Four Modern Verse Plays [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Drama is a composite art. It is literature and it is theatre. The series of plays which are planned as Penguins for the next few years will have to satisfy both criteria, and will be designed both for reading and for acting. This accords with the way in which drama itself, and the public attitude towards it, have developed during this half-century. In the nineteenth century, most of what was put on the public stage" had no pretensions to being called literature. Much of it was skilful as theatre-material, well calculated to catch the quick interest, excitement, or laughter of the 'house' ; some examples will find a place in tliis series. The literary plays of Tennyson, Browning and their fellows may also come in later on. But the main purpose is to offer texts which satisfy the desire of our own day for the play which is at once well written and good theatre. It may not be out of place to illustrate the development of our thought in this matter by referring to the change in the published texts of Shakespeare. The older texts, prepared by literary scholars, strove for correctness according to the rules of grammar, of pmictua-tion, of scene-description current in the editor's day. To the reader, they gave a wrong impression of the play as acted: to the actor they provided innumerable stumbling-blocks in the shape of stops that disturbed the natural flow of speech and scene-breaks where the action should be continuous. Scholars today are concerned, not with grammatical correctness, but with the original text, which was an actor's text. Such editions as the Penguin Shakespeare, based on the First Folio and modernizing spelling and pimctuation only so as to give the modern reader the closest possible impression of the effect of the original, are a revolution most welcome to lovers of this art of drama which is the common province of reader and actor. Our century has not produced a Shakespeare; but it is nevertheless possible to feel that it is the most fruitful century in the theatre since his own. To write for acting is an attraction to most good writers today. In some ways it is more difficult to do now than it ever was; but at least the public which attends the theatre is interested in the quality of the writing it listens to; and the reader has learnt to enjoy reading plays.