From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of The Blot in the Scutcheon or Stratford, I must leave the reader to draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a reconstruction of Tennyson's Queen Mary, with a few connecting links written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.
Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called "stichomythy," and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then, that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as he does.
Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.
A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient which ought not to be abused.
The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous and unnecessary slovenliness. In Les Corbeaux, by Henry Becque, produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii, Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)--either or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.