That is, as has been complained a hundred times before and since, the opera and the spectacular show drove the legitimate drama from the stage.
The theatre, indeed, is not dead: it has continued to live and to flourish, and is furnishing entertainment to the public to-day, as it did two hundred—nay, two thousand—years ago. The theatre, as an institution, has a life of its own, whose history is recorded in innumerable volumes. Playhouses have multiplied in London, in the provinces, in all English-speaking lands. The callings of the actor and the playwright have given occupation to many, and rich rewards to not a few. Scholars, critics, and literary men are apt to look at the drama as if it were simply a department of literature. In reading a play, we should remember that we are taking the author at a disadvantage. It is not meant to be read, but to be acted. It is not mere literature: it is both more and less than literature. The art of the theatre is a composite art, requiring the help of the scene-painter, the costumer, the manager, the stage-carpenter, sometimes of the musician and dancer, nowadays of the electrician; and always and above all demanding the interpretation of the actor. It is not addressed to the understanding exclusively, but likewise to the eye and the ear. It is a show, as well as a piece of writing. The drama can subsist without any dialogue at all, as in the pantomime; or with the dialogue reduced to its lowest terms, as in the Italian commedie a soggetto, where the actors improvised the lines. “The skeleton of every play is a pantomime,” says Professor Brander Matthews, who reminds us that not only buffoonery and acrobatic performances may be carried on silently by stock characters like Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Punchinello; but a story of a more pretentious kind may be enacted entirely by gesture and dumb show, as in the French pantomime play “L’Enfant Prodigue.” A good dramatist includes a good playwright, one who can invent striking situations, telling climaxes, tableaux, ensemble scenes, spectacular and histrionic effects, coups de théâtre. These things may seem to the literary student the merely mechanical or technical parts of the art. Yet, without them, a play will be amateurish, and no really successful dramatist has ever been lacking in this kind of skill.
Still, although stage presentation, the mise en scène, is the touchstone of a play as play, it is of course quite possible to read a play with pleasure. It is even better to read it than to see it badly acted, just as one would rather have no pictures in a novel than such pictures as disturb one’s ideas of the characters. A musical adept can take pleasure in reading the score of an opera, though he would rather hear it performed. This is not to say that a play depends for its effect upon actual performance in anywhere near the same degree as a musical composition; for written speech is a far more definite language than musical notation. I use the latter only as an imperfect illustration.
This professional quality has been much insisted on by practical playwrights, who are properly contemptuous of closet drama. But just what is a closet drama? Let it be defined provisionally as a piece meant to be read and not acted. Yet a play’s chances for representation depend partly on the condition of the theatre and the demands of the public. Mr. Yeats, for example, thinks that a play of any poetic or spiritual depth has no chance to-day in a big London theatre, with an audience living on the surface of life; and he advises that such plays be tried in small suburban or country playhouses before audiences of scholars and simple, unspoiled folk. To the English public, with its desire for strong action and variety, Racine’s tragedies are nothing but closet dramas; and yet they are played constantly and with applause in the French theatre. In the eighteenth century, when the English stage still maintained a literary tradition,—though it had lost all literary vitality,—the rankest sort of closet dramas were frequently put on and listened to respectfully. No manager now would venture to mount such a thing as “Cato” or “Sophonisba” or “The Castle Spectre.” The modern public will scarcely endure sheer poetry, or long descriptive and reflective tirades even in Shakespeare. Such passages have to be cut in the acting versions. The Elizabethan craving for drama was such that everything was tried, though some things, when brought to the test of action, proved failures. Ben Jonson’s heavy tragedies, “Catiline” and “Sejanus,” failed on the stage; and Daniel’s “Cleopatra” never got so far as the stage, a rare example of an Elizabethan closet drama. Very likely, modern literary plays like “Philip Van Artevelde” and Tennyson’s “Queen Mary” might have succeeded in the seventeenth century. For the audiences of those days were omnivorous. They hungered for sensation, but they enjoyed as well fine poetry, noble declamation, philosophy, sweet singing, and the clown with his funny business, all in close neighborhood. They cared more for quantity of life than for delicate art. Their art, indeed, was in some ways quite artless, and the drama had not yet purged itself of lyric, epic, and didactic elements, nor attained a purely dramatic type. Since then, the French, whose ideal is not so much fulness of life as perfection of form, have taught English playwrights many lessons. Brunetière, speaking of the gradual evolution and differentiation of literary kinds (genres), says that Shakespeare’s theatre, as theatre, exhibits the art of drama in its infancy.
Perhaps, then, no hard and fast line can be drawn between an acting drama and a closet play. It is largely a matter of contemporary taste. “Cato,” we know, made a prodigious hit. Coleridge’s “Remorse,” a closet drama if there ever was one, and a very rubbishy affair at that, was put on by Sheridan, though with many misgivings, and lasted twenty nights, a good run for those days. No audience now would stand it an hour. And yet we have seen Sir Henry Irving forcing Tennyson’s dramatic poems into a temporary succès d’estime. “Samson Agonistes” is a closet play, without question; but is “The Cenci”? Shelley wanted it played, and had selected Miss O’Niel for the rôle of Beatrice. But it never got itself played till 1889, when it was given before the Shelley Society at South Kensington. The picked audience applauded it, just as an academic audience will applaud a rehearsal of the “Antigone” in the original Greek; but the dramatic critics sent down by the London newspapers to report the performance were unconvinced.
Let it be granted, then, that the question in the case of any given play is a question of more or less. Still, the difference between our modern literary drama, as a whole, and the Elizabethan drama,—which was also literary,—as a whole, I take to be this: that in our time literature has lost touch with the stage. In the seventeenth century, the poets wrote for the theatre. They knew that their plays would be played. In the nineteenth century, English poets who adopted the dramatic framework did not write for the theatre. They did not expect their pieces to be played, and they addressed themselves consciously to the reader. When one of them had the luck to get upon the boards, it was an exception, and the manager generally lost money by it. Thus, in the late thirties and early forties, in one of those efforts to “elevate the stage,” which recur with comic persistence in our dramatic annals, Macready rallied the literati to his aid and presented, among other things, Taylor’s “Philip Van Artevelde,” Talfourd’s “Ion,” Bulwer’s “Richelieu” and “The Lady of Lyons,” and Browning’s “Stafford” and “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.” The only titles on this list that secured a permanent foothold on the repertoire of the playhouses were Bulwer’s two pieces, which were precisely the most flimsy of the whole lot, from the literary point of view. “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” has been tried again. As I saw it a number of years ago, with Lawrence Barrett cast for Lord Tresham and Marie Wainwright as Mildred, it seemed to me—in spite of its somewhat absurd motivirung—decidedly impressive as an acting play. On the other hand, “In a Balcony,” though very intelligently and sympathetically presented by Mrs. Lemoyne and Otis Skinner, was too subtle for a popular audience, and was manifestly unfitted for the stage.
The closet drama is a quite legitimate product of literary art. The playhouse has no monopoly of the dramatic form. Indeed, as the closet dramatist is not bound to consider the practical exigencies of the theatre, to consult the prejudices of the manager or the spectators, fill the pockets of the company, or provide a rôle for a star performer, he has, in many ways, a freer hand than the professional playwright. He need not sacrifice truth of character and probability of plot to the need of highly accentuated situations. He does not have to consider whether a speech is too long, too ornate in diction, too deeply thoughtful for recitation by an actor. If the action lags at certain points, let it lag. In short, as the aim of the closet dramatist is other than the playwright’s, so his methods may be independent.
In the rather bitter preface to the printed version of “Saints and Sinners” (1891), Mr. Henry Arthur Jones complains of “the English practice of writing plays to order for a star performer,” together with other “binding and perplexing . . . conventions and limitations of playwriting,” as “quite sufficient to account for the literary degradation of the modern drama.” The English closet drama of the nineteenth century is an important body of literature, of higher intellectual value than all the stage plays produced in England during the same period. It is not necessary to enumerate its triumphs: I will merely remind the reader, in passing, that work like Byron’s “Manfred,” Landor’s “Gebir,” George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy,” Beddoes’s “Death’s Jest-Book,” Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna,” Tennyson’s “Becket,” Browning’s “Pippa Passes” and Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon,” is justified in its assumption of the dramatic form, though its appeal is only to the closet reader. I do not forget that one or two of these have been tried upon the stage, but they do not belong there, and, as theatre pieces, were flat failures.
It is hard to say exactly what qualities ensure stage success. As reading plays, Lillo’s “George Barnwell” is intolerably stilted, Knowles’s “Virginius” insipid, “The Lady of Lyons” tawdry; yet all of them took notoriously, and the last two—as any one can testify who has seen them performed—retain a certain effectiveness even now. Perhaps the secret lies in simplicity and directness of construction, unrelaxing tension, quick movement, and an instinctive seizure of the essentially dramatic crises in the action. In a word, the thing has “go”; lacking which, no cleverness of dialogue, no epigrammatic sharpness of wit or delicate play of humor can save a comedy; and no beauty of style, no depth or reach of thought, a tragedy. Hence it is pertinent to remark how many popular playwrights have been actors or in close practical relations with the theatre. In the seventeenth century this was a matter of course. Shakespeare was an actor, and Molière and Jonson and Marlowe and Greene and Otway, and countless others. Cibber was an actor and stage-manager. Sheridan and both Colmans were managers. Garrick and Foote wrote plays as well as acted them. Knowles, Boucicault, Robertson, Pinero and Stephen Phillips have all been actors.
Conceded that this professional point of view has been rightly emphasized, yet before the acted drama can rank as literature, or even hope to hold possession of the stage itself for more than a season, it must stand a further test. It must read well, too. If it is no more than an after-dinner amusement, without intellectual meaning or vital relation to life: if it has neither strength nor truth nor beauty as a criticism of life, or an imaginative representation of life, what interest can it have for serious people? Let us stay at home and read our Thackeray. Eugène Scribe was perhaps the cunningest master of stagecraft who ever wrote. Schlegel ranked him above Molière. He left the largest fortune ever accumulated by a French man of letters. His plays were more popular in all the theatres of Europe than anything since Kotzebue’s melodramas; and all European purveyors for the stage strove to imitate the adroitness and ingenuity with which his plots were put together. But if one to-day tries to read any one of his three hundred and fifty pieces—say, “Adrienne Lecouvreur” or “La Bataille des Dames”—one will find little in them beyond the mechanical perfection of the construction, and will feel how powerless mere technical cleverness is to keep alive false and superficial conceptions.