Page images
PDF
EPUB

Art. 5.-DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION AND THE NEED FOR A NEW TECHNIQUE.

1. Shakespearean Tragedy. By Andrew Bradley. London: Macmillan, 1904.

2. Play-making; a manual of Craftmanship. By William Archer. London: Chapman and Hall, 1912.

3. A Study of the Drama.

London: Longmans, 1910.

By Brander Matthews.

London: Constable,

4. Plays. By G. Bernard Shaw.

1903-11.

5. Plays. By John Galsworthy. Two vols. London: Duckworth, 1909, 1912.

6. Two Plays by Tchekhof.

Translated by George

Calderon. London: Grant Richards, 1912.

7. Dramatic Works. By St John Hankin. Three vols. London: Martin Secker, 1912.

It is as well to begin with a general principle. Dramatic construction is a wide and general term, which includes various processes by means of which playwrights have been enabled to seize and retain the attention of their audiences; or, let us rather say, have been able to create those works of art which are inspired by high ideals. Our subject is, in other words, the grammar of the dramatic art. If it be true, as it is, that grammar follows language, that the literature is first created and that it is then dissected by the skill of competent critics, it is equally true that the drama must precede that kind of analysis of its methods and procedure which is involved in an enquiry about dramatic construction. Even in the case of that consummate critic of drama, Aristotle, the whole enquiry in the Poetics' is based on such drama as Aristotle was aware of, namely, the dramatic efforts of the great tragedians, Eschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Unless these had exhibited their plays to the quick-witted Athenian audiences, and had received their meed of encouragement, or suffered their censure, there would have been no Aristotle's 'Poetics'; and if there had been no Aristotle's Poetics,' there would assuredly not have been Horace's 'Ars Poetica,' still less the critical dogmas of Boileau and the whole apparatus of French classicism. This, therefore, is the first principle that must be laid

down. Art is what the great artists have created. Or, to state the principle together with a damaging deduction: Art is created by great people and subsequently is-dissected by small ones. Put in the second form, the maxim, of course, is not scientifically demonstrable; for there have been critics, as, for instance, Aristotle, as great as the artists whom they criticised. Nevertheless, it remains and must remain true that all the various forms which art assumes, and which the drama also assumes as one of the arts, are due to the inventive skill and to the experiments of great artists, who, for the most part, know nothing of rules, who carry out their experiments without any conscious regard for the laws of the art they are practising, who learn in the actual school of experience what is or is not effective on the stage; and-which is an important point-have the best possible right to try any and every experiment which, in their opinion, comes within the limits of their art.

The consequences of a principle like this can be drawn out to any length. I will confine myself to only one. The professors who reduce art to rules are, over and over again in the course of history, put to confusion by some fresh and original artist, who attacks the problem in creative fashion, and wins his success in his own way, Take the history of the celebrated 'three unities' of the stage the unity of time, the unity of place, and the unity of action. These were the inventions of the grammarians, so to speak, and Corneille felt that he had to square his dramatic procedure with them, because for years they had been accepted as unavoidable signs and guideposts. But Shakespeare did not care at all about unities. He was very careful in his own dramatic construction, at all events in the best and highest of his dramas; but he invented his technique as he went along. To him the professorial dogmas were so much waste paper. He may or may not have known what was written down as the necessary axioms of the dramatic art. But he had his own business to do in the theatrical world of England in the 16th and 17th centuries, and he did it in his own way.

If we apply the same moral to our existing drama, we shall see the importance of the principle with which I started. For years past the well-written, well-constructed Vol. 219.-No. 436.

G

play, 'la pièce bien faite,' has been an object of theatrical reverence, ever since Scribe wrote plays and Sarcey wrote criticisms. The necessity for dramatic construction, acknowledged by all practisers of the art, has sometimes been pursued even to the exclusion or supersession of real and constructive ideas. We have had an admirable framework, but often we have not had anything to put into it. Our most modern dramatists, on the other hand, do not seem to care very much about dramatic construction. They desire, above all, a drama of ideas; and in the second place they desire a psychological drama, a study of character, in order to illustrate or carry out ideas. But the form in which these things are to be put does not intimately or exclusively concern them. So that, if you contrast the extremes, you can have this kind of antithesis in the existing drama of the day: on the one hand, wellmade plays, often without ideas; and, on the other hand, ideas often without dramatic construction.

In the present study I have to ask in what sense dramatic construction is valuable and necessary, and whether there is a necessity for a new technique. But, throughout, our guiding principle must be that, as Art is made by the great artists, so Drama is made by the great dramatists, and that we, who come after the dramas have been made, as critical grammarians, so to speak, must perforce wait, suspend our judgment, be content to take a lower place, because dramatic wisdom, like other forms of sophia, is justified of all her children. Art, being organic and vital, never pauses, any more than life does. Having matured and organised one form, it fertilises another. It is always pushing on, feeling its way to new forms, in virtue of its original impulse of growth.

Definitions are dull things, and it does not much matter, at the present stage, how we define Drama. Prof. Brander Matthews defined it, I believe, as 'Life presented in action.' Perhaps that is hardly wide enough, if we use the word 'action' in the ordinary sense; for, if we are to cover some modern specimens, we must find room within our definition for some such conception as 'the representation and discussion of ideas,' and 'the interaction of characters by means of talk.' Our immediate object, however, is not to define Drama, but to

understand the conditions under which the dramatic artist works. He is the author of a very special kind of work; and it is special just because the dramatist has to remember the environment, the conditions, the circumstances which surround and limit his artistic industry. There are at least four limiting conditions. Firstly, there is the structure of the theatre. Next, there is the fact that the dramatist has to work through living personages, namely, actors and actresses. Then, thirdly, there is the audience, and the public taste. And, lastly, there are the technical possibilities of the art.

The dramatic author is limited, we say, by his theatre. Take the theatre in Greek times-a huge semicircle, exposed to the air, an enormous distance between the speaker on the stage and his audience, a raised platform for the principal characters, below which, in a semicircle, is grouped the Chorus. Now it is clear that under conditions of this kind we must help the actor, to begin with. If he is doing a big, tragic part, he must be made to look conspicuous and fine. He must have on the tragic cothurnus. He must have some means of getting his voice to the furthest confines of the theatre. The mask which he wears must have some arrangement for facilitating speech. It follows, also, that in a great auditorium like this, with all its advantages, there is at least this drawback, that only the large, broad, simple gestures, and only the large, broad, simple emotions, can possibly reach the main body of spectators. You can have no particular refinement of acting. Everything must be wide and simple, majestic, even colossal. And yet it is wonderful how much of subtle psychology the Greek dramatists managed to get into their characters, however little some of these subtleties may have appealed to their immediate audiences.

For the most part, however, you observe that the conditions of the theatre in Greek times had a very powerful influence on the nature of the drama and of the acting. Very likely, if the audience had not known the stories which the Greek tragedians illustrated, so that there was no necessity for scènes à faire, they might have been at a positive disadvantage. But they did know them. They were part of the myths of Greece: so that when Edipus, or Agamemnon, or Antigone, or

Heracles was represented on the stage, at all events the large body of the spectators were quite aware of the general outlines of the story which was to be presented for their hearing. How different are the conditions if we consider Molière's time! Molière and his troupe acted in a tennis-court. Or take the Elizabethan stage. Here you have an inner and an outer stage; and the outer stage, with its 'apron,' comes right into the audience. It is a platform stage, on which some of the exquisites of the time were allowed to sit and show their cleverness in manipulating their pipe-smoke, and sometimes to interfere with the action. If you have a platform stage, you will have to come down and deliver orations before the people; and, truly enough, we find in the Elizabethan drama great speeches, oratorical exercises, such as the conditions inevitably demand. Think, again, how different is our picture stage. It is separated from the audience, both by its structure and by its rows of footlights. It is kept apart, and we look upon it as a picture. There is not the same room for declamation. That belongs to the platform stage. We cannot bear such long speeches; and, as Ibsen and others have taught us, we can do perfectly well, under the modern conditions of a theatre, without soliloquies, which were found so necessary by an earlier generation. Or take one curious difference, due to the conditions of the stage, and apparently to nothing else. In an Elizabethan drama we have a turning-point, and then the play ends quietly, with some general reflections. Why? Because in the absence of a curtain, Shakespeare and his fellow-workers had to get their actors off the stage. But in the modern theatre the curtain drops on a situation. There is no necessity to get the actors off the stage. The curtain coming down shuts the picture off; and therefore we end, as it were, with the climax. Many other reflections might be made on the effects which the structure of a theatre has on the kind of drama produced within it. But enough has been said to show that the theatre itself is one of the limiting conditions which the dramatic author has to recognise and accept.

The second of the limiting conditions under which dramatic work takes place is the influence of the actors, the interpreters. An author is necessarily limited by his

« PreviousContinue »