Drama

DRAMA (literally action, from Gr. ~pav, act or do), the term applied to those productions of Art which imitate or, to use a more modern term, represent action by introducing the personages taking part in them as real, and as employed in the action itself. There are numerous varieties of the drama,, differing more or less widely from one another, both as to the objects imitated and as to the means used in the process. But they all agree in the method or manner which is essential to the drama and to dramatic art, namely, imitation in the way of action. The function of all Art being to give pleasure by representation (see FINE ARTS), it is clear that what is distinctive of any one branch or form must be the manner in which this function is performed by it. In the epos, for instance, the method or manner is narrative, and even when Odysseus tells of his action, he is not acting.

1. THEORY OF THE DRAMA, AND DRAMATIC ART

The first step towards the drama is the assumption of character, whether real or fictitious. It is caused by the desire, inseparable from human nature, to give expression to feelings and 1t~a~a. ideas. These man. expresses not only by sound and gesture, like other animals, and by speech significant by its delivery as well as by its purport, but also by imitation superadded to these. To imitate, says Aristotle, is instinctive in man from his infancy, and no pleasure is more universal than that which is given by imitation. Inasmuch as the aid of some sort of dress or decoration is usually at hand, while the accompaniment of dance or song, or other music, naturally suggests itself, especially on joyous or solemn occasions, we find that this preliminary step is taken among all peoples, however primitive or remote. But it does not follOw, as is often assumed, that they possess a drama in germ. Boys playing at soldiers, or men walking in a pageanta shoemakers holiday in ribbons and flowers, or a Shetland sword-dancenone of these is in itself a drama. This is not reached till the imitation or representation extends to action.

An action which is to present itself as such to human minds must enable them to recognize in it a procedure from cause to effect. This of course means, neither that the cause Dramatic action, suggested must be the final cause, nor that the result shown forth need pretend to be the ultimate result.

We look upon an action as ended when the purpose with which it began is shown to have been gained or frustrated; and we trace the beginning of an action back to the human will that set it on footthough this will may be in. bondage to a higher or stronger will, or to fate,, in any or all of its purposes. Without an action in the sense statedwithout a plot, ,in a wordthere can be no drama. But the very simplest action will satisfy the dramatic test; a mystery representing the story of Cain and Abel without a deviation from the simple biblical narrative, a farce exhibiting the stalest trick played by designing sobriety upon oblivious drunkenness, may each of them be a complete drama. But even to this point, the imitation of action by action in however crude a form, not all peoples have advanced.

But after this second step has been taken, it only remains for the drama to assume a form regulated by certain literary laws, in order that it may become a branch of dramatic literature. Such a literature, needless to say, only a limited number of nations has come to possess; and, while some are to be found that have, or have had, a drama without a dramatic literature, it is quite conceivable that a nation should continue in possession of the former after having ceased to ct~ltivate the latter. It is self-evident that no drama which forms part of a dramatic literature can ignore the use of speech; and however closely music, dancing and decoration may associate themselves with particular forms or phases of the drama, their aid cannot be more than adventitious. As a matter of fact, the beginnings of dramatic composition are, in the history of such literatures as are well known to us, preceded by the earlier stages in the growth of the lyric and epic forms of poetry, or by one of these at all events; ,and it is in the continuation of both that the drama in its literary form takes its origin in those instances which lie open to our study.

While the aid of all other artseven, strictly speaking, the aid of the literary artis merely an accident, the co-operation of the art of acting is indispensable to that of the drama. The draThe dramatic writer may have reasons for preferring to matte and leave the imagination of his~ reader to supply the tho hisabsence of this co-operation; but, though the term literary drama is freely used of works kept away from the stage, it is in truth either a misnomer or a self-condemnation. It is true that the actor only temporarily interprets, and sometimes misinterprets, the dramatist, while occasionally he reveals dramatic possibilities in a character or situation which remained hidden from their literary inventor. But this only shows that the courses of the dramatic and the histrionic arts do not run parallel; it does not contradict the fact that their conjunction is, on the one side as well as on the other, indispensable. No drama is more than potentially such till it is acted.

To essay, whether in a brief summary or in more or less elaborate detail, a statement of the main lawsof the drama, has often been regarded as a superfluous, not to say, futile effort. But the laws of which it is proposed to give ~ some indication here are not so much those which any the drama, particular literature or period has chosen to set up and follow, as those abstracted by criticism, in pursuit of its own free comparative method, from the process that repeats itself in every drama adequately meeting the demands upon it. Aristotle, whom we still justly revere as the originator of the theory of the drama, and thus its great eop.oO~i-i~s, was, no doubt, in. his practical knowledge of it, confined to its Greek examples, yet his object was not to produce another generation of great Attic tragedians, but rather to show how it was by following the necessary laws of their art that the great masters, true to themselves and to their artistic ends, had achieved what they had achieved. Still more distinctly was such the aim of the greatest modern critical writer on the drama, Lessing, whose chief design was to combat false dramatic theories and to overthrow laws demonstrated by him to be artificial inventions, unreal figments. He proved, what before him had only been suspected, that Shakespeare, though in hopeless conifict with certain rules dating from the sicle de Louis XIV, was not in conflict with those laws of the drama which are of its very essence, and that, accordingly, if Shakespeare and the rules in question could not be harmonized, it was only so much the worse for the rules. To illustrate from great works, and expound with their aid, the organic processes of the art to which they belong, is not only among the highest, it is also one of the most useful functions of literary and artistic criticism. Nor is there, in one sense at least, any finality about it. Neither the great authorities on dramatic theory nor the resolute and acute apologists of more or less transitory phases of the drama Corneille, Dryden and many later successorshave exhausted the statement of the means which the drama has proved, or may prove, capable of employing. The multitude of technical terms and formulae which has gathered round the practice of the most living and the most Protean of arts has at no time seriously interferedwith the operation of creative power. Ontheotherhand, no dramaturgic theory has (though the attempt has been often enough made) ever succeeded in giving rise ,to a single dramatic work of enduring value, unless the creative force was there to animate the form.

It is therefore the operation of this creative force which we are chiefly interested in noting; and its task begins with the beginning, of the dramatists labors. He must of Ch ~

course start with the choice of a subject; yet it is sleet. obvious that the subject is merely the dead material out of which is formed that living sopiething, the action of a play; and it is only in rare instancesfar rarer than might at first sight appearthat the subject is as it were self-moulded as a dramatic action. The less experienced a playwright, the more readily will he, as the phrase is, rush at his subject, more especially if it seems to him to possess prima facie dramatic capabilities; and the consequence will be that which usually attends upon a precipitate start. On the other hand, while the quickness of a great dramatists apprehension is apt to suggest to him an infinite number of subjects,.and insight and experience may lead him half instinctively in the direction of suitable themes, it will often be long before in his mind the subject converts itself into the initial conception of the action of a play. To mould a subjectbe it a Greek legend, or a portion of a Tudor chronicle, or one out of a hundred Italian tales, or a true story of modern lifeinto the action or fable of a play, is the primary task of the dramatist, and with this all-important process the creative part of his work really begins. Although his conception may expand or modify itself as he executes it, yet upon the conception the execution must largely depend. The range of subjects open to a dramatist may be as wide as the world itself, or it may be restricted by an endless variety of causes, conventions and considerations; and it is quite true that even the greatest dramatists have not always found time for contemplating each subject that occurs to them till the ray is caught which proclaims it a dramatic diamond. What they had time for, and what only the playwright who entirely misunderstands his art ignores the necessity of finding time for, is the transformation of the dead material of the subject into the living action of a drama.

What is it, then, that makes an action dramatic, and without which no action, whatever may be its natureserious or ludicrous, ,, stately or trivial, impetuous as a flame of fire, or light ~YO as a western breezecan be so described? The answer to this question can only suggest itself from an attempt to ascertain the laws which determine the nature of all actions corresponding to this description. The first of the laws in question is in so far the most noteworthy among them that it has been the most amply discussed and the most pertinaciously misunderstood. This is the law which requires that a dramatic action should be onethat it should possess unity. What in the subject of a drama is merely an approximate or supposititious, must in its action be an actual unity; and it is indeed this requirement which constitutes the most arduous part of the task of transforming subject into action. There is of course no actual unity in any group of events in human life which we may choose to call by a single collective namea war, a revolution, a conspiracy, an intrigue, an imbroglio. The events of real life, the facts of history, even the imitative incidents of narrative fiction, are like the waves of a ceaseless flood; that which binds a group or body of them into a single action is the bond of the dramatic idea; and this it is incumbent upon the dramatist to supply. Within the limits of a dramatic action all its parts should (as in real life or in history they so persistently refuse to do) flow into its current like tributaries to a single stream; or, to vary the figure, everything in a drama should form a link in a single chain of cause and effect. This law is incumbent upon every kind of dramaalike upon the tragedy which sets itself to solve one of the problems of a life, and upon the farce which sums up the follies of an afternoon.

Such is not, however, the case with certain more or less arbitrary rules which have at different times been set up for this or that kind of drama. The supposed necessity that an action should consist of one event is an erroneous interpretation of the law that it should be, as an action, one. For an event is but an element in an action, though it may be an element of decisive moment. The assassination of Caesar is not the action of a Caesar tragedy; the loss of his treasure is not the action of Tue Miser. Again, unity of action, while excluding those unconnected episodes which Aristotle so severely condemns, does not prohibit the introduction of one or even more subsidiary actions as contributing to the progress of the main action. The sole indispensable law is that these should always be treated as what they aresubsidiary only; and herein lies the difficulty, which Shakespeare so successfully overcame, of fusing a combination of subjects taken from various sources into the idea of a single action; herein also lies the danger in the use of that favorite device of the Spanish and other modern dramas by-plots or under-plots. On the other hand, the modern French drama has largely employed another devicequite legitimate in itselffor increasing the interest of an action without destroying its unity. This may be called the dramatic use of backgrounds, the depiction of surroundings on which the action or its chief characters seem sympathetically to reflect themselves, backbiting good villagers or academicians who inspire oneanother with tedium. But a really double or multiple action, logically carried out as such, is inconceivable in a single drama, though many a play is palpably only two plays knotted into one., It was therefore not all pedantry which protested against the multiplicity of action which had itself formed part of the revolt against the too narrow interpretation of unity adopted by the French classical drama. Thirdly, unity of action need not imply unity of herofor hero (or heroine) is merely a conventional term signifying the principal personage of the action. It is only when the change in the degree of interest excited by different characters in a play results from a change in the conception of the action itself, that the consequent duality (or multiplicity) of heroes recalls a faulty uncertainty in the conception of the action they carry on. Such an objection, while it may hold in the case of Schillers Don Carlos, would therefore be erroneously urged against Shakespeares Julius Caesar. Lastly, as to the theory which made the so-called unities of time and place constitute, together with that of action, the Three Unities indispensable to the (tragic) drama, the following note must suffice. Aristotles supposed exaction of all the Three Unities, having been expanded by Chapelain and approved by Richelieu, was stereotyped by Corneille, though he had (as one might say) got on very well without them, and was finally set forth in Horatian verse by Boileau. Thus it came to be overlooked that there is nothing in Aristotles statement to show that in his judgment unity of time and place are, like unity of action, absolute dramatic laws. Their object is by representing an action as visibly continuous to render its unity more distinctly or easily perceptible. But the imagination is capable of constructing for itself the bridges required for preserving to an action, conceived of as such, its character of continuousness. In another sense these rules were convenient usages conducing to a concise and clear treatment of a limited kind of themes; for they were a Greek invention, and the repeated resort tq the same group of myths made it expedient for a Greek poet to seek the subject of a single tragedy in a part only of one of the myths at his disposal. The observance of unity of place, moreover, was suggested to the Greeks by certain outward conditions of their stageas assuredly as it was adopted by the French in accordance with the construction and usages of theirs, and as the neglect of it by the Elizabethans was in their case encouraged by the established form of the English scene. The palpable artificiality of these laws needs no demonst,ration, so long as the true meaning of the term action be kept in view. Of the action of Othello part takes place at Venice and part at Cyprus, and yet the whole is one in itself; while the limits of time over which an action Hamlets progress to resolve, for instanceextends cannot be restricted by a revolution of the earth round the sun or of the moon round the earth.

In a drama which presents its action as one, this action must be complete in itself. This Aristotelian law, like the other, distinguishes the dramatic action from its subject. The former may be said to have a real artistic, while the CompIet~ latter has only an imaginary real, completeness. The historian, for instance, is aware that the complete exposition of a body of events and transactions at which he aims can never be more than partially accomplished, since he may present only what he knows, and all human knowledge is imperfect. But Art is limited by no such uncertainty. The dramatist, in treating an action as one, comprehends the whole of it in the form of his work, since, to him who has conceived it, all its parts, from cause to effect, are equally clear. It is his fault if in the action of his drama anything is left unaccounted for not motive; though a dramatic motif might not always prove to be a sufficient explanation in real life. Accordingly, every drama should represent in organic sequence the several stages of which a complete action consists, and which are essential to it. This law of completeness, therefore, lies at the foundation of all systems of dramatic construction.

Every action, if conceived, of as complete, has its causes, growth, height, consequences and close. There is no binding s stems 01law to prescribe the relative length or proportion at true- which these several stages in the action should be tlon based treated in a drama; or to regulate the treatment of on this law such subsidiary actions as may be introduced in aid of the main plot, or of such more or less directly connected episodes as may at the same time advance and relieve its progress. But experience has necessarily from time to time established certain rules of practice, and from the adoption of particular systems of division for particular species of the dramasuch as that into five acts for a regular tragedy or comedy, which Roman. example has caused to be so largely followedhas naturally resulted a certain uniformity of relation between the conduct of an action and the outward sections of a play. Essentially, however, there is no difference between the laws regulating the construction of a Sophoclean or Shakespearian tragedy, a comedy of Moliere or Congreve, and a well-built modern farce, because all exhibit an action complete in itself.

The introduction or exposition. forms an integral part of the action, and is therefore to be distinguished from the Prologues prologue in the more ordinary sense of the term, and which like the epilogue (and the Greek irap.I3aou)

epilogues stands outside the action, and is a mere address to the ~lde the public from author, presenter or actor occasioned by the play. Prologue and epilogue are mere external, though at times effective, adjuncts, and have, properly speaking, as little to do with the construction of a play as the bill which announces it or the musical prelude which disposes the mind for its reception. A special kind of preface or argument is the dumb-show, which in some old plays briefly rehearses in pantomime the action that is to follow. The introduction or Par-iso! exposition belongs to the action itself; it is, as the the action. Hindu critics called it, the seed or circumstance from introduc- which the business arises. Clearness being its primary don or ex- requisite, many expedlients have been. at various times Posit Ofl. adopted to secure this feature. Thus the Euripidean prologue, though spoken by one of the characters of the play, took a narrative form, more acceptable to the audience than to the critics, and placed itself half without, half within, the action. The same purpose is served by the separate inductions in many of the old English plays, and by the preludes or prologues, or whatever name they may assume, in. numberless modern dramas of all kindsfrom Faust down to the favorites of the Ambigu and the Adeiphi. More facile is the orientation supplied in French tragedy by the opening scenes between hero and confidant, and in French comedy and its derivatives by those between observant valet and knowing ladys-maid. But all such expedients may be rendered unnecessary by the art of the dramatist, who is able outwardly also to present the introduction of his action as an organic part of that action itself; who seems to take the spectators in medias res, while he is really building the foundations of his plot; who touches in the opening of his action the chord which is to vibrate throughout its course Down with the Capulets I down with the Montagues I With the Moor, sayest thou?

The exposition, which may be short or long, but which should always prepare and may even seem to necessitate the action, ends when the movement of the action itself begins. This transition may occasionally be marked with the utmost distinctness (as in the actual meeting between the hero and the Ghost in Hamlet), while in other instances subsidiary action. or episode may judiciously intervene (as in King Lear, where the subsidiary action of Gloster and his sons opportunely prevents too abrupt a sequence of cause and effect).

o ~.-th From this point the second stage of the actionits ro growth progresses to that third stage which is called its height or climax. All that has preceded the attainment of this constitutes that half of the dramausually its much larger halfwhich Aristotle terms the ~o-is, or tying of the knot. The varieties in the treatment of the growth or second stage of,the action are infinite; it is here that the greatest freedom is manifestly permissible; that in the Indian drama the personages make long journeys across the stage; and that, with the help of their under-plots, the masters of the modern tragic and the comic dramanotably those unequalled weavers of intrigues, the Spaniardsare able most fully to exercise their inventive faculties. If the growth is too rapid, the climax wili fail of its effect; if it is too slow, the interest will be exhausted before the greatest demand upon it has been madea fault to which comedy is specially liable; if it is involved or inverted, a vague uncertainty will take the place of an eager or agreeable suspense, the action will seem to halt, or a fall will begin prematurely. In. the contrivance of the climax itself lies one of the chief tests of the dramatists art; for while the transactions of real life often fail to reach any ~~or climax at all, that of a dramatic action should present itself as self-evident. In the middle of everything, says the Greek poet, lies the strength; and this strongest or highest point it is the task of the dramatist to make manifest. Much here depends upon the niceties of constructive instinct; much (as in all parts of the action) upon a thorough dramatic transformation of the subject. The historical drama at this point presents peculiar difficulties, of which the example of Henry VIII. may be cited as an illustration.

From the climax, or height, the action proceeds through its fall to its close, which in a drama with an unhappy ending we still call its catastrophe, while to termina- Fall. tions in general we apply the term denouement. This latter name would, however, more properly be applied in the sense in. which Aristotle employs its Greek equivalent Xi~nc the untying of the knotto the whole of the second part of the action, from the climax downwards. In the management of the climax, everything depends upon producing the effect; in the fall, everything depends upon not marring it. This may be ensured by a rapid advance to the close; but neither does every action admit of such treatment, nor is it in accordance with the character of those which are of a more subtle or complicated kind. With the latter, therefore, the fall is often a revolution or return, i.e. in Aristotles phrase a change into the reverse of what is expected from the circumstances of the action (irepnr~reta)as in. Coriolanus, where the Return. Roman story lends itself so admirably to dramatic demands. In any case, the art of the dramatist is in this part of his work called upon. for the surest exercise of its tact and skill. The effect of the climax was to concentrate the interest; the fall must therefore, above all, avoid dissipating it. The use of episodes is not even now excluded; but, even where serving the purpose of relief, they must now be such as help to keep alive the interest, previously raised to its highest pitch. This may be effected by the raising of obstacles between the height of the action and its expected consequences; in tragedy by the suggestion of a seemingly possible recovery or escape from them (as in the wonderfully powerful construction of the latter part of Macbeth); in comedy, or wherever the interest of the action is less intense, by the gradual removal of incidental difficulties. In all kinds of the drama discovery will remain, as it was in the judgment of Aristotle, a most effective expedient; but it should be a discovery prepared by that method of treatment which in its consummate master, Sophocles, has been termed his irony. Nowhere should the close or catastrophe be other than a consequence of the action itself. Sudden revulsions from the conditions of the actionsuch as Close or are supplied with the aid of the deus ex machina, or the revising officer of the emperor of China,or the nabob returned from India, or a virulent malariacondemn themselves as unsatisfactory makeshifts. However sudden, and even in manner of accomplishment surprising, may be the catastrophe, it should, like every other part of the action, be in organic connection with the whole preceding action. The sudden suicides which terminate so many tragedies, and the unmerited paternal blessings which close an equal number of comedies, should be something more than a way out of it, or a signal for the fall of the curtain. A catastrophe may conveniently, and even (as in Faust) with powerful effect, be left to the imagination; but to substitute for it a deliberate blank is to leave the action incomplete, and the drama a fragment ending with apossibly interestingconfession of incompetence.

The action of a drama, besides being one and complete in itself, ought likewise to be probable. The probability or necessity (in the Aristotelian sense of the terms) required of a drama ~7i~voi is not that of actual or historical experienceit is a action, conditional probability, or in other words an internal consistency between the course of the action and the conditions under which the dramatist has chosen to carry it on. As to the former, he is fettered by no restrictions save those which he imposes upon himself, whether or not itt deference to the usages of certain accepted species of dramatic composition. Ghosts seldom appear in real life or in dramas of real life; but the introduction of supernatural agency is neither enjoined nor prohibited by any general dramatic law. The use of such expedients is as open to the dramatic as to any other poet; the judiciousness of his use of them depends upon the effect which, consistently with the general conduct of his action, they will exercise upon the spectator, whom other circumstances may or may not predispose to their acceptance. The Ghost in Hamlet belongs to the action of the play; the Ghost in the Persae is not intrinsically less probable, but seems a less immediate product of the surrounding atmosphere. Dramatic probability has, however, a far deeper meaning than this. The Eumenides is probable, with all its mysterious commingling of cults, and so is Macbeth, with all its barbarous witchcraft. The proceedings of the feathered builders of Cloudcuckootown in the Birds of Aristophanes are as true to dramatic probability as are the pranks of Oberons fairies in Midsummer Nights Dream. In other words, it is in the harmony between the action and the characters, and in the consistency of the characters with themselves, in the appropriateness of both to the atmosphere in which they have their being, that this dramatic probability lies. The dramatist has to represent characters affected by the progress of an action in a particular way, and contributing to it in a particular way,, because, if consistent with themselves, they must be so affected, and must so act.

Upon the invention and conduct of his characters the dramatist must therefore expend a great propOrtioneven a preponderance of his labor. His treatment of them will, in at least as high a degree as his choice of subject, conception of action, Characterization: and method of construction, determme the effect which his work produces. And while there are aspects of the dramatic art under which its earlier phases already exhibit an unsurpassed degree of perfection, there is none under which its advance is more notable than this. Many causes have Advance of. .

the drama contributed to this result; the chief 25 to be sought in In this the multiplication of the opportunities ,for mankinds, respects study of man. The theories of the Indian critics on the subject of dramatic oharacter are little more than an elaborate scaffolding. Arist0tles remarks on the subject are scanty; nor indeed is the strength of the dramatic literature from whose examples he abstracted his maxims to be sought in the fulness or variety of its characterization. This relative deficiency was, beyond doubt largely caused by the outward conditions of the Greek theatre-the remoteness of actor from spectator, and the consequent necessity for the use of masks, and for the raising, and consequent conventionalizing, of the tones of the voice. Later Greek and Roman comedy, unable or unwilling to resist the force of habit, limited their range of characters to an accepted gallery of types. Nor is it easy to ignore the fact that the influence of these classical examples, combined with that of national tendencies of mind and temperament, have all along inclined the dramatists of the Romance nations to attach less importance to characterization of a closer and more varied kind than to interest of action and effectiveness of construction. The Italian and the Spanish drama more especially, and the French during a great part of its history, have in general shown a disposition to present their characters, as it were, ready made-whether in the case of trnn4r. hornac .,nrl hnrnr.sc r,r n flint of rnnrk tunAs off en moulded, as in the commedi~z dell~ arie and beyond, according to a long-lived system of local or national selection, These types, expanded, heightened and modified, are recognizable in some of the triumphs of comic characterization achieved by the Germanic drama, and by its master, Shakespeare, above all; but this fact must not obscure one of more importance than itself. In the matter of comic as well as of serious characterizationin the individualizing of characters and in evolving them as it were out of the progress of the actionthe modern drama has not only advanced, but in a sense revolutionized, the dramatic art, as inherited from its ancient masters.

Yet, however the method and scope of characterization may vary under the influence of different historical epochs and different tendencies or tastes of races or nations, the laws of this branch of the dramatic art remain based qn the same essential requirements. What interests us in character. a man or woman in real life, or in the impressions we form of historical personages, is that which seems to us to give them individuality. A dramatic character must therefore, whatever its part in the action, be sufficiently marked by features of its own to interest the imagination; with these features its subsequent conduct must be consistent, and to them its participation in the action must correspond. In order to achieve such a result, the dramatist must have, in the first instance, distinctly conceived the character, however it may have been suggested to him. His task is, not to paint a copy of some contemporary or historical personage, but to conceive a particular kind of man, acting under the operation of particular circumstances. This conception, growing and modifying itself with the progress of the action, also invented by the dramatist, will determine the totality of the character which he creates. The likeness which the result bears to an actual or historical personage may very probably, from secondary points of view, affect the immediate stage success of the creation; upon its dramatic result this likeness can have no influence whatever. In a wider sense than that in which Shakespeare denied the charge that Falstaff was Oldcastle, it should be possible to say of every dramatic character which it is sought to identify with an actual personage, This is not the man. The mirror of the drama is not a photographic apparatus; and not even the most conscientious combination of science and art can bring back even a phase of the real Napoleon.

Distinctiveness, as the primary requisite in dramatic characterization, is to be demanded in the case of all personages introduced into a dramatic actiott, but not in all cases in an equal degree. Schiller, in adding to the dramatis personae of his Fiesco superscriptions of their chief characteristics, labels Sacco as an ordinary person, and this, nO doubt, suffices for Sacco. But with the great masters of characterization a few touches, of which the true actors art knows how to avail itself, distinguish even their lesser characters from one another; and every man is in his humour down to the third citizen. Elaboration is necessarily reserved for characters who are the more important contributors to the action, and the fulness of elaboration for its heroes. Many expedients may lend their aid to the higher degrees of distinctiveness. Much is gained by a significant introduction of hero or heroine-thus Antigone is dragged in by the watchman, Gloucester enters alone upon the scene, Volpone is discovered in adoration of his golden saint. Nothing marks character more clearly than the use of contrast as of Othello with lago, of Ottavio with Max Piccolomini, of Joseph with Charles Surface. Nor is direct antithesis the only effective kind of contrast; Cassius is a foil to Brutus, and Leonora to her namesake the P~rincess. But, besides impressing the imagination as a conception distinct in itself, each character must maintain a consistency between its conduct in the action and the features it has established as its own. ~ This consistency does not imply uniformity; for, as Aristotle observes, there are characters which, to be represented with uniformity, must be presented as uniformly un-uniform.

Of such consistently complex characters the great critic cites no instances, nor indeed are they of frequent occurrence in Greek frnopdv. ~n the n-,n,lern ,-lrnrnn TTnn,let- c fhs~,. ,,rr.4unhls,-l exemplar; and Weislingen in Goethes Gft, and Alcest in the Misanthrope, may be mentioned as other illustrations in dramas differing widely from one another. The list might be enlarged almost indefinitely from the gallery of female characters, in view of the greater pliability and more habitual dependence of the nature of women. It should be added that those dramatic literatures which freely admit of a mixture of the serious with the comic element thereby enormously increase the opportunities of varied characterization. The difficulty of the task at the same time enhances the effect resulting from its satisfactory accomplishment; and, if the conception of a character is found to meet a variety of tests resembling that which life has at hand for every man, its naturalness, as we term it, becomes more obvious to the imagination. Naturalness is only another word for what Aristotle terms propriety; the artificial rules by which usage has at times sought to define particular species of character are in their origin only a convenience of the theatre, though they have largely helped to conventionalize dramatic characterization., Lastly, a character should be directly effective with regard to the dramatic actionin which it takes partthat is to EffeCt vc say, the influence it exerts upon the progress of the action should correspond to its distinctive features; the conduct of the play should seem to spring from the nature of its characters. In other words, no characterization can be effective which is not what may be called economical, i.e. which does not strictly limit itself to suiting the purposes of the action. Even the minor characters should not idly intervene; while the chief characters should predominate over, or determine, the course of the action, its entire conception should harmonize with their distinctive features. It is only a Prometheus whom the gods bind fast to a rock, only a Juliet who will venture into a living death for her Romeo. Thus, in a sense, chance is excluded from dramatic action, or rather, like every other element in it, bends to the dramatic idea.

In view of this predominance of character over action, we may appropriately use such expressions as a tragedy of love or jealousy or ambition, or a comedy of character. For such collocations merely indicate that plays so described have proved (or were intended to prove) specially impressive by the conception or execution of their chief character or characters.

The term manners (as employed in a narrower sense than the Aristotelian l~On) applies to that which colors both action and characters, but does not determine the essence of Manners. either. As exhibiting human agents under certain conditions of time and place, and of the various relations of life, the action of a drama, together with the characters engaged in it, and the incidents and circumstances belonging to it, must more or less adapt itself to the external conditions assumed. From the assumption of some such conditions not even those dramatic species which indulge in the most sovereign licence, such as Old Attic comedy, or burlesque in general, can wholly emancipate themselves; and even supernatural or fantastic characters and actions must suit themselves to some sort of antecedents. But it depends altogether on the measure in which the nature of an action and the development of its characters are effected by considerations of time and place, or of temporary social systems and the transitory distinctions incidental to them, whether the imitation of a particular kind of manners becomes a significant Their element in a particular play. The Hindu caste-system relative is an antecedent of every Hindu drama, and the peculiar sign!!!- organization of Chinese society of nearly every Chinese eence. play with which we are acquainted. Greek tragedy itself, though treating subjects derived from no historic age, had established a standard of manners from which in its decline it did not depart with impunity. Again, the imitation of manners of a particular age or country may or may not be of moment in a play. In some dramas, and in some species of drama, time and place are so purely imaginary and so much a matter of indifference that the adoption of a purely conventional standard of manners, or at least the exclusion of any definitely fixed standard, is here desirable. The ducal reign of Theseus at Athens (if its period be ascertainable) does not date A Midsummer Nights Dream,; nor do the coasts of Bohemia in The Winters Tale localize the manners of the customers of Autolycus. Where, on the other hand, as more especially in the historic drama, or in that kind of comedy which directs its shafts against the ridiculous vices of a particular age or country, significance attaches to the degree in which the manners represented resemble what is more or less known, the dramatist will do well to be careful in his coloring. How admirably is the French court specialized in Henry V.; how completely are we transplanted among the burghers of Brussels in the opening scenes of Eginont; what a portraiture of a clique we have in the Frcieuses ridicules of Moliere; what a reproduction of a class in the pot-house politicians of Holberg! And how minutely have modern dramatists found it necessary to study the more fascinating aspects of la vie parisienne, in order to convey to the curious at home and abroad a conviction of the verisimilitude of their pictures! Yet, even in such instances, the dramatist will only use what suits his dramatic purpose; he will select, not transfer in mass, historic features, and discriminate in his use of modern instances. The details of historic fidelity, and the lesser shades distinguishing the varieties of social usage, will be introduced by him at his choice, or left to be supplied by the actor. Where the reproduction of manners becomes the primary purpose of a play, its effect can only be of an inferior kind; and a drama purely of manners is a contradiction in terms.

No complete system of dramatic species can be abstracted from any one dramatic literature. They are often the result of particular antecedents, and their growth is often ~ ~

affected by peculiar conditions. Different nations or ~, ages use the same names and may preserve some of the same rules for species which in other respects their usage may have materially modified from that of their neighbors or predecessors. The very question of the use of measured or pedestrian speech as fit for different kinds of drama, and therefore distinctive of them, cannot be profitably discussed except in reference to particular literatures. In the Chinese drama the most solemn themes are treated in the same forman admixture of verse and prosewhich not so very long since was characteristic of that airiest of Western dramatic species, the French vaudeville. Who would undertake to define, except in the applications which have been given to the words in successive generations, such terms as tragi-comedy, or indeed as drama (drame) itself? Yet this uncertainty does not imply that all is confusion in the terminology as to the species of the drama. In so far as they are distinguishable according to the effects which their actions, or those which the preponderating parts of their actions, produce, these species may primarily be ranged in accordance with the broad differtnce established by Aristotle between tragedy and comedy. Tragic and comic effects differ in regard to the emotions of the mind which they excite; and a drama is tragic or comic according as such effects are produced by it. The strong or serious emotions are ~ and alone capable of exercising upon us that influence which, employing a bold but marvellously happy figure, Aristotle termed purification, and which a Greek comedian, after a more matter-of-fact fashion, thus expressed:

For whensoeer a man observes his fellow Bear wrongs more grievous than himself has known, More easily he bears his own misfortunes.

That is to say, the petty troubles of self which disturb without elevating the mind are driven out by the sympathetic participation in greater griefs, which raises while it excites the mind employed upon contemplating them. it is to these emotions which are and can be no others than pity and terrorthat actions which we call tragic appeal. Naif as we may think Aristotle in desiderating for such actions a complicated rather than a simple plot, he obviously means that in form as well as in design they should reveal their relative importance. Those actions which we term comic address themselves to the sense of the ridiculous, and their themes are those vices and moral infirmities the representation of which is capable of touching the springs of laughter. Where, accordingly, a drama confines itself to effects of the former class, it may be called a pure tragedy; when to those of the latter, a pure comedy. In dramas where the effects are mixed the nature of the main action and of the main characters (as determined by their distinctive features) alone enables us to classify such plays as serious or humorous dramasor as tragic or comic, if we choose to preserve the terms. But the classification admits of a variety of transitions, from pure tragedy to mixed, from mixed tragedy to mixed comedy, and thence to pure comedy, with the more freely licensed farce and burlesque, the time-honored inversion of the relations of dramatic method and purpose. This system of distinction has no concern with the mere question of the termination of the play, according to which Philostratus and other authorities have sought to distinguish tragic from comic dramas. The serious drama which ends happily (the German Schauspiel) is not a species co-ordinate with tragedy and comedy, but at the most a subordinate variety of the former. Other distinctions may be almost infinitely multiplied, according to the point of view adopted for the classification.

The historical sketch of the drama attempted in the following pages will best serve to indicate the successive growth of national dramatic species, many of which, by asserting their influence in other countries and ages than those which gave birth to them, have acquired a more than national vitality.

The art of acting, whose history forms an organic though a distinct part of that of the drama, necessarily possesses a theory and a technical system of its own. But into these it is ~7art of impossible here to enter. One claim, hOwever, should be vindicated for the art of acting, viz, that, though it is a dependent art, and most signally so in its highest forms, yet its true exercise implies (however much the term may have been. abused) a creative process. The conception of a character is determined by antecedents not of the actors own making; and the term originality can be applied to it only in a relative sense. Study and reflection enable him, with the aid of experience and of the intuition which genius bestows, but which experience may in a high degree supply, to interpret, to combine, and to supplement given materials. But in the transformation of the conception into the represented character the actors functions are really creative; for here he becomes the character by means which belong to his art alone. The distinctiveness which he gives to the character by making the principal features recognized by him in it its groundworkthe consistency which he maintains in it between groundwork and detailsthe appropriateness which he preserves in it to the course of the action and the part borne in it by the characterall these are of his own making, though its means suggested by the conception derived by him from his materials. As to the means at his disposal, they are essentially of two kinds only; but not all forms of the drama have admitted of the use of both, or of both in the same completeness. All acting includes the use of gesture, or, as it has been Gesture more comprehensively termed, of bodily eloquence. From various points of view its laws regulate the actors bearing, walk and movements of face and limbs. They teach what is aesthetically permitted and what is aesthetically pleasing. They deduce from observation what is appropriate to the expression of particular affections of the mind and of their combinations, of emotions and passions, of physical and mental conditions joy and grief, health and sickness, waking, sleeping and dreaming, madness, collapse and deathof particular ages of life and temperaments, as well as of the distinctive characteristics of ~ h race, nationality or class. While under certain conpeec ditionsas in the masked dramathe use of bodily movement as one of the means of expression has at times been partially restricted, there have been, or are, forms of the drama which have altogether excluded the use of speech (such as pantomime), or have restricted the manner of its employment (such as opera). In the spoken drama the laws of rhetoric regulate the actors use of speech, but under conditions of a special nature. Like the orator, he has to follow the laws of pronunciation, modulation, accent and rhythm (the last in certain kinds of prose as well as in such forms of verse as he may be called upon to reproduce). But he has also to give his attention to the special laws of dramatic delivery, which vary in soliloquy and dialogue, and in such narrative or lyrical passages as may occur in his part.

The totality of the effect produced by the actor will in some degree depend upon other aids, among which those of a purely external kind are unlikely to be lost sight of. But the Costume significance of costume in. the actor, like that of decoration and scenery (see THEATRE) in an action, is a wholly relative one, and is to a large measure determined by the claims which custom enables the theatre to make, or forbids its making, upon the imagination of the spectators. The actors real achievement lies in the transformation which the artist himself effects; nor is there any art more sovereign in the use it can make of its means, or so happy in the directness of the results it can accomplish by them.

2. INDIAN DRAMA

The origin of the Indian drama may unhesitatingly be described as purely native. The Mahommedans, when they overran India, brought no drama with them; the Persians, the Arabs and the Egyptians were without a national theatre. It would be absurd to suppose the Indian drama to have owed anything to the Chinese or its offshoots. On the other hand, there is no real evidence for assuming any influence of Greek examples upon the Indian drama at any stage of its progress. Finally, it had passed into its decline before the dramatic literature of modern Europe had sprung into being.

The Hindu writers ascribe the invention of dramatic entertainments to an inspired sage Bharata, or to the communications made to him by the god Brahma himself concerning origin an art gathered from the Vedas. As the word Bharata signifies an actor, we have clearly here a mere personification of the invention of the drama. Three kinds of entertainments, of which the ndtya (defined as a dance combined with gesticulation and speech) comes nearest to the drama, were said to have been exhibited before the gods by the spirits and nymphs of Indras heaven, and to these the god ~iva added two new styles of dancing.

The origin of the Indian drama was thus unmistakably religious. Dramatic elements first showed themselves in certain of the hymns of the Rig Veda, which took the form of dialogues between divine personages, and in one of which is to be found the germ of Klidasas famous Vikrama and Urvasi. These hymns were combined with the dances in the festivals of the gods, which soon assumed a more or less conventional form. Thus, from the union of dance and song, to which were afterwards added narrative recitation, and first sung, then spoken, dialogue, was gradually evolved the acted drama. Such scenes and stories from the mythology of Vishnu are still occasionally enacted by pantomime or spoken dialogue in India (jtras of the Bengalis; rdsas of the Western. Provinces); and the most ancient Indian play was said to have treated an episode from the history of that deitythe choice of him as a consort by Laxmia favorite kind of subject in the Indian drama. The tradition connecting its earliest themes with the native mythology of Vishnu agrees with that ascribing the origin of a particular kind of dramatic performancethe sangitato Krishna and the shepherdesses. The authors later poem, the Gitagovinda, has been conjectured to be suggestive of the earliest species of Hindu dramas. But, while the epic poetry of the Hindus gradually approached the dramatic in the way of dialogue, their drama developed itself independently out of the union of the lyric and the epic forms. Their dramatic poetry arose later than their epos, whose great works, the Mahbhdrata and the Ramayana, had themselves been long preceded by the hymnody of the Vedasjust as the Greek drama followed upon the Homeric poems and these had been preceded by the early hymns.

There seems, indeed, no reason for dating the beginnings of the regular Indian drama farther back than the 5th century AD., though it is probable that the earliest extant Sanskrit play, the delightful, and in some respects incomparable, Mrichchhakatikd ii~iJi!~i~J L.~

(The Toy Cart), was considerably earlier in date than the works of Klidasa. Indeed, of his predecessors in dramatic composition very little is known, and even the contemporaries who competed with him as dramatists are mere names. Thus, by the time the Indian drama produced almost the earliest specimens with which we are acquainted, it had already reached its zenith; and it was therefore looked upon as having sprung into being as a perfect art. We know it only in its glory, in its decline, and in its decay.

The history of Indian dramatic literature may be roughly divided into the following periods.

I. To the sit/s Century A .p.This period virtually belongs to the pre-Mahommedan age of Indian history; but already to that second division of it in which Buddhism had become a powerful factor in the social as well as in the moral ,c!assical), and intellectual life of the land. It is the classical period of the Hindu drama, and includes the works of its two indisputably greatest masters. The earliest extant Sanskrit play is the pathetic Mrichchhakatik (The Toy Cart), which has been dated back as far as the close of the 2nd century A.D. It is attributed (as is not uncommon with Indian plays) to a royal author, named Sudraka; but it was more probably written by his court poet, whose name has been concluded to have been Dandin. It may be described as a comedy of middle-class life, treating of the courtship and marriage of a ruined Brahman and a wealthy and large-hearted courtesan.

Kalidsa, the brightest of the nine gems of genius in whom the Indian drama gloried, lived at the court of Ujjain, though whether in the earlier half of the 6th century A.D., or in the 3rd century, or at a yet earlier date, remains an unsettled question. He is the author of Sakuntalathe work which, in the translation by Sir William Jones (1789), first revealed to the Western world of letters the existence of an Indian drama, since reproduced in innumerable versions in many tongues. This heroic comedy, in seven acts, takes its plot from the first book of the Mahabhdrata. It is a dramatic love-idyll of surpassing beauty, and one of the masterpieces of the poetic literature of the world. Another drama by Kfllidgsa, Vikrama and Urvasi (The Hero and the Nymph), though unequal as a whole to Skuntala, contains one act of incomparable loveliness; and its enduring effect upon Indian dramatic literature is shown by the imitations of it in later plays. (It was translated into English in 1827 by H. H. Wilson.) To K~lidgsa has likewise been attributed a third play, /v! lavika and Agnimitra; but it is possible that this conventional comedy, though held to be of ancient date, was composed by a different poet of the same name.

To Harsadeva, king of northern India, are ascribed three extant plays, which were more probably composed by some poet in his pay. One of these, Nagananda (Joy of the Serpents), which begins as an erotic play, but passes into a most impressive exemplification of the supreme virtue of self-sacrifice, is notable as the only Buddhist drama which has been preserved, though others are known to have existed and to have been represented.

The palm of pre-eminence is disputed with Kaiidsa by the great dramatic poet Babhavuti (called Crikaflfha, or he in whose throat is fortune), who flourished in the earlier part of the 8th century. While he is considered more artificial in language than his rival, and in general more bound by rules, he can hardly be deemed his inferior in dramatic genius. Of his three extant plays, Mahavdra-Charitra and Uttara-Rama-Charitra are heroic dramas concerned with the adventures of Rama (the seventh incarnation of Vishnu); the third, the powerful melodrama, in ten acts, of Mlati and Madhava, has love for its theme, and has been called (perhaps with more aptitude than usually belongs to such comparisons) the Romeo and Juliet of the Hindus. It is considered by their critical authorities the best example of the prakaraa, or drama of domestic life. Babhavutis plays, as is indicated by the fact that no jester appears in them, are devoid of the element of humour.

The plays of Rjasekhara. who lived about the end of the oth century ilesi like those of T4sr~,idevs with }isrem ,ind I~.LY.L.L,L ~..OJ.

is stated to be the only example of the saltaka or minor heroic comedy, written entirely in Prakrit.

In this period may probably also be included Vi~akhadattas interesting drama of political intrigue, Mudni-Rakshasa (The Signet of the Minister), in which Chandragupta (Sandracottus) appears as the founder of a dynasty. In subject, therefore, this production, which is one of the few known Indian historical dramas, goes back to the period following on the invasion of India by Alexander the Great; but the date of composition is probably at least as late as A.D. 1000. The plot of the play turns on the gaining-over of the prime minister of the ancien rgime.

Among the remaining chief works of this period is the VeniSamhara (Binding of the Braid) by Narayana Bhatta. Though described as a play in which both pathos and horror are exaggeratedits subject is an outrage resembling that which Dunstan is said to have inflicted on Elgivait is stated to have been always a favorite, as written in exact accordance with dramatic rules. Perhaps the Candakan.tika by Ksemrivara should also be included, which deals with the working of a curse pronounced by an aged priest upon a king who had innocently offended him.

II. The Period of Decline.This may be reckoned from about the 11th to about the 14th century of the Christian era, the beginning roughly coinciding with that of a continuous series of Mahommedan invasions of India. Hanman- Second Nalaka, or the great Nataka (for this irregular ~e~ne). play,, the work of several hands, surpasses all other Indian dramas in length, extending over no fewer than fourteen acts), dates from the 10th or 11th century. Its story is taken from the Rama-cycle, and a prominent character in it is the mythical monkey-chief King Hanman, to whom, indeed, tradition ascribed the original authorship of the play. Ktishfiamicras theosophic mystery, as it has been called,though it rather resembles some of the moralities,Prabodha-Chandrodaya (The Rise of the Moon of Insight, i.e. the victory of true doctrine over error), is ascribed by one authority to the middle of the 11th century, by another to about the end of the 12th. The famous Ratnavali (The Necklace), a court-comedy of love and intrigue, with a half-Terentian plot, seems also to date from the earlier half of the period.

The remaining plays of which it has been possible to conjecture the dates range in the time of their composition from the end of the 11th to the 14th century. Of this period, as compared with the first, the general characteristics seem to be an undue preponderance of narrative and description, and an affected and over-elaborated style. As a striking instance of this class is mentioned a play on the adventures of Rama, the Anargha-Raghava, which in spite, or by reason, of the commonplace character of its sentiments, the extravagance of its diction, and the obscurity of its mythology, is stated to enjoy a higher reputation with the pundits of the present age than the masterpieces of Kalidsa and Babhaviiti. To the close of this period, the 14th century, has likewise (but without any pretension to certainty) been ascribed the only Tamil drama of which we possess an English version. Arichandra (The Martyr of Truth) exemplifieswith a strange likeness in the contrivance of its plot to the Book of Job and Faustby the trials of a heroically enduring king the force of the maxim Better die than lie.

III. Period of Decay.Isolated plays remain from centuries later than the 14th; but these, which chiefly turn on the legends of Kfishfia (the last incarnation of Vishnu), may be regarded as a mere aftergrowth, and exhibit the Indian drama in its decay. Indeed, the latest of them, (d~e~y). Chitra- Yajna, which was composed about the beginning of the I9th century, and still serves as a model for Bengali dramatic performances, is imperfect in its dialogue, which (after the fashion of Italian improvised comedy) it is left to the actors to supplement. Besides these there are farces or farcical entertainments, more or less indelicate, of uncertain dates.

The number of plays which have descended to us from so vast an nvnanca crc a dill rnynnant,,nl.r cm,,11 Rnf ,h~11~h.;,-.

those mentioned by Hindu writers on the drama, amounted to many more than sixty, M. Schuylers bibliography (1906) enumerates over five hundred Sanskrit plays. To these have to be added the plays in Tamil, stated to be abOut a hundred in number, and to have been composed by poets who enjoyed the patronage of the Pandian kings of Madura, and some in other vernaculars.

There certainly is among the flindus no dearth of dramatic theory. The sage Bharata, the reputed inventor of dramatic entertainments, was likewise revered as the father of dramatic criticisma combination of functions to which the latter days of the English theatre might perhaps furnish an occasional parallel. The commentators (possibly under the influence of inspiration rather than as a strict matter of memory) constantly cite his stras, or aphorisms. (From sfftra, thread, was named the stra-dhra, thread-holder, carpenter, a term applied to the architect and general manager of sacrificial solemnities, then to the director of theatrical performances.) By the 11th century, when the drama was already approaching its decline, dramatic criticism had reached an advanced point; and the Dasa-Rupaka (of which the text belongs to that age) distinctly defines the ten several kinds of dramatic composition. Other critical works followed at later dates, exhibiting a rage for subdivision unsurpassed by the efforts of Western theorists, ancient or modern; the misfortune is that there should not be e~famples remaining (if they ever existed) to illustrate all the branches of so elaborate a dramatic system.

What, inquires the manager of an actor in the induction to one of the most famous of Indian plays, are those qualities Exclusive- which the virtuous, the wise, the venerable, the learned ness of the and the Brahmans require in a drama? Profound indian exposition of the various passions, is the reply, drama. pleasing interchange of mutual affection, loftiness of character, delicate expression of desire, a surprising story and elegant language. Then, says the manager (for the Indian dramatists, though not, like Ben Jonson, wont to rail the public into approbation, are unaffected by mauvaise honte), I recollect one. And he proceeds to state that Babhavti has given us a drama composed by him, replete with all qualities, to which indeed this sentence is applicable: How little do they know who speak of us with censuret This entertainment is not for them. Possibly some one exists, or will exist, of similar tastes with myself; for time is boundless, and the world is wide! This disregard of popularity, springing from a consciousness of lofty aims, accounts for much that is characteristic of the higher class of Indian plays. It explains both their relative paucity and their extraordinary length, renders intelligible the chief peculiarity in their diction, and furnishes the key to their most striking ethical as well as literary qualities. Connected in their origin with religious worship, they were only performed on solemn occasions, chiefly of a public nature, and more especially at seasons sacred to some divinity. Thus, though they might in some instances be reproduced, they were always written with a view to one particular solemn representation. Again, the greater part of every one of the plays of Northern India is written in Sanskrit, which ceased to be a popular language by 300 B.C., but continued the classical and learned, and at the same time the sacred and court form of speech of the Brahmans. Sanskrit is spoken by the heroes and principal personages of the plays, while the female and inferior characters use varieties, more or less refined, of the Prakrit languages (as a rule not more than three, that which is employed in the songs of the women being the poetic dialect of the most common Prakrit language, the ~auraseni). Hence, part at least of each play cannot have been understood by the large majority of the audience, except in so far as their general acquaintance with the legends or stories treated enabled them to follow the course of the action. Every audience thus contained an inner audience, which could alone feel the full effect of the drama. - It is, then, easy to see why the Hindu critics should make demands upon the art, into which only highly-trained and refined intellects were capable of entering, or called upon to enter. The general public cOuld not be expected to appreciate the Sentiments expressed in a drama, and thus (according to the process prescribed by Hindu theory) to receive instructio1~ by means of amusement. These sentiments are termed rsas (tastes or flavours), arid said to spring from the bhdvas (conditions of mind and body). A variety of subdivisions is added; but the santa rdsa is logically enough excluded from dramatic composition, inasmuch as it implies absolute quiescence.

The Hindu critics know of no distinction directly corresponding to that between tragedy and comedy, still less of any determined by the nature of the close of a play. For, in accordance Species of with the child-like element of their character, the dramas.

Hindus dislike an unhappy ending to any story, and a positive rule accordingly prohibits a fatal conclusion in their dramas. The general term for all dramatic compositions is rupaka (from rupa, form), those of an inferior class being distinguished as uparupakas. Of the various subdivisions of the rpaka, in a more limited sense, the ntaka, or play proper, represents the most perfect kind. Its subject should always be celebrated and importantit is virtually either heroism or love, and most frequently the latterand the hero should be a demigod, or divinity (such as Rama in Babhavtis heroic plays) or a king (such as the hero of Sakuntala). But although the earlier dramatists took their plots from the sacred writings or Purnas, they held themselves at liberty to vary the incidentsa licence from which the later poets abstained. Thus, in accordance, perhaps, with the respective developments in the religious life of the two peoples, the Hindu drama in this respect reversed the progressive practice of the Greek. The p-rakaraas agree in all essentials with the ntdkas except that they are less elevated; their stories are mere fictions, taken from actual life in a respectable class of society.1 Among the species of the uparupaka may be mentioned the trolaka, in which the personages are partly human, partly divine, and of which a famous example remains.1 Of the bha4a, a monologue in one act, one literary example is extanta curious picture of manners in which the speaker describes the different persons he meets at a spring festival in the streets of Kolahalapur.3 The satire of the farcical prahasanas is usually directed against the hypocrisy of ascetics and Brahmans, and the sensuality of the wealthy and powerful. These trifles represent the lower extreme of the dramatic scale, to which, of course, the principles that follow only partially apply.

Unity of action is strictly enjoined by Hindu theory, though not invariably observed in practice. Episodical or prolix interruptions are forbidden; but, in order to facilitate Th ,the connection, the story of the play is sometimes :nities. carried on by narratives spoken by actors or interpreters, something after the fashion of the Chorus in Henry V., or of Gower in Pericles. Unity of time is liberally, if rather arbitrarily, understood by the later critical authorities as limiting the duration of the action to a single year; but even this is exceeded in more than one classical play.i The single acts are to confine the events occurring in them to one course of the sun, and usually do so. Unity of place is unknown to the Hindu drama, by reason of the absence of scenery; for the plays were performed in the open courts of palaces, perhaps at times in large halls set apart for public entertainments, or in the open air. Hence change of scene is usually indicated in the texts; and we find5 the characters making long journeys on the stage, under the eyes of spectators not trained to demand real mileage.

With the solemn character of the higher kind of dramatic performances accord the rules and prohibitions defining what may be called the pro prieties of the Indian drama. It has been already seen that all plays must have a happy ~~tje~ ending. Furthermore, not only should death never be inflicted coram populo, but the various operations of biting, scratching, kissing, eating, sleeping, the bath, and the marriage ceremony should never take place on the stage. Yet such rules are made to be occasionally broken. It is true that the mild humour of the vidshaka is restricted to his gesticulating 2 Vikrama and Urvasi. i 54aradcf-Tilaka.

4Sakuntala; Uttara-Rt~ina-Charitrrr. ~ Arichandra, act iv.

eaUng instead of perpetrating the obnoxious act.1 The charming love-scene in the Saltuntala (at least in the earlier recension of the play) breaks off just as the hero is about to act the part of the bee to the honey of the heroines lips.2 But later writers are less squeamish, or less refined. In two dramas1 the heroine is dragged on the stage by her braid of hair; and this outrage is in both instances the motive of the action. In a third,4 sleeping and the marriage ceremony occur in the course of the representation.

The dramatic construction of the Indian plays presents no very striking peculiarities. They open with a benediction (nandf), spoken by the manager (supposed to be a Construc- highly accomplished person), and followed by some account of the author, and an introductory scene between the manager and one of the actors, which is more or less skilfully connected by the introduction of one of the characters with the pening of the play itself. This is divided into acts (anks) and scenes; of the former a nataka should have not fewer than 5, or more than 10; 7 appears a common number; the great natdka reaches 14. Thus the length of the higher class of Indian plays is considerableabout that of an Aeschylean trilogy; but not more than a single play was ever performed on the same occasion. Comic plays are restricted to two acts (here called sand his). In theory the scheme of an Indian drama corresponds very closely to the general outline of dramatic construction given above; it is a characteristic fnerit that the business is rarely concluded before the last act. The Scenes and piece closes, as it began, with a benediction or prayer. sit US 055. Within this framework room is found for situations as ingeniously devised and highly wrought as those in any modern Western play. What could be more pitiful than the scene in Sakuntala, where the true wife appears before her husband, whose remembrance of her is fatally overclouded by a charm; what more terrific than that in Ma/at-i and Mad/java, where the lover rescues his beloved from the horrors of the charnel field? Recognitionespecially between parents and childrenf requently gives rise to scenes of a pathos which Euripides has not surpassed.i The ingenious device of a play within the play (so familiar to the English drama) is employed with the utmost success by Babhavti.6 On the other hand, miraculous metamorphosis7 and, in a later play,8 vulgar magic lend their aid to the progress of the action. With scenes of strong effectiveness contrast others of the most delicate poetic grace-such as the indescribably lovely little episode of the two damsels of the god of love helping one another to pluck the red and green bud from the mango tree; or of gentle domestic pathossuch as that of the courtesan listening to the prattle of her lovers child, one of the prettiest scenes of a kind rarely kept free from affectation in the modern drama. For the denouement in the narrower sense of the term the In.dian dramatists largely resort to the expedient of the deus ex machina, often in a sufficiently literal sense.9

Every species of drama having its appropriate kind of hero or heroine, theory here again amuses itself with an infinitude of subdivisions. Among the heroines, of whom not less Characters.

than three hundred and eighty-four types are said to be distinguished, are to be noticed the courtesans, whose social position to some extent resembles that of the Greek hetaerae, and association with whom does not seem in practice, however it may be in theory, to be regarded as a disgrace even to Brahmans.io In general, the Indian drama indicates relations between the sexes subject to peculiar restraints of usage, but freer than those which Mahommedan example seems to have introduced into higher Indian society. The male characters are frequently drawn with skill, and sometimes with genuine force. Prince Samsthanaka n is a type of selfishness born in the purple worthy to rank beside figures of the modern drama, of which Veni-Sam/fara; Viddha-Salabhanjika.

~ Skuntal; Uttara-Rmci-Charitra. 61b. act vii.

Vikrama and Urvsi, act iv.. - Ratnvali.

~ Vikrama and Urvsi: Arichandra; Nagnanda.

10 M,ichchhakatlka. Miichchhakalik.

this has at times naturally been a favorite class of character, elsewhere,n the intrigues of ministers are not more fully exposed than their characters and principles of action are judiciously discriminated. Among the lesser personages common in the Indian drama, two are worth noticing, as corresponding, though by no means precisely, to familiar types of other dramatic literatures. These are the vita, the accomp]ished but dependent companion (both of men and women), and the vidshaka, the humble associate (not servant) of the prince, and the buffoon of the action.ii Strangely enough, he is always a Brahman, or the pupil of a Brahmanperhaps a survival from a purely popular phase of the drama. His humour is to be ever intent on the pleasures of a quiet life, and on that of eating in particular; his jokes are generally devoid of both harm and point.

Thus, clothing itself in a diction always ornate and tropical, in which (as Rckert has happily expressed it) the prose is the warp and the verse the weft, where (as Goethe says) D~tion words become allusions, allusions similes, and similes metaphors, the Indian drama essentially depended upon its literary qualities, and upon the familiar sanctity of its favorite themes for such effects as it was able to produce. Of scenic apparatus it knew but little. The plays were usually performed in the hall of a palace; the simple devices by which exits and entrances were facilitated it is unnecessary to describe, and on the contrivances employed for securing such SICI7

properties as were required (above all, the cars of costume. the gods and of their emissaries) ,1~r it is useless to speculate. Propriety of costume, on the other hand, seems always to have been observed, agreeably both to the peculiarities of the Indian drama and to the habits of the Indian people.

The ministers of an art practised under such conditions could not but be regarded with respect, and spared the contempt or worse, which, except among one other great civilized A~ors. people, the Greeks, has everywhere, at one period or another, been the actors lot. Companies of actors seem to have been common in India at an early date, and the inductions show the players to have been regarded as respectable members of society. In later, if not in earlier, times individual actors enjoyed a widespread reputation. all the world is acquainted with the talents of Kalaha-Kandala.if The managers or directors, as already stated, were usually gifted and highly-cultured Brahmans. Female parts were in general, though not invariably, represented by females. One would like to know whether such was the case in a piece16 whereafter the fashion of more than one Western playa crafty minister passes off his daughter as a boy, on which assumption she is all but married to a person of her own sex.

The Indian drama would, if only for purposes of comparison, be invaluable to the student of this branch of literature. But from the point of view of purely literary excellence it holds its Summary own against all except the very foremost dramas of the world. It is, indeed, a mere phrase to call Kalidsa the Indian Shakespearea title which, moreover, if intended as anything more than a synonym for poetic pre-eminence, might fairly be disputed in favor of Babhavuti; while it would be absolutely misleading to place a dramatic literature, which, like the Indian, is the mere quintessence of the culture of a caste, by the side of one which represents the fullest development of the artistic consciousness of such a people as the Hellenes. The Indian drama cannot be described as national in the broadest and highest sense of the word; it is, in short, the drama of a literary class, though as such it exhibits many of the noblest and most refined, as well as of the most characteristic, features of Hindu religion and civilization. The ethics of the Indian drama are of a lofty character, but they are those of a scholastic system of religious philosophy, self-conscious of its completeness. To the power of Fate is occasionally ascribed a supremacy, to which gods as well as mortals must bow;17 but, if mans present life is merely a ii Mudr-Rakshasa. 1~ Sakuntala; Nagnanda.

ii Skunfal, acts vi. and vii; Ma/au and Madhava, act v.

d Induction to Anargha-Raghava.

12 Viddha-Salabhanjika. ~ Vikrama and (Jrvsi.

phase in the cycle of his destinies, the highest of moral efforts at the same time points to the summit of possibilities, and selfsacrifice is the supreme condition both of individual perfection and of the progress of the world. Such conceptions as these. seem at once to enfold and to overshadow the moral life of the Indian drama. The affections and passions forming part of self it delineates with a fidelity to nature which no art can afford to neglect; on, the other hand, the freedom of the picture is restricted by conditions which to us are unfamiliar and at times seem intolerable, but which it was impossible for the Indian poets imagination to ignore. The sheer self-absorption of ambition or love appears inconceivable by the minds of any of these poets; and their social philosophy is always based on the system of caste. On the other hand, they are masters of many of the truest forms of pathos, above all of that which blends with resignation. In humour of a delicate kind they are by no means deficient; to its lower forms they are generally strangers, even in productions of a professedly comic intention. Of wit, Indian dramatic literaturethough a play on words is as the breath of its nostrilsfurnishes hardly any examples intelligible to Western minds.

The distinctive excellence of the Indian drama is to be sought in the poetic robe which envelops it as flowers overspread the bosom of the earth in the season of spring. In its POet I) of nobler productions, at least, it is never untrue to its drama, half religious, half rural origin; it weaves the wreaths of idyllic fancies in an unbroken chain, adding to its favorite and familiar blossoms ever fresh beauties from an, inexhaustible garden. Nor is it unequal to depicting the grander aspects of nature in her mighty forests and on the shores of the ocean: A close familiarity with its native literature can here alone follow its diction through a ceaseless flow of phrase and figure, listen with understanding to the hum of the bee as it hangs over the lotus, and contemplate with Sakuntals pious sympathy the creeper as it winds round the mango tree. But the poetic beauty of the Indian drama reveals itself in the mysterious charm of its outline, if not in its full glow, even to the untrained; nor should the study of itfor which the materials seem continually on the increasebe left aside by any lover of literature.

3. CHINESE DRAMA

Like the Indian drama, the Chinese arose from the union of the arts of dance and song. To the ballets and pantomimes out of which it developed itself, and which have continued to flourish by the side of its more advanced forms, the Chinese ascribe a primitive antiquity of origin; many of them originally had a symbolical reference to such subjects as the harvest, and war and peace. A very ancient pantomime is said to have symbolized the -conquest of China by Wu-Wang; others were of a humbler, and often of a very obscure, character. To their music the Chinese likewise attribute a great antiquity of origin.

There are traditions which carry back the characters of the Chinese drama to the 18th century before the Christian era. Others declare the Emperor Wan-Te (ft. about A.D. 580) to have invented the drama; but this honor is more usually given to the emperor Yuen-Tsung (A.D. 720), who is likewise remembered as a radical musical reformer. Pantomimes henceforth fell into disrepute; and the history of the Chinese drama from this date is divided, with an accuracy we cannot profess to control, into four distinct periods. Each of these periods, we are told, has a style, and each style a name of its own; but these names, such as Diversions of the Woods in Flower, have little or no meaning for us; and it would therefore be useless to cite them.

The first period is that of the dramas composed under the Tang dynasty, from a.n. 720 to 907. These pieces, called Tchhouen-Khi, were limited to the representation of extraordinary events, and were therefore, in design at least, a species of heroic drama. The ensuing times of civil war interrupted~ the pleasures of peace and prosperity (a Chinese phrase for dramatic performances)which, however, revived.

The second period is that of the Tsung Dynasty, -from 960 to 1119. The plays of this period are called Hi-K hio, and presented what became a standing peculiarity of the Chinese CIaszI~1 drama, viz, that in them figures a principal personage age.

who sings.

The third and best-known age of the Chinese drama was under the Kin and Yuen dynasties, from 1125 to 1367. The plays of this period are called Vuen-Pen and Tsa-Ki; the latter seem to have resembled the Hi-Khio, and to have treated very various subjects. The Yuen-Pen are the plays from which our literary knowledge of the Chinese drama is mainly derived; the short pieces called Yen-Kia were in the same style, but briefer. The list of dramatic authors under the Yuen dynasty, the most important period in Chinese literary annals, which covered the years 1260 to 1368, is tolerably extensive, comprising 85, among whom four are designated as courtesans; the number of plays composed by these and by anonymous authors is reckoned at not less than 564. In 1735 the Jesuit missionary Joseph Henry Prmare first revealed to Europe the existence of the tragedy Tchao-Chi-Cu-Eul (The Little Orphan of the House of Tchao), which was founded upon an earlier piece treating of the fortunes of an heir to the imperial throne, who was preserved in a mysterious box like another Cypselus or Moses. Voltaire seized the theme of the earlier play for a rhetorical tragedy, LOrp/selin de la Chine, in which he coolly professes it was his intention to paint the manners of the Chinese and the Tartars. The later play, which is something less elevated in the rank of its characters, and very decidedly less refined in treatment, was afterwards retranslated by Stanislas Jvlien; and to the labors of this scholar, of Sir J. F. Davis (1795-1890) and of Antoine Bazin (1799-1863), we owe a series of translated Chinese dramas, among which there can be no hesitation whatever in designating the master-piece.

The justly famous Pi-Pa-Ki (The Story of tile Lute) belongs to a period rather later than that of the Yuen plays, having been composed towards the close of the 14th century by ~, ,~ K! Kao-Tong-Kia, and reproduced in 1404, under the Ming ~

dynasty, with the alterations of Mao-Tseu, a commentator of learning and taste. Pi-Pa-Ki, which as a domestic drama of sentiment possesses very high merit, long enjoyed a quite exceptional popularity in China; it was repeatedly republished with laudatory prefaces, and so late as the 18th century was regarded as a monument of morality, and as the master-piece of the Chinese theatre. It would seem to have remained without any worthy competitors; for, although it had been originally designed to produce a reaction against the immorality of the drama then in fashion, especially of Wang-Chi-Fous celebrated Si-Siang-Ki (The Story of the Western Pavilion), yet the fourth period of the Chinese drama, under the Ming dynasty, from 1368 to 1644, exhibited no improvement. What (says the preface to the 1704 edition of Fi-Pa-Ki) ~J~:cay do you find there? Farcical dialogue, a mass of scenes in which one fancies one hears the hubbub of the streets or the ignoble language of the highways, the extravagances of demons and spirits, in addition to love-intrigues repugnant to delicacy of manners. Nor would it appear that the Chinese theatre has ever recovered from its decay.

In theory, no drama could be more consistently elevated in purpose and in tone than the Chinese. Every play, we learn, should have both a moral and a meaning. A virtuous Th ~aim is imposed upon Chinese dramatists by an article ~51~~5 of the penal code of the empire; and those who write immoral plays are to expect after death a purgatory which will last so long as these plays continue to be performed. In practice, however, the Chinese drama falls far short of its ideal; indeed, according to the native critic already cited, among ten thousand playwrights not one is to be found intent upon perfecting the education of mankind by means of precepts and examples.

The Chinese are, like the Hindus, unacquainted with the distinction between tragedy and comedy; they classify their plays according to subjects in twelve categories. It may be -.. Religious doubted whether what seems the highest of these is drama. actually such; for the religious element in the Chinese drama is often sheer buffoonery. Moreover, Chinese religious life, as reflected in the drama, seems one in which creed elbows creed, and superstitions are welcome whatever their origin. Of all religious traditions and doctrines, however, those of Buddhism (which had reached China long before the known beginnings of its drama) are the most prominent; thus, the theme of absolute self-sacrifice is treated in one play, that of entire absorption in the religious life in another.2 The historical flistoilcal drama is not unknown to the Chinese; and although a law prohibits the bringing on the stage of emperors, empresses, and the famous princes, ministers, and generals of former ages, no such restriction. is observed in practice. In Han-Kong- Tseu (The Sorrows of Han), for instance, which treats a national historic legend strangely recalling in parts the story of Esther and the myth of the daughter of Erechtheus, the D t, emperor Yuen-Ti (the representative, to be sure, of owes ~ a fallen dynasty) plays a part, and a sufficiently sorry one. By far the greater number, however, of the Chinese plays accessible in translations belong to the domestic species, and to that subspecies which may be called the criminal drama. Their favorite virtue is piety, of a formal1 or a practical4 kind to parents or parents-in-law; their favorite interest lies in the discovery of long-hidden guilt, and in the vindication of persecuted innocence.f In the choice and elaboration of such subjects they leave little to be desired by the most ardent devotees of the literature of agony. Besides this description of plays, we have at least one love-comedy pure and simplea piece of a nature not tolerably mild, but ineffably harmless.6 Free in its choice of themes, the Chinese drama is likewise remarkably unrestricted in its range of characters. Chinese society, it is well known, is not based, like Indian, upon the principle of caste; rank is in China determined by office, and this again depends on the results of examination. These familiar facts are constantly brought home to the reader of Chinese plays. The Tchoang-Yuen, or senior classman on the list of licentiates, is the flower of Chinese society, and the hero of many a drama;1 and it is a proud boast that for years ones ancestors have held high posts, which they owed to their literary successes. 8 On the other hand, a person who has failed in his military examination, becomes, as if by a natural transition, a man-eating monster.9 But of mere class the Chinese drama is no respecter, painting with noteworthy freedom the virtues and the vices of nearly every phase of society. The same liberty is taken with regard to the female sex; it is clear that in earlier times there were few vexatious restrictions in Chinese life upon the social intercourse between men and women. The variety of female characters in the Chinese drama is great, ranging from the heroine who sacrifices herself for the sake of an empire ii to the well-brought-up young lady who avers that woman came into the world to be obedient, to unravel skeins of silk, and to work with her needle nfrom the chambermaid who contrives the most gently sentimental of rend ezvous,i2 to the reckless courtesan who, like another Millwood, upbraids the partner of her guilt on his suing for mercy, and bids him die with her in hopes of a reunion after death.1 In marriage the first or legitimate wife is distinguished from the second, who is at times a ci-devant courtesan, and towards whom the feelings of the former vary between bitter jealousy i4 and sisterly kindness.15

The conduct of the plays exhibits much ingenuity, and an aversion from restrictions of time and place; in fact, the nature of the plot constantly covers a long series of years, and spans wide intervals of local distance. The plays are divided into acts and scenesthe former being usually four in number, at times i Tire Self-Sacrifice of Tchao-Li.

2 Lai-Seng-Tchai (The Debt to be Paid in the Next World).

~ Lao-Seng-Eul. Pi-Pa-Ki.

The Circle of Chalk (HoeI-Lan-Ki); The Tunic Matched; The Revenge of Teou-Ngo.

6 Tchao-Mel-Hiang (The Intrigues of a Chambermaid).

~ Tchao-MeI-Hiang; Ho-Han-Chan; Pi-Pa-Ki.

8 Hoel-Lan-Ki, Prol. sc. i. Tchao-Li.

iO Han-Kong-Tseu. u Pi-Pa-Ki, Sc. 2.

u Tchao-MeI-Hiang. -

18He-Lang-Tan, act iv.; cf. Hoei-Lan-Ki, act iv.

4Hoei-Lan-Ki. i~ Pi-Pa-Ki.

with an induction ~r narrative prologue spoken by some of the characters (Sie- Tsen). Favorite plays were, however, allowed to extend to great length; the Pi-Pa-Ki is divided Consfrucinto 24 sections, and in another recension apparently tion and comprised 42. I do not wish, says the manager conduct of in the prologue, that this performance should last plots. too long; finish it to-day, but cut out nothing whence it appears that the performance of some plays occupied more than a single day. The rule was always observed that a separate act should be given up to the denouement; while, according to a theory of which it is not always easy to trace the operation, the perfection of construction was sought in the dualism or contrast of scene and scene, just as the perfection of diction was placed in the parallelism or antithesis of phrase and phrase. Being subject to no restrictions as to what might, or might not, be represented on the stage, the conduct of the plots allowed of the introduction of almost every variety of incidents. Death takes place, in sight of the audience, by starvation,i6 by drowning,17 by poison,f8 by execution; i~ flogging and torture are inflicted on the stage;2 wonders are wrought;21 and magic is brought into play; n the ghost of an innocently-executed daughter calls upon her father to revenge her foul murder, and assists in person at the L.ubsequent judicial enquiry.n Certain peculiarities in the conduct of the business are due to the usages of society rather than to dramaturgic laws. Marriages are generally managed at least in the higher spheres of societyby ladies professionally em~iloyed as matrimonial agents.24 The happy resolution of the ~.sdus of the action is usually brought about by the direct interposition of superior official authority2fa tribute to the paternal system of government, which is the characteristic Chinese variety of the deus ex machina. This naturally tends to the favorite close of a glorification of the emperor,Is resembling that of Louis XIV. at the end of Tartufe, or in spirit, at all events, those of the virgin queen in more than. one Elizabethan, play. It should be added that the characters save the necessity for a hill of the play by persistently announcing and re-announcing their names and genealogies, and the necessity for a book by frequently recapitulating the previous course of the plot.

One peculiarity of the Chinese drama remains to be noticed. The chief character of a play represents the author as well as the personage; he or she is hero or heroine and chorus in The prinone. This is brought about by the heros (or heroines) cipalpersin ging the poetical passages, or those containing sonage maxims of wisdom and morality, or reminiscences and who sings. examples drawn from legend or history. Arising out of the dialogue, these passages at the same time diversify it, and give to it such elevation and brilliancy as it can boast. The singing character must be the principal personage in the action, but may be taken from any class of society. If this personage dies in the course of the play, another sings in his place. From the mention of this distinctive feature of the Chinese drama, it will be obvious how unfair it would be to judge of any of its productions, without a due appreciation of the lyric passages, which do not appear to be altogether restricted to the singing of the principal personage, for other characters frequently recite verses. In these lyrical or didactic passages are to be sought those flowers of diction which, as Julien has shown, consist partly in the use of a metaphorical phraseology of infinite nicety in its variationssuch as a long series of phrases compounded with the word signifying jet and expressing severally the ideas ofrarity, distinction, beauty, &c., or as others derived from the names of colors, birds, beasts, precious metals, elements, constellations, &c., or alluding to favorite legends or anecdotes. These features constitute the literary element par excellence of Chinese dramatic composition. At the same time, though it is impossible for the untrained reader to be alive to i6 Pi-Pa-Ki, sc. 15. Ho-Han-Chan, act ii.

~i HoeI-Lan-Ki, act i. a Teou-Ngo- Vuen, act iii.

~ Hoei-Lan-Ki, act ii. ii Teou-Ngo- Yuen, act iii.

~ Pi-Pa-Ki, sc. 18.23 Teou-Ngo- Vuen, act. iv.

24 Tchao-Me-i-Hiang; Pi-P~-Ki. 25Hoei-Lan-Ki.

26Ho-Han-Chan.

the charms of so unfamiliar a phraseology, it may be questioned whether even in its diction the Chinese drama can claim to be regarded as really poetic. It may abound in poetic oinament; it is not, like the Indian, bathed in poetry.

On the other hand, the merits of this dramatic literature are by no means restricted to ingenuity of construction and variety Merits ~ of charactermerits, in themselves important, which the no candid criticism will deny to it. Its master-piece Chinese is not only truly pathetic in the conception and the drama, main situations, of its action, but includes scenes of singular grace and delicacy of treatmentsuch as that where the remarried husband of the deserted heroine in vain essays in the presence of his second wife to sing to his new lute, now that he has cast aside the old.1 In the last act of a tragedy appealing at once to patriotism and to pity, there is true imaginative power in the picture of the emperor, when aware of the departure, but not of the death, of his beloved, sitting in solitude broken only by the ominous shriek of the wild-fowl.2 Nor is the Chinese drama devoid of humour. The lively abigail who has to persuade her mistress into confessing herself in love by arguing (almost like Beatrke) that humanity bids us love men the corrupt judge (a common type in the Chinese plays) who falls on his knees before the prosecuting parties to a suit as before the father and mother who give him sustenance,4 may serve as examples; and in Pi-Pa-Ki there is a scene of admirable burlesque on the still more characteristic theme of the humours of a competitive examination.5 If such illustrations could not easily be multiplied, they are at least worth citing in order to deprecate a perfunctory criticism on the qualities of a dramatic literature as to which our materials for judgment are still scanty.

While in the north of China houses are temporarily set apart for dramatic performances, in the south these are usually confined to theatres erected in the streets (Hi- Thai).

sce; civ Thus scenic decorations of any importance must always costume, have been out of question in the Chinese theatre. The costumes, on the other hand, are described as magnificent; they are traditionally those worn before the i~th century, in accordance with the historical coloring of most of the plays. ActOrS. The actors profession is not a respectable one in China, the managers being in the habit of buying children of slaves and bringing them up as slaves of their own. Women may not appear on the stage, since the emperor Kien-Lung admitted an actress among his concubines; female parts are therefore played by lads, occasionally by eunuchs.

4. JAPANESE DRAMA

The Japanese drama, as all evidence seems to agree in showing, still remains what in substance it has always beenan amusement passionately loved by the lower orders, but hardly dignified by literature deserving the name. Apart from its native elements of music, dance and song, and legendary or historical narrative and pantomime, it is clearly to be regarded as a Chinese importation; nor has it in its more advanced forms apparently even attempted to emancipate itself from the reproduction of the conventional Chinese types. As early as the ~lose of the 6th century Hada Kawatsu, a man of Chinese extraction, but born in Japan, is said to have been ordered to arrange entertainments for the benefit of the country, and to have written as many as thirty-three plays. The Japanese, however, ascribe the origin of their drama to the introduction of the dance called Sambso as a charm against a volcanic depression of, the earth which occurred in 805; and this dance appears still to be used as a prelude to theatrical exhibitions. In 1108 lived a woman called Iso no Zenji, who is looked upon as the mother of the Japanese drama. But her performances seem to have been confined to dancing or posturing in male attire (otokomai); and the introiPi-paKi, sc. 14. - 2Hai1-KongTseu.

$ Tchtw-Mei-Hiang, act ii.

Teou-Ngo- Vuen, act ii.; cf. Hoei-Lan-Ki.

~ Ps-Pa-Ki, sc. 5.

ducition of the drama proper is universally attributed to Sarnwaka Kanzabur, who in 1624 opened the first theatre (sibaia) at Yeddo. N~t long afterwards (1651) the playhouses were removed to their present site in the capital; and both here and in the provincial towns, especially of the north, the drama has since continued to flourish. Persons of rank were formerly never seen at these theatres; but actors were occasionally engaged to play in private at the houses of the nobles, who appear themselves to, have taken part in performances of a species of opera affected by them, always treating patriotic legends and called no. The mikado has a court theatre.

The subjects of the serious popular plays are mainly mythologicalthe acts of the great spirit Day-Sin, the incarnation of Brahma, and similar themesor historical, treating Subjects of of the doings of the early dynasties. In these the the plays.

names of the personages are changed. An example of the latter class is to be found in the jOruri, or musical romance, in which the universally popular tale of Chiushingura (The Loyal League) has been amplified and adapted for theatrical representation. This famous narrative of the feudal fidelity of the fortyseven ronins, who about the year 1699 revenged their chiefs judicial suicide upon the arrogant official to whom it was due, is stirring rather than touching in its incidents, and contains much bloodshed, together with a tea-house scene which suffices as a specimen of the Japanese comedy of manners. One of the books of this dramatic romance consists of a metrical description, mainly in dialogue, of a journey which (after the fashion of Indian plays) has to be carried out on the stage. The performance of one of these quasi-historical dramas sometimes lasts over several day~ they are produced with much pomp of costume; but the acting is very realistic, and han-han is performed, almost to the life. Besides these tragic plays (in which, however, comic intermezzos are often inserted) the Japanese have middle-class domestic dramas of a very realistic kind. The language of these, unlike that of Chinese comedy, is often gross and scurrilous, but intrigues against married women are rigidly excluded. FaiIy and demon operas and ballets, and farces and intermezzos, form a~i easy transition to the interludes of tumblers andjugglers. As a specimen of nearly every class of play is required to make up a Japanese theatrical entertainment, which lasts from sunrise to sunset, and as the lower houses appropriate and mutilate the plays of the higher, it is clear that the status of the Japanese theatre cannot be regarded as at all high. III respect, however; of its movable scenery and properties, it is in advance of its Chinese prototype. The performers are, except in the ballet, males only; and the comic acting is said to be excellent of its kind. Though the leading actors enjoy great popularity and very respectable salaries, the class is held in contempt, and the companies were formerly recruited from the lowest sources. The disabilities under which they lay have, however, been removed; a Dramatic Reform Association has been organized by a number of noblemen and scholars, and a theatre on European lines built (see JAPAN).

5. PERSIAN AND OTHER ASIATIC, POLYNESIAN AND PERUVIAN

DRAMA

Such dramatic examples of the drama as may be discoverable in Siam will probably have to be regarded as belonging to a branch of the Indian drama. The drama of the Malay Siam populations of Java and the neighboring island of Sumatra also resembles the Indian, to which it may have owed what development it has reached. The Javanese, as we learn, distinguish among the lyrics sung on occasions of popular significance the pant on, a short simile or fable, ~u,~m~itra, and the tcharita, a more advanced species, taking the &c.

form of dialogue and sung or recited by actors proper.

From the tchaniia the Javanese drama, which in its higher forms treats the stories of gods and kings, appears to have been derived. As in the Indian drama, the functions of the director or manager are of great importance; as in the Greek, the performers wear masks, here made of wood. The comic drama is often represented in both Java and Sumatra by parties of strollers consisting of two men and a womana troop sufficient for a wide variety of plot.

Among other more highly civilized Asiatic peoples, the traces of the dramatic art are either few or late. The originally Aryan persian Persians exhibit no trace of the drama in their ample earlier literature. But in its later national development the two species, widely different from one another, of the religious drama or mystery and of the popular comedy or farce have made their appearancethe former in a growth of singular interest.

Of the Persian tazies (lamentations or complaints) the subjects are invariably derived from religious history, and more or less Th. directly connected with the martyrdoms of the EazJ~s. house of Ali. The performance of these episodes or scenes takes place during the first ten days of the month of Muharram, when the adherents of the great Shiite sect all over Persia and Mahommedan India commemorate the ~aths of the Prophet and his daughter Fatima, the mother of Ali, the martyrdoms of Au himself, shamefully murdered in the sanctuary, and of his unoffending son Hasan, done to death by hi3 miserable guilty Deianira of a wife, and lastly the never-to-be-forgotten sacrifice of Hasans brother, the heroic Hosain, on the bloody field of Kerbela (AD. 680). With the establishment in Persia, early in the 16th century, of the Safawid (Sufi) dynasty by the Shiites, the cult of the martyrs Hasan and Hosain secured the official sanction which it has since retained. Thus the performance of these tazis, and the defraying of the equipment of them, are regarded as religious, and in a theological sense meritorious, acts; and the plays are frequently provided by the court or by other wealthy persons, by way of pleasing the people or securing divine favor. The plays are performed, usually by natives of Isfahan, in courtyards of mosques, palaces, inns, &c., and in the country in temporary structures erected for the purpose.

It would seem that, no farther back than the beginning of the 19th century, the tazi~s were still only songs or elegies in honor of the martyrs, occasionally chanted by persons actually representing them. Just, however, as Greek tragedy was formed by a gradual detachment of the dialogue from the choric song of which it was originally only a secondary outgrowth, and by its gradually becoming the substance of the drama, so the Miracle Play of Hasan and Hosain, as we may call it, has now come to be a continuous succession of dramatic scenes. Of these fifty-two have, thanks to the labors of Alexander Chodzko and Sir Lewis Pelly, been actually taken down. in writing, and thirty-seven published in translations; and it is clear that there is no limit to the extension of the treatment, as is shown by such a tazi as the Marriage of Kassem, dealing with the unfortunate Hosains unfortunate son.i The performance is usually opened by a prologue delivered by the rouzkhdn, a personage of semi-priestly character claiming descent from the Prophet, who edifies and excites the audience by a pathetic recitation of legends and vehement admonitions in prose or verse concerning the subject of the action. But the custom seems to have arisen of specially prefacing the drama proper by a kind of induction which illustrates the cause or effect of the sacred storyas for instance that of Amir Timur (Tamerlane), who appears as lamenting and avenging the death of Hosain; or the episode of Josephs betrayal by his brethren, as prefiguring the cruelty shown to All and his sons. At the climax of the action proper Hosain prays to be granted at the day of judgment the key of the treasure of intercession; and the final scene shows the fulfilment of his prayer, which opens paradise to those who have helped the holy martyr, or who have so much as shed a single tear for him. It will thus be seen that not only is this complex and elaborate production unapproached in its length and in its patient development of a long sequence of momentous events by any chronicle history or religious drama, but that it embodies together with the passionately ,cherished traditions of a great religious community the expression of a long-lived resentment of foreign invasionand is thus a kind of Oberammergau play and complaint of the Nibelungs in one. -

I Translated by Comte de Gobineau, in his Religions et philosophies dans lAsie centrale (Paris, 1865).

The other kind of Persian drama is the ~macha (= spectacle), a kind of comedy or farce, sometimes called teglid (disguising), performed by wandering minstrels or jocul at ores called loutys, who travel about accompanied by their baya- ~ach~ dres, and amuse such spectators as they find by their improvised entertainments, which seem to be on much the same level as English interludes. A favorite and ancient variety of the species is the karaguez or puppet-play, of which the protagonist is called ktchel phlvan (the bald hero).

The modern Persian drama seems to have admitted Western influences, as in the case of such comedies as The Plead ers of the Court, and, avowedly, Monsieur Jourdan and Muslali Shah, of whOm the former steals away the wits of young Persia by his pictures of the delights of Paris.

There is no necessity for any reference here to the civilization or to the literature of the Hebrews, or to those of other Semitic peoples, with whom the drama is either entirely wanting, or only appears as a quite occasional and exotic growth. Dramatic elements are apparent in two of the books of the Hebrew scripturethe Book of Ruth and the Book of Job, of which latter the author of Everyman, and Goethe in his Faust, made so impressive a use.

From Polynesia and aboriginal America we also have isolated traces of drama. Among these are the performances, accompanied by dancing and intermixed with recitation and singing, of the South Sea Islanders, first described by ~ Captain Cook, and reintroduced to the notice of students -Pei.tz:

of comparative mythology by W. Wyatt Gill. Of the so-called Inca drama of the Peruvians, the unique relic, Apu Ollantay, said to have been written down in the Quichua tongue from native dictation by Spanish priests shortly after the conquest of Peru, has been partly translated by Sir Clements Markham, and has been rendered into German verse. It appears to be an historic play of the heroic type, combining stirring incidents with a pathos finding expression in at least one lyric of some sweetness the lament of the lost Collyar. With it may be contrasted the ferocious Aztek dramatic ballet, Rabinal-Achi (translated by Brasseur de Bourbourg), of which the text seems rather a succession of warlike harangues than an attempt at dramatic treatment of character. But these are mere isolated curiosities.

6. DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN EGYPTIAN CULTURE

The civilization and religious ideas of the Egyptians so vitally influenced the people of whose drama we are about to speak that a reference to them cannot be altogether omitted. The influence of Egyptian upon Greek civilization has probably been overestimated by Herodotus; but while it will never be clearly known how much the Greeks owed to the Egyptians in divers branches of knowledge, it is certain that the former confessed themselves the scholars of Egypt in the cardinal doctrine of its natural theology. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul there found its most solemn. expression in mysterious recitations connected with the rites of sepulture, and treating of the migration of the soul from its earthly to its eternal abode. These solemnities, whose transition into the Hellenic mysteries has usually been attributed to the agency of the Thracian worship of Dionysus, undoubtedly contained a dramatic element, upon the extent of which it is, however, useless to speculate. The ideas to which they sought to give utterance centred in that of Osiris, the vivifying power or universal soul of nature, whom Herodotus simply identifies with the Dionysus of the Greeks. The same deity was likewise honored by processions among the rural Egyptian population, which, according to the same authority, in nearly all respects except the absence of choruses~ resembled the Greek phallic processions in honor of the wine-god.

That the Egyptians looked upon music as an important science seems fully established; it was diligently studied by their priests, though not, as among the Greeks, forming a part~ of general education, and in the sacred rites of their gods they as a rule permitted the use of flute and harp, as well as of vocal music. Dancing was as an art confined to professionalperson,s;~but though the higher orders abstained from its practice, the lower indulged in it on festive occasions, when a tendency to pantomime naturally asserted itself, and licence and wanton buffoonery prevailed, as in the early rustic festivals of the Greek and Italian peoples. Of a dance of armed men, on the other hand, there seems no satisfactory trace in the representations of the Egyptian monuments.

7. GREEK DRAMA

Whatever elements the Greek drama may, in the sources from which it sprang, have owed to Egyptian, or Phrygian, or other Asiatic influences, its development was independent Pefl claus and self-sustained. Not only in its beginnings, but so long as the stage existed in Greece, the drama was in intimate connection with the national religion. This is the most signal feature of its history, and one which cannot in the same degree or to the same extent be ascribed to the drama of any other people, ancient or modern. Not only did both the great branches of the Greek drama alike originate in the usages of religious worship, but they never lost their formal union with it, though one of them (comedy) in its later growth abandoned all direct reference to its origin. Hellenic polytheism was at once so active and so fluid or flexible in its anthropomorphic formations, that no other religious system has ever with the same conquering force assimilated to itself foreign elements, or with equal vivacity and variety developed its own. Thus, the worship of Dionysus, introduced into Greece by the Phoenicians as that of the tauriform sun-god whom his worshippers adored with loud cries (whence Bacchus or Iacchus), and the god of generation (whence his phallic emblem) and production, was brought into connection with the Dorian religion of the sun-god