Art of the Play: An Anthology of Nine Plays (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Art of the Play: An Anthology of Nine Plays

As for The Tempest, Freud, Marx, and the cultural anthropologists would be as misleading as the realists or the gaudy showmen. I fancy, he said, that if you consider it as a Masque and not a play, and recog nize the difference of treatment and tone, it comes out all right. He was thinking of the problem of presenting the play in a theater, but the same problem faces any reader who wishes to approximate something like the full experience intended for him by the artist.

The present volume is intended both for the student of literature as an introduction to the drama as an art, and for the student of theater as an introduction to the problems presented by the drama as an historical, lit crary, and esthetic phenomenon. It is assumed that understanding and producing drama are very nearly synonymous, and that the end and pur pose of seeing and reading a play is to experience the work as a whole. It is further assumed that this experience is available to the trained reader.

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