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Updated: July 9, 2025
The dramatist's psychological sayings serve his art, unfolding before us the psychological individuality of the speaker, but they do not contribute to the textbooks of psychology, which ought to be independent of personal standpoints. And yet what a stream of verses flows down to us, which have the ring of true psychology! And so on.
The whole thing, with the reservation I have made, must be admitted to be consummately managed from the composer's as well as from the dramatist's point of view. What follows needs little discussion. Wagner knew quite well how to represent a row on the stage without passing beyond the limits of what is music.
And in so far as he twists character to suit his moral or his plot, he is neglecting a first principle, that truth to Nature which alone invests art with handmade quality. The dramatist's license, in fact, ends with his design. In conception alone he is free.
The electric light burns in the novelist's study at three a.m., the novelist is still endeavouring to convey by means of words the extraordinary fascination that his heroine could exercise over mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and he never has really succeeded and never will. The dramatist writes curtly, "Enter Millicent." All are anxious to do the dramatist's job for him.
Webster exercised the dramatist's privilege of connecting various threads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazarding an ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardly warrants.
Charles I must not die in a green old age, Oliver Cromwell must not display the manners and graces of Sir Charles Grandison, Charles II must not be represented as a model of domestic virtue. Thus popular knowledge can scarcely be said to lighten a dramatist's task, but rather to impose a new limitation upon him.
Marathon, Aeschylus, the nascent democracy were his ideal and he was evidently put out by the ending of the period of "Periclean calm." He then has no solution for the problems in front of him. But it might be asked whether a dramatist's business is not rather to leave solutions to the thinker, concerning himself only with mirroring men's natures.
Nothing can really dissemble the fact that the long scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden, which occupies almost one-third of the first act, is simply a formal exposition, outside the action of the play. This happy conjuncture of events is manifestly artificial: a trick of the dramatist's trade: a point at which his art does not conceal his art. Mrs.
The great dramatist's action in this respect is not, as a general rule, followed by the serious playwrights of the present. Whilst speaking of Shakespeare, one may refer to a passage in the essays which has some bearing on the question of the place of acting in the hierarchy of the arts.
He spoke favorably of the idea of an all-girl cast, saying that each year many girls' colleges presented Shakespearian plays with marked success. The main thing to be considered was the intelligent delivery of the great dramatist's lines.
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