Chapter 7 No.7

In 1581 Sir Philip Sidney praised the tragedy of Gorboduc, which he had seen acted by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, because it was "full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases." A few years later the young poet, Christopher Marlowe, promised the audience of his initial tragedy that they should "hear the Scythian Tamburlaine threatening the world with high astounding terms." These two statements are indicative of the tenor of Elizabethan plays.

Gorboduc, to be sure, was a ponderous piece, made according to the pseudo-classical fashion that soon went out of favor; while Tamburlaine the Great was triumphant with the drums and tramplings of romance. The two plays were diametrically opposed in method; but they had this in common: each was full of stately speeches and of high astounding terms.

Nearly a century later, in 1670, John Dryden added to the second part of his Conquest of Granada an epilogue in which he criticised adversely the dramatists of the elder age. Speaking of Ben Jonson and his contemporaries, he said:

But were they now to write, when critics weigh

Each line, and every word, throughout a play,

None of them, no, not Jonson in his height,

Could pass without allowing grains for weight.

* * * * *

Wit's now arrived to a more high degree;

Our native language more refined and free:

Our ladies and our men now speak more wit

In conversation than those poets writ.

This criticism was characteristic of a new era that was dawning in the English drama, during which a playwright could hope for no greater glory than to be praised for the brilliancy of his dialogue or the smartness of his repartee.

At the present day, if you ask the average theatre-goer about the merits of the play that he has lately witnessed, he will praise it not for its stately speeches nor its clever repartee, but because its presentation was "so natural." He will tell you that A Woman's Way gave an apt and admirable reproduction of contemporary manners in New York; he will mention the make of the automobile that went chug-chugging off the stage at the second curtain-fall of Man and Superman, or he will assure you that Lincoln made him feel the very presence of the martyred President his father actually saw.

These different classes of comments give evidence of three distinct steps in the evolution of the English drama. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was essentially a Drama of Rhetoric; throughout the eighteenth century it was mainly a Drama of Conversation; and during the nineteenth century it has grown to be a Drama of Illusion. During the first period it aimed at poetic power, during the second at brilliancy of dialogue, and during the third at naturalness of representment. Throughout the last three centuries, the gradual perfecting of the physical conditions of the theatre has made possible the Drama of Illusion; the conventions of the actor's art have undergone a similar progression; and at the same time the change in the taste of the theatre-going public has made a well-sustained illusion a condition precedent to success upon the modern stage.