Modern Verse Drama

Arnold P. Hinchliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351630207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1977, this book provides a clear and well-illustrated analysis of modern verse drama. It studies the work of its chief exponents, T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry, as well as the genre's place in the development of modern theatre. It particular focuses on the effect that verse drama has had on an audience's awareness of language in the theatre, paving the way for dramatists like Pinter, Beckett and Wesker.

This book will be of particular interest to those studying modern poetry and drama.

1

Modern Verse Drama

A large question mark hangs over the title. Clearly ‘modern’ can mean anything according to its context (try asking an ancient historian what he means by modern!) but here, for the purposes of argument, it means something that happened in the British Theatre in the 1930s and 1940s which seems crucial in the larger struggles of verse drama. Even that word ‘drama’ which seems so solid has its elusive quality which may sound surprising until one thinks about the list in The Art of Drama which runs from Agamemnon to The Playboy of the Western World and leads the author, Ronald Peacock, to suggest that the voice of the dramatist is so individual that ‘the association in a form known as drama seems fortuitous and of little consequence’ (p. 102). And when we turn to verse the difficulties intensify. Criticism suffers from too many terms and too much confusion about them. We have prose, verse and poetry and we can usually distinguish prose from verse but this leaves us asking what we mean by poetry. It is not a modern question. Aristotle, in Poetics, noted that Homer and Empedocles were both called poets though they have nothing in common except their metre: ‘the former, therefore, justly merits the name of poet; while the other should rather be called a physiologist than a poet.’ (Everyman edition, translated Thomas Twining, p. 6). There was no real urgency to the problem while verse served a common purpose until the nineteenth century when the Romantic movement defined a specialized idea of poetry. This helped the growing recognition that many works obviously in prose were producing results usually associated with poetry. For Aristotle tragedy was in verse because verse was the natural form and the iambic metre ‘the most colloquial; as appears evidently from this fact, that our common conversation frequently falls into iambic verse; seldom into hexameter, and only when we depart from our usual melody of speech.’ (ibid., pp. 11–12).

But what happens when conversation does not fall naturally into iambics? In the twentieth century some dramatists have confused us by returning to unnatural verse in an age of prose, an age when prose has, moreover, absorbed the techniques of poetry if not verse.

So: we have too many terms. Denis Donoghue, in The Third Voice, begins his study of modern verse drama with ‘poetic drama’, ‘verse drama’, ‘prose drama’, ‘dramatic verse’ and ‘dramatic poetry’ and attempts a distinction, on page 3, between poetic drama and verse drama. He points out that T. S. Eliot seems to make the two terms synonymous – which may explain those critics who have been able to describe his plays as poetic, written in prose printed as verse. In fact Donoghue sees verse drama as a ‘purely technical phrase’:

it makes no implications whatever as to the quality of the script or of the play as a whole. Unlike ‘poetic drama’, it is entirely neutral in its application.

This may or may not be so: critical terms are never so passionately used as when they claim neutrality. We must admit, however, that Mr Donoghue is correct when he writes that it is customary ‘and appropriate’ to describe plays by Ibsen, Shaw and Synge, which are clearly not verse drama, as ‘poetic dramas’. And they are clearly not in verse because verse, as John Arden puts it:

is an arrangement of ideas in metrical form with or without rhyme and similar devices, which generally involves more than one principal meaning. In other words, we use the associations of words and images as strengthened by our metre and rhyme to remind us of an almost unlimited range of associations over and beyond their surface significance; in prose, however, each word simply means what it says and nothing else.

(Speech to NUS Drama Festival in Leeds, printed in New Theatre Magazine, vol. 11, 3 April 1961)

This last sentence concerning prose is unfortunate, but it reminds us that our present debate between poetic and verse drama was, initially, a debate on the relative merits of verse and prose. George Steiner, in chapter VII of his illuminating study The Death of Tragedy, recalls that for two thousand years the notion of tragic drama and verse had been inseparable, that verse imposes on the mind a sense of occasion, that its form is memorable (literally so; witness its use in television advertising). As the medium which divides the world of high tragedy from that of ordinary existence verse simplifies and complicates. It simplifies because it strips away the problems of material contingency: as Steiner briskly observes, bathrooms only exist in tragedy for Agamemnon to be murdered in. So verse does not express menial facts, or, for that matter, comedy and in modern verse drama it has been required to do both. No, verse matches the actors who wore high shoes and spoke through great masks, characters who lived, spoke and thought higher and louder than life.

Yet the theatre in England has seldom been pure. Shakespeare, we know, uses prose and verse as character, circumstance or mood demand, though he was usually conventional about those demands, retaining prose for peasants and comedy. The audience of the time was used to verse and considered an elevated style natural for character of noble birth and yet we find Corneille writing in the Examen to Andromède (1650):

J’avoue que les vers que l’on récite sur Ie théâtre sont présumés être prose; nous ne parlons pas d’ordinaire en vers et sans cette fiction leur mesure et leur rime sortiraient du vraisemblable …

(I assume that the verse spoken in the theatre is supposed to be prose; we do not ordinarily speak in verse and without this assumption the metre and rhyme will depart from the truth …)

Writers like Fontenelle and La Motte protested against the tyranny of verse and in 1722 La Motte began to write prose tragedies though he lacked the talent to suggest the possible strength of the medium. The argument, therefore, is not recent and Donoghue devotes his first chapter to a ‘neutral survey’ of this problem ranging from La Motte through Stendahl (who repeatedly declared during the 1820s that tragedy could only survive in prose), Ibsen and William Archer to statements by recent poets and critics like Yvor Winters who found verse dead for drama. The problem is one of naturalness. Aristotle may maintain that conversation lapses naturally into iambic metres but subsequent generations spoke differently. How could verse with its rhythm, syntax and diction be related to the common language of the audience to which it was addressed, and Donoghue quotes from Cinthio, Castelvetro, Corneille, Dryden and Victor Hugo arguing for their own beliefs and proving nothing.

For we must remember that drama, unlike the lyric, is not primarily a verbal composition: the words emerge from the underlying structure of incident and character. Aristotle pointed out that the poet (or ‘maker’) should be a maker of plots rather than of verses since he is a poet because he imitates and what he imitates are actions. Which leads us to another confusion of words: between drama and theatre.

Let us first tackle the central problem of verse and prose which was brought to a head in the theatre by one man: Ibsen. Here, however, we have other problems. We must decide what Ibsen did, what people said Ibsen had done and what the consequences were of both. And what, in the larger perspective, did it all mean. Ibsen’s views on verse drama are conveniently summed up in his famous letter to Lucie Wolf who had asked him to write a prologue for her:

The prologue would of course have to be in verse, since that is the established custom. But I will take no part in perpetuating this custom. Verse has been most injurious to the art of drama. A true artist of the stage, whose repertoire is the contemporary drama, should not be willing to let a single verse cross her lips. It is improbable that verse will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate future since the aims of the dramatists of the future are almost certain to be incompatible with it … During the last seven or eight years I have hardly written a single verse, devoting myself exclusively to the very much more difficult art of writing the straightforward, plain language spoken in real life.

(Selected Letters, 25 May 1883, pp. 217–18)

Ibsen’s struggle towards that ‘very much more difficult art’ was neither brief nor simple and it has been exhaustively traced by Michael Meyer whose abridged version of Ibsen in Penguin Books runs to over 900 pages. Ibsen had an extraordinary facility for writing verse, especially rhymed verse, in any metre and he made his break slowly and deliberately. Prose was the medium natural to the action he sought to portray and this implies a break with the kind of action and the kind of actor in the theatre of his time. To that theatre comedy might be in prose but tragedy must be in verse, and the notion that tragedy could be about ordinary people speaking the language of the streets would have struck both the actors and the audience as absurd. Ibsen at first restricted prose to peasants and lower-class characters but in The Pretenders (1863) there are signs of an attempt to create a living, colloquial language. Meyer claims the line – ‘Buy a dog, my lord’ – as the beginning of modern prose drama (Ibsen, pp. 221–2). The League of Youth (1869) was Ibsen’s first attempt to write a play entirely in modern colloquial dialogue dealing with the ‘forces and frictions in modern life’ (letter to Hegel, October 1868, Selected Letters, p. 75) and written in prose ‘which gives it a strong realistic colouring’ (letter to Georg Brandes, Selected Letters, p. 84). As William Archer pointed out Ibsen’s criticism of life needed to come to closer terms with reality ‘and to that end he required a suppler instrument than verse’ (quoted Meyer, pp. 311–12). It was not easy for one to whom verse came easily to abandon a medium in which he felt free for one which constricted him but, as he wrote in a letter to Fru Heiberg — which was in verse: prose is for ideas, verse for visions. After the epics Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) which established his reputation as a verse dramatist he wrote his next epic, Emperor and Galilean (1873), in prose, a decision he defended in a letter to Edmund Gosse dated 15 January 1874:

You say the drama ought to have been written in verse and that it would have gained by this. Here I must differ from you. As you must have observed, the play is conceived in the most realistic style. The illusion I wished to produce was that of reality. I wished to produce the impression on the reader that what he was reading was something that had actually happened. If I had employed verse, I would have counteracted my own intention and defeated my purpose. The many ordinary, insignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced into the play would have become indistinct and indistinguishable from one another if I had allowed all of them to speak in the same metre. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare… Speaking generally, the dialogue must conform to the degree of idealization which pervades the work as a whole. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient sense. What I sought to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk the ‘language of the Gods’.

(Selected Letters, pp. 144–5)

The progress towards the play of ideas rather than visions was slow but it was helped by two things: when Ibsen’s colleague Bjornson completed two plays in prose and on contemporary themes which Ibsen recognized as genuinely realistic modern dramas – A Bankrupt and The Editor – and secondly when his own play The Pretenders was acted, in 1876, by the Duke of Meiningen’s company.¹ Their production showed Ibsen that the techniques of production and acting were being forged which would be equal to the demands made by his plays. The first play to make such demands was The Pillars of Society (1877) which set the style for his future work since it was in prose, on temporary themes and set in Norway. It shows that sharp difference between the speech of individual characters which was to be one of his contributions to modern drama and one of the main difficulties for his translators. In a letter to Rasmus B. Anderson, Professor of Scandinavian Languages at the University of Wisconsin, Ibsen stressed that the dialogue should be kept

as close to ordinary, everyday speech as possible. All turns of speech and inflections that belong only in books must be very carefully avoided in plays, especially in plays like mine, which aim at making the reader or spectator feel that during the reading or performance he is actually experiencing a piece of real life …

(Selected Letters, p. 211)

Very much like Look Back in Anger this play opened the eyes of the young to ‘the false tinsel of the theatre that was being offered us’ (quoted Meyer, p. 454) and gave ‘the first inkling of a new world of creative art, when we first felt ourselves face to face with people of our time, in whom we could believe, and with a criticism which embraced the whole society of our time’ (ibid., p. 455). Ghosts (1881) was possibly the first great tragedy written about middle-class people in everyday prose, something we tend to forget since it now looks to us like a costume drama.

The Duke of Meiningen’s troupe had shown Ibsen that a new style of acting was possible. Life-size characters speaking ordinary prose required restrained acting rather than a large, declamatory style; thus neither Bernhardt nor Irving welcomed Ibsen but Duse did and was to be a great success as Ellida in The Lady from the Sea. Yet, noticeably, Ibsen was gaining some curious effects from this ordinary language, distinctive speech patterns and bourgeois life and was soon to pass from the middle period of social dramas (The Pillars of Society to An Enemy of the People, 1877–82) to those final eight plays which are so much admired by modern opinion. Ibsen’s contemporaries were confused. They found his plays deliberately obscure and sordid. Certainly the last plays are realistic and concern real people but we now recognize that they have a symbolism fully integrated into their prosaic texture. Thus The Wild Duck depends on one symbol, a technique Ibsen used frequently afterwards – and the characters can never free themselves from this image. Nevertheless Yeats’s comment in The Trembling of the Veil is quite characteristic:

I resented being invited to admire dialogue so close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible.

(quoted Meyer, p. 632)

Ibsen’s views were remarkably consistent; human beings in the social conditions and principles of the day, presented by the actors and scenic designers as true to nature, each character having his own personal way of speaking ‘by means of which his degree of education or learning can be noted’ (Selected Letters, p. 310). Unfortunately this insistence upon naturalness only directed attention to the ideas of the play, and audiences were much st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Modern Verse Drama
• 2 Poets in the Theatre
• 3 Religious Verse Drama
• 4 T. S. Eliot
• 5 Christopher Fry
• 6 Poets of the Theatre
• 7 Poetic Drama
• Bibliography
• Index