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The playwrights are recovering too, yet, if anything, more tardily than the people; for when a nasty cynicism, like that pervading the old comedies, is once boldly cultivated, many a long day must elapse ere it can be replaced by a cleaner, healthier spirit.
From the time that Austin Selwyn received the note there was nothing else in his mind as in Elise's but the coming meeting. As playwrights planning a scene, each went through the encounter in prospect a dozen times, reading into it the play of emotions which was almost certain to dominate the affair.
Aside from this, other causes were at work, and the chief of these was at the very source of the Elizabethan dramas. It must be remembered that our first playwrights wrote to please their audiences; that the drama rose in England because of the desire of a patriotic people to see something of the stirring life of the times reflected on the stage.
Now, seeing that there are upon record a vast number of adaptations that have failed, a number that bears a proportion to the successful far higher than the proportion of failures in original works, it seems worth while to consider for a little what is at the bottom of the matter, since to do so may prevent some playwrights from wasting their time and other people's money.
By 1592, when Greene wrote his Groatsworth, "Shakescene" thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor, he is also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene's three author friends: whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights; the critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of them.
A stage career, connected with a certain degree of infamy, had been open to the sex since Restoration times, and writing for the theatre had been successfully practiced by Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Pix, and Mrs. Davys. The first two female playwrights mentioned had produced beside their dramatic works a number of pieces of fiction, and Mrs. Mary Hearne, Mrs.
Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Ryepin's or Shishkin's pictures turned your head? Charming, talented, you are enthusiastic; but at the same time you can't forget that you want to smoke. Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, and dull time.
"These actor-managers what?" "More or less. I must be off. Dining out." "What! Not going to wait for the end of the fourth act?" "No, I'm late as it is. Ta-ta!" The white-haired man was amused. He did not turn round, nor, if he had, would he have known the retreating gentleman for the most eminent of living playwrights; but he knew the reason for his sudden retreat.
Their fault is not to use Hamlet's phrase that they "imitate humanity so abominably": it is, rather, that they do not imitate humanity at all. Most of our playwrights, especially the newcomers to the craft, imitate each other. They make plays for the sake of making plays, instead of for the sake of representing life.
Specialists and experts in crime, novelists and playwrights, retired magistrates and chief-detectives, erstwhile Lecocqs and budding Holmlock Shearses, each had his theory and expounded it in lengthy contributions to the press.
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