Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 105The Modern Drama
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The revival of the drama is a characteristic feature of the latter part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The plays of the Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), affected England profoundly in the last decade of the nineteenth century and proved an impetus to a new dramatic movement, seen in the work of men like Shaw.
The great literary school of dramatists passed away soon after the death of Shakespeare. While it is true that the writing of plays has been practically continuous since the time of the Restoration, yet for more than two hundred years after that event, the history of the drama has had little memorable work to record. There were two brief interesting comic periods: (1) the period of Congreve at the close of the seventeenth century, and (2) of Goldsmith and Sheridan nearly a hundred years later. The literary plays of the Victorians,—Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne,—were lacking in dramatic essentials.
The modern drama has accomplished certain definite results. Pinero's work is typical of vast improvement in technique. Shaw is noted for his power of "investing modern conversation with vivacity and point." J.M. Synge has won distinction for presenting the great elemental forces that underlie the actions of primitive human beings. The playwrights are making the drama perform some of the functions that have been filled by the novel. The modern drama is also wrestling with the problem of combining literary form, poetic spirit, and good dramatic action. Some of the modern plays deal with unpleasant subjects, and some of the least worthy are immoral in their tendencies. Such plays will be forgotten, for the Anglo-Saxon race has never yet immortalized an unwholesome drama. Fortunately, however, the influence of a large proportion of the plays is pure and wholesome. In this class may be included the dramas of the Irish school and of Barrie, the majority by Galsworthy, and a number by Phillips and Shaw.
Jones and Pinero.—The work of Henry Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero marks the advance of the English drama from artificiality and narrowness of scope toward a wider, closer relation to life. Henry Arthur Jones, both a playwright and a critic, was born in Grandborough, Buckinghamshire, in 1851. Contemporary English life is the subject of his numerous plays. The Manoeuvers of Jane (1898) and _Mrs. Dane's Defence (1900), are among his best works.
[Illustration: HENRY ARTHUR JONES.]
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, born in 1855 in London, began his career as an actor.
[Illustration: ARTHUR WING PINERO.]
His real ambition, however, was to write for the stage. More than forty works, including farces, comedies of sentiment, and serious dramas of English life, attest his zeal as a dramatist. Among his most successful farces are The Magistrate (1885), The School Mistress (1886), and The Amazons (1893). Clever invention of absurd situations and success in starting infectious laughter are the prime qualities of these plays.
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) is by most critics considered Pinero's masterpiece. The failure of a character to regain respectability once forfeited supplies the nucleus for the dramatic situations. Excellent in craftsmanship as it is disagreeable in theme, this play contains no superfluous word to retard the action or mar the technical economy. Adolphus William Ward says: "With The Second Mrs. Tanqueray the English acted drama ceased to be a merely insular product, and took rank in the literature of Europe. Here was a play which, whatever its faults, was …an epoch-marking play."
One great service of Pinero and Jones to the twentieth-century drama has been excellent craftsmanship. Their technical skill may be specifically noted in the naturalness of the dialogues, in the movement of the characters about the stage, in the performance of some acts apparently trivial but really significant, and in the substitution of devices to take the place of the old soliloquies and "asides." Of the two, Pinero is the better craftsman, since Jones, in his endeavor to paint a moral, sometimes weakens his dramatic effect.
George Bernard Shaw.—Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1856. He was willful and took "refuge in idleness" at school. His education consisted mainly in studying music with his talented mother, in haunting picture galleries, and in wide reading. At the age of twenty, he went to London and began his literary career. He was at various times a journalist, a critic of art, music, and the drama, a lecturer, a novelist, and a playwright. Shaw describes himself as a man "up to the chin in the life of his times." He is a vegetarian, an anti-vivisectionist, an advocate for woman's suffrage, and a socialist.
[Illustration: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW.]
Arms and the Man, Candida, You Never Can Tell, and The Man of Destiny, published (1898) in the second volume of Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant; and The Devil's Disciple, published (1900) in Three Plays for Puritans, are among his best dramas. With their stage directions and descriptions, they are as delightful to read as novels. Of these plays, Candida is first in character drawing and human interest. The dramatic action is wholly within the mental states of the three chief actors, but the situations are made intense through a succession of unique, absorbing, entertaining, and well-developed conversations.
Shaw is more destructive than constructive in his philosophy as expressed in his plays; and he criticizes so many of the institutions held sacred by society that people have refused to accept him seriously, even when he has written expository prefaces to his dramas. In Arms and the Man, he satirizes the romantic admiration for the soldier's calling; in The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), he attacks the professional man; in Widowers' Houses (1898), he assails the rich property holder with his high rents on poor people's houses: and in Man and Superman (1903), he dissects love and home until the sentiment is entirely taken out of them.
Shaw's chief object is to place before his audience facts, reasons, and logical conclusions. He will not tolerate romantic emotions or sentimentalism, which he ridicules with a reckless audacity, a literal incisiveness, and a satiric wit that none of his contemporaries can excel. His chief claim to his present important position among playwrights is based on his originality and fearlessness of thought, the unfailing sprightliness of his conversation, the infectious spirit of raillery in his comedies, and his mastery of the requirements of the modern stage.
J.M. Barrie.—With the successful stage production of The Little Minister (1897), Barrie passed from novelist to playwright. The qualities of humor, fancy, and quaint characterization, which were such a charm in his novels, reappear in his plays.
[Illustration: JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE.]
The Admirable Crichton, produced in 1903, is one of Barrie's most successful comedies. He displays skill and humor in handling the absurd situation of a peer's family wrecked on a desert island, where the butler, as the most resourceful member of the party, takes command. In Peter Pan (1904), the dramatization of the novel, The Little White Bird, care-free, prankish Peter Pan visits three children in their sleep and teaches them to fly away with him. He carries them to the little people of the fairy world, to the pirate ship, to other scenes dear to children's hearts, and finally to his home in the tree tops. The play is a mixture of fancy, symbolism, and realism. These are woven into a bright phantasy by an imagination that is near to childhood and has not lost its morning's brightness.
What Every Woman Knows (produced in 1908) shows Barrie's dramatic art at its height. He knows how to introduce variety and to give his characters an opportunity to reveal themselves. Every word, every movement of the heroine, Maggie Shand, adds to the unfolding of a fascinating personality. A period of intensely dramatic action may be followed by a comparative pause, such as occurs when the audience sees Maggie's husband slowly realize her cleverness and helpfulness, —qualities that had been long apparent to every one else.
Barrie shows the ability to present dramatically situations that are emotionally appealing or delightfully humorous. His plays exhibit admirably the deep feelings, the momentary moods, the resourcefulness, or the peculiar whimsicalities of men and women.
John Galsworthy.—As a means of presenting social problems, Galsworthy utilizes the drama even more than the novel. Faulty prison systems, discords between labor and capital, discrepancies between law and justice, are some of the themes he chooses to dramatize. The Silver Box (1906) ironically interprets Justice as blind rather than impartial. The poor man is often punished while the more fortunate man goes free. Strife (1909), in some respects the most powerful of his plays, illustrates the clash between capital and labor. In The Eldest Son (1912), the conflict is between two social orders. Justice (1910), which secured reforms in the English prison system, shows how a young man is affected by an inflexible but legal punishment; and how such a method fails to assist him humanely to a better manhood, but drives him to lower and lower depths.
In Joy (1907), a delightful play, Galsworthy momentarily relinquishes social problems for a drama of more personal emotion. In the mystical, poetical composition, The Little Dream (1911), he presents an allegory of the maiden in the Alps, dreaming first of the simple mountain life and then of the life in cities. With its spiritual note and delicate fancy, The Little Dream turns a golden key on the ideal world beyond the strife and gloom dramatized in the sociological plays.
Galsworthy has good stagecraft. His characterization is distinct and consistent. His plays are simple in construction and direct in movement. He strictly avoids rhetorical and theatrical effects, but his dramatic economies often sacrifice all charm and aesthetic appeal. His gray world leaves no hope save the desperate one that conditions so grim may shame and spur society to reform.
Stephen Phillips.—This dramatist and poet was born at Somerton, near Oxford, in 1864. The boy was sent to Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon, to attend school. He entered Cambridge, but at the end of his first term he left the university to join a company of Shakespearean players. His six years with them initiated him into the technique of stagecraft, which he later applied in the writing of his poetic dramas.
[Illustration: STEPHEN PHILLIPS.]
Before producing the plays for which he is known, he wrote some narrative and lyric verse. Marpessa (1890), a blank verse poem, is a beautiful treatment of the old Greek myth, in which Apollo, the god, and Idas, the mortal, woo Marpessa. Marlowe might have written the lines in which Apollo promises to take her to a home above the world, where movement is ecstasy and repose is thrilling. In some of his non-dramatic poems, Christ in Hades (1896), Cities of Hell (1907), and The New Inferno (1896), Phillips shows how the subject of life and punishment after death attracts him.
With the appearance of his Paolo and Francesca in 1899, the poetic drama seemed phoenix-like to arise from its ashes. Tennyson and Browning had failed to write successful plays. In fact, since the death of Dryden, poetry and drama had seemed to be afraid to approach each other. Phillips effected at least a temporary union. His several plays have distinctly dramatic qualities and many passages of poetic beauty. From both a dramatic and a poetic point of view, Paolo and Francesca is Phillips's best play. Its dramatic values lie chiefly in its power to create and sustain a sense of something definitely progressing toward a certain point. The poetic elements of the play consist in the beauty of atmosphere and the charm of the lines. Giovanni Malatesta, the ugly tyrant of Rimini, being at war when his marriage draws near, sends his young brother Paolo to escort Francesca to Rimini. On the journey Paolo and Francesca fall in love with each other. When Giovanni discovers this, his jealous hand slays them. To such a tragic climax, Phillips drives steadily onward from the first scene, thus focusing the interest on a concrete dramatic situation.
Herod (1900) is a drama of ambition versus love. Herod, the great historic king of the Jews, though passionately in love with his wife Mariamne, sacrifices her brother Aristobulus to his suspicions, fearing that this young prince, the last of the Maccabees, may supplant him on the throne. This sacrifice, prompted by evil counselors, results in a train of tragic episodes, including Mariamne's death and Herod's madness. The lines in which Herod speaks of thinking in gold and dreaming in silver call to mind the hyperbole and music of Marlowe's mighty line.
Ulysses (1902), more of a panorama than a play, is founded on the Homeric story. Its scenes are laid in Olympus, in Hades, on Calypso's isle, and finally in Ithaca. Calypso tries to retain Ulysses upon her isle, beautiful—
"With sward of parsley and of violet And poplars shimmering in a silvery dream."[15]
He struggles against her enchantment, returns home, finds his wife surrounded by her suitors, joins in their bow-drawing contest, and, in a most exciting and dramatic scene, surpasses all rivals and claims his faithful, beautiful Penelope.
The plays of Phillips not infrequently lack that clinching power that stretches the interest taut. Many scenes are admirably spectacular, suggestive of richly decorated tapestries, which hang separately in spacious rooms; but the plays need more forceful dramatic action, moving through changes to a climax. Phillips's diction, though sometimes rhetorical, is also often ornately beautiful and highly poetical. We feel that even in his plays, he is greater as a poet than as a dramatist.