Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

III

Altho modern melodrama was developed in the totally unliterary minor playhouses of Paris more than a hundred years ago, the playgoers of France had not had to wait until the early nineteenth century or even until the early eighteenth to be consoled and reassured by a tragedy with a happy ending. It was in the first half of the seventeenth century that Corneille took over from a Spanish original the first and fieriest of his tragedies, the ‘Cid,’—the story of which leads up to one of the strongest situations in all dramatic literature. The duty is suddenly laid upon a high-strung warrior to fight a duel to the death with the father of the woman whom he loves and who loves him. Seemingly the deadly stroke of his sword has severed the lovers forever, for how could a woman wed the red-handed slayer of her father? Yet it is with this prospective wedding, abruptly brought about, that Corneille ends his play; and he was so dextrous a dramatist, so abundant in emotion and so persuasive in eloquence, that he was able to carry his audience with him, even at the cost of their intellectual honesty.

Nor did the playgoers of England have to await the importation of French melodrama in the original package before they could enjoy reassurance and consolation after being harrowed and even slightly shocked. Indeed, the Londoners had this pleasure provided for them even earlier than it had been vouchsafed to the Parisians. All students of the history of our stage are familiar with the type of play known as tragi-comedy. Its name sufficiently describes it, a name apparently first used in the prolog to a play by Plautus and revived by the Italian theorists of the theater. Dramas of this species sprang up spontaneously in Italy, in Spain and in France; and we find the form flourishing in England in the second half of the sixteenth century, altho it cannot be said to have been more popular among the English than it was among the French. Shakspere’s somber ‘Measure for Measure’ is the most immediately obvious example; and at the performance of this play the spectators were harrowed, and even more than slightly shocked, by a succession of powerful situations, only to be at last reassured and consoled by a happy ending, mechanically and unconvincingly brought about.

In the course of time tragi-comedy modified its methods and became the dramatic-romance, of which Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Philaster’ may be taken as one characteristic specimen and Shakspere’s ‘Cymbeline’ as another. Perhaps it would be more exact to say that the dramatic-romance is only an insular sub-species of sentimental tragi-comedy. Most of the best known of the dramatic-romances of Beaumont and Fletcher (or of Fletcher and Massinger) conform to the definition of tragi-comedy, as Professor Ristine has skilfully condensed this from a defence of the type made by Guarini, author of the ‘Pastor Fido’:

Tragi-comedy, far from being a discordant mixture of tragedy and comedy, is a thorough blend of such parts of each as can stand together with verisimilitude, with the result that the deaths of tragedy are reduced to the danger of death, and the whole in every respect a graduated mean between the austerity and the dignity of the one and the pleasantness and ease of the other.

This Italian definition of Renascence tragi-comedy can be transferred to modern melodrama of the more literary kind,—the ‘Silver King,’ for example, and ‘Secret Service,’ in which we find the graduated mean between austere dignity and easy pleasantness. After quoting from Guarini, Professor Ristine gave his own analysis of the elements combined in English tragi-comedy:

Love of some sort is the motive force; intrigue is rife; the darkest villainy is contrasted with the noblest and most exalted virtue. In the course of an action ... in which the characters are enmeshed in a web of disastrous complications, reverse and surprise succeed each other with lightning rapidity.... But final disaster is ingeniously averted.... Wrongs are righted, reconciliation sets in, penitent villainy is forgiven, and the happy ending made complete.

In its turn this American description of English tragi-comedy is applicable also to French melodrama of the less literary kind,—the ‘Lyons Mail’ and the ‘Two Orphans.’

It is possible to find at least one tragedy with a happy ending amid the two score plays which alone have come down to us from all the hundreds acted in the Theater of Dionysus before the assembled citizens of Athens,—probably the most intelligent body of playgoers to which any dramatist has ever been privileged to appeal. The ‘Alcestis’ of Euripides is a beautiful play, grave, inspiring and moving; yet it has been a constant puzzle to the historians of Greek literature, who have never been quite able to declare what manner of tragic drama it is, since it has one character who is frankly humorous and since it has a happy ending,—the revivification of the pathetic heroine who had given her life to save her husband and who is brought back by Hercules, after a combat with Death.