VIII
THE EVOLUTION OF SCENE-PAINTING
THE EVOLUTION OF SCENE-PAINTING
I
Only recently have students of the stage seized the full significance of the fact that dramatic literature is always conditioned by the circumstances of the special theater for which it was designed. They are at last beginning to perceive that they need to know how a play was originally represented by actors before an audience and in a theater to enable them to appreciate adequately the technical skill of the playwright who composed it. The dramatist is subdued to what he works in; and he can accomplish only that which is possible in the particular playhouse for which his pieces were destined. For the immense open air auditorium of ancient Athens, with its orchestra leveled at the foot of the curving hillside whereon thousands of spectators took their places, the dramatic poet had to select a simple story and to build massively. For the unadorned platform of the Tudor theater, with its arras pendent from the gallery above the stage, and with its restless groundlings standing in the yard, the playwright was compelled to heap up swift episodes violent with action. For the eighteenth-century playhouse, with its apron projecting far beyond the line of the curtain, the dramatist was tempted to revel in ornate eloquence and in elaborate wit. And nowadays the dramatic author utilizes skilfully all the manifold resources of the twentieth-century picture-frame stage, not only to give external reality to the several places where his story is supposed to be laid, but also to lend to these stage-sets the characteristic atmosphere demanded by his theme.
Merely literary critics, secluded in their studies, intent upon the poetry of a play and desirous of deducing its philosophy, rarely seek to visualize a performance on the stage, and they are, therefore, inclined to be disdainful of the purely theatrical conditions to which its author has had, perforce, to adjust his work. As a result they sometimes misunderstand the dramatic poet's endeavors, and they often misinterpret his intentions. On the other hand, purely theatrical critics may be inclined to pay too much attention to stage-arrangements, stage-business, and stage-settings, and even on occasion to disregard the dramatist's message and his power of creating character to consider his technic alone. And yet it can scarcely be denied that the theatrical critics are nearer to the proper method of approach than the literary critics who neglect the light which a careful consideration of stage-conditions and of stage-traditions may cast upon the masterpieces of the drama.
Since all these masterpieces of the drama were devised to be heard and to be seen rather than to be read, the great dramatic poets have always been solicitous about the visual appeal of their plays. They have ever been anxious to garnish their pieces with the utmost scenic embellishment and the utmost spectacular accompaniment of the special kind that a play of that particular type could profit by. In view of the importance of this scenic embellishment and of its influence upon the methods of the successive playwrights, there is cause for wonder that we have no satisfactory attempt to tell the history of the art of the scene-painter as this has been developed thru the long ages. The materials for this narrative are abundant, even if they still lie in confusion. Certain parts of the field have been surveyed here and there; but no substantial treatise has yet been devoted to this alluring investigation. The scholar who shall hereafter undertake the task will need a double qualification; he must master the annals of painting in Renascence Italy, and later in France and in England, and he must familiarize himself with the circumstances of the theater at the several periods when the art of the scene-painter made its successive steps in advance.
It is partly because we have no manual covering the whole field that we find so many unwarranted assertions in the studies of the scholars who confine their criticism to a single period of the development of the drama. Partly also is this due to the fact that we are each of us so accustomed to the theaters of our own century and of our own country that we find it difficult not to assume similar conditions in the theaters of other centuries and other countries. Thus the Shaksperian commentators of the early eighteenth century seem not to have doubted that the English playhouse in the days of Elizabeth was not unlike the English playhouse in the days of Anne; and as a result they cut up the plays of Shakspere into acts and into scenes, each supposed to take place in a different spot, in accord with the eighteenth-century stage practise, and absolutely without any justification from the customs of the Tudor theater. This was the result of looking back and of believing that the late sixteenth-century stage must have resembled the early eighteenth-century stage. We are now beginning to see that, in any effort to recapture the methods of the Elizabethan theater, we must first understand the customs of the medieval stage, and then look forward from that point. Of all places in the world the playhouse is, perhaps, the most conservative, and the most reluctant to relinquish anything which has proved its utility in the past and which is accepted by the public in the present; and many of the peculiarities of the Tudor theater are survivals from the medieval performances.
There are still to be found classical scholars who accept the existence of a raised stage in the theater of Dionysus at Athens, and even of painted scenery such as we moderns know; and they find support in the assertion of Aristotle that among the improvements due to Sophocles was the introduction of "scenery." But what did the Greek word in the text of Aristotle which is rendered into English as "scenery" really mean? At least, what did it connote to an Athenian? Something very different, we may be sure, from what the term "scenery" connotes to us. Certainly, the physical conditions of the stageless Attic theater precluded the possibilities of painted scenes such as we are now familiar with. That there were no methods of representing realistically, or even summarily, the locality where the action is taking place is proved by the detailed descriptions of these localities which the dramatic poet was careful to put into the mouths of his characters whenever he wished the audience to visualize the appropriate background of the action. We may be assured that the dramatists would never have wasted time in describing what the spectators had before their eyes. Ibsen and Rostand and d'Annunzio are poets, each in his own fashion, but their plays are devoid of all descriptions of the special locality where the action passes—that task has been spared them by the labors of the modern scene-painter working upon their specific directions.
As there was no scenery in the Greek theater so there was little or none in the Roman. M. Camille Saint-Saëns once suggested that certain airy scaffoldings in the Pompeian wall-paintings were perhaps derived from scenic accessories. But this seems unlikely enough; and the surviving Latin playhouses have a wide and shallow stage closed in by a sumptuous architectural background, suggesting the front of a palace with three portals, often conveniently utilized as the entrances to the separate dwellings of the several characters. Again, we may infer the absence of scenery from the elaboration with which Plautus, for one, localizes the habitations of his leading characters. In Rome, as in Athens, some kind of a summary indication of locality, some easily understood symbol, may have been employed; but of scene-painting, as we moderns know the art, there is not a trace.