 was petty; it was without elevation or auster- 
 ity; and yet he thought that the French had 
 been able to improve on the type of tragedy 
 275 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which they had borrowed from the Greeks. He 
 did not see that French tragedy, vaunting itself 
 as absolutely Greek, had acquired from the 
 Spanish drama a trick of complicating its plot 
 with ingenious surprises, than which nothing 
 could be more foreign to the large simplicity of 
 the Athenian drama. He did not perceive that 
 what his countrymen had been trained to expect 
 and to admire in the tragic drama " was a set of 
 circumstances peculiar to that play, with a set 
 of characters common to all French plays in 
 general, — the mesdames et seigneurs of the 
 Spanish * Cid ' of Corneille, the Jewish ' Athalie * 
 of Racine, and the Grecian ' Merope ' of Voltaire '* 
 himself. 
 
 How widely the ideal of tragedy upheld by the 
 French dramatists under Louis XV differed from 
 that pursued by the English playwrights under 
 Elizabeth, and also from that followed by the 
 Greek poets under Pericles, was made plain by 
 Voltaire's own formal declaration in which he set 
 up a standard of tragedy as he understood it: 
 **To compact an illustrious and interesting event 
 into the space of two or three hours ; to make 
 the characters appear only when they ought to 
 come forth; never to leave the stage empty; to 
 put together a plot as probable as it is at- 
 tractive; to say nothing unnecessary; to in- 
 struct the mind and move the heart; to be 
 276 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 always eloquent in verse and with the eloquence 
 proper to each character represented ; to speak 
 one's tongue with the same purity as in the 
 most chastened prose, without allowing the 
 effort of riming to seem to hamper the thought; 
 to permit no single line to be hard or obscure or 
 declamatory;— these are the conditions which 
 nowadays one insists upon in a tragedy." From 
 this explicit definition it is evident that Voltaire 
 regarded tragedy as a work of the intelligence 
 rather than of the imagination ; and it might even 
 be inferred that he distrusted the imagination, 
 and that he thought that the intelligence could 
 be aided in the accomplishment of its task by 
 the rules. 
 
 The rules of the theater, including that of 
 the Three Unities, had been adopted in France in 
 the seventeenth century largely because Cor- 
 neille had given his adhesion to them, altho they 
 held him in a bondage he could not but feel; 
 and they were maintained in France in the eigh- 
 teenth century very largely because of the au- 
 thority of Voltaire, who was ever ready to re- 
 proach Corneille for every chance dereliction and 
 to denounce Shakspere for every open disre- 
 gard of dramatic decorum. The weight of Vol- 
 taire's authority was acknowledged not only in 
 France but throughout Europe. His plays were 
 translated and acted in the various languages of 
 277 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 civilization; and his opinions about the theater 
 were received with acquiescence in Italy, in 
 Germany, and in England. It is true that in ' 
 England, while the professed critics deplored 
 the lamentable lack of taste shown by their rude 
 forefathers, they themselves continued to enjoy 
 the actual performance of the vigorous plays of 
 the Elizabethan dramatists. It is true that in / 
 Italy the men-of-letters who accepted the rulings 
 of Voltaire could take little more than an aca- 
 demic interest in the drama, since their theater 
 was not flourishing, and even the comedy-of- 
 masks seemed to be wearing itself out. It is 
 true that in Germany also the theater was in a 
 sorry condition, and that the German actors 
 were often forced to perform in adaptations of 
 French plays in default of native dramas worthy 
 of consideration. 
 
 Charming as are certain of the comedies of 
 Goldoni, they are slight in texture and super- 
 ficial in character; and it is significant that Gol- 
 doni himself felt it advisable to leave his native 
 land and to go to Paris to push his fortunes. 
 Significant is it also of the increasing cosmo- 
 politanism of the theater toward the end of the 
 century that the plot of one of Goldoni's Italian 
 comedies was utilized by Voltaire, whose French 
 play was adapted into English by the elder Col- 
 man. Lofty as are the tragedies of Alfieri, 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 they have a scholarly rigidity as if they were in- 
 tended rather for the closet than the stage, altho 
 the simplicity of their structure has made it 
 possible to present them in the actual theater. 
 ( Italy in the eighteenth century was sunk in cor- 
 ruption or busy with petty intrigue ; and it was 
 devoid of the energy of will which is the vital 
 element of the drama. Not only was there little 
 expectation or even hope of national unity: 
 there was in fact but little solidarity of feeling 
 among those who spoke the language. The 
 French people, and the English also, were each 
 of them conscious of their nationality and proud 
 of it; but the Italians were like the Germans 
 in having neither pride nor consciousness. Italy 
 >yas only a geographical expression then ; and 
 no fervid lyrist had yet proclaimed the large 
 limits of the German fatherland. The Italians 
 and the Germans, whatever their merits as indi- 
 viduals, were then as peoples too infirm of pur- 
 pose and too lax of will to be ripe for an out- 
 flowering of the drama such as might follow 
 hard upon the achievement of national unity and 
 the establishment of a national capital. Very 
 important indeed is the contribution which a 
 city can make to the development of a dramatic 
 literature; and not only Athens but also Madrid,. 
 London, and Paris have deserved well of all 
 lovers of the drama. 
 
 279 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Altho the Germans had then no center of na- 
 tional life and had not yet felt the need of it, 
 they had given more proof of resolution than the 
 Italians; and it was in the eighteenth century 
 that Frederick laid the firm foundation of the 
 national unity to be achieved more than a century 
 later. It was in Germany again that there arose 
 a stalwart antagonist to withstand Voltaire, to 
 destroy the universal belief in the infallibility of 
 French criticism, and to disestablish the pseudo- 
 classicism which needed to be swept aside be- 
 fore a rebirth of the drama was possible, 
 ^.essing was the best equipped and the most 
 broad-minded critic of esthetic theory who ha^i 
 come forward since Aristotle; and he had not a 
 little of the great Greek's commingled keenness 
 and common sense. The German critic was not 
 so disinterested as Aristotle; indeed, what strikes 
 us now as the sole defect of his stimulating study 
 of the drama is its polemic tone. It was in the stress 
 of a contemporary controversy that Lessing set 
 forth eternal principles of dramatic art. He went 
 into the arena with the zest of the trained athlete; 
 and he was never afraid to try a fall with Voltaire 
 himself. In fact, it was especially in the hope of 
 a grapple with the French dictator of the republic 
 of letters that the German kept his loins girded. 
 280 
 
tHE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Lessing had not only a courage of his yown : he 
 had also the solid learning of his race. He was 
 a scholar, thoroughly grounded and widely read. 
 He knew at first hand the Greek drama and the 
 Latin; he was acquainted with Shakspere and 
 with Lope de Vega in the original; he was tho- 
 roughly familiar with the French theater, and 
 with the criticisms made against it in Paris itself. 
 Original as Lessing was, he profited by the sug- 
 gestions of his predecessors, and there is no rea- 
 son now to deny his immediate indebtedness to 
 Diderot. The French critic it was who pointed 
 out the path, but only the German critic was able 
 to attain the goal. What Diderot had happened 
 merely to indicate in passing, Lessing, with his 
 wider knowledge of life, of literature, and of art, 
 was able to accomplish. He took up the French 
 rules of the theater with their insistence on the 
 alleged Three Unities, and\he was able to show . , 
 the baselessness of the claim that they are de- ^ 
 rived from the practice or the precepts of the 
 ancients. Then he went further and pointed out 
 the inherent absurdity of these factitious restric- 
 tions and their fettering effect upon the French 
 dramatic poet, even when they were kept only 
 in letter and broken in spirit. 
 
 / Lessing destroyed the superstitious reverence — 
 for the French theories ; but he could build up 
 as vrell as tear down. German literature was 
 281 
 
 u 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 then at its feeblest period; and such original 
 German pieces as might exist were almost as 
 pitiful as the weak imitations of French tragedy. 
 The German theater was battling for life; it 
 was barren of plays worthy of good acting; it 
 was almost as deficient in good actors capable 
 of doing justice to a fine drama; and it attracted 
 scant and uncultivated audiences without stan- 
 dards of comparison and therefore with little 
 appreciation of either the dramaturgic art or the 
 histrionic. Like Aristotle, Lessing had grasped 
 the complex nature of the dramatic art, with the 
 necessary correlations of playwright and player; 
 and, like Aristotle again, he never thought of a 
 drama as a work of pure literature but always as 
 something intended to be performed by actors, 
 in a theater, before an audience. The French 
 imitations Lessing strove to eliminate by substi- 
 ^1 tution,Aby providing plays of his own which 
 
 should be native to Germany in motive and in 
 temper, and which might serve as the founda- 
 tion for a national drama. He was almost as 
 successful in this constructive effort as he had 
 been in his destructive labors. 
 
 A critic Lessing was, no doubt, but a critic who 
 
 had the rare ability to practise what he preached. 
 
 In at least three plays he revealed himself as a 
 
 true dramatist, as a man who had mastered the 
 
 282 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 craft of play-making, and who could present on 
 the stage the essential scenes of a struggle be- 
 tween contending forces embodied in vital cha- 
 racters. The proof of the play is in the acting 
 always; and Lowell did not hesitate to assert 
 that * Minna von Barnhelm ' and ' Emilia Galotti ' 
 act " better than anything of Goethe or Schiller." 
 In justification of Lowell's assertion it may be 
 noted that these two plays are nowadays seen 
 in the German theaters quite as often as any two 
 dramas of either Goethe or Schiller. 
 
 ' Emilia Galotti ' and * Miss Sara Sampson ' are 
 tragedies of middle-class life, tragedies bour- 
 geoises, owing something to the precept of Di- 
 derot and owing perhaps more to the practice of 
 the English dramatists, whom Lessing had also 
 admired. Altho his style is noble and direct, he ^ 
 is not primarily a poet, with the poet's instinctive 
 happiness in finding the illuminative phrase. His 
 culture, his formidable instruction, his resolute 
 thinking, unite to give certain of his dramas a 
 richness of texture uncommon enough in popu- 
 lar plays. ' * Minna von Barnhelm ' is a comedy, 
 not tearful exactly, nor yet mirthful, rather cheer- 
 ful, even if grave in spirit. Lessing was scarcely 
 ever gay, altho he could be witty enough on 
 occasion. His dialog has sometimes a Gallic 
 ease, and it has always a Teutonic sincerity. 
 285 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 'Minna' is the best of his plays; it is brisk in 
 action, lively in incident, and ingeniously con- 
 trived throughout. 
 
 Perhaps the model of which Lessing availed 
 himself unconsciously when his serious plays 
 were taking shape in his mind, was that sug- 
 gested by Moliere's larger and later comedies. 
 But with his practicality and his perfect com- 
 prehension of the conditions of the modern 
 theater, Lessing made one important modifica- 
 tion in the form of drama which Moliere had 
 supplied. Where the Frenchman, dealing only 
 with the crisis of Tartuffe's career in Orgon's 
 house, had no difficulty in concentrating the ac- 
 tion into a single day and a single spot, the Ger- 
 man, rejecting the Unity of Time and the Unity 
 of Place, held himself at liberty to protract the 
 action over so long a period as he might find ad- 
 visable, and to change the scene as often as he 
 might see fit. But Lessing perceived the advan- 
 tage of not distracting the attention of the audi- 
 ence by changes of scene during the progress of 
 the act; and he therefore made his removals 
 from place to place while the curtain was down. 
 J. / He was apparently the first playwright who gave 
 to each act its own scenery, not to be changed 
 until the fall of the curtain again. Here he sup- 
 plied an example now followed by the most ac- 
 complished playwrights of the twentieth century 
 284 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 VI 
 
 In this avoiding of the confusion resulting from 
 frequent shifting of the scenery before the eyes 
 of the spectators, Lessing was more modern than 
 either Goethe or Schiller, both of whom— es- 
 pecially in their earlier dramatic efforts, in the 
 ' Goetz ' of the one and in the * Robbers ' of the 
 other— appeared to hold that the example of 
 Shakspere warranted their returning to the more 
 medieval practice of making as many changes of 
 place as a loosely constructed plot might seem to 
 require. Lowell suggested that there was "in the 
 national character an insensibility to proportion " 
 which would "account for the perpetual groping 
 of German imaginative literature after some for- 
 eign mold in which to cast its thought or feeling, 
 now trying a Louis Quatorze pattern, then some- 
 thing supposed to be Shaksperian, and at last 
 going back to ancient Greece." 
 
 Nowadays Goethe's surpassing genius is every- 
 where acknowledged,— his comprehensive and 
 insatiable curiosity, his searching interrogation of 
 life, his power of self-expression in almost every 
 department of literature. But great poet as he 
 was, a theater-poet he was not. He was not 
 a born playwright, seizing with unconscious 
 certainty upon the necessary scenes, the scenes d 
 faire, to bring out the conflict of will against will 
 285 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which was the heart of his theme. ( He lacked 
 the instinctive perception of the exact effect likely 
 to be produced on the audience, and he was de- 
 ficient in the intuitive knowledge of the best 
 method to appeal to the sympathies of the spec- 
 tators. In fact, the time came in Goethe's career 
 as a dramatic poet when vhe refused to reckon 
 with the playgoers Who might be present at the 
 performance of his plays, —an attitude inconcei- 
 vable on the part of a true dramatist and as re- 
 mote as possible from that taken by Sophocles, 
 by Shakspere, and by Moliere. When he was 
 director of the theater in Weimar he did not hesi- 
 tate to assert that "the public must be con- 
 trolled." A more enlightened tyrant than Goethe 
 no theater could ever hope to have; and yet 
 little more than sterility and emptiness was the 
 net result of his theatrical dictatorship and of 
 his refusal to consider the native preferences of 
 the Weimar playgoers. 
 
 It was Victor Hugo who once declared that the 
 audience in a theater can be divided into three 
 classes,— the crowd which expects to see action, 
 women, who are best pleased with passion, and 
 thinkers, who are hoping to behold character. 
 The main body of playgoers has always wanted 
 to be amused by the spectacle of something hap- 
 pening before their eyes; and many of them, 
 including nearly all the women, desire to have 
 286 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 their sympathies excited ; but it is only a chosen 
 few who go to the theater seeking food for 
 thought and ready, therefore, to welcome psycho- 
 logic subtlety an5 philosophic profundity. The 
 great dramatists have been able to satisfy the 
 demands of all three classes; and * Oedipus the 
 King,' 'Hamlet,' and ' Tartuffe ' were popular 
 with the plain people from their first perform- 
 ance. But Goethe seemed to care for the approval 
 of only the smallest class of the three; and only 
 in ' Faust ' did he reveal the dramaturgic skill 
 needed to devise an action interesting enough in 
 itself to bear whatever burden of philosophy he 
 might wish to lay upon it. 
 
 Even in his early plays, in * Goetz von Ber- 
 lichingen,' for example, in which there is action 
 enough and emotion also, there is no felicity of 
 stagecraft. It purports only to be a chronicle- 
 play; but altho afterward reshaped for the stage, 
 it was not conceived to suit the conditions of the 
 actual theater. 'Clavigo,' however, which is 
 only a dramatized anecdote, an unpretending 
 improvisation, swift in its action and clear in its 
 handling of contending motives, is effective on 
 the boards ; and as a stage-play it is perhaps the 
 most satisfactory of all Goethe's dramatic at- 
 tempts, trifle as it is after all, devoid of either 
 poetry or philosophy. * Iphigenia ' is a dramatic 
 poem rather than a play; and ' Egmont' is little 
 287 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 more than a novel in dialog. So fraternal a critic 
 as Schiller confessed that he found ' Iphigenia ' to 
 be wanting in " the sensuous power, the life, the 
 agitation, and everything which specifically be- 
 longs to a dramatic work." But if final proof is 
 needed that Goethe, however various and power- 
 ful as a poet, was not a born playwright, it can 
 be found, outside his own attempts at the dra- 
 matic form, in his alteration of * Romeo and 
 Juliet.' In this he not only modified and con- 
 densed both Mercutio and the Nurse, but he also 
 substituted a tame narrative for Shakspere's skil- 
 ful and spirited exposition by which the quarrel 
 of the two families was brought bodily before 
 our eyes. 
 
 VII 
 
 A THEATER-POET Schiller was, even if Goethe 
 ^ was not; yet Schiller's first drama, the * Robbers,' 
 
 was not written for performance,— altho it soon 
 found its way to the stage-door, after the poet 
 had somewhat restrained its boyish extravagance. 
 Schiller rejected the model he could have found 
 in Lessing's tragedies of middle-class life, a model 
 too severe for the tumultuous turbulence of the 
 storm-and-stress period. He followed Goethe, 
 who, in ' Goetz,' had claimed the right to be form- 
 less as Shakspere was supposed to be. There is 
 in the * Robbers ' a certain resemblance to the 
 288 
 
 X 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 crude Elizabethan tragedy-of-blood with its per- 
 fervid grandiloquence and its frequent assassina- 
 tion. 
 
 In this first play Schiller's stagecraft was 
 primitive and unworthy; he shifted his scenes 
 with wanton carelessness, and he let his absurd 
 villain turn himself inside out in interminable so- 
 liloquies. But however reckless the technic, the 
 play revealed Schiller's abundant possession of 
 genuine dramatic power. The conflict of con- 
 tending passions was set before the spectator in 
 scenes full of fire and action. The antithesis of 
 Moor's two sons, one strenuously noble and the 
 other unspeakably vile, was rather forced, but it 
 was at least obvious even to the stupidest play- 
 goer. The hero lacked common sense, no doubt; 
 but he had energy to spare; and at the end he 
 rose to tragic elevation in his willingness to ex- 
 piate his wrong-doing. 
 
 Dramatist as Schiller was by native gift, he 
 was but a novice in the theater when the ' Rob- 
 bers ' was written, and it was the fitting of that 
 play to the actual stage which drew his attention 
 to the inexorable conditions of theatrical per- 
 formance. In his later dramas, in * William Tell,' 
 for example, and in ' Mary Stuart,' the technic is 
 less elementary and more in accord with the 
 practice of the contemporary playhouse. But 
 Schiller appears to have been thinking rather of 
 289 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 his readers than of the spectators massed and ex- 
 pectant in the theater. He seems to have taken 
 no keen interest in spying out the secrets of the 
 stage. His plays are what they are by sheer dra- 
 matic power, and not by reason of any adroitness 
 of technic. Indeed, in Schiller's day the German 
 theater was almost in chaos; and probably he 
 never saw a satisfactory performance of a dra- 
 matic masterpiece, German or French or English, 
 until he went to Weimar. 
 
 Despite his limitations, Schiller was the one 
 dramatic poet of the eighteenth century ; he is to 
 be compared, not with Sophocles and Shakspere, 
 the supreme masters, but rather with Calderon 
 and Hugo. He lacked their conscious control of 
 theatrical effect, but he had something of their 
 rhetorical luxuriance and their exuberant lyrism. 
 He was intellectually deeper than the Spaniard and 
 he was more masculine than the Frenchman. 
 Schiller's influence on the later development of the 
 drama would have been fuller if his structure 
 had been more modern and if he had profited 
 earlier by the example of Lessing, emulating the 
 great critic's certainty of artistic aim and imitating 
 his rigorous self-control. 
 
 But self-control was rarely a characteristic of 
 German poets in those days of impending cata- 
 clysm. Lessing had emancipated his countrymen 
 from the tyranny of French taste, from the despot- 
 290 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ism of pseudo-classicism. Other despotisms sur- 
 vived in Germany, not in literature but in life itself; 
 and a younger generation was ardent for the de- 
 struction of these survivals from the middle ages. 
 In Lessing's play the father of Emilia Galotti slew 
 his daughter to preserve her honor, while the evil 
 ruler who was responsible escaped scot-free. In 
 * Goetz ' and in the ' Robbers ' the aggrieved hero 
 was ready to turn outlaw on slight provocation, 
 and to revenge individual injuries on society at 
 large. The ' Robbers ' especially had the super- 
 saturated sentimentality of the last half of the 
 eighteenth century; and it was filled with the 
 clamor of revolt, which was to reverberate louder 
 and louder throughout Europe until at last the 
 tocsin tolled in the streets of Paris and the French 
 Revolution was let loose to sweep away feudalism 
 forever. 
 
 r VIII 
 
 ' The most of the German dramas of this period 
 of unrest were not intended for the actual theater, 
 altho many of them did manage to get them- 
 selves acted here and there. With all their wild 
 bombast and with all their overstrained emo- 
 tionalism, they were not without a significance 
 and a vitality of their own, a freshness of self- 
 expression \vholly lacking on the German stage 
 before Lessing had inspired it. If these dramas 
 291 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 had been controlled by something of Lessing's 
 self-restraint, if they had been less excessive in 
 their violence, they might have afforded shelter 
 for the growth of a dramatic literature native to 
 the soil and national in spirit. But they were not 
 healthy enough, and they soon fell into decay; 
 and what did burgeon from their matted roots 
 was the melodrama of Kotzebue, with its exag- 
 geration of motive, its hollow affectation, and its 
 tawdry pathos. Kotzebue's taste is dubious 
 and his methods are now outworn ; but his play- 
 making gift is as undeniable as that of Hey- 
 wood before him or that of Scribe after him.) 
 'Misanthropy and Repentance,' known in Eng- 
 lish as the * Stranger,' has caused as many tears 
 to flow as *A Woman Killed with Kindness'; 
 and whereas Heywood's simply pathetic play 
 was known to his contemporaries only in the 
 land of its language, Kotzebue's turgid treatment 
 of the same theme was performed in all the 
 tongues of Europe, in Paris and London and 
 New York as well as in Vienna and Berlin. 
 
 Melodrama bears much the same relation to 
 tragedy and to the loftier type of serious play 
 that farce does to pure comedy. When we can 
 recall more readily what the persons of a play do 
 than what they are, then the probability is that 
 the piece if gay is a farce, and if grave a melo- 
 drama. Even among the tragedies of the Greeks 
 292 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 we can detect more than one drama which was 
 melodramatic rather than truly tragic ; and not a 
 few of the powerful plays of the Elizabethans 
 were essentially melodramas. So also were 
 some of Corneille's, tho they masqueraded as 
 tragedies and conformed to the rules of the 
 pseudo-classics. Yet it was only in the eigh- 
 teenth century that melodrama plainly differen- 
 tiated itself from every other dramatic species. ' 
 The ''tradesmen's tragedies" of Lillo and 
 i^ Moore in England and the tearful-comedies of La 
 Chaussee and Sedaine in France had helped along 
 its development; but it was Kotzebue in Ger- 
 many who was able at last to reveal its large 
 possibilities. In the pieces which the German 
 playwright was prolific in bringing forth there 
 was something exactly suited to the temper of 
 the times; and, this helped to make his vogue 
 cosmopolitan. He was the earliest play-maker 
 whose dramas were instantly plagiarized every- 
 where; and in this he was the predecessor of 
 Scribe and Sardou. He influenced men like 
 Lewis in England and like Pixerecourt and Du- 
 cange in France. In the works of the Parisian 
 playwrights there was a deftness of touch not 
 visible in the pieces of Kotzebue, who was 
 heavy-handed; as Amiel once suggested, it is 
 not unusual to see "the Germans heap the fag- 
 ots for the pile, the French bring the fire." It 
 293 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 was this French modification of eighteenth cen- 
 tury German melodrama which was to serve as 
 a model for French romanticist drama in the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 A century is only an artificial period of time 
 adopted for the sake of convenience and corre- 
 sponding to no logical division of literary history. 
 None the less are we able to perceive in one cen- 
 tury or in another certain marked characteristics. 
 No doubt every century is more or less an era 
 of transition ; but surely the eighteenth century 
 seems to deserve the description better than 
 most. For nearly three quarters of its career, it 
 appears to us prosaic in many of its aspects, 
 dull and gray and uninteresting; but it was ever 
 a battle-ground for contending theories of litera- 
 ture and of life. In the drama more especially jt 
 was able to behold the establishment and the 
 disestablishment of pseudo-classicism. 
 
 At its beginning the influence of the French 
 had won wide-spread acceptance for the rules 
 with their insistence on the Three Unities and on 
 the separation of the comic and the tragic. At 
 its end every rule was being violated wantonly^ 
 and the drama itself seemed almost as lawless as 
 the bandits it delighted in bringing on the stage 
 so abundantly. Throughout Europe, except in 
 France, the theater had broken its bonds; and 
 even in France, the last stronghold of the theorists, 
 294 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 freedom was to come early in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. Lessing had undermined the fortress of 
 pseudo-classicism ; and the walls of its last citadel 
 were to fall with a crash at the first blast on the 
 trumpet of Hernani. 
 
 295 
 
IX. THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH 
 CENTURY 
 
 I 
 
 THE dawn of the nineteenth century was 
 illumined by the last flickers of the red 
 torch of the French Revolution; and its earlier 
 years were filled with the reverberating cannon- 
 ade of the Napoleonic conquests. It was not 
 until after Waterloo that the battle-field of Europe 
 became only a parade-ground ; and/ this is per- 
 haps one reason why there was /a dearth of 
 dramatic literature in the first quarter of the cen- 
 tury and why no dramatist of prominence flour- 
 ished,— excepting only the gentle Grillparzer far 
 away in Vienna. In war-time the theaters are 
 filled often enough, but the entertainment they 
 proffer then is rarely worthy of the hour. Altho 
 the drama must deal directly with a contest of 
 human souls, it does not flourish while there is 
 actual fighting absorbing the attention of the 
 multitude; but when great captains and their 
 drums depart, then are the stronger spirits again 
 attracted to the stage. 
 
 296 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Despite their survival in the Austrian theaters 
 Grillparzer's pleasing plays are no one of them 
 epoch-making; altho they had more life in them 
 than the closet-dramas upon which British bards 
 like Byron and Shelley were then misdirecting 
 their efforts. Throughout Europe during the 
 first score years of the century the(acted drama • 
 was for the most part frankly unliterary and the 
 so-called literary drama was plainly unactable,^ 
 proving itself pitifully ineffective whenever it 
 chanced to be put on the . stage. ( In Germany 
 the more popular plays were either sentimental 
 or melodramatic I and sometimes they were both. 
 (^ In England the more serious dramas were fre- 
 quently adapted or imitated from the German, ) 
 while the comic plays — like those of the younger 
 Colman — were often little better than helter- 
 skelter patchworks of exaggerated incident and 
 contorted caricature, f In France tragedy was 
 being strangled in the tightening bonds imposed 
 by the classicist rules; and comedy was panting 
 vainly for a larger freedom of theme and of treat- 
 ment. But even in France help was at hand; 
 and in certain Parisian theaters, wholly without 
 literary pretensions, two species were growing 
 to maturity, destined each of them to reinvigorate 
 the more literary drama. 
 
 One species was the comddie-vaudeville of 
 Scribe, with its attempt to enchain the interest 
 297 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of the Spectator by an artfully increasing intricacy 
 of plot; and the other was the melodrama of 
 Pixerecourt and Ducange, derived more or less 
 directly from the emotional drama of Kotzebue, 
 but depending not so much on the depicting of 
 passion as on the linking together of startling 
 situations at once unexpected by the spectator 
 and yet carefully prepared for by the playwright. 
 ' Thirty Years of a Gambler's Life ' is a typical 
 example of this French melodrama, none the less 
 typical that one of its most striking incidents had 
 been borrowed from a German play. The com^- 
 die-vaudeville and the melodrama of the boule- 
 vard theaters were fortunately fettered by no 
 rules, obeying only the one law, that they had to 
 please the populace. They grew up sponta- 
 neously and abundantly; they were heedlessly 
 unliterary; they were curbed by no criticism, — 
 which was never wasted by the men-of-letters 
 on these species of the drama, deemed quite be- 
 neath their notice. 
 
 The comedie-vaudeville of Scribe and the melo- 
 drama of Pixerecourt were alike in that they 
 both were seeking success by improving the 
 mere mechanism of play-making and in that they 
 both were willing to sacrifice everything else to 
 sheer ingenuity of structure. Unpretending as 
 was each of the two species, its popularity was 
 undeniable; it accomplished its purpose satisfac- 
 298 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 torily ; and it needed only to be accepted by the 
 men-of-letters and to be endowed with the liter- 
 ature it lacked. Nothing is more striking in the 
 history of the French drama of the first quarter 
 ^of the century than the contrast between the 
 I sturdy vitality of these two unliterary species, 
 xomedie-vaudeville and melodrama, and the ane- 
 mic lethargy of the more literary comedy and 
 tragedy. The fires of the Revolution had flamed 
 up fiercely, and the French, having cast out the 
 Ancient Regime, had remade the map of Europe 
 regardless of vested rights; but in the theater 
 they were still in the bonds of the pseudo-classi- 
 cism which had been rejected everywhere else, 
 even in Germany. Comedy, as it was then com- 
 posed by the adhWents of the classicist theories, 
 was thin and feeble, painfully trivial and elabo- 
 rately wearisome; and tragedy, as the classicist 
 poets continued to perpetrate it, was even more 
 artificial and void. In fact, so far as classicism 
 was concerned, comedy was moribund and tra- 
 gedy was defunct, even tho they neither of them 
 suspected it. 
 
 Now, as we look back across the years, we 
 cannot but wonder why the task of ousting the 
 dying and the dead should have seemed so ardu- 
 ous or have caused so much commotion. We 
 marvel why there was need of a critical manifesto 
 like Victor Hugo's preface to his * Cromwell ' or 
 299 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of a critical controversy over the difference be- 
 tween the Classic and the Romantic. Even then 
 it ought to have been easily evident that there 
 was nothing classic about the comedies and the 
 tragedies which continued to be composed labo- 
 riously in accordance with the alleged rules of the 
 theater; and even the defenders of the traditional 
 faith might have suspected that there was really 
 nothing sacrosanct about mere pseudo-classicism. 
 But few on either side could see clearly. The 
 classicist deemed himself to be defending the 
 holy cause of Art against a band of irreverent out- 
 laws, striving to capture the temple of taste that 
 they might debase the standards and defile the 
 sanctuary. The romanticist swept forward reck- 
 y lessly to the assault, proclaiming that he had re- 
 discovered Truth, which had been buried, and 
 boasting that he was to revive Art, which had 
 long lain asleep awaiting his arrival. Tho the 
 defenders stood to their guns valiantly, and tho 
 they asserted their intention of dying in the last 
 ditch, they never had a chance against their su- 
 perb besiegers, — ardent young fellows, all of 
 them, sons of soldiers, begotten between two 
 battles and cradled to the mellow notes of the 
 bugle. For nearly twoscore years the French 
 people had made a profuse expenditure of energy ; 
 and the time was ripe for a new birth of the 
 French drama. 
 
 300 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 / 
 
 The younger generation abhorred the artifi- 
 ciality and the emptiness of the plays presented 
 at the Theatre Fran^ais ; and they were bitter in 
 denouncing the absurdity of the rules. Like all 
 literary reformers, they proclaimed a return to na- 
 ture ; and they asserted their right to represent 
 life as they saw it^ in its ignoble aspects as well 
 as in its nobler manifestations. They claimed 
 freedom to range through time and space at will, 
 to mingle humor and pathos, to ally the grotesque 
 with the terrible, and to take for a hero an out- 
 cast of the middle ages instead of a monarch of 
 antiquity. 
 
 But a critical controversy like this with its spec- 
 tacular interchange of hurtling epithets need have 
 little effect upon the actual theater. Even in 
 Paris the bulk of the playgoers cared little or 
 nothing about the artistic precepts which a dra- 
 matist might accept or reject; it was only his 
 practice that concerned them. If his plays seized 
 their attention, holding them interested and re- 
 leasing them satisfied that they had enjoyed the 
 pleasure proper to the theater, — then his princi- 
 ples might be what he pleased. They neither 
 knew nor cared what party he might belong to 
 or what rules he might hold binding. And here 
 the broad public showed its usual common sense, 
 301 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which prompts it ever to refuse to be amused by 
 what it does not really find amusing. The play- 
 goers as a body wanted in France early in the 
 nineteenth century what they had wanted in Spain 
 and in England early in the seventeenth century, 
 — and what, indeed, the playgoers as a body want 
 now in the twentieth century, what they always 
 have wanted and what they always will want. 
 What this is Victor Hugo has told us: they want, 
 first of all , actio n ; then they crave the display of 
 passion to excite Jhdrj^jmipathy ; and finally they 
 relish the depicting of JiuLnian.,nature, to satisfy 
 man's eternal curiosity about himself. 
 
 These wants the old fogies of pseu^io-classi- 
 cism did not understand, and this is why the pub- 
 lic received with avidity the earlier plays of the ro- 
 manticists with their abundant movement, their 
 vivacity, their color, and their sustaining emotion.) 
 Alexander Dumas came first with ' Henri III et 
 sa Cour ' ; Alfred de Vigny followed speedily with 
 his spirited arrangement of ' Othello ' ; and at last 
 Victor Hugo assured the triumph of the move- 
 ment, when he brought out * Hernani ' with its 
 picturesqueness of scenery, its constant succes- 
 sion of striking episodes, its boldly contrasted cha- 
 racters and its splendidly lyrical verse. Significant 
 it is that Hugo and Dumas were both of them 
 sons of Revolutionary generals, while Vigny was 
 himself a soldier. Dumas increased the impres- 
 302 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sion of his early play by producing the * Tour de 
 Nesle' and 'Antony/ marvels of play-making 
 skill both of them, and surcharged with passion. 
 Vigny won attention again with his delicate and 
 plaintive * Chatterton.' Hugo put forth a succes- 
 sion of plays in verse and in prose, all of them 
 challenging admiration by qualities rarely united 
 in a dramatist's work, and yet no one of them 
 establishing itself in popular favor by the side of 
 * Hernani,' excepting only * Ruy Bias.' 
 
 The flashing brilliancy of ^Hug o's versification 
 blinded many spectators for a brief season and 
 prevented most of them from seeing what was 
 made plain at last only by an analysis of the 
 plays in prose, ' Mary Tudor,' for example. When 
 no gorgeously embroidered garment draped the 
 meager skeleton it was not difficult to discover 
 that Victor Hugo was not a great dramatic poet, 
 *' of the race and lineage of Shakspere." , A great 
 poet he was beyond all question, perhaps the 
 greatest poet of the century -/but his gift was 
 lyric and not dramatic. ) He was a lyrist of in- 
 comparable vigor, variety, and sonority ; and as a 
 lyrist he. had often an almost epic amplitude of, „ 
 vision. As a dramatist his outlook was narrow 
 and petty; he could not conceive boldly a lofty 
 theme, treating it with the unfailing simplicity of 
 the masters. His subjects were lacking in nobil- 
 ity, in dignity, in stateliness. His plots were 
 303 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 violent and extravagant; and his characters were 
 as forced as his situations. The poetry to be 
 found in his plays is external rather than internal; 
 it is almost an afterthought. Under the lyrical 
 drapery which is so deceptive at first, there is no 
 more than a melodrama. 
 
 Melodrama for melodrama, ' Hernani ' and * Ruy 
 Bias,' fascinating as they are, seem now to be 
 less easily and less spontaneously devised than 
 * Antony ' and the * Tour de Nesle.' Durpas was 
 / a born playwright with an instinctive felicity in 
 handling situation ; and Hugo, altho he was able, 
 by dint of hard work and by sheer cleverness, to 
 make plays that could pleas^ in the theater, had 
 far less of the native faculty. In their play-mak- 
 ing both Hugo and Dumas were pupils of Pixere- 
 courtandDucange; and * Hernani ' and 'Antony' 
 do not differ greatly in kind from * Thirty Years 
 of a Gambler's Life,' however superior they may 
 be in power, in vitality, and, above all, in style. 
 What Dumas and Hugo did was little more than 
 to take the melodrama of the boulevard theaters 
 and to make literature of it, — just as Marlowe 
 had taken the unpretending but popular chronicle- 
 play as the model of his 'Edward II.' 
 
 The French playwrights who supplied the 
 
 stage of the boulevard theaters had borrowed 
 
 from the German playwrights of the storm-and- 
 
 stress a habit for choosing for a hero an outcast 
 
 304 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 or an outlaw. Here again they were followed 
 by the dramatists of the romanticist movement, 
 who were forever demanding sympathy for the 
 bandit and the bastard, — Hernani was the one 
 and Antony was the other. A note of revolt 
 rang through the French theater in the second 
 quarter of the century; a cry of protest agai/ist 
 the social order echoed from play to play. ( In 
 their reaction against the restrictions which the 
 classicists had insisted upon, the romanticists 
 went beyond liberty almost to license, and they 
 did not always stop short of licentiousness. They 
 posed as defenders of the rights of the individual 
 against the tyranny of custom, and thus they were 
 led to glorify a selfish and lawless egotism. There 
 was truth in the remark of a keen French critic that 
 the communism of 187 1 was the logical successor 
 of the romanticism of 1830. To say this is to 
 suggest that the foundation of romanticism was 
 unsound and unstable. As a whole, romanticism 
 was destructive only ; it had no strength for con- 
 struction. When it had swept classicism aside 
 and cleared the ground, then its work was done, 
 and all that was left for it to do was itself to die. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Of all the manifold influences that united to 
 to\ 
 305 
 
 (reinvigorate the drama toward the middle of the 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 century, the most powerful was that of prose- 
 fiction. In France more particularly no stimulant 
 was more potent than the series of realistic in- 
 vestigations into the conditions and the results 
 of modern life which Balzac comprehensively 
 entitled the ' Human Comedy.' The novel is the 
 department of literature which was as character- 
 istic of the nineteenth century as the drama was 
 of the seventeenth ; and only in the nineteenth 
 was the novel able to establish its right to be 
 considered as a worthy rival of the drama. Until 
 after Scott had taken all Europe captive, the atti- 
 tude of the novelist was as apologetic and depre- 
 catory as the attitude of the playwright had been 
 while Sidney was pouring forth his contempt for 
 the acted drama of his own day. In the eigh- 
 teenth century, when it ought to have been evi- 
 dent that the drama was no longer at its best, 
 the tradition of its supremacy survived and it was 
 still believed to be the sole field for the first ven- 
 tures of ambitious authors. Men-of-letters as 
 dissimilar as Johnson and Smollett, both of them 
 hopelessly unfit for the theater, went up to Lon- 
 don, each with a dull tragedy in his pocket. 
 Steele and Fielding in England, like Lesage and 
 Marivaux in France, were writers of plays to be 
 performed on the stage, long before they conde- 
 scended to be depicters of character for the mere 
 reader by the fireside. 
 
 306 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 For years the novel was conceived almost in the 
 manner of a play, with its characters talking and 
 acting, projected forward and detached from their 
 surroundings, as tho they were appearing upon 
 an isolated platform, scant of scenery and bare of 
 furniture. The personages of prose-fiction were 
 not related to their environment nor were they 
 shown as component parts of the multitude that 
 peopled the rest of the world. Only after Rous- 
 seau had sent forth the ' New Helo'ise ' was there 
 disclosed in fiction any alliance between nature 
 and human nature; and 'only after Bernardin de 
 Saint-Pierre had issued ' Paul and Virginia ' did 
 the story-teller begin to find his profit in the 
 landscape and the weather, in sunsets and rain- 
 storms and the mystery of the dawn, all phe- 
 nomena not easily represented in the playhouse. 
 
 The novelist was long held to be inferior to the 
 dramatist, and his pay was inferior also. But 
 when by his resplendent improvisations Scott 
 was able to settle with his creditors, the Euro- 
 pean men-of-letters were made aware that prose- 
 fiction might be as profitable as play-writing. 
 They knew already that it was far easier, since the 
 technic of the novel seems liberty itself when 
 contrasted with the rigid economy of the drama. 
 The task appeared to be simpler and the imme- 
 diate reward appeared to be larger, so that the 
 temptation became irresistible for young men to 
 307 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 adventure themselves in the narrative form rather 
 than the dramatic. Yet not a few of those who 
 took to fiction were naturally more qualified for 
 success in the theater, — Dickens, for instance; 
 and many of those who had won triumphs as 
 playwrights sought also to receive the reward 
 of the story-teller, — Hugo for one and the elder 
 Dumas for another. 
 
 During the middle fifty years of the century it 
 r was only in French that the drama was able to 
 hold its own as a department of literature; and 
 in every other language ^it was speedily oversha- 
 dowed by prose-fiction. Bold and powerful as 
 the French novelists were, they had as competi- 
 tors playwrights of an almost equal brilliancy, 
 variety, and force. In French the drama and the 
 prose-fiction were vigorous rivals for threescore 
 years. But in German literature, in Italian and 
 Spanish, the novel during this same period was 
 at least the equal of the drama, whatever its own 
 demerits ; and in English literature the superiority 
 of prose-fiction was overwhelming. In fact, dur- 
 ing the second and third quarters of the century 
 the acted play in English had rarely more than 
 a remote connection with literature, whereas the 
 novel was absorbing an undue proportion of 
 the literary ability of the peoples speaking the 
 language. 
 
 This immense expansion of prose-fiction, and 
 308 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 its incessant endeavor to avail itself of the devices 
 of all the other forms of literary art, will prove to 
 be, perhaps, the most salient fact in the history 
 of literature in the nineteenth century. But^the 
 future historian will be able to see clearly tha^ the 
 obscuring of the drama was temporary only, and 
 that even tho, outside of France, dramatic litera- 
 ture might seem to have gone into a decline, it 
 bade fair to be restored to health again in the final 
 quarter of the century. The historian will have to 
 indicate also the points of contact between the 
 novel and the play and to dwell on the constant 
 interaction of the one and the other, — an interac- 
 tion as old as the origin of epic and tragic poetry. 
 It is to be seen in English, for example, in the 
 influence of the contemporary farces and melo- 
 dramas of the London stage upon the incidents 
 of Dickens's serial tales. 
 
 It is to be seen in French also, of course; just 
 as Lesage and Fielding had applied to their narra- 
 tives the method of character-drawing which they 
 had borrowed from Moliere, so Augier and the 
 younger Dumas were directed in their choice of 
 subject by the towering example of Balzac. The 
 Elizabethan playwrights had treated the Italian 
 story-tellers as storehouses of plots and motives, 
 of incidents and intrigues. But the Parisian dra- 
 matists of the Second Empire were under a deeper 
 debt to the great novelist who had been their 
 309 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 contemporary; it was to him that they owed, 
 in a great measure, their quicker interest in 
 the problems of society. They had not Bal- 
 zac's piercing vision into the secrets of the 
 heart, but they at least sought to face life from 
 a point of view not unlike his. 
 
 IV 
 
 Obvious as is the influence of Balzac upon 
 Augier and the younger Dumas, especially in 
 their later studies into social conditions, it is not 
 more obvious or more powerful than the influence 
 of Scribe. While the romanticists had been driv- 
 ing out the classicists, and exhausting them- 
 selves in the vain effort to establish their own 
 sterile formulas, Scribe had gone on his own way, 
 wholly unaffected by their theories or by their 
 temporary vogue. He had been elaborating his 
 technic until he was able to sustain the spacious 
 framework of a five-act comedy by means of 
 devices invented for use in the pettier comedie- 
 vaudeville. In almost every department of the 
 drama, including the librettos of grand opera and 
 of opera-comique, [ Scrib^ proved himself to be a 
 consummate master of the art and mystery of 
 ^ play-making. He devoted himself to perfecting 
 the mechanics of dramaturgy; and he has sur- 
 vived as the type of the playwright pure and 
 310 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 simple, to be remembered by the side of Hey- 
 wood and Kotzebue. , 
 
 His plays, like so rfiany of theirs, are now out- 
 worn and demoded. He is inferior to Kotzebue Y 
 in affluent emotion and to Hey wood in occasional 
 pathos ; but he is superior to both in sheer stage- 
 craft. The hundred volumes of his collected 
 writings may be consulted for proof that a play 
 can serve its purpose in the theater and still have 
 little relation to literature — and even less to life. 
 His best play, whatever it may be, was a plot and n{ 
 nothing more, a story in action, so artfully articu- 
 lated that it kept the spectators guessing until the 
 final fall of the curtain, — and never caused them 
 to think after they had left the theater. 
 
 Yet there were very few playwrights of the 
 second half of the nineteenth century who had 
 not been more or less influenced by Scribe, and 
 who did not find it difficult to release themselves 
 from their bondage to him. Even Augier and 
 the younger Dumas, while the content of their 
 social dramas was in some measure suggested to 
 them by Balzac, went to Scribe for their form; 
 and what now seems most old-fashioned in 
 the * Gendre de M. Poirier ' and in the * Demi- 
 monde' is a superingenuity in the handling of 
 the intrigue. No small part of the wilful form- 
 lessness of the French drama in the final quarter 
 of the century was due to the violence of the 
 311 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 reaction against the methods of this master- 
 mechanician of the modern theater. Even thought- 
 less playgoers began in time to weary of the 
 ** well-made" play, with its sole dependence on 
 the artificial adroitness of its structure, with its 
 stereotyped psychology, its minimum of passion, 
 its humdrum morality, and its absence of ve- 
 racity. But at the height of its popularity the 
 ** well-made" play was the model for most of 
 the playwrights, not of France only but bf the 
 rest of Europe;' and there was scarcely a modern 
 language in which Scribe's pieces had not been 
 translated and adapted, imitated and plagiarized. 
 It was in the second quarter of the century 
 that Scribe attained the apex of success at the 
 very hour when the romanticists were exube- 
 rantly triumphant; and it may sound like a para- 
 dox to suggest that it was the luxuriant abun- 
 dance of the drama in French that helped to 
 bring about its decline in the other languages; 
 but this is no more than the truth. At the mo- 
 ment when the comparative facility of prose- 
 fiction was alluring men-of-letters away from the 
 theater, the dramatists outside of France had their 
 already precarious reward suddenly diminished 
 by the rivalry of cheap adaptations from the 
 French. There was then neither international 
 copyright nor international stageright; and 
 French plays could be acted in English and in 
 312 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 German, in Italian and in Spanish, without the au- 
 thor's consent and without any payment to him. 
 
 As it happened, the French drama was then of 
 a kind easily exportable and adaptable. The 
 plays of the romanticists dealt with passion rather 
 than with character; and emotion has universal 
 currency. The "well-made " plays of Scribe and 
 his numberless followers in France dealt with 
 situations only; and their clockwork would 
 strike just as well in London or New York as in 
 Paris. The ' Tour de Nesle ' and the * Bataille de 
 Dames' could be carried anywhere with little 
 loss of effect. Few of the emotional plays or the 
 mechanical comedies had any pronounced flavor 
 of the soil; and they could be relished by Rus- 
 sian spectators as well as by Australian. But no 
 foreigner can really appreciate a comedy wherein 
 the author aims at a profound study of the society 
 he sees all around him in his own country; and 
 this is why the ' Femmes Savantes ' of Moliere 
 and the * Efifrontes ' of Augier are little known 
 beyond the boundaries of the French language, 
 while the ' Stranger ' of Kotzebue and the ' Adri- 
 enne Lecouvreur ' of Scribe have had their hour of 
 popularity everywhere the wide world over. 
 
 So long as ; the theatrical managers of the Ger- 
 man and Italian principalities, as well as those of 
 Great Britain and the United States, could borrow \ 
 a successful French play whenever they needed a 
 3>3 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 novelty, without other payment than the cost of 
 translation, they were naturally disinclined to 
 proffer tempting remuneration for untried pieces 
 by writers of their own tongue. This was an 
 added reason why men-of-letters kept turning 
 from the drama to prose-fiction, the rewards of 
 which were just then becoming larger than ever 
 before, as the boundless possibilities of serial pub- 
 lication were discovered, whereby the story- 
 teller could get paid twice for one work. 
 
 When we consider that novel-writing is not 
 only easier than play-writing, but that the novelist 
 had the advantage of a double market, while the 
 dramatist was then forced to vend his wares in 
 competition with stolen goods, we need not be 
 surprised that the drama apparently went into a 
 decline during the middle years of the century 
 everywhere except in France. The theater might 
 seem to flourish, but the stage was supplied 
 chiefly with plays filched from the French and 
 twisted into conformity with local conditions. 
 As most of these hasty adaptations had no 
 possible relation to the realities of life, there was 
 no call for literary quality; and thus it was that 
 there impended an unfortunate divorce between 
 literature and the drama. 
 3»4 
 
.^ 
 
 THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 By the ill-advised action of certain English 
 poets the breach between the stage and the men- 
 of-letters was made to appear wider than it 
 ought to have been. These poets fell victims to 
 the heresy of the so-called closet-drama> which 
 all who apprehend the true principles of the 
 drama cannot but hold to be only bon a mettre 
 au cabinet, as Moliere phrased it. Averting their 
 countenances from the actual theater of their 
 own time, the English poets followed out Lamb's 
 whimsical suggestion and 'tried to write for an- 
 tiquity.! Instead of letting ^he dead past bury 
 its dea^d, Matthew Arnold and Swinburne put 
 forth , alleged dramas composed in painful imi- 
 tation of the Greek plays, which had been origi- 
 nally planned in complete accord with all the 
 circumstances of the actual theater of Dionysus. 
 In like manner Tennyson and Browning spent 
 their time in copying the formlessness of Shak- 
 spere's chronicle-plays, which were exactly suited 
 to the conditions of the Elizabethan stage. 
 / This writing of plays which were not intended ^ 
 to be played, and which had no relation to the 
 expectations of contemporary spectator^, was an 
 aberration for which there is no warrant in the 
 works of any truly dramatic poet. It was just 
 as absurd for Tennyson to take as his model the 
 semi-medieval form of Shakspere, regardless of 
 all the changes in the circumstances of actual 
 3^5 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 performance in the theater, as it would have 
 been for Shakspere himself to have slavishly fol- 
 lowed the traditions of the Attic stage. It was 
 still more absurd for Arnold to suppose that he 
 could really get a Greek spirit into a play written 
 by a British poet in the nineteenth century. Even 
 if it had been possible for a man thus to step off 
 his own shadow, there was nothing to be gained 
 by venturing on a vain rivalry with the noble 
 Greek dramas which have happily survived for 
 our delight. 
 
 These unactable dramatic poems, with no bold 
 collision of will to serve as a backbone, with 
 scarcely any of the necessary scenes, without the 
 actuality of the real play, intended to be performed 
 by actors in a theater and before an audience, — 
 these mistakes of judgment may have their im- 
 portance in a history of English literature ; but they 
 need not even be mentioned in a history of Eng- 
 lish drama, any more than 'Samson Agonistes' 
 will need to be mentioned there. Probably even 
 those who most admire the poetry which has 
 put on the garb of the drama without having pos- 
 sessed itself of the spirit are not sorry that Milton 
 finally chose the epic form for * Paradise Lost ' 
 rather than the dramatic. There is a taint of un- 
 reality about all these misguided efforts, whatever 
 the genius of the authors themselves; there is a 
 lack of vitality, due wholly to the fact that these 
 316 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 English poets scorned the actual theater. They 
 yearned to reap the reward of the dramatic poet 
 without taking the trouble to learn the trade of 
 the playwright and without being willing to sub- 
 mit to the conditions he must perforce labor 
 under. 
 
 Here Browning, for one, could have profited 
 by the example of Hugo, who had perhaps no 
 larger share of the native dramatic gift, but who 
 put his mind to a mastery of the principles of the 
 dramaturgic art, taking a model in the playhouse 
 itself. The French had the double advantage 
 over the English that their men-of-letters kept in 
 contact with the actual theater, and also that the 
 acknowledged masterpieces of their drama had 
 been delayed until their stage had become almost 
 modern in its lighting and in its use of scenery. 
 Moliere and Racine supply excellent examples 
 from whose form there is no need to vary. Shak- 
 spere unfortunately planned his great plays for a 
 stage still more or less medieval; and his mas- 
 terpieces have to be modified and rearranged 
 before they conform to the conditions of the 
 modern theater. It was easy enough to borrow 
 from him the loose framework of the chronicle- 
 play; but it was impossible to steal the fire and 
 force of his swifter and more compact tragedies. 
 It is to be remarked also that we who speak 
 English have rarely revealed the instinctive feeling 
 
 3>7 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 for form which the French seem to have acquired 
 through the Latin from the Greek. Quite signifi- 
 cant of the French inherent regard for structural 
 beauty is the fact that the gracefully lyric roman- 
 tic-comedies of Alfred de Musset, published as 
 closet-dramas, needed only slight readjustment to 
 fitJ:hem for performance. 
 
 In the middle years of the century there was a 
 living dramatic literature only in France. The 
 romanticist drama had withered away, altho its 
 spirit reappeared now and again, — for ex- 
 ample we cannot help discovering in the heroine 
 of ' Dame aux Camelias ' of the younger Dumas 
 a descendant of the heroine of the ' Antony ' of 
 the elder Dumas. But there is little flavor of 
 romanticism in the best of the later dramatist's 
 profounder studies of contemporary manners, — 
 especially in his masterpiece, the 'Demi-monde,' 
 which shares the foremost place in modern 
 French comedy with the 'Gendre de M. Poirier' 
 of Augier and Sandeau. The * Froufrou ' of 
 Meilhac and Halevy was their sole triumph in the 
 comedy which softens into pathos, while their 
 lighter plays contained a fascinating collection of 
 comic characters, as veracious as they were hu- 
 morous. The comedy-farces of Labiche had not 
 a little of the large laughter of Moliere's less phil- 
 osophic plays. The comedy-dramas of Sardou 
 were the result of an attempt to combine the 
 318 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 contemporary satire of Beaumarchais with the 
 self-sufficient stagecraft of Scribe. 
 
 But even in France the rivalry of the novel 
 made itself felt and its sv^elling vogue tempted 
 some writers of fiction to take an arrogant atti- 
 tude and to assert that the drama had had its 
 day. Perhaps a portion of their distaste for the 
 acted play was owing to a healthy dislike for the 
 lingering artificialities of plot-making, visible even 
 in so independent and individual a playwright as 
 Augier and obviously inherited from Scribe. Yet 
 there was a still more active cause for their hos- 
 tility, due to their recognizing that the dramatic 
 art must always be more or less democratic and 
 that the dramatist cannot hold himself aloof from 
 the plain people. This necessity of pleasing the 
 public and reckoning with its likes and dislikes 
 was painful to writers who chose to think them- 
 selves aristocratic, — Theophile Gautier, for ex- 
 ample, and the Goncourts. 
 
 One of the Goncourts was rash in risking the 
 opinion that the drama was no longer literature 
 and that in the existing conditions of the theater 
 nothing more could be hoped from it. Gautier 
 had earlier complained that the stage never 
 touched subjects until they had been worn thread- 
 319 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 bare, not only in the newspapers but in the novel. 
 Here the poetic art-critic was making a reproach 
 of that which is really an inexorable condition of 
 the drama, so recognized ever since Aristotle, — 
 that the playwright must broaden his appeal, that 
 he cannot write only for the highly cultivated, 
 that he must deal with the universal. The dra- 
 matist may be a little in advance of the mass of 
 men, but it is not his duty to be a pioneer, since 
 he can discuss the newest themes only at the 
 risk of not interesting enough playgoers to fill 
 the theater. If Goncourt had known literary his- 
 tory better, he might have remembered that the 
 limitations of the theater had not prevented 
 Sophocles and Shakspere and Moliere from deal- 
 ing with the deeper problems of life. If he had 
 happened to care about what was going on out- 
 side of France he could have learned that even 
 while he was recording his opinion, Ibsen was 
 proving anew that there was no reason why a 
 playwright should not do his own thinking. 
 
 The drama was not on its death-bed, as these 
 aristocratic dilettants were hastily declaring; in- 
 deed, it was about to revive with new-born vigor, 
 altho it was not to find the elixir of life in France. 
 Since the Franco-German war there had been 
 visible among the defeated a relaxing energy, a 
 lassitude which French psychologists have re- 
 gretted as both physical and moral. Whenever 
 320 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the national fiber is enfeebled the drama is likely 
 to be weakened; and this is what took place in 
 France in the final years of the century. When- 
 ever a people displays sturdy resolution it is ripe 
 for a growth of the drama; and this is what was 
 to be seen in Germany in the two final decads^ 
 when the French were losing their grip. When- 
 ever a race, however few in number, stiffens its 
 will to attain its common desires, the conditions 
 are favorable for the appearance of the dramatist; 
 and this is what had happened in Norway, where 
 Ibsen was coming to a knowledge of his powers. 
 /With the appearance of Ibsen the supremacy of 
 France was challenged successfully for the first 
 time in the century. Ibsen's plays might be de- 
 nounced and derided; but it was difficult to deny 
 his strange power or his fecundating influence on 
 the drama of every modern language. ) 
 
 Simultaneously with the natural reaction against 
 the excessive vogue of prose-fiction and with the 
 revived int erest in the theater aroused by the 
 occasional performances of Ibsen's stimulating 
 plays, there was everywhere a revision of the 
 local laws which had permitted the free stealing 
 of French plays. Wn enlightened selfishness, an 
 increasing recognition of the right of the laborer 
 to his hire, and a growing sentiment of inter- 
 national solidarity led to such an extension of 
 copyright and of stageright as to assure the dra- 
 321 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 matist the control of his own work not only in 
 his own language but in almost every other. 
 The playwrights of the rest of the world were 
 relieved from the necessity of vending their wares 
 in a market unsettled by an abundant offering of 
 stolen goods ; and they also received proper pay- 
 ment when their own works were translated into 
 other languages to satisfy the increasingly cosmo- 
 politan curiosity of playgoers throughout the 
 world. 
 
 The new international laws even allowed the 
 dramatist to reap a double reward by protecting 
 his ownership of his play as a book also; and 
 thus they encouraged him to seek the approba- 
 tion of readers as well as of spectators. As a 
 result of this wise legislation the pecuniary returns 
 of the drama were raised again to an equality 
 with those of prose-fiction, so that the writer 
 who happened to be born with the dramatic gift 
 was no longer tempted to turn novelist in despair 
 of support by the theater. 
 
 The change in the law also brought with it 
 another advantage, since the dramatist, having 
 complete control of his own writings abroad as 
 well as at home, soon insisted that they should 
 be translated literally and not betrayed by a fan- 
 tastic attempt at adaptation; and this tended to 
 terminate the reign of unreality in the theater. So 
 long as French plots were wrenched out of all 
 322 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 veracity in the absurd effort to localize them in all 
 the four quarters of the globe, even careless play- 
 goers beholding these miserable perversions must 
 have been struck by their "incurable falsity," as 
 Matthew Arnold called it, — a falsity which tended 
 to prevent people from taking the drama seriously 
 or even from expecting it to deal truthfully with 
 life. No artist is likely to give his best to a pub- 
 lic which is in the habit of considering his art as 
 insincere and as having no relation to the eternal 
 verities, ethic as well as esthetic. 
 
 In the final decad of the century there was abun- 
 dant evidence that the drama was rising rapidly 
 in the esteem of thoughtful men and women.' 
 This higher repute was due in part, of course, to 
 the respectful attention which was compelled by 
 the weight and might of Ibsen's plays. It was 
 due also to the efforts of younger dramatists in 
 the various languages to grapple resolutely with 
 the problems of life and to deal honestly with the 
 facts of existence. Verga and Sudermann, Pinero 
 and Echegaray, are names to be neglected by no 
 one who wishes to understand the trend of mod- 
 ern thought. At the end of the century the drama 
 might still be inferior to prose-fiction in English 
 and in Spanish ; but it was probably superior in 
 German and in Italian. The theater was even 
 beginning again to attract the poets; and Haupt- 
 mann and Rostand, D'Annunzio and Phillips, 
 323 
 
THE DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 having mastered the methods of the modern 
 stage, and having ascertained its limitations and 
 its possibilities, proved that there need be no 
 more talk of a divorce between poetry and the 
 drama. 
 
 When the last year of the century drew to an 
 end, the outlook for the drama was strangely un- 
 like that of a quarter-century earlier. Except in 
 France, there was everywhere evidence of reinvigo- 
 ration ; and even in France there were not lacking 
 playwrights of promise, like Hervieu. Perhaps 
 everywhere, except in Norway, it was promise 
 rather than final performance which characterized 
 the drama ; and yet the actual performance of not 
 a few of the dramatists of the half-dozen modern 
 languages was already worthy of the most seri- 
 ous criticism. Just as a clever playwright so 
 constructs the sequence of his scenes in the first 
 act that the interest of expectancy is excited, 
 so the nineteenth century — in so far as drama is 
 concerned — dropped its curtain, leaving an inter- 
 rogation-mark hanging in the air behind it. 
 
 324 
 
X. THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 WHEN we stand upon the portal of a new 
 century a glance back may serve to reas- 
 sure us for a gaze forward ; altho we must ac- 
 knowledge that in the nineteenth century, as in- 
 deed in the eighteenth also, the drama did not pass 
 through a splendid period of expansion such as 
 made glorious its history in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. We are forced to remark that in the course 
 of the last two hundred years the drama had 
 lost its literary supremacy, partly as a result of 
 its own enfeeblement, and partly in consequence 
 of the overwhelming competition of prose-fic- 
 tion, which was able to perform in the nine- 
 teenth century even more than it had promised 
 in the eighteenth. 
 
 But we are encouraged to note that a score of 
 years before the century drew to an end the novel 
 was beginningto show signs of slackening energy, 
 while the play was apparently again gathering 
 strength for a sharper rivalry. In German and in 
 325 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 English, in Italian and in Spanish, young writers 
 of ardent ambition were mastering the methods 
 of the theater and were recognizing in the drama 
 the form in which they could best express them- 
 selves and in which they could body forth most 
 satisfactorily their own vision of life, with its 
 trials, its ironies, and its problems. Even in 
 French, in which language the drama had flour- 
 ished most abundantly during the middle of the 
 century only to languish a little toward the end, 
 the finai years were to be illumined by the tri- 
 umphs of a young poet, possessed of a delightful 
 fantasy and initiated into every secret of stage- 
 craft. And afar in the Scandinavian land, 
 which seems so remote to most of us, there still 
 towered the stern figure of the powerful play- 
 wright whose stimulating influence had been 
 felt in the dramatic literature of every modern 
 language. 
 
 Thus we catch a glimpse of one of the most 
 striking characteristics of the modern theater, — its 
 extraordinary cosmopolitanism which made pos- 
 sible the performance of * Cyrano de Bergerac ' 
 and of the 'Doll's Home' in every quarter of the 
 globe. Not only can we find French and Ger- 
 man plays acted frequently in New York, but we 
 are glad to record that the English-speaking stage 
 was again exporting its products, and that Mr. 
 Bronson Howard's ' Saratoga ' was performed in 
 326 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 Berlin, Mr. Gillette's * Secret Service ' in Paris, and 
 Mr. Pinero's * Second Mrs. Tanqueray ' in Rome. 
 Even more noteworthy is the fact that the play- 
 goers of New York had been permitted to see an 
 English play, 'Hamlet,' acted by a French com- 
 pany, a German play, * Magda,' acted by an Ital- 
 ian company, and a Russian play, the ' Power of 
 Darkness,' acted by a German company. 
 
 An educated man to-day is more than a native 
 of his own country : he is also a citizen of the 
 world, just as the educated man was in the mid- 
 dle ages when all Europe was governed by the 
 Church of Rome and by the Holy Roman Empire, 
 and when all men of learning wrote in Latin and 
 studied the same Roman law. The spread of 
 instruction, the ability to understand other lan- 
 guages than the native tongue, and the intelligent 
 curiosity of the more cultivated public, have 
 brought about a unity in modern literature like 
 that which was visible in medieval literature before 
 the Renascence came and before the population 
 of Europe was segregated into separate peoples, 
 hostile and intolerant. We have not let go the 
 idea of nationality, and indeed we cherish it un- 
 ceasingly ; but we are not now afraid to see the 
 idea of cosmopolitanism grafted on it. 
 
 In the middle ages the drama was almost the 
 same everywhere; and a French mystery was 
 always very like an English mystery, just as an 
 327 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 Italian sacred-representation was very similar to 
 a Spanish sacramental-act. So at the beginning 
 of the twentieth century the forms of the drama 
 are almost identical throughout the civilized 
 world. In structure there is little difference now- 
 adays between an English play and a Spanish, — 
 far less than there was when John Webster and 
 Lope de Vega were almost simultaneously put- 
 ting upon the stage the pitiful story of the sad 
 Duchess of Malfi. There is a flavor of the soil 
 about the 'Doll's Home,' about 'Magda,' and 
 about the * Second Mrs. Tanqueray ' ; the first is 
 unmistakably Scandinavian, the second is indu- 
 bitably Teutonic, and the third is frankly British ; 
 but in form there is little to distinguish them 
 from one another, — just as there is nothing in 
 the structure of any one of them to differentiate it 
 from the * Gendre de M. Poirier,' or from the 
 ' Froufrou, ' written in French during the same 
 half-century. 
 
 The cosmopolitanism of our civilization at the 
 beginning of the twentieth century, the eager- 
 ness of artists of every nationality to profit by 
 what they can learn from their fellow-craftsmen 
 in other capitals, the wide-spread international 
 borrowing, — these are not the sole causes of the 
 similarity of structure observable in the pieces of 
 328 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 the chief living playwrights of to-day. There is 
 another reason to be detected by extending our 
 glance into the past history of the drama and 
 piercing beyond the middle ages into antiquity. 
 If we do this we cannot fail to see that this like- 
 ness of the English play and the German play to 
 the French play is due in part to ^he fact that in 
 all the modern languages the drama has reached 
 an advanced period of its evolution, when it has 
 definitely specialized itself and when it has been 
 able to disentangle itself from the other and non- 
 dramatic element^ with which it was perforce 
 commingled in the more primitive periods. 
 
 The history of the drama is the long record of 
 the effort of the dramatist to get hold of the es- 
 sentially dramatic and to cast out everything 
 else. The essence of the drama is a representation 
 of_aJiuman will exerting itself against an oppos- 
 ing force; and the playwright has ever been 
 seeking the means of presenting his conflict with- 
 out admixture of anything else. The tragedy of 
 the Greeks, elaborated out of rustic song and 
 dance, retained to the end the evidences of its 
 origin, not only in the lyrics of the chorus but in 
 their vocal music and in their sculpturesque atti- 
 tudes. The drama of the Elizabethans, descended 
 directly from the mysteries and moralities of the 
 middle ages, was often prosily didactic, one cha- 
 racter being permitted to discourse at undue 
 329 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 length, in much the same fashion as the medieval 
 expositor, and another being allowed to deliver a 
 bravura passage, lyric or rhetorical, not unlike the 
 tenor solo of Italian opera, frequently delightful 
 in itself but alv^ays undramatic. 
 
 The stage of the Elizabethan theater was 
 sometimes in the course of a single play made to 
 serve as a pulpit for a sermon, a platform for a 
 lecture, and a singing-gallery for a ballad ; and it 
 would be easy enough to single out scores of 
 passages, even in Shakspere, which exist for their 
 own sake and which are not integral to the play 
 wherein they are embedded. But Shakspere could, 
 when he chose, anticipate the more modern 
 swiftness and singleness of purpose; and some- 
 times when he was inspired by his theme, as in 
 'Macbeth' and 'Othello,' he put all his strength 
 in the depicting of the central struggle which was 
 at the heart of his play. He excluded all acci- 
 dental and adventitious superfluities, of which the 
 most of his fellow-playwrights never thought of 
 depriving themselves. There is also to be re- 
 marked in the Elizabethan plays generally a nar- 
 rative freedom which is epic rather than drama- 
 tic. So in the plays written under Louis XIV 
 there is to be observed, more especially in Cor- 
 neille's tragedies, an oratorical tendency, a prone- 
 ness to formal argument, which is equally aside 
 from the truly dramatic. 
 350 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 But this confusion is not peculiar to the drama 
 and it is to be studied in all the other arts also. 
 As M. Emile Faguet has put it clearly, "litera- 
 tures always begin with works in which the 
 various species are either fused or confused, de- 
 pending on the genius of the authors; they al- 
 ways continue with works in which the distinc- 
 tion of species is observed; and they always end 
 with works which embrace only the half or the 
 quarter or the tenth of a single species." In other 
 words, there is always increasing differentiation ; 
 there is an advance from the heterogeneous to 
 the homogeneous; and M. Faguet gives as a 
 typical example the simplification of Greek 
 comedy. He asserts that the lyrical-burlesque 
 of Aristophanes was more or less a medley of 
 every possible species, — "true-comedy, farce, 
 pantomime, op^ra-bouffe, ballet, fairy-spectacle, 
 political satire, literary satire"; and yet in the 
 course of less than a century, little by little, what- 
 ever did not belong strictly to pure comedy was 
 eliminated. The chorus was cast aside, taking 
 with it the opera, the ballet, the fairy-spectacle : 
 and with the departure of the parabasis personal 
 satire went also, taking eloquence with it. So 
 the lyrical-burlesque of Aristophanes was slowly 
 simplified into the comic drama of Menander, 
 which is but "the witty and delicate- depicting 
 of average manners." Latin comedy followed 
 33^ 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 Greek comedy slavishly; but French comedy, 
 altho it inherited the classic traditions, still fur- 
 ther differentiated itself into subspecies, Moliere, 
 for example, showing how pure comedy could 
 sustain itself without the aid of farce. 
 
 The simplification of the primitive play, which 
 was carelessly comprehensive in its scope, has 
 been the result of a steadily increasing artistic 
 sense. It is due chiefly to the growth of a criti- 
 cal temper which is no longer content to enjoy 
 unthinkingly and which is educating itself to find 
 pleasure in the purity of type. This more deli- 
 cate appreciation of esthetic propriety is likely to 
 be gratified only in the higher efforts of the dra- 
 matist, in those plays which plainly aspire to be 
 judged also as literature. We need not look for 
 anything of the sort in the more boisterous popu- 
 lar pieces which make no pretense to literary 
 merit. In sensational melodrama, for example, 
 we are none of us shocked by the commingling 
 of farce and tragedy; and in operetta we are not 
 even surprised by the admixture of lyric senti- 
 mentality and horse-play fun-making. But the 
 more literary a play may be, the more elevated 
 its quality, the more carefully we expect it to 
 avoid incongruity and to conform to the type of 
 its species. 
 
 It seems now as tho the unliterary plays, like 
 melodramas and operettas, would always owe 
 some portion of their popularity to sheer specta- 
 332 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 cle, to extraneous allurements devised to tickle the 
 ears or to glut the eyes of the unthinking popu- 
 lace. But it is evident also that the critical spirit 
 of the more cultivated playgoers is now inclined 
 to resent the inclusion in the literary drama of 
 anything foreign to the main theme, whether this 
 extraneous matter is didactic or lyric, rhetorical 
 or oratorical. They prefer that the stage should 
 not be a platform or a pulpit. In Athens under 
 Pericles, and in London under Elizabeth, the poets 
 who wrote plays were addressing audiences 
 which had not read the newspapers and which 
 might welcome instruction nowadays needless. 
 The impatient playgoers of our own time can see 
 no reason why they also should not profit by the 
 invention of printing; and they are quick to re- 
 sent any digression from the straight path of the 
 plot. They are frankly annoyed when the author 
 ventures to halt the action that he may deliver a 
 sermon, an oration, or a lecture, that he may de- 
 claim a descriptive report or an editorial article. 
 They have not come to the theater to be in- 
 structed, but to be delighted by the specific plea- 
 sure that only the theater can give. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This elimination from our latter-day stage-plays 
 of all the non-dramatic elements which are so 
 abundant in the earlier periods of the drama has 
 
 333 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 been accompanied, and indeed greatly aided, by 
 certain striking changes in the physical conditions 
 of performance, and, more especially, in the shape 
 and size and circumstances of the theater itself. 
 The modern playhouse is as unlike as possible, 
 not only to the spacious Theater of Dionysus in 
 Athens, with its many thousand spectators seated 
 along the curving hillside, but also to the Globe 
 Theater and its contemporary rivals in London 
 and in Madrid, which were only unroofed court- 
 yards. 
 
 The plays of Sophocles were performed out- 
 doors, where the wind from the Aegean Sea 
 might flutter the robes of the actors; and the 
 plays of Shakspere and of Calderon were per- 
 formed in buildings open to the sky, so that a 
 sudden rain-storm might interfere sadly with the 
 telling of the tale. The English and the Spanish 
 playwrights were like the Greek in that they all 
 had to depend on the daylight. The pieces of 
 Moliere were performed by candle-light in a 
 weather-tight hall and on a stage decked with 
 the actual scenery, which had been lacking in 
 London and Madrid as well as in Athens; and 
 this is one reason why Moliere was able to per- 
 fect the outward form of the modern play. The 
 comedies of Sheridan and of Beaumarchais were 
 produced originally in theaters externally similar 
 to ours of to-day, but huge in size, villainously 
 354 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 ill-lighted with oil-lamps, and having a stage the 
 curve of which projected far beyond the prosce- 
 nium-arch. It was on this space, beyond the cur- 
 tain and close to the feeble footlights, that all 
 the vital episodes of the play had to be acted, 
 because it was only there that the expression of 
 the actor's visage could be made visible to the 
 spectators. 
 
 The most marked differences between our 
 more modern playhouses at the beginning of the 
 twentieth century and their predecessors a hun- 
 dred years ago are due to the improvement in the 
 methods of lighting, gas giving a far better light 
 than oil, and the later electricity having many ad- 
 vantages over gas. As a result of the newer 
 means of illumination the actor can now stand on 
 whatever part of the stage it is best for him to 
 place himself, and he is no longer forced to come 
 down to the center of the footlights so that his 
 features may be in the full glare of the "focus" 
 (as it used to be termed). The footlights them- 
 selves are of less importance, since there are now 
 "border-lights" and "bunch-lights," and since 
 the whole stage can be flooded with a sudden 
 glare or instantly plunged in darkness at the turn 
 of a handle or two. The space that used to 
 curve out into the auditorium has been cut back 
 to the curtain; and the proscenium opening has 
 now assumed the form of a picture-frame, with- 
 335 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 in which the curtain rises and falls and before 
 which no actor has any occasion to advance. 
 
 This change is far more momentous than it 
 may seem at first sight — indeed, it is probable 
 that its influence will be far-reaching. Only in 
 the score or two years since the proscenium has 
 become a picture-frame have all the audience 
 been seated in front of the performers. Until 
 then the acting had always taken place in a space 
 more or less surrounded by the spectators and in 
 closest proximity to them. In Greece the chorus 
 and the three actors played their parts in the 
 orchestra, around which the citizens sat in tiers 
 that rose high on the sides of the hill. In Eng- 
 land in the middle ages the performers may have 
 presented the major portion of their mystery on 
 the separate pageants, but not a little of the ac- 
 tion was represented in the neutral ground around 
 and between the pageants, and therefore in the 
 midst of the assembled sight-seers; and in Eng- 
 land, again, under Elizabeth, the stage was but a 
 bare platform thrust out into the yard, with some 
 of the spectators sitting along the edges of it and 
 with the most of them standing on three sides. 
 In France after the *Cid' of Corneille and until 
 after the ' Semiramis ' of Voltaire a portion of the 
 audience was also accommodated with seats on 
 the stage. And in the eighteenth century, as we 
 have seen, the stage curved forward into the 
 3}6 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 auditorium far beyond the stage-boxes, the spec- 
 tators in these being able to see the actors only 
 in profile. 
 
 But in the eighteenth century the stage had 
 been so far withdrawn that the use of the curtain 
 became general to mark the division into acts. 
 The absence of a curtain had forced Sophocles and 
 Shakspere to end their pieces by withdrawing all 
 the characters from the view of the spectators; 
 and even Moliere and Voltaire, perhaps in defer- 
 ence to the presence of those who sat on the 
 stage, always marked the end of an act by a 
 general exit of the performers. Not until the 
 nineteenth century was well advanced did the 
 dramatic poets begin to avail themselves of the 
 advantages of ''discovering" one or more cha- 
 racters in sight as the curtain rose, and of drop- 
 ping it at the end of the act upon several cha- 
 racters grouped picturesquely. 
 
 The modern playhouse differs from its prede- 
 cessors of past ages in the power to illuminate 
 every part of the stage. Sometimes we are 
 inclined to suppose that gorgeous spectacle, 
 elaborate scenery, and ingenuity of mechanical 
 effects are characteristics of our latter-day thea- 
 ters only; but when we consider the records we 
 soon find that this is not the fact. The late M. 
 Nuitter, archivist of the Opera in Paris (than 
 whom there was no higher authority), once 
 337 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 assured me that there was no spectacular device 
 in which the Italians of the Renascence had not 
 anticipated the utmost endeavor of the moderns. 
 Leonardo and his followers foresaw all that could 
 be done in this direction; and they invented 
 many a marvel for the royal processions and for 
 the court-ballets with which their princes liked 
 to amuse themselves. It was in Italy that Inigo 
 Jones learned the secrets of the wonders he was 
 wont to display in the beautiful masques for 
 which Ben Jonson found fit words. 
 
 / The Italian scene-painters and their apt pupils 
 in France and in England could accomplish all 
 that is within the reach of the most liberal of 
 modern managers, — excepting only the ability to 
 show the result of their labors properly illumi- 
 nated. The power of directing at will whatever 
 light may be desired confers an advantage upon 
 the modern stage-manager denied to his predeces- 
 sors; and it is certain to impress its mark upon 
 the drama of the next half-century, — just as 
 every other changing circumstance of the theater 
 in the past has necessarily registered itself in the 
 history of the dramatic literature that followed it. 
 What will hereafter be shown on the stage within 
 the picture-frame is likely to be increasingly pic- 
 torial and plastic. 
 
 338 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 The dramatist will profit by his ability to reach 
 the soul through the eye as well as through thej 
 ear. He will be tempted to let gesture supple- 
 ment speech, or even on occasion to let it serve 
 as a substitute. In real life the action precedes 
 the word; and it is sometimes so significant that 
 the explanatory phrase which follows is not al- 
 ways needed. Lessing had seized this truth, 
 which Diderot had half suggested ; and he urged 
 that the playwright should leave much to the 
 player, since there were many effects which the 
 actor could produce better than the poet. Her- 
 bert Spencer has remarked upon "the force with 
 which simple ideas are communicated by signs "; 
 and he noted that it was far more expressive to 
 point to the door or to place the fingers on the 
 lips than to say ''Leave the room" or "Keep 
 silent." The more accomplished the playwright' 
 chances to be, the more often he will have simple 
 ideas to communicate forcibly; and the more 
 frequently will he speak to the eye rather than to| 
 the ear. 
 
 In the ill-lighted theaters of old, the dramatic 
 poet had to take care that his plot was made 
 clear in words as well as in deeds; and he was 
 tempted often to let his rhetoric run away with 
 him. But in the well-lighted modern houses he 
 can, if he chooses, let actions speak louder than 
 words. Being able to reach the playgoers through 
 their visual as well as their auditory sense, he 
 339 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 sometimes plans to let a self-betraying movement 
 do its work without any needless verbal elucida- 
 tion. He recognizes that there are moments in 
 life when a silence may be more eloquent than 
 the silver sentences of any soliloquy. He is well 
 aware that a sudden pause, a piercing glance, an 
 abrupt change of expression, may convey to the 
 spectator what is passing in the minds of the 
 characters more directly than the most brilliant 
 dialog. He has noted not only that emotion is 
 often inarticulate when it is keenest, but also 
 that a mental struggle at the very crisis of the 
 story can often be made intelligible by visible 
 acts; and he knows that the spectators are far 
 more interested in what is done on the stage 
 than in what is said. 
 
 At first sight it may seem to some as tho this 
 utilization of the picture-frame must result in 
 making the drama in the immediate future even 
 less literary than it is to-day. This will surely 
 appear to be the case to those who are accus- 
 tomed to consider the drama as tho it was merely 
 one of the divisions of literature, — or, indeed, as 
 tho it was a department of poetry. But the 
 drama, altho it has often a literary element of 
 prime importance, does not lie wholly within the 
 boundaries of literature; and it has always exer- 
 cised its privilege of profiting by all the other 
 arts, pictorial and plastic, epic, lyrical, and musi- 
 340 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 cal. Above all, the drama is what it is because 
 of its specifically dramatic qualities; and these 
 qualities can be exhibited wholly without rhe- 
 torical assistance, as every one will admit who 
 has had the good fortune to see the 'Enfant 
 Prodigue.' In fact, many a noble drama — \ 
 'Hamlet,' for one — has a pantomime for its \ 
 skeleton and calls on literature only to furnish I 
 its flesh and blood. 
 
 The dramaturgic art being distinct from the 
 poetic, it can on occasion achieve results impos- 
 sible to the lyric poet or the epic. Indeed, its 
 ability to do this is the sole reason for its exis- 
 tence. What need of it would there be if it was! 
 no more than the echo of another art ? As Les-I 
 sing asked with his customary directness : " Why 
 undergo the painful toil of the dramatic form ?| 
 Why build a theater, disguise men and women' 
 in costumes, task their memories, pack all the 
 population in a playhouse, if my work, when 
 acted, can produce only a few of the effects which 
 could be produced by a good narrative read by 
 each at the fireside ? " And the younger Dumas 
 pointed out how an effect made in the theater is 
 sometimes so unlike any produced by a good 
 narrative read at the fireside that a spectator 
 seeking to recover, by means of the printed page, 
 the emotion that had stirred him as he saw the 
 piece performed, is sometimes "unable not only 
 341 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 to find the emotion again in the written words, 
 but even to discover the place where it was. A 
 Kvord, a look, a gesture, a silence, a purely atrno- 
 ppheric combination, had helcijiim spellbound." 
 But we may go further and insist that litera- 
 ture has a broader scope than is carelessly allowed 
 it; and it is not lightly limited to mere rhetoric. 
 It is not confined to phrase-making only. Liter- 
 ature goes deeper than style or even than poetry. 
 It includes invention and construction; it is con- 
 cerned with the meaning and with the propriety 
 of the thought contained. It deals with philoso- 
 phy and with psychology also. Now, if we take 
 this larger interpretation of literature, we need 
 not fear that the drama is likely to be less liter- 
 ary because the stage has receded behind a pic- 
 ture-frame. But it is likely to be less rhetorical, 
 less oratorical, less lyric, less epic, more purely 
 dramatic. 
 
 Whether it shall be less poetic also will depend 
 not on any circumstance of the actual theater,— 
 the use of a picture-frame, or the power of con- 
 trolling the lights of the stage, —but on the attitude 
 of the next generation toward the ideal. If the 
 growth of the useful arts, if the advance of sci- 
 entific discovery, if the spread of democracy, if 
 any or all of these things shall tend to destroy 
 542 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 our desire for the higher life,— if there is, as Mr. 
 Leslie Stephen has asserted, " something in the 
 very nature of modern progress essentially an- 
 tagonistic to poetry and romance," then the 
 drama of the future will be unpoetic, as all lit- 
 erature then must needs be. The drama will lack 
 poetry just as every other form of art will be 
 devoid of it, no more and no less. If, however, 
 romance springs eternal in the human breast, if 
 poetry is ever young, if beauty is born again 
 with every springtime, if Mr. Stephen is wrong 
 in his prophecy and if Lowell was right in be- 
 lieving that " while there is grace in grace, love 
 in love, beauty in beauty, God will still send 
 poets to find them and bear witness of them," 
 —then the drama will have its full share of poetry 
 in the future as in the past. 
 
 But we may venture the prediction that the \ 
 poetry hereafter to be found in the drama will be I 
 less extraneous than it has often been hitherto. 1 
 There may seem to be less of it, but what there 
 is will belong absolutely to the theme. It will be 
 internal and integral; it will not be external or 
 merely affixed. It will reside rather in the con- 
 ception of the story and in the relation of the 
 several characters than in the language they may 
 address to one another. The poetic playwrights 
 of the future will be more likely to profit by the 
 example set by Shakspere in * Romeo and Juliet/ 
 343 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 which is as beautiful in idea as it is in phrasing, 
 than to follow that given in ' Measure for Mea- 
 sure,' the subject-matter of which is abhorrent, 
 unworthy, and in itself unpoetic, however splen- 
 didly it has been draped in verse. 
 
 Such poetry as there may be in the dialog will 
 be there, not for its own sake chiefly, but because 
 it helps to enlighten the situation, to illustrate 
 character, or to reveal motive. The action of the 
 play will no longer pause for a rhetorical ex- 
 cursus like the satiric verses of Jaques about the 
 seven ages of man. The set speech, the orator- 
 ical display, the tirade, as the French term it, will 
 tend to disappear; and such lyrical passages as 
 the poet may feel hereafter that he must have he 
 will lead up to so artfully that they will seem to 
 be useful to the story, just as Shakspere made 
 Othello's description of his wooing, surcharged 
 as it is with poetry, appear to be absolutely ne- 
 cessary to the proper presentation of the subject. 
 
 We can predict with almost equal certainty 
 that poetry will not be wasted on unpoetical 
 themes, as has happened only too often in earlier 
 periods of the drama. The vivacity and the 
 brilliancy of the verse in certain of Massinger's 
 dramas, and even in a few of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's, should not blind us to the fact that the 
 subjects are often sordid, and that some of these 
 plays would have been solider pieces of work if 
 
 344 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 they had been wrought in honest prose. This 
 use of verse by the Elizabethan dramatic poets, 
 even when the subjects they had selected were 
 frankly prosaic, was unfortunately responsible for 
 much of the unreality we can discover now and 
 again in their plays. A beautiful theme • may 
 demand beautiful verse; but a tale of every-day 
 life can best be told in the language of every 
 day. Some of the Elizabethans seemed to find in 
 blank-verse a warrant for an arbitrary disregard 
 of the facts of life and for a freakish distortion 
 of natural human motives. This is one reason 
 why certain plays surviving from that glorious 
 era lack plausibility and sometimes even sincerity. 
 Fortunately prose has now established itself 
 firmly as the fit medium for such plays as are not 
 avowedly poetic in theme. Some dramatic poets 
 at the beginning of the twentieth century are not 
 ready to abandon prose even when they aspire 
 to enter the realm of fantasy; and it has also^ 
 been the medium chosen by M. Maeterlinck for 
 his melodious dramatic poems, ever vague, often 
 monotonous, and frequently formless, but at 
 times rich in mystic beauty and in symbolic sug- 
 gestion. 
 
 Prose, again, is what Ibsen has used in all his 
 later social dramas, poetic and indeed almost 
 allegorical as some of them have been in inten- 
 tion. Here we have another evidence of his 
 345 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 profound artistic sense ; for the fight Ibsen wished 
 to wage prose was the best weapon,— a prose 
 rhythmic, modulated, flexible, picked clean of all 
 verbiage, and adjusting itself sinuously to the 
 thought it had to express. A prose that achieved 
 its purpose so perfectly had almost the beauty of 
 poetry; and there was a like perfection in the 
 structure of his plots, as masterly as they are 
 straightforward. 
 
 The art of the drama, so an acute American 
 critic has pointed out, is parallel to the art of the 
 great builders " in the sequence of its parts, its 
 ordered beauty, the inevitableness of its converg- 
 ing lines, its manifestation of superintending 
 thought." In the dramaturgic art, as in the archi- 
 tectural, the latest form may be only a reversion 
 to a primitive type newly adjusted with all the 
 modern improvements; and as our towering 
 steel-frame buildings are in fact only the humble 
 frame-house of our forefathers wrought in metal 
 instead of in timber, so the constructive methods 
 of Ibsen are closely akin to those of Sophocles, 
 however different the ancient play may be from 
 the modern in subject-matter. 
 
 In the effort to grasp this severity of form, the 
 playwrights of the twentieth century will be in- 
 fluenced also by the steadily increasing interest in 
 personality. The lyric, which is ever the ex- 
 pression of an individual emotion, is now far 
 346 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 more widely cultivated than any other species of 
 poetry; and in prose-fiction there is an irresistible 
 tendency toward a more careful and a more mi- 
 nute delineation of character. In the drama, an 
 intrigue of which the convolutions shall seem 
 artificial or arbitrary will be incompatible with 
 any depth of character-analysis. The interest in 
 personality is perhaps a chief cause of the insis- 
 tence upon a strict adherence to the admitted facts 
 of life, and of that relish for realism and for the 
 subtleties of psychology which may be called 
 the predominant characteristics of serious prose- 
 fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. It 
 is probably also one of the springs of that desire 
 to understand sympathetically members of other 
 classes than our own, which is likely to exert an 
 obvious influence upon the drama of the imme- 
 diate future. 
 
 If the dramatist is to respond to this interest in 
 personality, and if he is to reflect the social move- 
 ment of his own age, then he will have an added 
 reason for striving to deal boldly with his main 
 theme, avoiding all complexity of plot-mongering, 
 which is necessarily inconsistent with any sin- 
 cerity of character-drawing. He will acquaint 
 himself wrth the methods of Scribe; but he will 
 not allow himself to hold Scribe's theories too 
 exclusively. Scribe had adjusted situations so 
 adroitly, one impinging on the other, that he had 
 347 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 no need of a serious study of men and women. 
 Indeed, he had no room for anything of the sort; 
 and in his workshop, as in so many others, ma- 
 chinery had ousted human beings. Then the 
 younger Dumas, brought up in the play-factory 
 of his father, was able to make the mechanism 
 less intricate, and so to provide room for a little 
 emotion and a little humanity. At last Ibsen,^ 
 trained in the theater itself and familiar with 
 every device of French stagecraft, made his 
 profit out of all his predecessors and perfected a 
 . technic of his own, which represents that ad- 
 vanced condition of an art when the utmost in- 
 genuity is utilized to avoid artificiality and when 
 complexity is made to take on the appearance of 
 simplicity. 
 
 Thus it is that Ibsen stretches back across the 
 centuries to clasp hands with Sophocles; and a 
 comparison of the sustaining skeleton of the story 
 in ' Oedipus the King ' with that in ' Ghosts ' will 
 bring out the fundamental likeness of the Scan- 
 dinavian dramatist to the Greek,— at least in so 
 far as the building of their plots is concerned. 
 Inspired in the one case by the idea of fate and in 
 the other by the doctrine of heredity, each of 
 them worked out a theme of overwhelming im- 
 port and of weighty simplicity. Each of them in 
 his drama dealt not so much with actiop in the 
 present before the eyes of the spectator, as with 
 348 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 the appalling and inexorable consequences of 
 action in the past before the play began. In both 
 dramas these deeds done long ago are not set 
 forth in a brief exposition more or less inge- 
 niously included in the earlier scenes: they are 
 slowly revealed one by one in the course of the 
 play, and each at the moment when the revela- 
 tion is most harrowing. , 
 
 The influence of Ibsen has been felt in all the 
 theaters of civilization, and none the less keenly 
 by playwrights who would deny that they were 
 his disciples, who dislike his attitude, and who 
 disapprove of his subjects. His influence has 
 been exerted both upon the manner of thecon- 
 temporary drama and upon its matter. His 
 technic is the last word of craftsmanship; yet it 
 never flaunts its surpassing dexterity in the eyes 
 of the playgoer, for it has the saving grace that 
 its ingenuity is so abundant that it can conceal 
 itself. And Ibsen has shown how this technic 
 could be employed in the depicting of modern 
 life with its inconsistencies, its reticences, its 
 unwillingness to look into itself. His social 
 plays— tragic, some of them, deep and search- 
 ing always, yet sometimes freakish and uncon- 
 vincing—stand as a complete answer to those 
 who think that the drama is now only the idle 
 amusement of men and women who are digest- 
 ing their dinners. 
 
 349 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 An idle amusement the theater often is now, as 
 it always has been in the past; and the stage is 
 only too often occupied by empty spectacle. 
 Yet the drama in its graver aspects, the drama as 
 a contributi(^n to literature and as a form of 
 poetry, is not dead, nor is it dying. Indeed, 
 there is evidence that it is on the threshold of a 
 new youth. .-Sighs of its refreshed vitality can be 
 found by whoso cares;to keepfhis eyes open and 
 his mind free from prejudice. It bids fair to win 
 back the attention of many who have been taken 
 captive by tHe flexibility and freedom of prose- 
 fiction. It cannot do. all that the novel may ac- 
 complish; but?, it can do many things that the 
 novel is striving vainly to achieve. 
 
 Only the future can decide whether or not the 
 drama is successfully to contest the present su- 
 premacy of prose-fiction. Years may elapse be- 
 fore the play shall evict tlae novel from its appa- 
 rent primacy ; or it may never be able to resume 
 its former superiority. The two most obvious 
 characteristics of the century that has gone are 
 the spread of democracy and the growth of the 
 scientific spirit; and in the century that has just 
 begun we may dfscover that- the drama, which 
 has always been democratic of necessity, shall 
 prove also to be more satisfying than prose-fic- 
 tion to a people bred to science. Even now we 
 can see that not only the plays of Ibsen but also 
 350 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA 
 
 those of Bjornson and Sudermann, of Verga and 
 Echegaray, of Hervieu and Pinero, stand forward 
 to show that the drama can deal adequately and 
 suggestively with some of the problems of exis- 
 tence as these present themselves tumultuously 
 to-day in our seething society. 
 
 ^•v 
 
 351 
 
 
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