Some Platitudes Concerning Drama

A DRAMA must be shaped so as to have a spire of meaning. Every grouping of life and character has its inherent moral; and the business of the dramatist is so to pose the group as to bring that moral poignantly to the light of day. Such is the moral that exhales from plays like Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. But such is not the moral to be found in the great bulk of contemporary [1912] drama. The moral of the average play is now, and probably has always been, the triumph at all costs of a supposed immediate ethical good over supposed immediate ethical evil.

The vice of drawing these distorted morals has permeated the drama to its spine; discoloured its art, humanity, and significance; infected its creators, actors, audience, critics; too often turned it from a picture into a caricature. A drama which lives under the shadow of the distorted moral forgets how to be free, fair, and fine-forgets so completely that it often prides itself on having forgotten.

Now, in writing plays, there are, in this matter of the moral, three courses open to the serious dramatist. The first is: To definitely set before the public that which it wishes to have set before it, the views and codes of life which the public lives and in which it believes. This is the most common, successful and popular. It makes the dramatist's position sure, and not too obviously authorative.

The second course is: To definitely set before the public those views and codes of life by which the dramatist himself lives, those theories in which he himself believes the more effectively if they are the opposite of what the audience may swallow them like powder in a spoonful of Jam.

There is a third course: To set before the public no cut-and-dried codes, but the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted, by the dramatist's outlook, set down without fear, favour, or prejudice, leaving the public to draw such poor moral as nature may afford. This third method requires a certain...