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RIOT, REVOLUTION, AND THE II/EAVERS GERHART HAUPTMANN HOLDS THE LONELY DISTINCTION of being a playwright who is anthologized and taught with some frequency but who, with equal frequency, is criticized and dismissed as minor, dated, and inconsistent. Indeed, The Weavers, his most significant play, is often found in textbooks for courses in modern drama with a notable critic such as John Gassner calling it repetitious and criticizing Hauptmann for not fully developing the characters. Gassner even comments that the actions of the weavers contribute nothing to "an intelligent treatment of modern realities."l In general, critical opinion is reluctant to abandon Hauptmann completely to the once popular-then taught-now forgotten category to which many writers are discarded. On the other hand, the superficial and generalized analyses done of his work fail to reveal reasons for continuing to read, study, or produce his plays. Upon reading much of the Hauptmann study of the past few years one is led to wonder what all the enthusiasm could ever have been about. But upon reading Hauptmann himself, the old excitement returns and one wonders what the sneering was all about. In light of the revolutionary aspects of the present day, The Weavers is a surprisingly current and socially relevant play. Revolution, a word used only a decade ago with some sense of superiority when referring to the governments of South America, is today a term pondered, condemned, and celebrated by America's taxi-drivers, intellectuals, and teen-agers. If heretofore Hauptmann's play has been read with a degree of misunderstanding and apathy, the events of this decade, and more particularly the past election year, bring today's reader to the play with experiences which heighten and clarify its passion and its simplicity. Certainly a close reading of The Weavers reveals that a basic misunderstanding of the themes of the play has led to a general misreading of the work as a whole. Whereas most analysts have seen the play as a social protest against injustice, one which rehearses the inequities and abuses of the industrial revolution, The Weavers is far more. In 1 Treasury of the Theatre, ed. John Gassner (New York, 1960), p. 133. 165 166 MODERN DRAMA September fact, It IS a play of definition, a drama in which the actions of its collective hero of some seventy people probe and analyze the nature of revolution itself. They show its causes, its purposes, its results. True, Hauptmann based his play on the 1844 uprising of poverty stricken German cottage weavers, a protest against poverty and exploitation of labor. But through art the uprising becomes not a pathetic , if idealistic, cry against wrong. It becomes a broadly developed study of an abstraction. Instead of a play which contributes nothing to an intelligent treatment of modern realities, it is an intensely current work which seeks to understand and define a contemporary social problem: revolution. If in reading The Weavers one is struck by the modernity of the conflicts portrayed, one must also be reminded of a statement Hauptmann himself made shortly before his death in a letter to Walter Reichart. "My works will be understood only gradually. . . . There is much in my work still undiscovered, which can be of great help to the present and future."2 It is time for modern analysis and reassessment of the plays, for the evidence given by The Weavers is that Hauptmann is not repetitious, dated, or superficial as charged. Indeed, The Weavers is a very modern play. One difficulty the modern American reader has in seeing The Weavers as a definition of revolution is its ending. Our history has accustomed us to accepting revolution as progress. The American Revolution, even the Civil War, a social revolution against an inhuman system, led to ends which are now considered right and good. Both grew out of injustice and grievance and moved to justice. In contrast, the revolution of the weavers in Hauptmann's play ends in disaster and defeat for those who declared it. The revolutionists .are dispersed with little difficulty by well armed troops ordered to quell the uprising. This, then, is not revolution as we have known it. Hence the play has been...

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