The Theory of the Theatre | Page 5

task were practically finished when he arrives
at the point when he finds himself prepared to begin the writing of his
dialogue. This accounts for the otherwise unaccountable rapidity with
which many of the great plays of the world have been written. Dumas
fils retired to the country and wrote _La Dame aux Camélias_--a
four-act play--in eight successive days. But he had previously told the
same story in a novel; he knew everything that was to happen in his
play; and the mere writing could be done in a single headlong dash.
Voltaire's best tragedy, _Zaïre_, was written in three weeks. Victor
Hugo composed Marion Delorme between June 1 and June 24, 1829;
and when the piece was interdicted by the censor, he immediately
turned to another subject and wrote Hernani in the next three weeks.
The fourth act of Marion Delorme was written in a single day. Here
apparently was a very fever of composition. But again we must
remember that both of these plays had been devised before the author
began to write them; and when he took his pen in hand he had already
been working on them in scenario for probably a year. To write ten acts
in Alexandrines, with feminine rhymes alternating with masculine, was
still, to be sure, an appalling task; but Hugo was a facile and prolific
poet, and could write very quickly after he had determined exactly what
it was he had to write.
It was with all of the foregoing points in mind that, in the opening
sentence of this chapter, I defined a play as a story "devised," rather
than a story "written." We may now consider the significance of the
next phrase of that definition, which states that a play is devised to be
"presented," rather than to be "read."
The only way in which it is possible to study most of the great plays of
bygone ages is to read the record of their dialogue; and this necessity
has led to the academic fallacy of considering great plays primarily as
compositions to be read. In their own age, however, these very plays
which we now read in the closet were intended primarily to be
presented on the stage. Really to read a play requires a very special and

difficult exercise of visual imagination. It is necessary not only to
appreciate the dialogue, but also to project before the mind's eye a vivid
imagined rendition of the visual aspect of the action. This is the reason
why most managers and stage-directors are unable to judge
conclusively the merits and defects of a new play from reading it in
manuscript. One of our most subtle artists in stage-direction, Mr. Henry
Miller, once confessed to the present writer that he could never decide
whether a prospective play was good or bad until he had seen it
rehearsed by actors on a stage. Mr. Augustus Thomas's unusually
successful farce entitled _Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots_ was considered a
failure by its producing managers until the very last rehearsals, because
it depended for its finished effect on many intricate and rapid
intermovements of the actors, which until the last moment were
understood and realised only in the mind of the playwright. The same
author's best and most successful play, The Witching Hour, was
declined by several managers before it was ultimately accepted for
production; and the reason was, presumably, that its extraordinary
merits were not manifest from a mere reading of the lines. If
professional producers may go so far astray in their judgment of the
merits of a manuscript, how much harder must it be for the layman to
judge a play solely from a reading of the dialogue!
This fact should lead the professors and the students in our colleges to
adopt a very tentative attitude toward judging the dramatic merits of the
plays of other ages. Shakespeare, considered as a poet, is so
immeasurably superior to Dryden, that it is difficult for the college
student unfamiliar with the theatre to realise that the former's Antony
and Cleopatra is, considered solely as a play, far inferior to the latter's
dramatisation of the same story, entitled _All for Love, or The World
Well Lost_. Shakespeare's play upon this subject follows closely the
chronology of Plutarch's narrative, and is merely dramatised history;
but Dryden's play is reconstructed with a more practical sense of
economy and emphasis, and deserves to be regarded as historical drama.
Cymbeline is, in many passages, so greatly written that it is hard for the
closet-student to realise that it is a bad play, even when considered
from the standpoint of the Elizabethan theatre,--whereas Othello and
Macbeth, for instance, are great plays, not only of their age but for all
time. King Lear is probably a more sublime poem than _Othello_; and

it is