Drama, a Greek term literally signifying action, and applied to that form of literature which serves as text for what in the same sense is called acting, that is to say, the performance before spectators of an 'acted' and spoken imitation of scenes of life. The following article discusses merely the drama as limited to a class of literary productions, the art of acting and the history of theatrical performances being reserved for the article THEATRE. Nor will any attempt be made here to give a detailed account of the work of distinguished dramatists, which will be found from Æschylus downwards under the proper heads. We shall here confine ourselves to the survey of the general characteristics of the successive schools of literary drama in Greece, Rome, the middle ages, and modern Europe. In some oriental languages the drama holds a not unimportant place, but the written examples are not supposed to be of very great antiquity, and in any case they are, as drama, much inferior in interest to the European examples.
No specimens of the earliest age of Greek drama, that is to say, of the compositions, either purely dithyrambic or consisting of choric songs interspersed only with monologue, which are supposed to have prevailed in the infancy of the art, now survive, nor can much (if anything) be said to be known about them. Our earliest examples, the dramas of Æschylus, whose chief predecessors were Phrynichus, Chorus, and Pratinas, exhibit the drama in a very advanced condition, so far as the particular style goes. The dialogue, though in the earliest examples not more than two actors were permitted to be present as speakers on the stage at the same time, is managed so as to unfold a varied and completely dramatic story; while the chorus, either as a whole or subdivided into sections, performs its lyrical odes, and, when necessary, takes part by its leader, and rarely by other members, in the actual dialogue. The almost immediate addition of the protagonist or third speaking actor, which, whether due to Æschylus himself or not, appears in his later plays, is practically the only change of importance subsequently made; and this was not as a rule further extended in Greek tragedy, that is to say, in the works of the three great writers, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, of whose works we possess, though unfortunately but a very small proportion, yet a part considerable when considered by itself. Very rarely the quarta persona or something like him appears, but this is a mere exception, and unimportant. We have thus the very remarkable phenomenon of an extremely artificial and complicated art, which seems almost within a single generation to have attained its furthest possible development. The actors—who sometimes make a tolerably numerous list, though not more than three may, as a rule, figure on the stage at once, except as mute persons—conduct the dramatic performance strictly so called by dialogue, gesture, and a certain amount (though less than on the modern stage) of action. The chorus, in its odes, explains incidents which assist if they are not necessary to the comprehension of the action, moralises on this same action, and occasionally takes part in it, giving in its specially choric utterances a certain heed to the keeping up of the sacred character which (see THEATRE) seems to have been associated with the origin of dramatic performances, if not of dramatic writing, in almost all countries.
The plays written for this disposition of company were for the most part, if not always, arranged in trilogies or sets of three, followed or not by a fourth play of a quite distinct and comic or satiric character. Whether there was any original reason for this arrangement, except that of convenience, is not known; but the reasons of convenience, when the limitations of the drama are considered, are obvious. For with each new play the restrictions of the Unities were relaxed, or rather disappeared altogether, and a fresh time, a fresh place, and an only distantly connected scheme of action could be entered upon. These famous Unities, which at various times in the history of literature have been the subject of the fiercest discussion, appear to be less a priori rules which the authors had before them and obeyed, than generalisations from these authors' practice, which later critics and students deduced and formulated. Some slight and some serious deviations from them, as in the case of the change of scene and the lapse of time in the Eumenides, have been detected. But generally speaking, the Unity of Time rules that not more than twenty-four hours are to be supposed to pass; the Unity of Place, that the scene shall not be changed; and the Unity of Action, that nothing like an independent underplot shall be permitted, every incident, and practically every speech, being subordinated to the main argument. On the whole, these strict conditions are very strictly observed. When they were taken with the exact and (in the case of the choruses) intricate metrical structure of the verse, they set Greek tragedy at the head of all literary performances as an example of exquisite symmetry of form, of severe but not overdone proportion. It is, however, almost as remarkable that, at least in Æschylus and Sophocles (for the 'Third Poet' is in this respect far inferior), no deficiency of dramatic interest attends this severity of form. Even in the earliest examples the metrical arrangements—iambic trimeter and trochaic tetrameter for the dialogue, anapaestic dimeter for part of the chorus work, and a vast variety of apparently lawless but in reality most correctly regulated rhythms for the rest—are consummate. The magnificent poetical quality of Æschylus, the sense of overmastering fate with which he manages to charge all his drama, and the perfect humanity of Sophocles, relieve their work entirely from the charge of sterility which has been brought against more modern imitations of their form. No other general remark is required as to Greek tragedy, except that its subjects, as we have them, were limited to poetical and heroic tradition, with a certain admixture of what in modern literature we should call the chronicle-play, or drama of contemporary event. The only extant example (for we know that there were others) is the Perse of Æschylus; an exceedingly interesting play, because it shows the ease with which the Greeks could achieve what has baffled almost all moderns.
We are even more scantily furnished with examples of Greek comedy. Indeed, we have no complete specimens, except (very fortunately) the work of the acknowledged chief of the style, Aristophanes. Yet we know that not only the two poets whose names are indissolubly coupled with his—Eupolis and Cratinus—but many others, illustrated what is called the Old Comedy, in which persons and political events of the day were satirised with a fearlessness never exceeded, rarely equalled, and likely to provoke (as we know it did provoke) violent reprisals. In addition to this we have in the Cyclops of Euripides an example, though probably not a very typical example, of the satiric play which finished the tragic trilogy, making with it a tetralogy. Of the so-called Middle and New Comedies which succeeded the Old, and which successively attenuated its bold personal attack into a weak comedy of manners, we have no specimens at all, though we can judge to some extent of their nature by the Latin imitations which have survived. But the great name of Menander, although illustrated at the present day only by the merest fragments, survives with a reputation in the New Comedy only inferior to that of Aristophanes in the Old. Of the two later kinds, the best that can be said is that the Greek genius, with its almost unfailing peculiarity of pushing such kinds as it attempted at all to their utmost capabilities, elaborated pretty completely the stock comedy, or comedy of certain general types of character; and that great as have been the changes of manners, no one, with the single exception of Molière, has made much original addition thereto since. Of the Old Comedy much more might be said, though we must for the present chiefly refer the reader to the article ARISTOPHANES. It must suffice here to say that to an abundance of wit in dialogue, not excelled even by Molière and Congreve, Aristophanes joined poetical faculties to which neither of these great writers can make the faintest pretence, a bold and thorough grasp of politics, which he exhibits especially in the parabases or direct addresses to the audience, and a quality of humour in the English sense, which no other ancient has approached. If it were not for the limitations of the female characters which Greek manners necessitated, Aristophanes would probably have been the equal of Shakespeare in the comedy of which As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing are examples that never can be excelled, and that have never been equalled in their own way. As it is, the Knights, the Clouds, and the Frogs deserve exactly the same description.
It was thus the fortune of this extraordinary people, in the literary practice of a very brief period of years, to leave examples ranking to this day in the first class of the literature of the world, and serving as the basis of a set of critical rules which, followed not always with knowledge, governed literature until but the other day. Their immediate disciples and successors, the Latin poets, added but little if anything to the general system of drama, and their work has been transmitted to us in a most fragmentary condition. Latin tragedy of the regular kind may be said to have perished en masse, with a singular and very important exception. By very great good luck the comic work of Plautus and Terence, which we possess in good measure, not only represents for us the two great divisions of the Greek comic drama which, as we have said, are in Greek utterly lost, save in the most insignificant fragments, but exhibits in its own characteristics a very important difference of feature. The work of Terence is distinctly literary work, probably coming as near as the author could manage to its Greek originals. The work of Plautus, though hardly less indebted in many cases to those originals for plot and incident, displays a very strong infusion of vernacular character—the character, as we may judge, of the lost Atellan farces, and the character generally of Roman humour. The fault of Terence is, that he is thin; the fault of Plautus is, that he is coarse; and as far as we can judge from evidence but little more abundant than the fragmentary bones of extinct animals, these two defects may or must have been characteristic of the Roman drama generally. Of the tragedy, as we have said, at least of the early tragedy of Pacuvius, Accius, and others, it is very hard to judge at all; but there seems good ground for regarding it as a feeble copy of Greek, probably with attempts to make up for feebleness by rant of diction. The very remarkable group of works which are attributed to Seneca, whether to L. Annaeus Seneca, the philosopher, or another of the same name, but which at least date with certainty from the imperial period of Rome, stand by themselves. They represent various styles, the heroic and so to speak romantic kind, the kind of already somewhat distant history, and the kind of contemporary interest. They are pretty obviously what we call 'closet drama,' that is to say, whether they were ever acted or not they were clearly written as writing, and not merely as playwright's work. They have, with much literary ability, a certain absence of vis viva, though this absence has often been exaggerated. But where they are so very important is in this—that they, far more than the great early plays of Greece, determined the tragic revival of the Renaissance. It is Seneca, not Æschylus, not Sophocles, not even Euripides, that the experimenting dramatists of Italy, of England, of France most of all, follow when they attempt the regular tragedy in the 16th and 17th centuries. Seneca (not any of 'The Three') is directly responsible for Corneille; and if England had not set her face against it, it was Seneca who would have been reproduced in England by Sackville and Norton, by Edwards, by Daniel, by the Countess of Pembroke, and others; as he was in France by Garnier and Montchrestien; as he had been in Italy by Trissino.
It is, however, evident that the drama, as distinguished from pantomimic shows, beast-fights, and the like, was not a favourite kind of literature either with the Romans or with the inhabitants of the Roman empire; and this partly accounts for the ferocity of the early fathers of the church against the theatre, a theatre which was for the most part occupied by things very different from the Antigone or the Eumenides, by things compared to which even the Lysistrata would appear innocent. It also accounts for the small attraction which dramatic writing seems to have had for the authors of the empire. Lucian, for instance, ought to have written admirable plays; but he has left us not one. And by degrees, from the combination of all the causes hinted at and others, drama seems to have become practically extinct. The early dark ages produce nothing worth speaking of, while the Terentian comedies of the nun Hrotswitha stand by themselves, and are little more than literary pastiches. When the drama reappears, the re-appearance marks a genuine new birth. As before, this birth was connected with the offices of religion, though the precise extent to which this connection reached is a matter of great, and (if one who has given some attention to it may say so) of never-to-be-settled debate among the learned. It is sufficient to say that about the 11th century in France appear the beginnings of the famous miracle or mystery play, which has sacred subjects only, is in its earliest forms very short, and consists for the most part in the representation 'by personages,' as the vernacular phrase went, either of scenes from the Bible or of legends of the saints. There is no chorus in the proper classical sense, though rarely there are approaches to it. The metre is usually rhymed octosyllabic couplets, with a few more complicated schemes thrown in, and the dramatic action, though genuine and complete as far as it goes, is very simple. This kind, which is still represented in sophisticated forms by the famous Ammergau passion-play, was extremely popular; and though later in other countries than in France, has tolerably early representatives in most of them, especially in Germany and England. France, however, was its special home, and the liking of the people for these at first sacred dramatic performances seems to have branched out there into a variety of secular kinds, which, so early at any rate, are not paralleled anywhere else. As early as the 13th century a single French author, Adam de la Halle, originated, so far as is known, two important styles, the comic opera (in Robin et Marion) and the modern comedy, in the half autobiographic composition called the Jus [Jeu, 'game'] Adam or Jus de la Feuillie ['of the booth']. Of these compositions the former has hardly a trace of roughness, while the latter contains no hint of classical inspiration. By the 14th century probably, by the 15th certainly, France had added to the miracle or mystery, which branched out into the 'profane mystery' or chronicle-play dealing with current events or ancient history, not merely the farce—the dramatisation of the earlier verse fabliau or comic story, and the 'Morality'—an allegorical play of virtues, vices, and the life of man generally, to which the general medieval passion for allegory gave great vogue; but also the sotie or political farce, something like though not in the least imitated from the Athenian comedy of the old type, as well as not a few minor varieties. The passion for dramatic entertainments was very great; societies or guilds existed for their performance, and it was not unusual for days, or even weeks, to be occupied in a single display. We still have mysteries extending to fifty thousand lines, and altogether it may be said that this passion for scenic representation, as it has been always more widespread, developed itself earlier in France than in any other European country. It is not a little striking also, that in the south-west corner of France the morality still substantially survives in the Basque pastorales.
In no other country than France, however, did the tastes of the middle age receive a more complete check and change at the Renaissance; and as this change was partly connected with the importation of Spanish and Italian fashions, it may be desirable very briefly to sketch the great and interesting dramas of the two peninsulas before recounting the later history of dramatic literature in France.
Great as are the performances of Italy in European literature, her achievements in drama, even to these late days, are of little moment, when compared with the towering fame of Dante and Petrarch, of Ariosto and Tasso. Her chief influence was to direct France into following the Senecan tragedy, and, through a writer who took the French name Larivey, but who was really a Giunto, the Terentian comedy somewhat relaxed. No Italian medieval work for the stage is in the least remarkable; but as soon as the Renaissance dawned, divers writers, Trissino especially, adopted the stiff form of tragedy already referred to, and persons no less notable than Macchiavelli, Cardinal Bibbiena, and the great Ariosto, attempted comedy. Before very long, however, the lyrical drama, which under the name of opera, was from Italy to conquer Europe, pushed drama proper much out of favour. It was a little restored by a group of learned writers in the late 17th century, the chief of whom was the Marquis Maffei, a soldier, an antiquary, and a playwright, whose Merope Voltaire deigned to follow very closely. Goldoni and Gozzi started a school of comedy which was to a great extent a reflection of national manners, and has real distinction. Whether as much can be said of the formal lyric dramas of Metastasio in the middle, or of the much vaunted tragedies of Alfieri at the end of the 18th century, is perhaps a matter of taste. There are some who hold that in no poet is the worse side of the so-called classical drama more apparent than in the second of these writers. But neither Alfieri nor any other writer of Italy has succeeded in drama, since the school of Venetian comedy above mentioned, in striking what may be called an original note, though during the 19th century Manzoni and others have attempted the style. In general literary history the dramatic achievement of modern Italy is the determination of France into the classical model.
Very different is the record of Spain. It is an infinitely more germinal history than that of Italy, though unluckily it is even shorter. The strong, though apparently not sustained originality of Spain, showed itself nowhere more than in her drama. No medieval performances of much merit are cited by historians; but instead of being diverted by the Renaissance into a mere following of classical models like France and Italy, the Spaniards showed independence almost equal to, and an immediate command of form far greater than, that of the English theatre itself. In part they continued the religious tradition by their autos; in part they diverged into romantic drama of the freest kind; and they almost invented for themselves the comedy of fashionable life and intrigue which was imitated freely by all the great playwrights of the 17th century in other countries, and which is famous for its prodigal waste of ingenuity, if also for its rather penurious thrift of probability. They furnished in the Don Juan (q.v.) story one of the two or three most fertile dramatic motives of Europe, and in Lope de Vega and Calderon they produced dramatists not equalled in fertility anywhere, and surpassed in genius only by the greatest names of the world. Half at least of the most famous plays of the French classical period are more or less directly borrowed from Spain, and England also pillaged in her turn. But the period of Spanish dramatic productiveness was unfortunately as short as it was brilliant; and it has had no revival. What the Spaniards did for Europe in dramatic matters was to develop a fertile and powerful drama in complete defiance of classical traditions, to show the dramatic possibilities of the supernatural, and to push almost to the farthest extent the comedy of ingenious surprises, and 'wheels within wheels.' The merits of this drama are the more remarkable that its most usual metrical vehicle, the trochaic dinner, does not seem beforehand very well suited for the purpose.
The first influence which impelled men to the creation of the new drama in France came, as has been said, from, or rather through Italy; but it was necessary before dramatic work of the first class could be produced, that the Spanish influence should also be felt. It is at first sight surprising that so vigorous and racy a kind as the indigenous comic drama of France had already shown itself to be, should be pushed out by a merely learned and literary importation. Nor in fact was it so, except in Paris and one or two other centres of culture, while even there it was not completely banished until the genius of Molière, which long exercised itself in something very like the ancient farce, effected a combination between the vernacular, the Terentian, and the Spanish comedy. In tragedy, however, the school commonly called the Pléiade—i.e. the poet Ronsard and his set—effected a complete revolution or innovation, following the Senecan model. The two plays of Jodelle, a member of the Pléiade itself, Cléopatre and Didon, set the example of a tragedy exactly resembling those attributed to Seneca, with choruses and all apparatus complete. This style of tragedy was continued for many years, and was cultivated by at least two poets of the greatest talent, Robert Garnier and Antoine de Montchrestien; but the choruses were by degrees dropped as unsuitable to modern audiences. Still the substance of the tragedy remained much the same, even when, in the hands of a later school, of whom Alexandre Hardy was the chief, a great infusion of Spanish romanticism took place. Nor was the scheme much altered, whatever might be the case with the treatment, when Rotrou and Corneille at last formed the French classical tragedy proper. For the details of this reformation, and of the similar, though less strict reformation which comedy, in the hands of Scarron, Corneille, and Molière chiefly, also underwent, reference must be made to the separate articles on Corneille, Molière, and Racine. As produced by these three great men, and by imitators in the second half of the 17th century, both tragedy and comedy assumed shapes which France long retained unaltered, and which for a time gave law and pattern to all Europe except England, and even to some extent there. The tragedy was of the Greek or rather the Senecan kind, without choruses, and with a slight relaxation of some of the minor stringencies, but with the unities for the most part maintained, and with, as a rule, the fortunes of a love affair substituted for the classic themes of fate and inherited doom. The metrical structure was unvarying, alexandrines or iambic trimeters arranged in couplets tipped with rimes difficiles, or rhymes as elaborate as possible. Much less restriction trammelled comedy, which accordingly ranks higher. It might be written either in prose or in verse; the unities of place, and even to some extent of action, were neglected or construed loosely. A very great variety of interest and subject matter was admitted, and the elaboration of really witty dialogue supplied endless opportunities of ornament. At the same time, in the hands of Molière nearly always, though less often in those of his followers, the moral or satirical purpose was carefully observed. The reign of these two kinds continued with little interruption, though with great variety, and on the whole constant diminution of merit, till the end of the first quarter of the 19th century. In tragedy, Crébillon the elder succeeded in raising the style to something not far below Corneille's level, while Voltaire, applying his own singularly various and versatile talent to it, and enlarging the range of subject and situation, produced work which ranks as drama, though not as poetry, almost with the work of Corneille and Racine itself. In comedy, the level continued higher, very excellent work of the Molièresque kind, slightly altered in various ways, being done by Destouches, Marivaux, Piron, and others; while towards the middle of the 18th century, a sort of third or bastard kind, variously called as it approached one extremity or the other, comédie larmoyante, or tragédie bourgeoise, was introduced by La Chaussée, Sedaine, Diderot, and others. Unlike most bastard kinds this proved fertile, and under the generic name of drame may be said to have important representatives at the present day. It tended naturally to emancipate itself from the restrictions of tragedy, and so no doubt helped the great revolt of what is called the Romantic Movement, which about 1830 practically destroyed the old French tragedy, and seriously interfered with the Molièresque tradition of comedy. Here, too, reference must be made to special names—e.g. Dumas, Hugo, and De Musset. It must be sufficient here to say that the alteration has revived the always keen interest of Frenchmen in the drama, and introduced a vast quantity of literary work of much higher value than had been produced in drama since the latter half of the 17th century. France has once more become the central seat of drama in Europe, and foreign nations have been much busier in adapting her productions than in producing original work of their own. At the same time it must be confessed that tragedy proper has continually dwindled, and that even comedy of the higher kind has been somewhat injuriously affected. The chief new growth of value at once literary and dramatic has been in the production of dramatic sketches of various sorts, slight in substance and brief in duration, but admirable of their kind. During the Second Empire an immense popularity was also achieved by comic opera or rather opera bouffe of a not very exalted class, the sprightly music of Offenbach contributing much to this result.
Of the great literary European nations, Germany has on the whole contributed least to the European drama, though one dramatic motive, the Faust story, worthy to rank with that of Don Juan, is due to her, and though at two distinct periods, the middle of the sixteenth and the junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the supernatural drama, of which this Faust legend has given the chief example, exercised, mainly on German impulse, great influence abroad. Otherwise the Germans have been, save for one brief period, more remarkable for assiduous cultivation of the art of acting, and the theory of the stage, than for the production of great dramatic work. There is no German drama of European reputation that dates either from the middle ages or from the Renaissance, or from the 17th century; and it was not till the middle of the 18th that Lessing, not so much by his actual dramas as by his critical discussions of the drama and dramaturgy generally, earned for himself a really great place in dramatic history. At the end of that century what has been called the Sturm und Drang school flooded Europe for a time with extravagant or sentimental productions of the class of which Schiller's Robbers and Kotzebue's Menschenhass und Reue ('The Stranger') are the most famous examples in two different kinds; while the first mentioned is perhaps the best, and the second one of the worst in literary merit. Kotzebue, indeed, was a very popular dramatist everywhere for a time. The two great writers, Schiller and Goethe, stand on a different level altogether. The former, calming down from the state of mind out of which grew his Robbers, produced a series of plays which to the English taste suffer from a too close approxima- tion to the French style, while, according to classical standards, they err by dramatic license, but which nevertheless contain much noble poetry and some striking drama. But in this same style Goethe's Egmont far surpasses anything of Schiller's, except the splendid chronicle-play of Wallenstein, while his Iphigenia in Tauris is (except Milton's Samson) the only modern classical drama which is really classical, and his Faust is not only one of the capital works of European literature, but includes rather than constitutes some of the finest dramatic work to be found out of Shakespeare. The chief vehicle of German dramatic poetry is the same as that of English, the unrhymed iambic decasyllable.
There are more reasons than one for taking the drama of England last, the two most pertinent being that it was, except the German, the last to crystallise itself into a determined form, and that while that form has on the whole maintained itself, each of the influences which have been already discussed in their several countries of origin has successively exercised more or less force there. In England, as elsewhere, the miracle-play existed, and divers collections of it, known as the York, Digby, Townley, Chester, and other collections, have been preserved and published. But these are both later and ruder than the French examples. Nor does the drama seem to have taken in medieval England, until quite the beginning of the 16th century, anything like the various extensions which it received in France. From this latter period we have a sufficient variety of kinds—interludes, moralities, mysteries, and so forth; the most important single composer of these being John Heywood. The great and original school, commonly known as that of the Elizabethan dramatists, did not, however, arise till the last quarter of the century. Among the somewhat amorphous dramatic products which preceded it, without as far as can be seen giving this great group of playwrights much help of pattern or precept, it is usual and proper to distinguish three pieces—Ralph Roister Doister, by Nicholas Udall; Gammer Gurton's Needle, assigned to Bishop Still; and the tragedy of Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, by Sackville the poet and Thomas Norton. The first and second are comedies, or rather farces, the second of ruder type than the first, but both exhibiting a considerable advance from the mere interlude towards comedy proper. The third, composed under the same influence as the drama of the Pléiade, is after the style of Seneca—a style which happily, though more than once attempted in the years immediately following, was obstinately resisted by the English genius, and took no root here whatever. It is not possible to assign any foreign origin to that school of English drama, which, suddenly appearing in the work of the so-called 'university' group, of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and in a rather different vein Lyly, passed into the far more capable hands of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Thomas Heywood, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. To indicate even briefly the main characteristics of this drama would overpass the whole limits of this article. Suffice it to say, that allowing for its admitted defects in order, measure, and elaborate finish, as well as in dramatic arrangement and in academically perfect literary style, no drama in the world excels or equals it in the vigorous variety of dramatic character and situation, or in the application of the highest poetry to the purposes of drama. Its desinenence is usually fixed at the death of Shirley (1666), but, as a matter of fact, the best plays of the class had ceased to be written even before the closing of the theatres twenty years earlier, as a result of the Puritan hatred for stage plays. By this time the two great ethical defects of the whole school, the unnecessary horror of its tragedy, and the unnecessary foulness of its comedy, had reached their highest point, while both the dramatic and the poetic quality of its practitioners had sadly fallen off. In particular, the secret of blank verse which had afforded so admirable a vehicle was all but lost before ever the Civil War broke out. Accordingly, when after the Restoration tragedy revived (the staple matter of comedy and its usual manner are so much the same in all circumstances that fewer changes appear therein in every case), it assumed a very different complexion. Partly influenced by the admiration of things French, but more by the fact that Davenant had been enabled by Oliver Cromwell's love of music to introduce even during the Commonwealth a sort of musical drama, there came in what are called 'heroic' plays, the chief formal characteristic of which is that they are written, not in blank verse, but in rhymed couplets. These held the stage for some twenty years or so, their chief practitioner being Dryden, with Crowne, Otway, Lee, and others to back him in tragedy, and Shadwell, Crowne, Otway, Etheredge, Wycherley, and others in comedy. At last Dryden himself, either following or guiding the public taste, returned to blank verse, and produced in it the last really fine examples of English tragedy, properly so called, for the work of Rowe and Congreve in this kind is not noteworthy. The 18th century produced nothing of value, and all the attempts that have been made since at pure tragedy on the English stage have been either merely literary work, or a kind of drame, or else performances of scarcely any literary merit but some stage adaptability.
No such fate for a long time befell comedy. It has frequently been held that the Restoration dramatists in the proper sense (for the term is often very loosely used) introduced an entirely new style. It might perhaps be maintained without much difficulty that Etheredge and Wycherley, the two chief writers of the new school, rather adjusted the old humour comedy of Jonson, and the bustling lively comic work of Fletcher, to the change of manners, the greater demand for literary style, and the example of Molière. Following them, in the reign of William of Orange and that of Anne, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar carried this altered style to almost its highest possible perfection. All their work, as well in the earlier as in the later examples of it, was, however, marred by a singular brutality of thought, even where (which was rarely the case) this brutality of thought was not coupled with an equal coarseness of language. For a long time the public demanded, enjoyed, or tolerated this; but at length taste changed, and the famous paper war, which had begun with Jeremy Collier's attack on the stage, undoubtedly did much to purify English comedy. But it did not strengthen it, and nothing in the way of comic dialogue has since been produced which equals the best scenes of Vanbrugh and Congreve. It is, however, justly complained that this liveliness of dialogue is frequently studied at the expense of the verisimilitude and progress of the action. No similar complaint had to be made, though much comic work of merit was produced, until the time of Goldsmith. His two masterpieces were followed at no very great interval by the famous work of Sheridan, in which the methods of what may still be called Restoration comedy are adapted to altered tastes in literature and morals with surpassing skill. Sheridan is the last great name in the English drama, and though, especially of late years, the taste for theatrical performances has spread enormously, and the opportunities of gratifying it have increased in proportion, drama of the first or even a high second-rate quality has perpetually refused to be written. With rare intervals the works of Shakespeare have kept the stage; but all the other old tragic dramatists have become obsolete, and, except Goldsmith and Sheridan, the old comic writers have shared the same fate. Successive schools of dramatic writing have had their day of favour, sometimes owing to the predilections of certain popular actors. Thus a school imitated from the Germans of the Sturm und Drang class was followed by a period of jejune, though decent dramas such as Talfourd's Ion, Milman's Fazio, and the works of Joanna Baillie and Sheridan Knowles. Then succeeded (though exact succession is rarely to be predicated of such things) a period of light low comedy and farce, such as that identified in one way or other with the names of Mathews, Planché, and Maddison Morton. And this again has been followed by a rage for burlesque, for a new kind of comic opera of not inconsiderable merit, &c. But Shakespeare has always continued to be acted, and has trained actors without producing dramatists. The most considerable, probably, of strictly 19th-century English playwrights was the late Lord Lytton. Yet the Lady of Lyons, Money, Richelieu, &c., though usually effective on the stage, can scarcely be said to be so to the reader, while some later dramas by poets of excellence, though respectable or admirable to the reader, have either not succeeded in being acted at all, or have not been acted successfully.
It has seemed preferable for the plan of such an article as the present to adopt the historical method rather than to divide the drama into its kinds and examine the characteristics of each, such as tragedy, comedy, farce, melodrama, pantomime, and others, with their subdivisions, philosophical and historical. A survey of the great body of dramatic literature in our possession will, however, lead to the not uninteresting conclusion that not merely the forms which literary work for dramatic representation can take, but even the situations and incidents which are suitable to such representation, are by no means very numerous, and tend to reproduce themselves in the practice of different times and different nations with considerable regularity. So also in necessary consequence do the faults incident to the looser and severer systems of drama respectively recur. We also see, as might again be foreseen, that considerably less variety is obtainable in tragedy than in comedy, and that the former is infinitely the more difficult, and, in any excellence, the less abundant variety. Such questions as the baleful effect alleged, and probably with justice, to have been exercised on the drama by the popularity during the 19th century of the prose novel, and the extension of periodical literature generally, can also only be hinted at. But it may be briefly said that the ages and circumstances in which drama has flourished most, have been those in which, by this or that accident, it occupied for a time and sometimes almost monopolised the position of public instructor and informer on questions of thought and news, as well as that of public amuser. And another point worth noting is that the periods of best acting have by no means always coincided with the periods of best drama-writing.