of all the influences that have gone to make up dramatic literature," Mr. William Archer promptly pointed out that this was "just about as reasonable as to declare that the sea is only one, and a very insignificant one, among the influences that have gone to the making of ships." It is true, Mr. Archer admitted, that there are "model ships and ships built for training purposes on dry land; but they all more or less closely imitate sea-going vessels, and if they did not, we should not call them ships at all. … The ship-builder, in planning his craft, must know what depths of water—be it river, lake, or ocean—she will have to ply in, what conditions of wind and weather she may reckon upon encountering, and what speed will be demanded of her if she is to fulfil the purpose for which she is destined. … The theater—the actual building, with its dimensions, structure, and scenic appliances—is the dramatist's sea. And the audience provides the weather."
III
Since the drama is irrevocably related to the theater, all the varied ramifications of the show business have their interest and their significance for students of the stage. It is not too much to say that there is no form of entertainment, however humble and however remote from literature, which may not supply a useful hint or two, now and again, to the historian of the drama. For example, few things would seem farther apart than the lamentable tragedy of Punch and Judy and the soul-stirring plays of the Athenian dramatic poets; and yet there is more than one point of contact between these two performances. An alert observer of a Punch-and-Judy show in the streets of London can get help from it for the elucidation of a problem or two which may have puzzled him in his effort to understand the peculiarities of Attic tragedy. Mr. Punch's wooden head, for example, has the same unchanging expression which characterized the towering masks worn by the Athenian performers. In like manner a nondescript hodgepodge of funny episodes, interspersed with songs and dances, such as Weber and Fields used to present in New York, may be utilized to shed light on the lyrical-burlesques of Aristophanes as these were performed in Athens more than two thousand years ago.
Perhaps even a third instance of this possibility of explaining the glorious past by the humble present may not be out of place. A few years ago Edward Harrigan put together a variety-show sketch, called the 'Mulligan Guards,' and its success encouraged him to develop it into a little comic drama called the 'Mulligan Guards' Picnic,' which was the earliest of a succession of farcical studies of tenement-house life in New York, culminating at last in a three-act comedy, entitled 'Squatter Sovereignty.' In this series of humorous pieces Harrigan set before us a wide variety of types of character, Irishmen of all sorts, Germans and Italians, negroes and Chinamen, as these are commingled in the melting-pot of the cosmopolitan metropolis. These humorous pieces were the result of a spontaneous evolution, and their author was wholly innocent of any acquaintance with the Latin drama. And yet, as it happened, Harrigan was doing for the tenement-house population of New York very much what Plautus had done for the tenement-house population of Rome. A familiarity with the plays of the Latin playwright could not but increase our appreciation of the amusing pieces of the Irish-American sketch-writer; and a familiarity with the comic dramas of Harrigan could not fail to be of immediate assistance to us in our desire to understand the remote life which Plautus was dealing with.
The plays of the Roman dramatist were deliberately adapted from the Greek, and they therefore had an avowedly literary source, whereas the immediate origin of the plays performed in New York was only an unpretending sketch for a variety-show; but both of these groups had the same flavor of veracity in their reproduction of the teeming life of the tenements. Humble as is the beginning of the 'Mulligan Guard' series, at least as humble is the beginning of the improvised pieces of the Italians, the comedy of masks, which Molière lifted into literature in his 'Etourdi,' and in his 'Fourberies de Scapin.' In the hands of the Italians the comedy of masks was absolutely unliterary, since it was not even written, and its performers were not only comedians, but acrobats also. And here the drama is seen to be impinging on the special sphere of the circus—just as it does again in the plays prepared for the New York Hippodrome. It is more than probable that this improvised comedy of the Italians is the long development of a primitive semi-gymnastic, semi-dramatic entertainment, given by a little group of strollers, performing in the open market-place to please the casual crowd that might collect.
Equally unpretending was the origin of the French melodrama, which Victor Hugo lifted into literature in his 'Hernani' and 'Ruy Blas.' It began in the temporary theaters erected for a brief season in one or the other of the fairs held annually in different parts of Paris. The performances in these playhouses were almost exactly equivalent to those in our variety-shows; they were medleys of song and dance, of acrobatic feats and of exhibitions of trained animals. As in our own variety-shows, again, there were also little plays performed from time to time, at first scarcely more than a framework on which to hang songs and dances, but at last taking on a solider substance, until finally they stiffened themselves into pathetic pieces in three or more acts, capable of providing pleasure for a whole evening. The humor was direct, and the characters were painted in the primary colors; the passions were violent, and the plots were arbitrary; but the playwrights had discovered how to hold the interest of their simple-minded spectators, and how to draw tears and laughter at will.
In fact, the more minutely the history of the stage is studied, the more clearly do we perceive that the beginnings of every form of the drama are strangely unpretentious, and that literary merit is attained only in the final stages of its development. Dramatic literature is but the ultimate evolution of that which in the beginning was only an insignificant and unimportant experiment in the show business; and it must always remain intimately related to the show business, even when it climbs to the lonely peaks of the poetic drama. Whatever its value, and however weighty its message, it is still to be commented upon under the head of "amusements," for if it does not succeed in amusing, it ceases to exist except in the library, and even there only for special students. It lives by its immediate theatrical effectiveness alone, even if it can survive solely by its literary quality.
IV
Those who are in the habit of gaging the drama by this literary quality only are prone to deplore the bad taste of the public which flocks to purely spectacular pieces. But this again is no new thing, and it does not disclose any decline in the ability to appreciate the best. A century ago in London, when Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble were in the full plenitude of their powers, and when they were performing the noblest plays of Shakspere, they were thrust aside for a season or two while the theater was given up to empty melodramatic spectacles like 'Castle Specter' and the 'Cataract of the Ganges.' It was horrifying to the lovers of the drama that these great actors in those great plays should have to give way to the attraction exerted on the public by a trained elephant, or by an imitation waterfall; but it is equally horrifying to be informed that the theater in London for which Shakspere wrote his masterpieces, and in which he himself appeared as an actor, was also used for fencing-matches, and for bull-baitings and bear-baitings, and that the theater in Athens for which Sophocles wrote his masterpieces, and in which he may have appeared as an actor, was also used for the annual cock-fight.
So strong is the popular appreciation of spectacle that the drama, the true theater as distinguished from the mere show business, has always to fight for its right to exist, and to hold its place in competition with less intellectual and more sensational entertainments. The playhouses of any American city are likely to have a lean week whenever the circus comes to town, and perhaps the chief reason why the most of them now close in summer is to be sought not so much in the frequent hot spells, as in the irresistible attraction exerted by the base-ball games. The drama in Spain, which flourished superbly in the days of Lope de Vega and Calderon, sank into a sad decline when it had to compete with the fiercer delights of the bullfight; and the drama in Rome was actually killed out by the overpowering rivalry of the sports of the arena, the combats of gladiators, and the matching of men with wild beasts. What is known to the economists as Gresham's Law, according to which an inferior currency always tends to drive out a superior, seems to have an analog in the show business.
(1912.)
II
