Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

As criticism has to find its material in the work of the creators it is not surprizing that the masters of the craft have appeared during periods of abundant creation or shortly thereafter. Aristotle was not separated by many years from Sophocles and Euripides. Boileau was the most intimate friend of Molière; and Sainte-Beuve was the contemporary of Hugo and Balzac, altho he did not greatly care for either of them. Coleridge lived in an epoch of ample productivity; and so did Matthew Arnold. Lessing was stimulated by Voltaire and Diderot; and he prepared the way for Goethe and Schiller. And these are only a few of the critics who have held their own by the side of the creators.

But when the creative impulse relaxes, when there is no longer a succession of masterpieces demanding appreciation, then is it that the criticasters have their turn, the pigmies who promulgate edicts for those who are still striving to attain the twin summits of Parnassus. It was not in the rich abundance of Athens but in the thin sterility of Alexandria that the laws of poetry were codified with Draconian severity. It was not under Louis XIV but under Napoleon, when French literature was dying of inanition, that Népomucène Lemercier declared the twenty-five rules which the writer of tragedy must obey and the twenty-two to which the writer of comedy must conform.

There was no living Latin drama when Horace penned his epistle on poetry, and the theaters of Rome were given over to unliterary spectacle. It is unlikely that Horace had ever had occasion to see a worthy play worthily acted. No doubt he had read the works of the great Greeks, but that could not disclose to him the full emotional force of their dramas revealed only by actual performance. To judge a play by reading it is like judging a picture by a photograph. The greater the drama the more completely does it put forth its power when it is made to live by the actor in the theater and before the audience. As a result of Horace’s lack of experience as a spectator, what he has to say about the principles of playmaking has little validity. He is not exercising his own keen critical faculty; he is merely echoing the opinions of Alexandrian criticasters. His counsel to aspiring dramatists was not practical; it was academic in the worst sense of the word. In fact, Horace was only going through the motions of giving advice, since there were no aspiring dramatists in Rome, as there were then no stages on which a play could be acted and no company of actors to perform it.

A comparison of the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle with the ‘Art of Poetry’ of Horace is as amusing as it is profitable. Aristotle is the earliest and the shrewdest of dramatic critics. Horace had no intimacy with the theater. Horace is sketching from a lay-figure in a studio, whereas Aristotle is drawing from the living model in the open air. When Aristotle discusses the effect of an episode upon an audience, we can be sure that he himself was once one of that audience, and that his memory had retained the intonations and the gestures of the actors as well as the unformulated response of the spectators to the emotional appeal of the plot. Aristotle is as insistent in taking the audience in account as Sarcey was; and his dramatic criticism is as technical as Sarcey’s. Horace had never thrilled to a situation as it slowly unfolded itself in the theater; and therefore what he has to say about the principles of playmaking is more or less beside the mark. It is hit or miss; it may be right or it may be wrong; it is supported by no understanding of dramaturgy; it is undramatic criticism.

The theories which Horace took over second-hand from the Alexandrian criticasters, the supersubtle Italians of the Renascence took third-hand from him. They suffered, as Horace had suffered, from the lack of a living dramatic literature in their own tongue. In the pride of their newfound learning they looked with contempt upon the unliterary types of drama then popular, the Sacred Representations and the Comedy-of-Masks. They never suspected that in these artless exhibitions there were the germs out of which a noble dramatic literature might be evolved. They could not foresee that the Elizabethans would develop their tragedy from the English Mystery-Plays, which were no cruder than the Italian Sacred Representations, and that in the ‘Étourdi’ Molière would lift into literature the loose and lively Comedy-of-Masks. And because they refused to do what Shakspere and Molière were to do, they left Italy barren of drama for centuries. The most of the dramatic poems which are catalogued in the histories of Italian literature were unacted and unactable,—altho now and again one or another did achieve performance by amateurs before an audience of dilettants.

So it is that the host of theorists of the theater in Renascence Italy are undramatic critics, not because they lacked acuteness, but because they knew nothing of the actual theater, the sole region where drama can live, move and have its being. Only infrequently does one of them,—Castelvetro, for example,—venture to give a thought to the audience for whose delight a drama ought to be prepared. As they had no acquaintance with any stage, except the sporadic platform of the strolling acrobat-comedians whom they despised, they had no concrete knowledge as a foundation for their abstract speculation. They were working in a vacuum. And it is small wonder that they complicated their concepts until they had elaborated the Classicist doctrines of the Three Unities and of the total separation of Comedy from Tragedy. The Classicist code was so hampering to the free expansion of the drama that Corneille cried out against its rigor, that Lope de Vega paid it lip-service but disregarded it unhesitatingly, and that Shakspere never gave it a thought—excepting only when he was writing his last play, the ‘Tempest.’

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.”