The Theory of the Theatre | Page 9

remains often unappreciated by academic critics, is familiar to
everyone who has had any practical association with the theatre. It is
almost never possible, even for trained dramatic critics, to tell from a
final dress-rehearsal in an empty house which scenes of a new play are
fully effective and which are not; and the reason why, in America, new
plays are tried out on the road is not so much to give the actors practice
in their parts, as to determine, from the effect of the piece upon
provincial audiences, whether it is worthy of a metropolitan
presentation. The point is, as we shall notice in the next chapter, that
since a play is devised for a crowd it cannot finally be judged by
individuals.
The dependence of the dramatist upon his audience may be illustrated
by the history of many important plays, which, though effective in their

own age, have become ineffective for later generations, solely because
they were founded on certain general principles of conduct in which the
world has subsequently ceased to believe. From the point of view of its
own period, _The Maid's Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher is
undoubtedly one of the very greatest of Elizabethan plays; but it would
be ineffective in the modern theatre, because it presupposes a principle
which a contemporary audience would not accept. It was devised for an
audience of aristocrats in the reign of James I, and the dramatic struggle
is founded upon the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Amintor, in
the play, has suffered a profound personal injury at the hands of his
sovereign; but he cannot avenge this individual disgrace, because he is
a subject of the royal malefactor. The crisis and turning-point of the
entire drama is a scene in which Amintor, with the king at his mercy,
lowers his sword with the words:--
But there is Divinity about you, that strikes dead My rising passions: as
you are my king, I fall before you, and present my sword To cut mine
own flesh, if it be your will.
We may imagine the applause of the courtiers of James Stuart, the
Presumptuous; but never since the Cromwellian revolution has that
scene been really effective on the English stage. In order fully to
appreciate a dramatic struggle, an audience must sympathise with the
motives that occasion it.
It should now be evident, as was suggested at the outset, that all the
leading principles of the theory of the theatre may be deduced logically
from the axiom which was stated in the first sentence of this chapter;
and that axiom should constantly be borne in mind as the basis of all
our subsequent discussions. But in view of several important points
which have already come up for consideration, it may be profitable,
before relinquishing our initial question, to redefine a play more fully
in the following terms:--
A play is a representation, by actors, on a stage, before an audience, of
a struggle between individual human wills, motivated by emotion
rather than by intellect, and expressed in terms of objective action.

II
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THEATRE AUDIENCES
I

The drama is the only art, excepting oratory and certain forms of music,
that is designed to appeal to a crowd instead of to an individual. The
lyric poet writes for himself, and for such selected persons here and
there throughout the world as may be wisely sympathetic enough to
understand his musings. The essayist and the novelist write for a reader
sitting alone in his library: whether ten such readers or a hundred
thousand ultimately read a book, the writer speaks to each of them apart
from all the others. It is the same with painting and with sculpture.
Though a picture or a statue may be seen by a limitless succession of
observers, its appeal is made always to the individual mind. But it is
different with a play. Since a drama is, in essence, a story devised to be
presented by actors on a stage before an audience, it must necessarily
be designed to appeal at once to a multitude of people. We have to be
alone in order to appreciate the Venus of Melos or the Sistine Madonna
or the Ode to a Nightingale or the Egoist or the _Religio Medici_; but
who could sit alone in a wide theatre and see Cyrano de Bergerac
performed? The sympathetic presence of a multitude of people would
be as necessary to our appreciation of the play as solitude in all the
other cases. And because the drama must be written for a crowd, it
must be fashioned differently from the other, and less popular, forms of
art.
No writer is really a dramatist unless he recognises this distinction of
appeal; and if an author is not accustomed