As I have trod the long trail which leads slowly to the summit of three score years and ten, and as I am now swiftly descending into the dim valley beyond, this sheaf of essays is probably the last that I shall garner; and my septuagenarian vanity prompts me to set down here the theories of the theater that I have made my own after half a century of playgoing and of persistent effort to spy out the secrets of stage-craft. To me these theories appear so indisputable and, indeed, so obvious that I am ever surprized when I chance to see them challenged. They are not many, and they can be declared briefly.
I. The drama is an art, the laws of which (like those of all the other arts) are unchanging through the ages, altho their application has varied from century to century and from country to country.
II. The drama (again like the other arts) has its conventions, that is to say, its implied contracts between the artist and his public, without which it could not exist; and while some of these conventions are essential and therefore permanent, others are local and accidental, and therefore temporary.
III. The dramatist, whether he is truly a poet or only an adroit playwright, has always composed his plays with the hope and expectation of seeing them performed, by actors, in a theater, and before an audience; and therefore what he has composed has always been conditioned, consciously or unconsciously, by the players, by the playhouses, and by the playgoers of his own race and of his own time.
These three theories may be more or less implicit in the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle and in the ‘Dramaturgy’ of Lessing; and it would ill become me not to confess frankly my indebtedness to Francisque Sarcey, for first calling attention to the necessity of dramatic conventions. Among the moderns the influence of the audience seems to have been hinted at first by Castelvetro; James Spedding saw clearly the probable influence exerted upon Shakspere by his fellow actors in the Globe Theater; and Gaston Boissier pointed out the probable influence exerted upon Plautus and Terence by the theaters of Rome; but I venture to believe that I had no predecessor in utilizing all three of these influences to elucidate the technic of Sophocles, of Shakspere and of Molière,—to say nothing of the dramatists of our own day.
IV. I believe that I was also the first to show that the principle of Economy of Attention,which Herbert Spencer applied only to Rhetoric, was applicable to the other arts and more particularly to the drama.
V. Perhaps I may claim a share in the wide acceptance of Brunetière’s ‘Law of the Drama,’—that the drama is differentiated from the other forms of story-telling by the fact that an audience desires to behold a conflict, a stark assertion of the human will, a clash of character upon character.
These theories of the theater, which I feel to be mine, wherever I may have derived them, I have discussed now and again in the present volume, as I discussed them earlier in the ‘Principles of Playmaking,’ in the ‘Development of the Drama,’ in the ‘Study of the Drama’ and in my biographies of Shakspere and Molière. In many years of lecturing to graduate classes I have found them useful in arousing the interest of students always eager to acquire insight into technic. What a dramatist meant to do—that is something about which we may endlessly dispute. What he actually did—that is something we can test and measure.
B. M.
Columbia Universityin the City of New York