CHAPTER III

THE INFLUENCE OF THE THEATER

It is obvious that the general spectacle presented by the interior of a Greek theater during the representation of a drama must have been quite unlike anything we are accustomed to in modern times. The open-air buildings, the performance in broad daylight, the vast crowds of spectators, the chorus grouped together in the center all these characteristics of a Greek theatrical exhibition must have combined to produce a scene to which there is no exact parallel at the present day. This fact should be kept clearly in view. — A. E. HAIGH, The Attic Theater.

I

In every period when the literature of any language has been characterized by abundant dramatic productivity, the playwright will be found to have composed his plays in accordance with the conditions of the actual theater of his own time. He may not have liked these conditions and he may have believed that they could be bettered; but he has always begun by accepting them, whatever they might be. He has done this necessarily and inevitably, whether he himself was truly a dramatic poet like Sophocles and Shakspere or merely an ingenious stage-craftsman like Kotzebue and Scribe. What the playwrights of every age have done instinctively and without hesitation, the historians of literature are now beginning to perceive; and only a few of them have yet grasped the full significance of the fact that it is impossible justly to appreciate the art of the truly dramatic poet, Sophocles or Shakspere,

Molière or Ibsen, without a clear understanding of the chief circumstances of an actual performance in the particular theater for which the dramatist prepared his plays, and to the size and shape of which, and to the scenic appliances of which, he had to adjust the construction of his story.

We are now well aware that there have been many types of theater in different countries and at different times, most of them varying very widely from our snug modern playhouses. We all recognize that the immense outdoor theater of the Athenians was as unlike as possible to the smaller half-roofed cockpit of the Londoners under Elizabeth, and also to the long narrow tennis-court of the Parisians under Louis XIV. But while these differences between the theaters of earlier periods may be a matter of common knowledge, we do not always apply our information when we undertake to discuss the dramaturgic skill of the playwrights of these several epochs. We must always keep in mind the extent to which the theater has often dictated to the author what he could put into his play and what he had to leave out, and how he had to present what he desired to set forth. We ought to give full weight to the pressure exerted on the playwright by the changing conditions of the playhouses of successive centuries, — by the size of the theater, for one thing, which may be so huge as to forbid the author's choice of any but broad and simple themes, by the elaboration of heavy scenery, which may impose on him the duty of compacting his plot so that he will need few changes of place, or by the improved modern modes of artificial illumination (candles first, then oil-lamps, after a while gas, and finally electricity), all of which

have wrought in turn significant modifications of dramaturgic method. For example, it is only as we come to a realizing sense of the influence exerted upon the art of the dramatist by the specific conditions of each of the special types of theater which have existed each in its own time and place, that we can measure the wisdom of Shakspere in rejecting the advice of Sidney to model his plays after those of the Greek dramatists; and that we can gage also the unwisdom of Tennyson in taking Shakspere's histories as the pattern of his own poetic dramas, composed centuries later, when the conditions of the English theater had entirely changed.

The critics of any particular period of the drama have not always been familiar with the conditions existing during other periods. The historians of Greek literature are acquainted with our modern playhouses and they are now studying the ruins of the theaters still accessible in Greece and in the Grecian colonies; but they have paid little attention to the methods of presenting plays in the Middle Ages, at first in the churches, and later, on platforms in the market-places. The historians of English literature have scarcely yet attained to a fairly clear perception of the way in which plays were acted under the Tudors, and they have not yet seized the full significance of the changes which resulted during the Restoration from the introduction of painted scenery and of artificial light. The scholars who knew only one manifestation of the drama have rarely possessed the perspective which would be supplied to them by a knowledge of other aspects in the other periods when the drama was flourishing. There is a striking unity in the drama as we trace its

development down through the ages; its essential principles are always the same, since the aim of the real dramatist has varied little, whether he was a Greek of old, a Frenchman of the seventeenth century or a Scandinavian of the nineteenth. And his methods were affected by traditions still surviving from the playhouses of an earlier generation. These traditions the dramatist profits by even if they are no longer in exact accord with the actual conditions of the theater for which he is writing; and so we find the Elizabethan playwrights making use of the two doors on opposite sides of the stage to indicate two wholly distinct places, — a device which is apparently a survival from the several "mansions" of the French miracle-plays. In fact, it is impossible really to understand the dramaturgic methods in vogue at any particular period without taking into consideration the circumstances of performance at least half a century earlier.

No one, it may be noted, has undertaken to trace the slow development of the art of the scene-painter, distinguishing sharply between true scene-painting as we now know it, a realistic perspective intended to reproduce the place itself, and that very different thing, the building up in miniature of the house or of a part of the house (such as we find in the Middle Ages and again in the Italian comedy-of-masks), which is the work of carpenters completed by the work of housepainters. No one has collected the many references which make it plain that properties of all sortsaltars, thrones, arbors, etc. - were in use long before there was any attempt at true scene-painting. And no one has ever made a collection of plans of theaters, all drawn to the same scale, so that we could see at a

glance how immense was the theater of Dionysus at Athens and how small the tennis-court wherein Molière acted. With the aid of a collection of these plans and with the collateral information now available, we could follow the changes in the method of performance from Sophocles to Ibsen, and we should be led to one interesting conclusion, that instead of there being only two types of theater, as is often assumed, the ancient and the modern, there are in reality many, of which the medieval is not the least important.

We should be induced to acknowledge that the theater in England for which Marlowe and Shakspere and Jonson wrote, and the theater in Spain for which Lope de Vega and Calderon wrote, were neither of them really modern; and they were both medieval in their methods or at least semi-medieval. We should be made to see that Molière is apparently the earliest of the moderns, in that his plays now need no readjustment, no editing, no transposing of any kind, to fit them for the playhouses of to-day. And we should discover that a very striking change in the practices of the playwrights was brought about in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the stage was at last abundantly lighted in every part by electricity and when the curving bow of the footlights was cut back to the curtain, which thereafter rose and fell inside a picture-frame.

II

The difference between the playhouse in which we can to-day see one of Mr. Clyde Fitch's plays and the playhouse in which Sheridan's comedies were originally given, is greater than the difference between Sheridan's Drury Lane and the house for which Congreve wrote