comment upon the bustling ambitions of the chiefs of the parties
in the insurrection of the Percys.
Today, however, because of the handicap under which verse
drama suffers, I believe that in verse drama prose should be used
very sparingly indeed ; that we should aim at a form of verse in
which everything can be said that has to be said ; and that when
we find some situation which is intractable in verse, it is merely
because our form of verse is inelastic. And if there prove to be
scenes which we cannot put in verse, we must either develop our
verse, or avoid having to introduce such scenes. For we have to
accustom our audiences to verse to the point at which they will
cease to be conscious of it ; and to introduce prose dialogue would
only be to distract their attention from the play itself to the
medium of its expression. But if our verse is to have so wide a
range that it can say anything that has to be said, it follows that
it will not be 'poetry' all the time. It will only be 'poetry' when the
dramatic situation has reached such a point of intensity that
poetry becomes the natural utterance, because then it is the only
language in which the emotions can be expressed at all.
It is indeed necessary for any long poem, if it is to escape monotony, to be able to say homely things without bathos, as well as to take the highest flights without sounding exaggerated. And it is
still more important in a play, especially if it is concerned with contemporary life. The reason for writing even the more pedestrian parts of a verse play in verse instead of prose is, however, not only
to avoid calling the audience's attention to the fact that it is at
other moments listening to poetry. It is also that the verse rhythm
should have its effect upon the hearers, without their being
conscious of it. A brief analysis of one scene of Shakespeare's may
illustrate this point. The opening scene of Hamlet - as well constructed an opening scene as that of any play ever written - has the advantage of being one that everybody knows.
What we do not notice, when we witness this scene in the
theatre, is the great variation of style. Nothing is superfluous, and
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there is no line of poetry which is not justified by its dramatic
value. The first twenty-two lines are built of the simplest words in
the most homely idiom. Shakespeare had worked for a long time
in the theatre, and written a good many plays, before reaching the
point at which he could write those twenty-two lines. There is
nothing quite so simplified and sure in his previous work. He first
developed conversational, colloquial verse in the monologue of the
character part - Faulcon bridge in King John, and later the Nurse
in Romeo and Juliet. It was a much further step to carry it unobtrusively into the dialogue of brief replies. No poet has begun to master dramatic verse until he can write lines which, like these
in Hamlet, are transparent. You are consciously attending, not to
the poetry, but to the meaning of the poetry. If you were hearing
Hamlet for the first time, without knowing anything about the
play, I do not think that it would occur to you to ask whether the
speakers were speaking in verse or prose. The verse is having a
different effect upon us from prose ; but at the moment, what we
are aware of is the frosty night, the officers keeping watch on the
battlements, and the foreboding of a tragic action. I do not say
that there is no place for the situation in which part of one's
pleasure will be the enjoyment of hearing beautiful poetry - providing that the author gives it, in that place, dramatic inevitability.
And of course, when we have both seen a play several times and
read it between performances, we begin to analyse the means by
which the author has produced his effects. But in the immediate
impact .of this scene we are unconscious of the medium of its
expression.
From the short, brusque ejaculations at the beginning, suitable
to the situation and to the character of the guards - but not
expressing more character than is required for their function in
the play - the verse glides into a slower movement with the
appearance of the courtiers Horatio and Marcellus.
Horatio says 'tis but our fantaSJ', . . .
and the movement changes again on the appearance of Royalty,
the ghost of the King, into the solemn and sonorous
What art thou, that usurp's! this time of night, . . .
(and note, by the way, this anticipation of the plot conveyed by
the use of the verb usurp) ; and majesty is suggested in a reference
reminding us whose ghost this is :
So frown' d he once, when, in an a11gr)' parle,
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
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There i s an abrupt change to staccato in Horatio's words to the
Ghost on its second appearance ; this rhythm changes again with
the words
·
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show �{violence;
For it is, as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
The scene reaches a resolution with the words of Marcellus :
It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long; . . .
and Horatio's answer :
So have I heard and do in part believe it.
But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of)'Oil high eastern hill.
Break we our watch up.
This is great poetry, and it is dramatic ; but besides being poetic
and dramatic, it is something more. There emerges, when we
analyse it, a kind of musical design also which reinforces and is
one with the dramatic movement. It has checked and accelerated
the pulse of our emotion without our knowing it. Note that in these
last words of Marcellus there is a deliberate brief emergence of the
poetic into consciousness. When we hear the lines
But, look, the mom, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
we are lifted for a moment beyond character, but with no sense of
unfitness of the words coming, and at this moment, from the lips
of Horatio. The transitions in the scene obey laws of the music of
dramatic poetry. Note that the two lines of Horatio which I have
quoted twice are preceded by a line of the simplest speech which
might be either verse or prose :
So have I heard and do in part believe it,
and that he follows them abruptly with a half line which is hardly
more than a stage direction :
Break we our watch up.
P OETRY AND D R A M A
It would be interesting to pursue, by a similar analysis, this problem of the double pattern in great poetic drama - the pattern which may be examined from the point of view of stagecraft or
from that of the music. But I think that the examination of this
one scene is enough to show us that verse is not merely a formalization, or an added d
ecoration, but that it intensifies the drama. It should indicate also the importance of the unconscious effect of
the verse upon us. And lastly, I do not think that this effect is felt
only by those members of an audience who 'like poetry' but also
by those who go for the play alone. By the people who do not like
poetry, I mean those who cannot sit down with a book of poetry
and enjoy reading it : these people also, when they go to a play in
verse, should be affected by the poetry. And these are the
audiences whom the writer of such a play ought to keep in mind.
At this point I might say a word about those plays which we call
poetic, though they are written in prose. The plays of John
Millington Synge form rather a special case, because they are
based upon the idiom of a rural people whose speech is naturally
poetic, both in imagery and in rhythm. I believe that he even
incorporated phrases which he had heard from these country
people of Ireland. The language of Synge is not available except
for plays set among that same people. We can draw more general
conclusions from the plays in prose (so much admired in my
youth, and now hardly even read) by Maeterlinck. These plays
are in a different way restricted in their subject matter ; and to say
that the characterization in them is dim is an understatement. I do
not deny that they have some poetic quality. But in order to be
poetic in prose, a dramatist has to be so consistently poetic that his
scope is very limited. Synge wrote plays about characters whose
originals in life talked poetically, so he could make them talk
poetry and remain real people. The poetic prose dramatist who
has not this advantage, has to be too poetic. The poetic drama in
prose is more limited by poetic convention or by our conventions
as to what subject matter is poetic, than is the poetic drama in
verse. A really dramatic verse can be employed, as Shakespeare
employed it, to say the most matter-of-fact things.
Yeats is a very different case, from Maeterlinck or Synge. A
study of his development as a dramatist would show, I think, the
great distance he went, and the triumph of his last plays. In his
first period, he wrote plays in verse about subjects conventionally
accepted as suitable for verse, in a metric which - though even at
that early stage having the personal Yeats rhythm - is not really a
form of speech quite suitable for anybody except mythical kings
and queens. His middle-period Plays for Dancers are very beautiful, but they do not solve any problem for the dramatist in verse : 137
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they are poetic prose plays with important interludes in verse. It
was only in his last play Purgatory that he solved his problem of
speech in verse, and laid all his successors under obligation to
him.
I I
Now, I am going to venture to make some observations based on
my own experience, which will lead me to comment on my intentions, failures, and partial successes, in my own plays. I do this in the belief that any explorer or experimenter in new territory may,
by putting on record a kind of journal of his explorations, say
something of use to those who follow him into the same regions
and who will perhaps go farther.
The first thing of any importance that I discovered, was that a
writer who has worked for years, and achieved some success, in
writing other kinds of verse, has to approach the writing of a verse
play in a different frame of mind from that to which he has been
accustomed in his previous work. In writing other verse, I think
that one is writing, so to speak, in terms of one's own voice : the
way it sounds when you read it to yourself is the test. For it is
yourself speaking. The question of communication, of what the
reader will get from it, is not paramount : if your poem is right to
you, you can only hope that the readers will eventually come to
accept it. The poem can wait a little while ; the approval of a few
sympathetic and judicious critics is enough to begin with ; and it is
for future readers to meet the poet more than half way. But in the
theatre, the problem of communication presents itself immediately. You are deliberately writing verse for other voices, not for your own, and you do not know whose voices they will be. You
are aiming to write lines which will have an immediate effect upon
an unknown and unprepared audience, to be interpreted to that
audience by unknown actors rehearsed by an unknown producer.
And the unknown audience cannot be expected to show any indulgence towards the poet. The poet cannot afford to write his play merely for his admirers, those who know his non-dramatic work
and are prepared to receive favourably anything he puts his name
to. He must write with an audience in view which knows nothing
and cares nothing, about any previous success he may have had
before he ventured into the theatre. Hence one finds out that
many of the things one likes to do, and knows how to do, are out
of place ; and that every line must be judged by a new law, that of
dramatic relevance.
When I wrote Murder in the Cathedral I had the advantage for a
beginner, of an occasion which called for a subject generally
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admitted to be suitable for verse. Verse plays, it has been generally
held, should either take their subject matter from some mythology,
or else should be about some remote historical period, far enough
away from the present for the characters not to need to be
recognizable as human beings, and therefore for them to be
licensed to talk in verse. Picturesque period costume renders
verse much more acceptable. Furthermore, my play was to be
produced for a rather special kind of audience - an audience of
those serious people who go to 'festivals' and expect to have to put
up with poetry - though perhaps on this occasion some of them
were not quite prepared for what they got. And finally it was a
religious play, and people who go deliberately to a religious play
at a religious festival expect to be patiently bored and to satisfy
themselves with the feeling that they have done something
meritorious. So the path was made easy.
It was only when I put my mind to thinking what sort of play I
wanted to do next, that I realized that in Murder in the Cathedral
I had not solved any general problem ; but that from my point of
view the play was a dead end. For one thing, the problem of
language which that play had presented to me was a special problem. Fortunately, I did not have to write in the idiom of the twelfth century, because that idiom, even if I knew Norman French and
Anglo-Saxon, would have been unintelligible. But the vocabulary
and style could not be exactly those of modern conversation - as
in some modern French plays using the plot and personages of
Greek drama - because I had to take my audience back to an
historical event; and they could not afford to be archaic, first
because archaism would only have suggested the wrong period,
and second
because I wanted to bring home to the audience the
contemporary relevance of the situation. The style therefore had
to be neutral, committed neither to the present nor to the past. As
for the versification, I was only aware at this stage that the
essential was to avoid any echo of Shakespeare, for I was persuaded that the primary failure of nineteenth-century poets when they wrote for the theatre (and most of the greatest English poets
had tried their hand at drama) was not in their theatrical technique, but in their dramatic language ; and that this was due largely to their limitation to a strict blank verse which, after
extensive use for non-dramatic poetry, had lost the flexibility
which blank verse must have if it is to give the effect of conversation. The rhythm of regular blank verse had become too remote from the movement of modern speech. Therefore what I kept in
mind was the versification of EverJ•nzan, hoping that anything
unusual in the sound of it would be, on the whole, advantageous.
An avoidance of too much iambic, some use of alliteration, and
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occasional unexpected rhyme, helped to distinguish the versification from that of the nineteenth. century.
The versification of the dialogue in Murder in the Cathedral has
therefore, in my opinion, only a negative merit : it succeeded in
avoiding what had to be avoided, but it arrived at no positive
novelty : in short, in so far as it solved the problem of speech in
verse for writing today, it solved it for this play only, and provided me with no clue to the verse I should use in another kind of play. Here, then, were two problems left unsolved : that of the
idiom and that of the metric (it is really one and the same problem), for general use in any play I might want to write in future. I next became aware of my reasons for depending, in that play, so
heavily upon the assistance of the chorus. There were two reasons
for this, which in the circumstances justified it. The first was that
the essential action of the play - both the historical facts and the
matter which I invented - was somewhat limited. A man comes
home, foreseeing that he will be killed, and he is killed. I did not
want to increase the number of characters, I did not want to write
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 20