The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Comedy, on the other hand, is not only possible within a Christian society, but capable of a much greater breadth and depth than classical comedy. Greater in breadth because classical comedy is based upon the division of mankind into two classes, those who have arete and those who do not, and only the second class, fools, shameless rascals, slaves, are fit subjects for comedy. But Christian comedy is based upon the belief that all men are sinners; no one, therefore, whatever his rank or talents, can claim immunity from the comic exposure and, indeed, the more virtuous, in the Greek sense, a man is, the more he realizes that he deserves to be exposed. Greater in depth because, while classical comedy believes that rascals should get the drubbing they deserve, Christian comedy believes that we are forbidden to judge others and that it is our duty to forgive each other. In classi­cal comedy the characters are exposed and punished: when the curtain falls, the audience is laughing and those on stage are in tears. In Christian comedy the characters are exposed and forgiven; when the curtain falls, the audience and the characters are laughing together. Ben Jonson's comedies, unlike Shakespeare's, axe classical, not Christian.

If the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson—and Jonson is untypical, anyway—had been lost, we should find in the dramatic literature written between 1590 and 1642, many passages of magnificent poetry, many scenes of exciting theatre, but no play which is satisfactory as a whole; the average Elizabethan play is more like a variety show—a series of scenes, often moving or entertaining enough in themselves, but without essential relation to each other—than like a properly constructed drama in which every character and every word is relevant. For this defect we should probably blame the laxness of Elizabethan stage conventions, which permitted the dramatist to have as many scenes and characters as he liked, and to include tragic and comic scenes, verse and prose, in the same play. Fortunately, Shakespeare's plays have not perished, and we are able to see how greatly, in his case, these conventions contributed towards his achievement. Had the stage conventions of his day been those, for example, of the French classical theatre in the seventeenth century, he could not, given his particular kind of genius and interests, have become the greatest creator of "Feigned Histories" in dramatic form who ever lived. In the preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession,

with his typical mixture of perspicacity and polemical exaggeration, Shaw writes:

The drama can do little to delight the senses: all the ap­parent instances to the contrary are instances of the personal fascination of the performers. The drama of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the play­wright: it has been conquered by the musician, after whose enchantment all the verbal arts seem cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is dry, tedious and rhetorical in comparison with Wagner's

Tristan, even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often is in Germany . . . There is, flatly, no future now for any drama without music except the drama of thought. The attempt to produce a genus of opera without music (and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time past without knowing it) is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problems as the normal material for drama.¹

¹ Curiously enough, now we have got used to them, what impresses us most about Shaw's plays is their musical quality. He has told us himself that it was from Don Giovanni that he learned "How to write seriously