Verse Drama: A Reconsideration

Verse Drama: A Reconsideration William G. McCollom In 1963, E. Martin Browne published a lecture with the title Verse in the Modern English Theatre. The Times Literary Sup­ plement responded with the question: What verse?1 By that year the work of Eliot and Fry had nearly been completed, and the Angry Young Men had seized popular and critical attention. In the United States, the theater was as angry as in England but less articulate. The declining visibility of verse drama in this century raises the question whether the verse medium can again attract large numbers of playgoers. About thirty years ago John Gielgud played to enthusiastic audiences of The Lady’s Not For Burning. A spectator reported that a woman seated directly behind him exclaimed with delight after every witticism from Christopher Fry. Such a response, for better or worse, is not likely to be soon repeated. On February 16, 1980, The New York Times in its Theatre Directory recorded some sixty current productions in New York. Of these, only one, listed as Yeats’ Cuchulain, was evidently a poetic drama of the twentieth century. Similarly, Block and Shedd’s large anthology, Masters of Modern Drama (1962), printed only one poetic play in English, Yeats’ A t the Hawk’s Well, one of his less dramatic plays. Paddy Chayevsky was represented, but not Eliot or one of the many other poets in English who have written plays in verse. Many reasons contribute to this change of taste—the coming of television and the related decline in demand for excellent or even educated speech, the increasingly high risks of theatrical production, the defensive reaction of the poet to the money­ changer, the sense that verse drama belongs to a distant and irrecoverable past, the supposition that iambic pentameter fails to suit our speech patterns, the movement of poets from metered verse to prose rhythms, and their tendency to prefer verse or even prose dialogue to drama. In addition, verse drama has 99 100 Comparative Drama been met with criticism ranging from indifference to savagery. An author of a recent book on the subject finds the genre of slight value. A classical scholar treats with scorn a dramatic poet’s return to a myth found in Euripides. Kenneth Tynan ridicules what may be Eliot’s best play.2 All this suggests that verse drama, along with medieval allegory, Elizabethan tragedy, and Augustan wit, may soon become a historical phenomenon, whatever the achievement of individual plays. In a time when the philosophy of criticism veers toward the conclusion that critical conclusions are impossible,3 few would claim certainty for critical judgments on that most protean of forms, drama. When estimating a playwright, one is interpret­ ing and judging the words on the page but also their potential for theatrical success. Yet predicting success on the stage is notoriously difficult, and success in the theater has misled critics into wildly excessive praise. Moreover, failure in the theater or failure to reach production may prove nothing. Georg Büchner died in his early thirties and was unknown as a play­ wright for half a century, but he is now recognized as an as­ tonishingly gifted forerunner of significant modem drama. The multiple bases of dramatic criticism and the whirligig of time, place, and subjectivity are a permanent warning against critical hybris. In spite of these cautions, I believe that twentieth-century verse drama has been underrated and that much of it deserves the second chance that Büchner received. At any rate we have reached a point when a re-examination of the persisting quali­ ties of this dramatic mode seems called for as a preliminary to any attempt to reassess its place in this century. Though much great drama is in prose, it is obvious that the towering achievements have been poetic drama written in verse. Visions of human reality that are at once vivid, profound, and comprehensive are poetic visions or, what is more to the point, are poetry. But since the Renaissance, such insight has less and less often been confined to verse. In a brief essay suggesting that verse is no longer necessary in drama, John Wain wrote that “Waiting for...