The principles of playmaking, and other discussions of the drama

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CHAPTER

I The Principles of Playmdking . 1 1 How to IVrite a Play ....

I I I Om Putting Literature into the Drama

II In the epitaph written by Pope we are told that

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, "Let Newton be !" and all was li^ht.

But Newton's Law is only one of Nature's laws; it declares only one of the principles which control the visible universe; and no Newton has yet arisen to declare the principles which control dramatic construction. These principles however have been obeyed unwittingly by all the great dramatists, ancient and modern. The Rules laid down tentatively or arbitrarily by the theorists of theater are but groping efforts to grasp the undying principles which we can seize only unsatisfactorily, which "exist in the passions and sympathies of the human race," and which are never completely disclosed to anyone, not even if he is possest of the piercing insight of Aristotle. No doubt, this is just as true of painting and of sculpture as it is of the drama. The principles of the pictorial art and of the plastic art have been de- 5 clared with certainty and with finality by no critic, not even by Lessing.

The principle of Nature which causes an apple to fall from a tree is eternal; it existed and did its work long before Newton was able to formulate the Law of Gravitation; and it would continue to exist and to do its work even if some later and greater Newton should some day be able to prove that Newton's Law is not just what he asserted it to be. What is true of Newton's Law in mechanics is true also of Gresham's Law in finance and of Grimm's Law in philology. It is no less true of Brunetiere's Law in the drama. The stalwart French critic contended that what diff'erentiates the drama from the epic is the necessity the play is under of presenting strong-willed creatures engaged in a tense struggle of clashing volitions; and the principles of dramatic construction, whatever they may be, remain just what they were, and what they had always been before Brunetiere made his suggestive and instructive effort to reduce one of these principles to a formally stated Law. In other words, Newton's Law and Gresham's and Grimm's and Brunetiere's are not strictly speaking "laws" at all; they are only working hypotheses, which seem to square with the fact so far as we have been able to ascertain it.

The Rules of the Drama which were formulated in the classicist code by the supersubtle Italian critics of the Renascence, Castelvetro, Mintorno 6 and the rest, were accepted by the profest critics of all the other nations, altho the professional playwrights of England and of Spain refused to be driven into the triple-barred cage of the Unities and declined to deprive themselves of the privilege of commingling the comic with the tragic or to force themselves to fill out thejirtificial framework of five acts. Lessing battered a breach in the classicist citadel; and it was finally stormed and sacked by the fiery French romanticists of 1830. The Rules of the classicists were elaborated by pedants, who had no intimate acquaintance with the actual theater, where alone the principles of dramatic construction can be seen at work. It is more than probable that Castelvetro and Mintorno had neither of them ever seen a good play well acted before any other audience than an invited assembly of dilettants; and it is no wonder that their Rules were found to lack validity when put to the test in the theater itself.

Far more valuable are the rough-and-ready Maxims, the bread-and-butter Precepts, which the old stager is forever impressing upon the young playwright. These Precepts and these Maxims, handed down from generation to generation, studio-traditions so to speak, are valid, as far as they go. They are efforts to codify the practice of contemporary playwrights and to put into useful words the common sense of these plajrwrights and their study of their own emotions 7 and of the emotions of their fellows. They may not be adequate expressions of the eternal principles of playmaking, which exist and have always existed "in the passions and sympathies of the human race"; but they stand on a solider foundation, whatever their imcompleteness, than any of the alleged Rules of the pedantic theorists, ignorant of the actual theater with its actual audience.

"Never keep a secret from the audience"! — "Never try to fool the audience!" — "Begin in the thick of the action, and quit when you are thru!" — "Show every thing that is important to the plot; don't tell about it tnerely, but let the spectators see it for themselves !" — these are all monitions of indisputable importance; and the 'prentice playwright will do well to get them by heart and to take them to heart. He will even find profit in recalling the advice of the wily old stage-manager to J. R. Planche: "If you want to make the British public understand what you are doing, you must tell them that you are going to do it, — later you must tell them that you are doing it — finally you must tell them that you have done it; and then — confound them ! perhaps they will understand you!" This cynical and contemptuous saying reveals itself as only a brutal over-statement of the undying principle that the audience needs ever to know what has happened so that it may have its interest aroused in what is about to happen. This is the principle which imposes upon the dramatist the duty of always being so clear that he cannot be misunderstood even by the most inattentive spectator.

The difficulty of perceiving the eternal principles of the dramatic art, and the distinction between these eternal principles and the rule-ofthumb precepts, will be found clearly exprest in Weil's 'Etudes sur le Drame Antique,' from which this suggestive passage may be borrowed: " Poetry has its laws, natural, necessary, inherent in the nature of things; it has also its traditional rules, variable, due to habit, consecrated by inheritance. The natural laws scarcely need to be declared as they can be understood without effort; but easy to seize they are none the less difficult to declare. Genius follows them instinctively; ordinary talent may hear them set forth without being able to conform to them. The traditional rules may also have a foundation; but they are for a time only, and they may become a restraint for the artist, a curb rather than a salutary check; they cannot be devined, but must be formulated to have the force of law."

iir

No one of these rule-of-thumb admonitions is older than that which advises the dramatist to show everything that is important and to make it 9 take place before the eyes of the spectators. We can find it set forth in the shrewd epistle of good counsel that Horace wrote to the son of an old friend when that youth began to manifest literary ambitions : —

The events, which plays are written to unfold, Are either shown upon the stage, or told. Most true, whate'er's transmitted thru the ear To mind and heart will never come so near. As what is set before the eyes, and each Spectator sees, brought full within his reach. Yet do not drag upon the stage what might Be much more fitly acted out of sight; Much, too, there is which 'twill be always well To leave the actor's well-graced speech to tell. Let not Medea kill her boys in view, —

If things like these before my eyes be thrust, I turn away in sceptical disgust.

There was no living Latin drama when Horace made these suggestions; and he was proclaiming the practice of the Greek dramatic poets, when he warned the youthful playmaker not to let Medea destroy her children in view of the spectators. The actors of the Attic drama were raised §loft on thick-soled boots and they wore towering masks, and therefore they could not indulge in any violent gestures; they could neither kill nor be killed without danger of tripping and of thereby disarranging the mask, a misadventure which would be unseemly. Yet this reservation, scarcely more than suggested by Horace, was by the Italian theorists tightened into a rigorous restriction of action. In England, for example, the first five-act tragedy in blank verse is ' Gorbuduc,' in which little or nothing happens before the eyes of the spectators, altho the story itself is filled with violent horrors, all of which are decorously and dully narrated by subsidiary characters. And in France the classicists came in time almost to eschew visible action and to abound in rhetorical description of things not seen.

In Victor Hugo's famous preface to his unacted and unactable 'Cromwell,' an essay which may be accepted as the Declaration of Independence of the romanticists, he protested against the deadening results of obedience to this law by the feebler followers of Voltaire and Racine. "Instead of actions we have narratives, instead of pictures we have descriptions. Solemn personages placed, like the ancient chorus between us and the drama, come to tell us what is being done in the temple, in the palace, in the public square, until we are often tempted to cry out to them, 'Really, — then take us there! It seems to be amusing; it ought to be interesting to see !' To which they would no doubt reply, ' It is possible II that it would amuse and interest you, but that is not the question: we are the guardians of the dignity of Melpomene in France !' And there you are!"

Yet the French classicists might have avoided getting themselves into this tight box if they had paid less attention to the later critics, even to Voltaire himself, and if they had gone back to Comeille, the father of French tragedy. Corneille was a bom playwright, if ever there was one, with an instinctive apprehension of the principles of playmaking. He was a very mitigated classicist; in fact, he was plainly a classicist against his will and only in consequence of the strictures of the French Academy on his earliest masterpiece,* the 'Cid/ In his third ' Discourse on Dramatic Art' Corneille showed a clear understanding of the principle which Horace had declared. "The poet is not obliged to put on the stage all the subsidiary actions which bring about the main action; he ought to choose those which are most advantageous to be seen, from the beauty of the spectacle or from the vigor and the vehemence of the pas-" sions which they produce, or from any other advantage they may have. And he ought to hide the others oflf the stage, letting them become known to the spectator either by a narration or by some other device of the art."

Here, with intuitive certainty, Corneille laid his finger on the reasons why certain parts of the story should be shown in action, — ^those which are interesting to the audience "from the vigor and the vehemence of the passions they produce." Here he was anticipating Robert Louis Stevenson's assertion that the drama is most dramatic when it sets before the spectators the great passionate crises of existence, "when duty and incHnation come nobly to the grapple." Here, he was justifying in advance BrunetiSre's Law that' the stuff out of which drama can be made most effectively, is the stark assertion of the human will and the collision of contending desires. Here, once more, he was on the verge of discovering Sarcey's most significant contribution to the theory of the theater, — ^that in any story there are certain episodes, interviews, moments, which the spectator must see for himself and which if not shown will leave the audience dumbly disappointed by their absence. Sarcey called these the scenes that must be shown, the schies Afaire; and Mr. William Archer has called them the Obligatory Scenes.

There is no characteristic of the born playwright more obvious than this, — ^that he makes an immediate and an unerring choice between the Obligatory Scenes, which the spectators will expect to have placed before their eyes, and the less significant parts of the plot, as to which the audience is quite willing to be informed "either by a narrative or by some other device of the art." In the drama, as in all the other departments of poetry, the half is often greater than the 13 whole. Indeed, since the Middle Ages the dramatist has never sought to put on the stage all the details of his story; he has felt himself forced to make a choice and to focus the attention of the audience upon the moments which are really worth while.

IV

In the first of his ' Discourses on Dramatic Art/ Corneille had plaintively remarkt, "It is certain that there are Laws of the drama, since it is an art; but it is not certain what these laws are." And even when we have good reason to believe that we have at last laid hold of an indisputable principle, we can never be quite assured as to its proper application. Horace advised the avoidance of the offensively horrible;

Let not Medea kill her boys in view.

For the reasons already suggested the Greeks had to refrain from the exhibition of any murder, altho they seem to have had a mechanical device for bringing into view the gory corpse after the victim had been slain behind closed doors. The French, governed by the decorum of the court of Louis XIV, were content that all scenes of murderous violence should be left to

The actor's well-graced speech to tell.

But we who speak English do not

Turn away in sceptical disgust when Richard and Richmond cross swords or when Macbeth and Macduff at last stand face to face to fight to the death. Nor are we revolted by the murder of Desdemona, painful tho it is to witness, nor by the suicide of Othello. To some of us, no doubt, there comes a feeling of satiety, in the last act of ' Hamlet,' when the stage is littered with the bodies of character after character removed from this life by battle, murder and sudden death; and there are other plays of Shakspere's at the performance of which some of us are a little annoyed by the prodigality of assassination. We are well aware that this or that character is doomed to die; but we would not object if we were spared from beholding the deep damnation of his taking off and if his necessary demise had been made known to us "either by a narrative or by some other device of the art."

It is because ^Cschylus and Shakspere were born playwrights, masters of all the devices of the art, that they were each of them enabled to move us more powerfully by an unseen murder, by an assassination behind closed doors, than we could have been moved if we had been forced to see the fatal stroke descend and the smitten victim drop. In the 'Agamemnon' we know that Clytemnestra has gone within, resolved to slay the husband who had wronged her and whom she has wronged, and we listen in dread suspense, not daring to hope that she will abandon her deadly purpose; we wait until we hear the wail- 15 ing outcry of the betrayed hero, taken unawares and treacherously stricken in his own house. The only other moment in all drama which surpasses this in thick intensity of expectant horror is that when Macbeth, goaded by the stern purpose of his ambitious wife, takes up the daggers and creeps into the inner chamber where Duncan, his king and his guest, lies sleeping the sleep from which he is never to awaken. It is the outcry of Agamemnon which tells us that he has been slain; and Duncan makes no outcry. We know that he has been slain only when Macbeth comes out from the room which he entered a brave man and which he leaves a craven from that time on. That an unseen murder, which we are made to feel impending and inevitable, is more effective dramatically we discover when in the same play we are witnesses of the later assassination of Banquo, which discloses itself merely a brutal and vulgar slaughter, devoid of horror and of terror.

Jules Lemaitre once wrote a criticism of Maeterlinck's tragedy of childhood, the ' Death of Tintagiles'; and he began by quoting Horace's

Whate'er's transmitted thru the ear To mind and heart will never come so near As what is set before the eyes, and each Spectator sees, brought full within his reach.

Then the brilliant French critic declared that "this is true,— and yet it is not true. Yes, often,

l6 what is set before our eyes, strikes us more forcibly than what is merely told; yes, action is ordinarily more moving than narrative. But what is infinitely more pathetic than an action told or seen, is an action which is divined. Victor Hugo has said that nothing is more interesting than a wall behind which something is taking place." And here Lemaitre and Hugo suggest to us the explanation why the deaths of Agamemnon and Duncan, which happened out of our sight behind a wall, are more moving than if we had seen them with our own eyes, because in each case we divine the dire event about to happen beyond our vision. Lemaitre remarkt that he found this blank wall in play after play of Maeterlinck's; and he discovered also in Maeterlinck an unfailing power of forcing us to divine what was taking place behind the wall. Poor little Tintagiles had fled up the stairs of the tower till he comes to an iron gate. His feeble voice calls for his sister, whom we see trying in vain to open the gate. At last, we hear the sound of the little body falling on the far side of the door. "And this is terrible, because we have seen nothing, not the child shivering with fright, not her who is not ever named, the wicked old woman whose hundred year old hands strangle the child so slowly that he has time to glue his mouth to the iron bars."

Plainly enough when Horace asserts that what is heard is less eflFective than what is seen and when the old stager bids the novice to "show 17 everything important and let the spectators see it themselves," they have neither of them been able to do more than draft a rough-and-ready Rule, which is true and yet not true. They have not succeeded in laying firm hold on a principle so certain that it is true in all cases, indisputable and inexorable.

For example, that is a sound Rule which bids the playwright not to keep a secret from the audience. Bronson Howard once told me that the one of the dullest evenings he ever spent in the theater was due to the playwright's having hidden from the spectators the actual facts, thus putting them upon a false trail. The play was a dramatization of Miss Braddon's novel ' Henry Dunbar,' made by Tom Taylor. A daughter knows that her father has been wronged by Henry Dunbar and has been led thereby into a life of crime. She receives a letter from her father announcing his intention of seeking Henry Dunbar (who has just returned to England after a long stay in India), and of having it out with his old enemy. And after that she hears nothing more from her father, who has vanisht from the face of the earth. She has no doubt that Henry Dunbar has made away with him; so she sets out in pursuit. But Henry Dunbar evades her again and again, just when they are on the point of meeting. At last she comers him; and in the Henry Dunbar who i8 stands at bay before her she recognizes her father — ^who has killed his enemy and assumed that enemy's name and that enemy's fortune. The disclosure is effective, in its way; it procures a shock of surprise; but the total effect is far less than it would have been if the spectator had known the facts from the first. In that case there would have been no shock of surprize, but there would have been a steadily increasing intensity of suspense as the daughter came nearer to the father whom she loved and whom she was to find an assassin.

In Lessing's implacable dissection of Voltaire's 'Merope,' he admits that "our surprize is greater if we do not know with certainty that /Egisthus is /Egisthus before Merope knows it. But what a poor amusement is this surprize! And why need the poet surprize us ? He may surprize his characters as much as he likes; and we shall derive our pleasure therefrom, even if we have long foreseen what befals them so unexpectedly. Nay, our sympathy will be the more vivid and the more vigorous, the longer and more certainly we have foreseen it. . . . Let the characters knot the complication without knowing it; let it be impenetrable for them; let it bring them without their foreknowledge nearer and nearer to the untying. If the characters feel emotion, the spectators will yield to the same feelings."

When Lessing wrote this he was a bold man, 19 for he was confessing a heresy. He records his dissent from the Rule laid down by a majority of those who had written on the dramatic art and who insisted that the spectators should be kept guessing at the final solution, never permitted to foresee it. Even so practical a playwright as Lope de Vega held that it was wise to conceal the way in which the plot was to be wound up, so that the audience might not be tempted to get up and go out as soon as the end of the complication became visible. Voltaire, also a practical playwright, thought that Sophocles should have kept the spectators of his 'CEdipus' in an ignorance of the secret as total as that which envelopt the characters. It was only toward the middle of the nineteenth century that Sophocles began to be praised for the very quality for which he had been blamed in the eighteenth.

What was flagrant heresy in the eighteenth century is accepted as establisht dogma in the twentieth century. Yet even today the Rule that a secret must not be kept from the audience is only a rule-of-thumb. It is not one of the permanent principles of playmaking; and a dextrous dramatist may sometimes see his profit in breaking the Rule, if by so doing he can achieve what appears to him an intensification of emotional interest. Paul Hervieu called one of his pieces the 'Enigma'; and he concealed from the spectators almost up to the falling of the final curtain which of two sisters had been guilty of admitting a detected lover by night; but it may be doubted whether the result of his experiment proved it to be justified. Perhaps he would have heightened his appeal if we had known from the beginning which was the guilty wife. "By means of secrecy," said Lessing, "a poet effects a short surprize, but in what an enduring disquietude he could have maintained us if he had made no secret about it! Whoever is struck down in a moment, I can pity only for a moment. But how if I expect the blow? — How if I can see the storm brewing and threatening for some time over the head of a character?"

None the less are there occasions where the Rule has to be broken, in the interest of the play as a whole, — ^that is to say, in the interest of the spectators themselves. In 'Henry Dunbar' the Rule not to keep a secret from the spectators was violated to the disadvantage of the play. But in Bronson Howard's own piece, 'Young Mrs. Winthrop,' it was violated to the advantage of the play, — ^and it was deliberately violated, so its author told me, because it conflicted with one of the eternal principles of playmaking. Young Mrs. Winthrop is jealous because her husband is frequently visiting a woman whose antecedents are doubtful. This brings about a dispute so violent that Mrs. Winthrop leaves hfer husband's house. In the final act, she learns that her suspicions were unfounded, since her husband's visits to her supposed rival were due to a highly honorable motive. But the author had kept this motive a secret from the spectators and had allowed them to believe that the jealousy of the wife was probably justified. When I askt him why he had done this, he explained that he needed to have his audience sympathize with his heroine when she left her husband and that the spectators must see things thru her eyes and believe the worst. Having only the information that the wife had, they would feel that her departure from her husband's home was fully warranted. If they had known that the husband was innocent of any wrongdoing they would have credited their own knowledge to the wife and they would have held her to be unreasonable if she broke with him for a suspicion which they had seen to be unfounded. And in this case, the spectators did not resent having been kept in the dark, for they were not formally told that Winthrop was guilty, — they were merely left in doubt; and therefore they were ready enough to be pleased when he was relieved from suspicion and reunited to his wife.

VI

That it is unsafe to pin faith to the Rules which happen to be current in our own time and to feel confident that they contain the law and the gospel was made manifest in the first half of the second decade of the twentieth century, when there happened to be produced in New York half-a-dozen plays characterized by an honest effort to find new methods of expression and to broaden the scope of theatrical presentation. In 'A Poor Little Rich Girl' the spectators were made to see scenes and characters that existed only in the ignorant imaginings of a child in the grip of fever. In 'Seven Keys to Baldpate' the clever author played a characteristically clever trick upon the audience itself, most unexpectedly taking them into his workshop. In 'On Trial' we were invited to behold in three successive acts, events which took place long before the beginning of the play itself, and the event thus shown in the second act was earlier than that shown in the first act and the event shown in the third act was earlier than that shown in the second, — ^thus taking us further and further backward toward the beginning of the story. In the 'Phantom Rival' we had presented before us the fond day-dreams of a fanciful woman, — day-dreams made actually visible to us, forced to take on a concrete existence, and peopled by four contradictory possibilities of a single character, creations called into life only by the brooding imagination of the heroine. And in the 'Big Idea' we were invited to witness the successive «3 steps of the invention, the construction, and the writing of a play, which is to be built on the dangerous predicament in which the chief character finds himself in the piece which is actually being performed; and this big idea is carried so far that at last we discover that the play which has been put together before our eyes is the very play which is being performed before our eyes.

In all these dramas, serious, comic and seriocomic, four of them American in authorship and one of them freely Americanized from a Hungarian original, there was a deliberate intention to achieve novelty of form. They were all characterized by ingenuity of invention; and at least two of them can be credited, more or less, with^the loftier quality of imagination. They might be termed new departures in the drama, due to the desire of their several authors to desert the beaten path and to explore fresh fields. They were all of them more or less successful on the stage; that is to say, the authors were able to carry the public with them along these hitherto untrodden trails. Indeed, it may as well be admitted that a considerable share of the popularity of these pieces was directly due to the attraction exerted upon the spectator by the freshness of treatment which is their most salient quality. These plays seemed to not a few among those who discuss the drama to prove that the wisest of men was less wise than was his wont when he insisted that there was 24 nothing new under the sun. And the favorable reception of this series of daring experiments in stagecraft was the more surprizing since the theater itself has always been considered ultraconservative, clinging desperately to ancient landmarks, and struggling blindly against all efforts to overturn its traditions and to overthrow its customs.

There is no occasion for surprize, therefore, that we should have been told vehemently and vociferously that all the traditions of the theater were to be abandoned, that all the customs of the stage were to be renounced, that all the Rules of the Drama were hereafter to be broken, that all the Laws hitherto held binding upon the plaj'wright were to be repealed, and that all the principles of playmaking were suddenly reduced to chaotic confusion. To many ardent aspirants for dramaturgic victory it seemed almost as if a bomb had been suddenly exploded in the temple of the drama, shattering the tables of the law and bringing down the walls in ruin. A skilful and successful American playwright was quoted as asserting that "the day is not far distant when there will be no stage conventions, so far as the audience is concerned." A newspaper reviewer of current plays felt emboldened to declare that the professor of dramatic literature in one of our leading universities must be greatly grieved by the success of one of the five plays already cited — ^a play writ- 25 ten by one of the professor's former students — because it violated all the doctrines about the drama, which the professor had been discussing year after year.