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Updated: July 20, 2025
Since Irving's letter was written a fair number of unsentimental plays have been produced and well received, such, for instance, as Strife and The Silver Box and The Voysey Inheritance, all works of great quality. Some Unsuccessful Dramatists When considering some of the criticisms upon Becket, and accepting them as accurate, one is inclined to ask why Tennyson failed as a dramatist.
Many of the present school of French dramatists write plays unfortunately chosen for presentation in England which assume the existence in society of a large class of people, otherwise amiable, who act upon the proposition that in Paris as in heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.
That he had real talent both as author and as actor I do not doubt, and I am persuaded that had things fallen out differently he would have won for himself a lasting place among French dramatists, and thus fully have realized that dream of his. Now, dream though it was, he did not neglect the practical side of it.
We have returned in a curious way to something like the ideas underlying "the unities"; perhaps that statement is incorrect, but, at least, we have put upon our dramatists certain working laws almost as embarrassing as the unities. The average playgoer has no idea of the skill involved in writing the ordinary successful comedy of the present time.
Admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature. Shakspeare has had neither equal nor second.
Cicero places his wit on a par with the old Attic comedy; while Jerome spent much time in reading his comedies, even though they afterward cost him tears of bitter regret. Modern dramatists owe much to Plautus. Molière has imitated him in his "Avare," and Shakspeare in his "Comedy of Errors."
One of the worst of the number was L'Age d'Aimer, by M. Pierre Wolff, a piece so cynically immoral, and written with such an air of truth, that it might well cause some of us to shrink in horror from the idea of an entente cordiale with a people which, if truly represented by its fashionable dramatists, has no concept of cleanliness of life.
These intellectual aristocrats hurled the keen shafts of their wit at those dramatists, who, without a university education, were arrogant enough to think that they could write plays. Because Shakespeare had never attended a university, Greene called him "an upstart Crow beautified with our feathers."
In what makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to rhymed pentameters something of the freedom of blank verse, and not mistaking metre for rhythm. Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently lamented the awkwardness of movement imposed upon the French dramatists by the gyves of rhyme.
Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived.
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