Synopses & Reviews
Text extracted from opening pages of book: Critical Introduction by Brander Matthews Illustrated New York D. Appleton and Company 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1901, Bv D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. FRENCH AND GERMAN DRAMA THE Greeks are the only people who have developed a really great drama of their own, wholly uninfluenced by any authority beyond the borders of their own race. Out of the loosely knit rhapsody of the Dionysiac revellers they evolved the perfect form of the tragedy of Sophocles, with its lyric passages subordinated to the essential drama. Out of the make-believe and horse-play of a village festival they were able to rise to the comedy of Menander. The drama of the Latins, tragic or comic, was an imitation of the Greek. The drama as we have it now in the various modern languages of Europe has been evolved from primitive and popular elements very like those which served as the basis of Greek develop ment; but the modern evolution has not been as independent as that of the Greeks, since they had no model to guide them, and were forced to feel their own way toward perfection, whereas the moderns ever since the Renascence have had the Greek drama, if not as an avowed model, at least as a most helpful standard of comparison. The history of the modern drama is the record of the inces sant effort made by scholars and men of letters to impose rules derived from a study of the Greek drama upon the popular theatre, which has been spontaneously developed by the un learned, who knew nothing about the great Greeks, and who were hard at work trying to improve a primitive form just as the Greeks themselves had striven to do when they were but beginners. And the relative value of the dramatic literatureof each of the modern languages is proportionate to the com pleteness of the fusion that took place between the primitive iii av' FHENCHf AND GERMAN DRAMA and popular piay\ ojn tne one hand, and on the other the schol arly and artistic form favoured by those who upheld the Greek tradition. In Italy, for example, there was no fusion, the scholars despising the actual theatre of their own times and refusing to learn from it how a contemporary audience might be interested and moved to tears or to laughter; and as a result Italy had no outflowering of the drama; the acted plays are unliterary the commedie delV arts were even unwritten, which is the acme of the unliterary and the literary attempts were unactable except by main strength. In England the fusion was perfect, although the scholars of the Elizabethan period did not perceive it; and the robust play with no pretence of art or literature, planned solely to please the groundlings that delighted in the gore and bombast of the tragedy-of - blood, was purified by slow degrees and transformed at last so that the public applauded Macbeth and Othello, tragedies of lofty purpose, with a unity of conduct and a simplicity of theme essentially Greek, and with a heartiness and freedom charac teristically English. In Spain and in France the fusion took place, but it was not so well balanced as in England. In Spain the rougher popular elements predominated; and vigorous as Spanish dramatic literature unquestionably is, it lacks any specimen of the higher drama at all comparable with Hamlet or Othello, and its merits are to be found in fertility of invention and ingenuity of intrigue, rather than in perfection of form or insight into hu manity. InFrance the native drama yielded too readily to the attacks of the classical theorists, and in the resulting fusion the scholars seem to have got the better of the popular play wrights. In Italy the admirers of the ancient drama refused to pay any attention whatever to the theatre of their own day; whereas in France the upholders of the ancient methods went forward boldly and took possession of the stage, and imposed upon the future playwrights of France the observance of cer tain rules which the critics believed to have been laid down by Aristotle, and therefo