The Big Drum is published exactly as it was written, and as it was originally performed. At its first representation, however, the audience was reported to have been saddened by its “unhappy ending.” Pressure was forthwith put upon me to reconcile Philip and Ottoline at the finish, and at the third performance of the play the curtain fell upon the picture, violently and crudely brought about, of Ottoline in Philip’s arms.
I made the alteration against my principles and against my conscience, and yet not altogether unwillingly. For we live in depressing times; and perhaps in such times it is the first duty of a writer for the stage to make concessions to his audience and, above everything, to try to afford them a complete, if brief, distraction from the gloom which awaits them outside the theatre.
My excuse for having at the start provided an “unhappy” ending is that I was blind enough not to regard the ultimate break between Philip and Ottoline as really unhappy for either party. On the contrary, I looked upon the separation of these two people as a fortunate occurrence for them both; and I conceive it as a piece of ironic comedy which might not prove unentertaining that the falling away of Philip from his high resolves was checked by the woman he had once despised and who had at last grown to know and to despise herself.
But comedy of this order has a knack of cutting rather deeply, of ceasing, in some minds, to be comedy at all; and it may be said that this is what has happened in the present instance. Luckily it is equally true that certain matters are less painful, because less actual, in print than upon the stage. The “wicked publisher” therefore, even when bombs are dropping round him, can afford to be more independent than the theatrical manager; and for this reason I have not hesitated to ask my friend Mr. Heinemann to publish The Big Drum in its original form.[24]
What Ibsen thought of the ultimate effect of changing an ending to accord with public sentiment, these words about A Doll’s House show:
At the time when A Doll’s House was quite new, I was obliged to give my consent to an alteration of the last scene for Frau Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, who was to play the part of Nora in Berlin. At that time I had no choice. I was entirely unprotected by copyright law in Germany, and could, consequently, prevent nothing. Besides, the play in its original, uncorrupted form was accessible to the German public in a German edition which was already printed and published. With its altered ending it had only a short run. In its unchanged form it is still being played.[25]
Dumas fils was even more severe in his strictures:
If at the second performance you are ready to modify your central idea, your development or your conclusion to please the public whom the night before you were pretending to teach something fresh, you may be, perhaps, an ingenious worker in the theatre, an adroit impresario, a facile inventor; you will never be a dramatist. You can make mistakes in details of execution; you have no right to make a mistake in the logic of your play, its correlations of emotions and acts, and least of all, in their outcome.[26]
Characterization, then, should be watched carefully in its fundamentals, all changes, and especially for its logical outcome. Long ago, Diderot summed up the subject thus: