THE DRAMA ITS LAW AND ITS TECHNIQUE
BY
ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE, PH.D.
ALLYN AND BACON
Boston and Chicago
Copyright, 1898,
By Lamson, Wolffe and Company.
PREFACE
Freytag’s Technik des Dramas, written thirty-five years ago, remains up to this time the best work of its kind. Yet its defects of manner and of arrangement are apparent even to the casual reader, and they become yet more evident when the book is subjected to the test of the college class-room. Such a test – one for which the book was never intended – obscures its merits, which are many, and emphasizes its defects, which might appear few and superficial, but which are peculiarly irritating to both teacher and student. Yet the need of such a book is indicated by the number of treatises on the drama which have appeared since Freytag wrote. All of these that I have seen, however, are either too exclusively philosophical, and in their theorizing about the art ignore the practical details of the craft, or they are not philosophical enough, and in their preoccupation with the craft lose sight of the fundamental principles, the absolute standards, of the art.
In this, as in all other essentials, Freytag was sound; his proportionate emphasis is right, and when I first began to realize the defects of the book, I thought that by making some changes it could be rendered more practically available while no less suggestive. I soon discovered, however, that it was not possible to fit Freytag’s discussion into the Procrustean framework of my own plan. His book lacks system, but it does possess the unity that must always characterize the utterances, however careless, of an honest and conscientious thinker. My book, I saw, might rectify some of the faults of the original, but would fall short of its merits. So I laid Freytag quite aside, and wrote the following chapters with as little regard as possible to the discussions in the Technik. “As little as possible,” – for to make any claim to entire independence would be preposterous. No one can read the utterances of a thoughtful critic and veteran in stage-craft like Freytag without being influenced by them. Even if one has arrived independently at the theories and the judgments therein contained, the formulation and illustration of these theories and judgments by another mind must affect him, if not by altering his thought, at least by enriching its subject-matter. I wish, therefore, to make a comprehensive acknowledgment of my indebtedness to the Technik. Comprehensive and general it must be, for just because his book, despite its diffuseness and its desultoriness, is vital and fundamental, it is impossible to lay a finder on the exact places where I am in its debt.
One of the chief merits of Freytag’s work is its mass of illustrative comments on ancient and modern dramas. More especially was his use of the Greek dramatists valuable and suggestive, and I hesitated before determining to omit from this treatment any such detailed discussion. Without a sympathetic familiarity with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for tragedy, and with Aristophanes for comedy, no one can claim the right to “judge righteous judgment” in things dramaturgic. When Freytag wrote, such a familiarity was scarcely to be gained without years of toil; since his time, modern classical scholarship has experienced a wonderful growth, bearing fruit in a number of critical treatises whose profound learning is informed by philosophic insight and delicate taste, is directed by a sense for historic proportion, is dominated by just aesthetic standards. With such works at hand as the treatises of Jebb, of Butcher, of Haigh, any detailed treatment of the ancient drama would be presumptuous, not to say superfluous, and its place is more fittingly taken by the bibliography at the end of the volume, which points out to the student some of the guides to whom he will commit himself when he shall explore this part of the field.
Of Freytag’s illustrations from modern drama, many are based on German plays, and are thus less illuminating to the average American reader – even the college student – than to the German audience for whom they were intended; hence they greatly increase the bulk of the book without adding proportionately to its effectiveness. I have confined my illustrations more strictly to English literature, using the drama of other nations only where it is needed for comparison. Such a method is theoretically lawful as well as practically expedient, since English drama was in its formative period – that is, up to Dryden – scarcely at all influenced by any other drama save the Roman and, chiefly indirectly, the Greek. With our own contemporary drama it is different. It is not possible to set up a language-barrier when our English and American stages are occupied with the plays of Italian, French, German, and Scandinavian writers.
Of contemporary drama Freytag’s book takes almost no account. Indeed, when he wrote, the renaissance, if we may venture to call it so, of drama had only just set in. Ibsen had been writing plays only a few years, and his greatest were yet to come; Sudermann was six years old; Hauptmann was an infant; Fulda was not yet born, nor was Maeterlinck, nor Rostand, the brilliant actor-dramatist who is now hailed by some of his countrymen as their young Shakespeare; in England a few critics were hopelessly hoping that the drama was not really so dead as it seemed. Small wonder that Freytag’s mention of modern work had rather the character of an exhortation and a warning than of a critical judgment. But in the last thirty years many good plays, many brilliant ones, some great ones, have been written, and it is well not to ignore them. In the ordinary college courses it is, indeed, scarcely possible to lay much emphasis on these, yet it is unfortunate to treat the drama as though it came to an end, for England in 1616, and for Germany in 1832. Such an attitude lends color of truth to the assertion that the drama is no longer a living art form. One of the signs of its life is that it is changing; and we must not be deceived by the frequent presentations of Shakespeare’s plays into thinking that our stage is like the Elizabethan, or that our Shakespeare is the Shakespeare of Elizabeth and of James. In the study of drama Shakespeare must be our centre, but just as we cannot arrive at the truest judgment if we leave out the Greeks, so too we cannot if we ignore our own contemporaries.
Finally, there is one great section of the drama which Freytag left untouched, – comedy. Yet it is present as an element in every one of Shakespeare’s plays, it is the predominant element in many of them, and a discussion of the drama which ignores this is, not Hamlet with Hamlet left out, but something more preposterous – Henry IV with Falstaff left out.
For an exhaustive, or even a fairly satisfactory, discussion of dramatic comedy an entire volume is needed; such a volume ought to be written. In the three chapters here devoted to the subject I have tried merely to make a survey of the field, to suggest points of view whence it may be studied, to point out lines along which it may be explored. So little has it been investigated that I cannot offer the student even the nucleus for a bibliography. My hope is that others may come to realize the fascination of this branch of dramatic theory, and that more may be done to illuminate this, at present the most complex and the least adequately treated subject in the realm of literary criticism.
INTRODUCTION
A drama is a presentation of an action, or closely interlinked series of actions, expressed directly by means of speech and gesture. It is, however, distinguished from other literary species, not only by its form, but by its subject-matter and its point of view. Its subject-matter is the action and reaction of human will, and it is treated with a view, not to the sequence of events, but to their essential relations as causes and effects. The drama is like the epic in that it deals with events of human life; it differs from it by emphasizing more strongly the volitional and_subjective rather than the incidental and objective elements in such events: it is like the lyric in that it is concerned with emotional, or, more broadly, with spiritual states; it differs from it by emphasizing, not the emotional or spiritual state considered in itself, but this considered as issuing from or developing into volition. Thus, though it has a closer connection with the inner life than has the epic, and a closer connection with the outer life than has the lyric, it trenches upon the realm of both epic and lyric, and every great drama has in it each of these elements, though their relative proportions may vary.
Vary, indeed, they do. The Greek drama, developing out of the choral ode, always kept a strongly lyric cast; the Teutonic drama is as strongly epic in character. The Greek type, as we get it in Seneca, degenerates into the rhetorical monologue, from which the French classical drama never wholly freed itself; the Teutonic type easily lapses into the presentation of a series of events without inner unity, as in some of Shakespeare’s historical plays which are little more than chronicles thrown into dramatic form. Within the limits of art, however, there is possibility of wide divergence in the proportionate values of the two elements, and the Oedipus Tyrannus does not exclude Macbeth from the number of great dramas.
In the following discussion it has been assumed that, beneath the differences of form that distinguish the ancient drama from the modern, there is enough identity in their informing spirit and underlying motive to justify a treatment of them as one. Differences there are, nor are they merely those of form, and Freytag states one side of the truth when he says: “Since Aristotle formulated some of the chief laws of dramatic effect, the culture of the human race has grown older by more than two thousand years. It is not merely the artistic forms – the stage and the manner of presentation – which have altered, but, what is more important, the spiritual and moral nature of man, the relation of the individual to the race and to the highest forces of life, the idea of freedom, and the conception of the divine being, all these have undergone great changes.” This is true, yet the more familiar one grows with the Greek drama the more one comes to realize that in the fundamental constitution of human nature there has been little change, and that in proportion as the drama is great it is the same for all ages. Or, if there are in this respect great essential differences, as there are certainly great superficial ones, we English are closer to the Greeks in sympathy than we are to some peoples of more recent times, for example, the French of the seventeenth century, and are more at one with the writer of Oedipus Tyrannus than with the writer of Athalie.
The two elements that are emphasized in dramatic treatment of human nature are, broadly speaking, free will and causality. It is a commonplace of criticism to say that the Greek drama presented the latter, the modern drama the former, and indeed the Greek and the modern use of these two elements is different. But the doctrine of the freedom of the individual is not new, it is as old as the words, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” The doctrine which sees the individual borne remorselessly forward to his fate by forces which he did not initiate is not confined to Greece, it is as old as the first commandment in the Decalogue, or the words, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”; but it is also as modern as Ibsen. The ancient world laid greater stress on the second of these two truths, the modern world on the first, but it is only the proportionate emphasis that has changed: nothing old has been wholly lost, nothing really new has been added.
§
In discussing any art it is possible to treat it in two ways, according as one considers the principles or laws that underly it as an art, or the rules of technique that govern it as a craft. In the first aspect it is brought into more or less close relation with all art; in the second aspect it needs a narrower and more detailed treatment of those things which mark it off from the other arts. The following discussion has attempted to open up the subject first in the more general aspect, and then in the more specific.
Like all art, the drama, to be of value at all, must have truth; to be coherent and effective, it must have unity; to command our veneration, it must have that quality which the Greeks called σπουδη, and which we call greatness, seriousness, nobility. In one sense, any one of these qualities, deeply interpreted, includes the others, but it is possible also to separate them in thought. It has seemed best to take them thus separately and then to try to follow up the two main lines, the tragic and the comic, along which dramatic art has developed.
