Diverse Pursuits

Essays on Drama and Theatre

Javed Malick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000412864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teatro

The five essays in this book reflect many years of the author's sustained academic engagement with dramatic forms and traditions. The opening essay traces the historical trajectory of modern drama in Europe from its bourgeois period through the period of the liberal dissent to the more recent periods of radical alternative. The subsequent essays deal with certain specific examples of that drama in India and the West, such as Shakespeare adaptations on the Parsi theatre stage, Habib Tanvir, and Samuel Beckett. The author places each of these in a historical perspective. This approach constitutes the theoretical underpinning of the book giving cohesion to this collection of diverse essays. Although they were individually published in various journals and books in their earlier versions, they have been substantially revived and updated by the author for this volume.

This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

1
Bourgeois Worldview and Beyond: Alternative Traditions in Modern Drama¹

In his book, To Brecht and Beyond (1984), Darko Suvin writes: “From the very large number of modelling possibilities, one or (at exceptional periods of strife) a few become dominant in a given socio-historical constellation or age” (4). Taking our cue from Suvin’s observation, we can identify in 20^th century Western drama two distinct and rival dramaturgic traditions or modelling possibilities. We can describe these traditions as: one, the dominant bourgeois liberal tradition and two, the radical alternative tradition. The axiomatic basis of the first is in the ideology of individualism, while the alternative tradition takes its inspiration from some form of historically and ideologically post-bourgeois thought, and embodies concerns which are categorically societal or supra-individual. The two traditions contended for supremacy throughout the 20^th century, often major changes in the socio-political climate tilting the balance in favour of one or the other.

In what follows we shall discuss these rival currents at length. However, it must be pointed out right at the outset that neither of these two traditions is monolithic or homogeneous. Each covers a wide and diverse body of formal and stylistic experiments in playwriting and play-producing. In other words, in a finer distinction, it should be entirely possible to sub-divide each of these traditions into a number of specific trends that emerged in the course of history. But, since in this chapter our purpose is to identify and describe only the general trends of these two dramaturgic types for the strictly functional purpose of historical perspective, we will not concern ourselves with specific examples of internal variations, but shall remain focused on the two overarching paradigms and their underlying ideological assumptions. Besides, practical examples from the two traditions are not always and necessarily exclusive but at times they can, and do, overlap in terms of political orientation and even content.

Bourgeois Origins of Modern Drama

During my long career as a teacher, I taught courses in modern European drama for many consecutive years. One of the very first questions that I usually took up for discussion in my class was: What was specifically modern about this drama; or, more precisely, how does one distinguish it from the non-modern or pre-modern dramatic traditions. Drawing upon the existing body of scholarship, I improvised a way of studying the changes in the dramatic form in relation to the changes in society. I found it instructive to approach it through a system of two distinct yet inter-locking perspectives: a long perspective or view of the genesis and history of modern drama going back to the 18^th, and in some ways even to the 17^th century, and a short one dealing with its, and, for our purposes more significant, view of its major formal and ideological tendencies since the latter part of the 19^th century. Thus, in the long view, I traced the origins of modern drama to the rise of the middle class to power and supremacy in Europe, while my short view encompassed the period of the rise of liberal dissent within the European middle classes.

What made this bi-focal approach pedagogically interesting was that it yielded a two-part, seemingly paradoxical proposition. One, that modern European drama and theatre, in all its dominant forms and traditions (except in what I have identified above as the radical alternative tradition), is socially and ideologically middle class. Obviously, this part of the proposition pertains to the long view mentioned above. The short view, on the other hand, pertains to the drama, since the rise in the late 19^th century, of a dissenting minority within the ruling class and inspires a seemingly contradictory proposition: that all influential examples of that very drama have been consciously and categorically anti-bourgeois. In other words, while almost all serious examples of modern drama from Ibsen to, say, Beckett, have been characterised by an unmistakable anti-bourgeois moral stance, this dramatic tradition, in the ideological implications and orientations of dramaturgic and theatrical forms, as also in the composition of its audiences, continued to be circumscribed by bourgeois philosophical horizons. It distinguished itself, on the one hand, from the pre-bourgeois (particularly medieval and Elizabethan) traditions, and, on the other, from the 20^th century attempts at a radical break and renewal as in the tradition from Mayakovsky, Piscator, and Brecht to Dario Fo, John Arden, and dozens of radical activist theatre groups that emerged during the euphoric 1960s.

The distinctive conventions of this middle class drama evolved through a long and complex process. English drama, which, during the Elizabethan period, was the glory of the European theatre, lost most of its artistic vibrancy and popular character in the course of the turbulent 17^th century. Instead of reaching out to all sections of society, it shrank till it became the theatre of a small social elite. As Arnold Hauser, one of the most incisive historians of the period, points out, “Since the reign of Charles I dramatists had limited themselves more and more to producing for the theatre of the court and the higher ranks of society, so that the popular tradition of the Elizabethan age had soon been lost” (87). Thus, when the Puritans closed down the theatre after the revolution of 1642, English drama was already in decline. A few decades later, when the theatres reopened in 1660, what was produced was a severely devitalised kind of drama. This situation continued for more than half a century and not much in what was produced was remarkable or of lasting value or influence.

Following the Cromwellian revolution, which brought the English middle class to power, it was clear that the new historical reality required new forms of cultural expression. Writers forged new forms out of old traditions. For instance, although fictional narratives like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels built on the old traditions of the picaresque, by the middle of the 18^th century, in the works of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, increasingly more developed examples of an entirely new form of prose fiction called the novel emerged. Around the same time (mid-18^th century), a new kind of drama also began to take shape in England and elsewhere in Europe. A new generation of playwrights emerged who, often, consciously, reworked old forms in order to make them reflect contemporary reality and the worldview of the emergent middle class. The most significant example of this was a new tragic drama, known as bourgeois tragedy which became widely popular during the middle decades of the 18^th century. Although formally offered as tragedy, this drama was distinguished by the fact that it jettisoned the conventions and concerns of the traditional aristocratic tragic form with its predilection for protagonists of high social rank and for larger than life passions and grandiloquence. Instead, it employed, for the first time in the history of European drama, middle class protagonists whose tragic stories usually turned around sex, morality, money, and marriage.

The play which inaugurated this new form of tragedy in Europe was written in 1731 by an English dramatist, George Lillo. It was titled The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell. The play dramatised the tragic fate of a young man from a trading family who falls prey to an evil woman’s charms and is led into murdering his loving uncle for money. Since he was using the traditional form of tragedy to convey a new kind of content, Lillo felt somewhat apologetic and found it necessary to offer an explanation to justify his “tragedy” about a young middle class man. In a dedicatory letter to his patron, Sir John Eyles, he wrote:

What I would infer is this, I think, evident truth; that tragedy is so far from losing its dignity, by being accommodated to the circumstances of the generality of mankind that it is more truly august in proportion to the extent of its influence, and the numbers that are properly affected by it. As it is more truly great to be the instrument of good to many, who stand in need of our assistance, than to a very small part of that number.

Elaborating this further, he says:

If princes, etc., were alone liable to misfortune, arising from vice or weakness in themselves or others, there would be good reason for consigning the characters in tragedy to those of superior rank; but, since the contrary is evident, nothing can be more reasonable than to proportion the remedy to the disease (250).

Lillo’s play was followed in 1755 by Lessing’s Sara, which broke new ground in the theatre and introduced bourgeois tragedy on to the German stage. Influenced by the novels of Richardson (in particular by Clarissa Harlowe), Sara was the first tragedy in German to be taken from contemporary life and, unlike Lillo’s, to have been written in ordinary, everyday prose dialogue. Writing about this new variety of drama, Hauser notes:

The tragic deed was an uncanny, inexplicable, irrational phenomenon in Greek drama, in Shakespeare and still, to some extent, in French classical drama; its shattering effect was due, above all, to its incommensurability. The new psychological motivation gave it a human measure and, as the representatives of the domestic drama intended, it was made easier for the audience to sympathise with the characters on the stage (92–93).

One of the notable features of the romantic German drama of the “storm and stress” movement was that it foregrounded the theme of the individual versus a hostile environment, a theme that was to become a pivotal motif in an entire current of significant modern drama from Ibsen and Strindberg to, say, Arthur Miller and John Osborne.

This Ibsenian tradition represented the full and finest expression of what Raymond Williams has described as the “general form” of bourgeois drama. In Williams’ abstract model, this emergent form consisted of five factors: one, the subject matter became contemporary and, two, indigenous; three, the dramatic speech was no longer verse or formal prose but ordinary everyday prose (in Williams’ own words “quasi-colloquial”); four, no longer confined exclusively to the life and actions of aristocracy, the drama became socially inclusive, so that all ranks and classes were now the acceptable subject of drama; and, five, all references to any supernatural or supra-human agency came to be gradually excluded and plays dealt with ordinary human reality and relationship in strictly human and secular terms (1981a, 166–67). These five constitutive factors can be reduced to three fundamental philosophical emphases: namely, realism, a secular worldview and a democratising orientation. These emphases define the new kind of drama and distinguish it from the theatre traditions of pre-modern periods. The emergent form thus can be said to herald the process of democratisation and secularisation of the dramatic form which reached its most significant culmination in the middle class drama in the late 19^th century.

Two features that define middle class drama in its fully developed form are its axiological basis in the ideology of individualism and, to a lesser degree, its aesthetics of illusionism. Individualism, which forms the epistemological basis of the dominant European and American culture, particularly since the 18^th century, is integrally allied to the materialist and atomist emphases of bourgeois theory and practice. It defines the horizon of the bourgeois worldview, revealing both its strengths (compared with earlier metaphysical modes and forms of thought) and its limitations (compared with what may be called post-individualist, particularly Marxist theory and practice). Illusionism, on the other hand, is the common artistic manifestation of this epistemology and endeavours to reproduce “mirror images” of observed life and setting, which not only blur the reader or spectator’s awareness of the essential fictionality of an artistic text with a view to maximising and intensifying the emotional impact, but also restrict that text’s artistic and cognitive range. Both these axioms are best illustrated in what is commonly described as the drama of naturalism.

Naturalism

Although naturalism developed as a conscious emphasis and stylistic term in drama only in the 19^th century, it has a long and varied history, which has been usefully traced by Raymond Williams. He notes two main senses in which the term was used prior to its full scale development in drama. First, it was used in the late 16^th century in “a form of conscious opposition, or at least distinction, between revealed (divine) and observed (human) knowledge” and as such signified “a philosophical position allied to science, natural history and materialism” (1977, 203). The early and general manifestations of naturalism in this sense can be seen in the tendency towards a consciously secular and social emphasis that goes back, in drama and fiction, to the 17^th century (prose comedy, domestic drama) but becomes particularly pronounced in the 18^th century “bourgeois tragedy” of which, as we saw above, Lillo’s The London Merchant is a good example. It is reflected, in particular in the reliance upon observed (and, as Williams has pointed out, contemporary and indigenous) social life as the source of dramatic action.

The term naturalism was also used, in the mid-19^th century, particularly in painting, to indicate a “method of ‘accurate’ or “lifelike reproduction” (1977, 203). This second meaning of naturalism, obviously related to what we have here identified as illusionism, continues to be the sense in which the term is popularly understood and used in relation to drama and fiction. However, according to Williams, naturalism in drama in its fully developed form combines both these senses; that is, it designates not only a method but also an ideological position. It indicates, in William’s words, “a movement in which the method of accurate production and the specific philosophical position are organically and usually consciously fused” (203). This twofold emphasis of naturalism can be clearly seen in Zola’s well-known defence of naturalist drama. He wrote:

In effect, the great naturalistic evolution, which comes down directly from the 15^th century to ours has everything to do with the gradual substitution of physiological man for metaphysical man. In tragedy, metaphysical man, man according to dogma and logic, reigned absolutely. The body did not count; the soul was regarded as the only interesting piece of human machinery; drama took place in the air, in pure mind. Consequently, what use was the tangible world? Why worry about the place where the action was located? Why be surprised at a baroque costume or false declaiming? Why notice that queen Dido was a boy whose budding beard forced him to wear a mask? None of that mattered; these trifles were not worth stooping to; the play was heard out as if it were a school essay or a low case; it was on a higher place than man, in the world of ideas, so far away from real man that any intrusion of reality would have spoiled the show (1968, 367).

Naturalism in this 19^th century conception, thus, meant a secular and materialist emphasis in conscious opposition to the metaphysical and religious world view of earlier times. But it also meant a style of surface realism, a life like and non-emblematic reproduction of the “tangible world”. However, it underwent a significant modification when it was combined with the idea of material determinism.

Determinism was a new emphasis which began with the enlightenment but developed to a fuller form in the theories of social and natural history in the course of the 19^th century. For, although as early as the 18^th century Montesquieu had, in The Spirit of the Laws, regarded environment not only as a background but also as a condition of human activity, and Denis Diderot had stressed the role of the milieu, it was only in the 19^th century that social and natural environment came to be seen as a decisive, deterministic factor in human destiny. A leading proponent of determinism was Robert Owen, who wrote:

The character of man is, without a single exception, always formed for him; …it may be, and is chiefly, created by his predecessors; …they give him, his ideas and habits, which are the powers that govern and direct his conduct. Man, therefore, never did, nor is it possible that he ever can, form his own character (1817, 91–92).

This new awareness of the importance of biological inheritance and material environment on one’s life was a central feature of what came to be called Social Darwinism, which grew out of a general materialist orientation of bourgeois thought. This materialism, however, was mechanistic and naive compared with the more complex idea of dialectical materialism developed later by Karl Marx. For, the specific terms in which it developed in liberal thought during the 19^th century carried with it a sense of inexorability that made it essentially a modern version of fate or destiny.

Naturalism with this determinist emphasis profoundly influenced the major dramaturgic forms and styles of the period. The consequence was that the physical environment, the setting, and the biographical past no longer functioned as mere realistic backdrops lending authenticity to the dramatised action but actually became crucial factors in that action. For example, the enclosed space of the room, within which the action was usual...