ENGLISH DOMESTIC DRAMA.

BY ARTHUR EUSTACE MORGAN, B.A.,

Head of English Department, University College, Exeter.

[Read May 22nd, 1912.]

So large is my subject that it would be quite impossible to give even a summary account of domestic tragedy in a short paper. My references to some of the plays may be more or less detailed, but in the main I want to consider the essential characteristics of this type of drama and perhaps try to raise a few questions on the nature of tragedy at large, so that it may be the easier to assign this species to its true position in the genus.

If there is a difficulty in drawing up a concise definition which will express accurately the characteristics of domestic tragedy, it is no less difficult in many instances to decide whether or not a play should be included in the category. There are two distinct types of tragedy, of which domestic tragedy is one. The other and more usual kind is concerned with the lives of great persons—the ideal drama, let us call it, that deals only with the aspirations and sorrows of the eminent, often, if not usually, the historically eminent. Whether good or evil the characters are on a lofty scale-a scale loftier than is found in actual life. The object of tragedy, says the heroic dramatist, is to move with pity and

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terror. Purge your characters of all human littleness, make them grandly virtuous or grandly wicked, and the catastrophe will thereby be the greater.

Because a tragedy is thus invested with a cloak of idealism it does not follow that the human element is the less true in essence. Iago is an ideal villain and Othello sublimely jealous, but Shakspere has none the less laid bare in them the heart of humanity and shown us the elemental constitution of the soul

of man. To say that a drama is idealistic means,

not that the dramatist has failed to show us the internal truth of things, but that he has neglected to cloak this truth in the matter-of-fact vesture that it wears in daily life. It is similar to the method of the artist in marble or in pigments who prefers to clothe truth of human form and physical beauty in some ideal drapery that pertains to no time or fashion, rather than in the actual clothing of man or woman. He may be accused of untruth in detail he is not realistic; but is he therefore less true to the essentials of his art? Yes, says the realist, and proceeds to carve or paint his figure in tweed suit or coat and skirt. Who can tell which is right? Surely both are. Though for one age the idealist will be righter and for another age the realist.

The ostensible subject of this paper is domestic drama, but in fact it is domestic tragedy. The nature of comedy is such that the dramatist wants ordinary men and women as material for his art. As George Meredith would have put it, comedy. consists of a chase in which folly is the hare and ridicule the hound. For great virtue and even for

great vice it is necessary to look beyond the circle of common life, but folly is even at the door. The comic analogue of heroic tragedy is farce, in which is depicted, not the foolishness of human weakness as it really exists in life, but the pure folly of sublime fools, who are the heroic figures of ideal comedy.

Now just as there are few, if any, comedies that are altogether free of the idealistic tendency of farce, so there are comparatively few tragedies which are completely, or even to a large extent, realistic. If a tragedy is to appeal to an audience as really like life, the characters must be of the class that embraces ordinary men and women; the events, too, must be familiar events that do or might befall ordinary people. It is this kind of play that has been called domestic tragedy. The difficulty of deciding whether a play is domestic or not arises from the fact that the difference is one of degree as well as of kind. Dr. Johnson applied the term to the plays of Otway and Rowe; John Payne Collier applied it to still more realistic tragedies in the Shaksperean age, such as "Arden of Feversham” and "A Warning for Fair Women"; but a modern critic might reserve it for the more truly realistic tragedies of Sir Arthur Pinero and Mr. Masefield. For want of a more accurate term I shall use it to cover all these types.

From the nature, then, of domestic tragedy one would expect to find it realistic, though the realism may be of various degrees. A common means of obtaining recognition of the realism was to choose some subject that was true because it had actually

happened. This truth was often emphasised for the purpose of strengthening the imagination of even an Elizabethan audience by an appeal to the habitual human reliance upon historical fact. The very first extant domestic tragedy, "Arden of Feversham," a play of unknown authorship published in 1592, is definitely called "The true and lamentable tragedy of Mr. Arden of Feversham in Kent." In "A Warning for Fair Women," a play based on a well-known murder committed in 1573, Tragedy, in her concluding speech, says expressly, "that now of truth I sing." Ford, Dekker and Rowley called their "Witch of Edmonton" "a known true story.'

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In the eighteenth century R. Philips in his "Fatal Inconstancy," a domestic tragedy of little merit, says: "I confined myself to the truth

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every

thing is represented according to the original, and reality of the story, which is not in the least fictitious, except in some part of the fifth act.” George Lillo's "Fatal Curiosity," one of the best of the eighteenth century contributions to this type of drama, is expressly called "a true tragedy." And to mention one more, the anonymous "Fair Parricide" (1752) is called "a tragedy of three acts founded on a late melancholy event.'

The true event usually chosen was some crime that had lately been before the public. These tragedies, like the broadsides and ballads of the day, served the purpose of giving the people what it always loves-a sensational story. Consequently, sufficiently lurid details of the original crime were introduced into the play to give the necessary

flavour demanded by the public; and these details made the piece appear the more realistic.

In tragedy the plot depends as a rule on the collision of human passions either with other human passions or with the conventions and laws of society. The dramatist who desires an awe-inspiring, terrorstriking catastrophe will produce a situation that only death can resolve. The basis of the tragedy may rest on crime, as in "Hamlet," where the passion of revenge collides with the passion of ambition, and only the death of Hamlet and Claudius, with the death of Gertrude to satisfy morality, loosens the complication. It is, we are led by Shakspere to believe, the filial duty of Hamlet to take life from the taker of life. Now in the real world such is not the convention, nor as a rule the actual practice. The convention is to delegate to the officers of the law the duty of punishing the murderer. In domestic tragedy, therefore, it is extremely common to find that the finale of a play is the dock, the gaol, or even the scaffold. What a realistic effect a modern manager might produce if he cared to pander to a sordid taste and let the curtain fall on a court scene-a scene familiar to frequenters of the Old Bailey-the judge still wearing the black cap, and the condemned man disappearing down to the cells. "The final act in the great drama " the halfpenny papers used to call it before criminal appeal was invented. But in former times the final act was carried to a more gruesome finish, and it was not the dock but the scaffold that was the scene on which the curtain fell.