4: HOW THE GREAT DRAMATISTS TORTURE
THE PUBLIC
Now if the critics are wrong in supposing that the formula
of the well made play is not only an indispensable factor in
playwriting, but is actually the essence of the play itself--if
their delusion is rebuked and confuted by the practice of every
great dramatist, even when he is only amusing himself by story
telling, what must happen to their poor formula when it impertinently
offers its services to a playwright who has taken on his supreme
function as the Interpreter of Life? Not only has he no use for
it, but he must attack and destroy it; for one of the very first
lessons he has to teach to a play-ridden public is that the romantic
conventions on which the formula proceeds are all false, and
are doing incalculable harm in these days when everybody reads
romances and goes to the theatre. Just as the historian can teach
no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic
delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being
a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright
of the first order can do nothing with his audiences until he
has cured them of looking at the stage through a keyhole, and
sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the
divorce court. The cure is not a popular one. The public suffers
from it exactly as a drunkard or a snuff taker suffers from an
attempt to conquer the habit. The critics especially, who are
forced by their profession to indulge immoderately in plays adulterated
with falsehood and vice, suffer so acutely when deprived of them
for a whole evening that they hurl disparagements and even abuse
and insult at the merciless dramatist who is torturing them.
To a bad play of the kind they are accustomed to they can be
cruel through superciliousness, irony, impatience, contempt,
or even a Rouchefoucauldian pleasure in a friend's misfortune.
But the hatred provoked by deliberately inflicted pain, the frantic
denials as of a prisoner at the bar accused of a disgraceful
crime, the clamor for vengeance thinly disguised as artistic
justice, the suspicion that the dramatist is using private information
and making a personal attack: all these are to be found only
when the playwright is no mere marchand de plaisir, but,
like Brieux, a ruthless revealer of hidden truth and a mighty
destroyer of idols.
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¹ This
essay was originally published by George Bernard Shaw in his
Preface to Three Plays by Brieux (New York: Brentano's,
1911), pp. xxii-xxvii. |