Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

II

Horace’s mistake was in his adventuring himself beyond the boundaries of his knowledge; and the blunder of the Renascence critics was caused by their scornful disregard of the contemporary types of drama in their own time, artless as these might be. But nowadays the theater is flourishing and every man has frequent opportunity to see worthy plays worthily performed and to acquaint himself with the immediate effect of a worthy performance upon the spectators. No apology is acceptable for the undramatic criticism which we discover in not a few of the learned treatises which profess to expound and explain the masterpieces of the mighty dramatists who lived in Periclean Athens and in Elizabethan England. Some of the scholars, who discuss Sophocles and Shakspere, deal with these expert playwrights as if their pieces had been composed not to be seen in swift action in the theater but to be read at leisure in the library. In their eyes ‘Œdipus the King’ and ‘Othello’ are only dramatic poems, and not poetic dramas. They study the printed page under the microscope; and they make no effort to recapture the sound of the spoken word or to visualize the illustrative action.

The undramatic critic of this type has no apprehension of the principles of playmaking, as these are set forth by Aristotle and by Lessing, by Sarcey and by Brunetière. He has made no effort to keep abreast of the “state of the art” of dramatic criticism. He seems never to have considered the triple influence exerted on the form and on the content of a play by the theater for which it was composed, by the actors for whom its characters were intended or by the audience for whose pleasure it was written. It is only occasionally that we have proffered to us a book like the late Professor Goodell’s illuminating analysis of ‘Athenian Tragedy,’ in which we are agreeably surprized to find a Greek scholar elucidating the masterpieces of the Greek drama by the aid of Brunetière’s ‘Law of the Drama’ and Archer’s ‘Playmaking.’ Professor Goodell firmly grasped the fact that the art of the drama is unchanging, no matter how various its manifestations may be in different centuries and in different countries. And he was therefore able to cast light upon the plays of the past by his observation of the plays of the present.

Less satisfactory is an almost contemporary volume on ‘Greek Tragedy,’ which covers the same ground. Altho Professor Norwood has not found his profit in Brunetière or Archer, he makes a valiant effort to visualize actual performance in the Theater of Dionysus more than twenty centuries ago. He deals with Greek plays as poetic dramas and not merely as dramatic poems. But he has fallen victim to the wiles of the late Professor Verrall, one of the most ingenious of undramatic critics; and in his discussion of ‘Agamemnon’ of Æschylus he gives Verrall credit for having solved a series of difficulties. Professor Norwood even goes so far as to declare that “Verrall’s theory should probably be accepted.”

I doubt if a single one of the alleged difficulties even occurred to any of the spectators present at the first performance of the play. The action of ‘Agamemnon’ is swift, irresistible, inevitable; and the audience was allowed no time for cavil. As the story unrolled itself in the theater it was convincing; and if any doubt arose in the mind of any spectator as to anything that had occurred, it could arise only after he had left the theater; and then it was too late. As a play, performed by actors, in a theater, before an audience, ‘Agamemnon’ triumphs. Only when it is considered in the study do we perceive any “difficulties.” In fact, when so considered one difficulty is likely to strike many readers; and it repays consideration.

The play begins with a long monolog from a watchman of the roof of Agamemnon’s palace. The king is at the siege of Troy; and when the beleaguered city is taken a series of beacons on the intervening hills will be lighted, one after another, to convey the glad news. Suddenly the watchman sees the distant flame, the wireless message that Troy has fallen and that the monarch is free to return home. In real life it would be two or three weeks before Agamemnon would arrive; yet in the play, before it is half over, the king comes in; he enters his palace, where he is done to death by his guilty wife and her paramour, Ægisthus. The exigencies of the two hours’ traffic of the stage often compel a playwright to telescope time; but no other dramatist has ever dared so violent a compression as this.

And this is how Verrall solves the difficulty “with lucidity, skill and brilliance,” so Professor Norwood tells us. The story of the series of beacons is a lie concocted by the wife and her lover. There is only one beacon, which Ægisthus lights when he discovers the landing of Agamemnon; it is to warn his accomplice that she may make ready to murder her husband. And as Agamemnon is actually on shore when this single beacon flames up, he is able to arrive in the middle of the play. If we accept this solution of the difficulty we are compelled to believe that Æschylus wrote a play, instantly accepted as a masterpiece, which had to wait for more than two thousand years for a British scholar to explain away an impossibility. This explanation is undoubtedly lucid and skilful and brilliant; but none the less is it a specimen of undramatic criticism. It could never have been put forward by anyone who had an elementary knowledge of the principles of playmaking.

A dramatist never tells lies to his audience; and the audience always accepts the statements of his characters as true—unless he himself takes care to suggest that a given statement is false. The play has to be taken at its face value. The characters talk on purpose to convey all needful information to the spectators. Æschylus may make the queen lie to the king, but when she does this the audience is aware of the truth or surmises it. The dramatist never hesitates to let his characters deceive one another; but if he knows his business he does not deceive the spectators. In real life Agamemnon could not arrive for a fortnight after Troy had fallen; but the Athenian audience could not wait in their seats two weeks, so Æschylus frankly brings on Agamemnon; and the spectators were glad to behold him, asking no inconvenient questions, because they were eager to see what would happen to him. It might be a contradiction of the fact, but it was not a departure from the truth, since the king would assuredly come home sooner or later. Everyone familiar with Sarcey’s discussion of the conventions of the drama is aware that the spectators in the theater are never sticklers for fact; they are willing to accept a contradiction of fact, if that contradiction is for their own profit, as it was in this case. And they accept it unthinkingly; and it is only when they hold the play in their hands to pick it to pieces that they discover any “difficulty.”