In writing this preface, my purpose is not to conduct a futile investigation to determine whether I have written a good play or a bad one. It is too late for that. Rather, it is scrupulously to subject it to examination (and I should do this under any circumstances), in order to discover whether I have written a blameworthy piece of work.

Since no one is obliged to write a comedy in strict imitation of other comedies, if I have strayed from the well beaten path for reasons I felt to be sound ones, am I to be judged, as the Messrs. so & so have judged me, by rules which are not my rules? Or, as they fatuously proclaim in print, for taking art back to its infancy, because I am attempting to blaze a new trail for that art whose first, perhaps whose only law, is to entertain while instructing? But that is not the question.

I have been asked from time to time, whenever I published unrhymed lyrics, how I came to designate such verse as lyric. The last time this happened was in connection with my Deutsche Satiren (German Satires). The question is justified, because even when lyrics abandon rhyme they generally have at least a fixed rhythm. Many of my recent lyric pieces show neither rhyme nor regularly fixed rhythm. The reason I call them lyric is that, although they do not have a regular rhythm, they do have rhythm—shifting, syncopated, gestural.

My first book of poems contained for the most part only songs and ballads, and the verse forms are comparatively regular. Most of them were supposed to be sung, and in the simplest fashion — I myself was the composer. Only one poem was unrhymed, and its rhythm was regular. On the other hand, nearly all the rhymed poems had irregular rhythms.

Bertolt Brecht's adatation of Scophocles' Antigone, first performed in Switzerland in 1948, presents an interesting combination of ancient and contemporary elements. In this paper I shall describe and attempt to explain the playwright's handling of his material.

For the most part, his version follows Sophocles' play, as translated into German by Friedrich Hölderlin, early in the 19th century. The parts added by Brecht are in verse, with rhythms not unlike Hölderlin's. In diction, then, there is no attempt at modern dress. Modernity appears in the changes made in the action.

In Sophocles' play, you will recall, Antigone's brother, Polynices, has enlisted aid from Argos and other cities to fight his way to the kingship of Thebes, and has died in the attempt. Creon, regent of Thebes, forbids the burial of Polynices, on the ground that he was a traitor.

Lorenzaccio, published in 1834, was revised by Alfred de Musset for the 1853 edition. This final text is reproduced by Paul Dimoff in his La Genèse de Lorenzaccio (1936) together with those passages of Benedetto Varchi's Storia fiorentina which were used by Georges Sand for her Une conspiration en 1537 as well as by Musset, who amply availed himself not only of Varchi's chronicles but also of Sand's brief play.

The play has five acts, each of which is divided into six to eleven scenes. Very seldom do the individual scenes of any act occur in the same setting. This complete disregard for the unity of place produces the effect of a constantly changing panorama of early sixteenth-century Florence, wherein glimpses of the seemingly unrelated actions of a great number of characters gradually merge into an integrated impression which creates a mood, an atmosphere. The technique anticipates the more recent impressionistic concern for apparently fleeting or accidental phenomena.

Those of you who have taken any courses here in English literature—and I believe a number of you have—have surely at one time or another used, and therefore abused, that difficult word, Realism. For we all abuse it, whether we naively rub it, as Aladdin rubbed his lamp, hoping thereby to produce the jinni of Ernest Hemingway, or like grand metaphysicians toy with it by conjuring up the likes of Plato, Berkeley and Dr. Johnson. It seems to be a word made to be abused, and sometimes I think we would be better off if we did not regard it as a word at all but as a lower form of utterance, a noise perhaps, like a pig's grunt or a dog's bark, that we just have to give off with on certain literary occasions.

That once flourishing but now moribund institution, the road, has had a long and frequently exciting past. It can be traced back at least 200 years to the time when the Old American Company toured its repertory up and down the East Coast. As the country grew and the road expanded, the problems of booking became increasingly complex. By the middle of the nineteenth century, actors arid managers of attractions were finding it almost impossible to book a road season adequately, since they were forced to deal individually with the multitude of local theatre managers across the country. The local managers were finding it equally difficult to book their theatres profitably, since they had to book each attraction separately. The resultant confusion grew to the point of chaos, particularly among the many one-night stands.

“It is about time someone wrote a new Poetics,” my friend said. He was thinking of Tragedy, of course, and he looked hopefully at me, or so my vanity led me to believe. And it occurred to me at once how easy it would be to join this enterprise of drafting new or modified “laws” for tragedy, and how difficult to extricate oneself from it. There hasn’t been a generation since the fifteenth century that hasn’t tried to rewrite Aristotle’s text whether by interpretation or augmentation. Yet nothing absolute has ever been said on the subject that went perceptibly beyond the prejudices or ambitions of a period, a nation, a species of litterateur, or a class of play-goers and readers. The very effort to define the limits of tragedy appears to have introduced more confusion into criticism and playwriting than it has eradicated.

Bertrand et Raton, ou L'Art de Conspirer, anonymously translated in 1840 as “The School for Politicians,” was the first of the 374 plays of Augustin-Eugène Scribe (1791-1861) to arouse serious interest in the theatre. Given its première at the Théatre Français on November 14, 1833, this popular comedy of manners presented vigorous characters and a clever plot, amusingly sustained and fresh in treatment. The characters and situations, because of their animation, still awaken curiosity; the dramatic craftsmanship and comic originality of the play make it one of Scribe's masterpieces. Though his technical resourcefulness was one of the most important contributions to French drama in the nineteenth century, and though the genre of the “well-made” play (pièce bien faite), of which Scribe is the acknowledged father, has certainly “paid off” in the modern theatre, his plays, almost without exception, have been neglected.

An hour before the departure of the train, a pater familias staying at a summer cottage walks into a friend's house, holding in his hands a glass lamp globe, a toy bicycle, and a child's coffin, and sinks down on the couch, completely exhausted.

“My dear fellow,” he mumbles, out of breath, and senselessly rolling his eyes, “I'd like to ask you a favor. I beg you, lend me your revolver until tomorrow. Be a friend.”

“What do you need a revolver for?”

“I do need it… Oh, Lord! Give me some water. Quickly, some water—I need it. At night I have to drive through dark woods— so, in case anything happens—lend it to me, be so kind.”

The friend looks at the pale, exhausted face of the pater familias, at his perspiring forehead and mad eyes, and shrugs his shoulders.

Despite the high praise it has received from critics and the interest it has inspired in nearly every age, Euripides’ Medea offers certain problems in interpretation which have never been satisfactorily resolved. It is rather paradoxical, in fact, that a play of such enduring vitality should so often have been found unsatisfactory in one aspect or another. Adverse criticisms generally have been directed at three problems: the interpretation of the character of Medea, the purpose and relevance of the scene with Aegeus, and the resolution of the play. The first source of difficulty, a certain ambivalence in Euripides’ characterization of Medea, has evoked contradictory claims: that she is “one of the most tragic figures of the tragic stage,” but that she arouses no tragic pity in the spectator; that she is a brilliant achievement in humanizing a legendary figure; that, on the contrary she is not intended to appear human but primarily supernatural and demonic.

By the time that Shakespeare set out, probably sometime in 1605, to retell the ancient story of King Lear and his daughters, he had already approached the problem of man's relation to the forces of evil from various directions, and in doing so he had developed certain distinctive modes of tragedy. In King Lear Shakespeare’s primary emphasis is upon the process of human regeneration. That he chose for the hero of such a play an old man at the very end of physical life was thematicaUy appropriate, for the emphasis is upon a spiritual rebirth for which man never can grow too old. Shakespeare dramatically juxtaposes the physical age of his hero against the new manhood he attains through suffering, and thus he asserts dramatically that Lear's four score years of pride and self-deception were merely the prelude to life, and not life at all.

We are indebted to psycho-analysis for much valuable insight into the psychology of tragedy. Not only has psycho-analysis made us recognize that the “tragic guilt” of the hero, postulated by aesthetics, actually stems from the repressed Oedipus-wishes of the dramatist but it has also drawn our attention to the interrelation of dramatist and audience; that is, to the fact of a common guilt as the decisive psychological factor which, on the one hand, enables the dramatist to create his work and, on the other, produces the Aristotelian catharsis, or “purging of the passions.” Freud, in particular, established the psychological traces of the primal crime in classical tragedy and following in his tracks, Winterstein has recently subjected the origins of tragedy to intensive study and radically clarified them.

By contrast, how little has psycho-analysis bothered about comedy! So far it has hardly attracted any interest worth mentioning: at most it was granted a modest domicile in that basement of research, the footnote, there to be dealt with in a cursory manner.

The soil from which art will grow is ever unpredictable and its discovery after the fact often suggests that caprice, rather than mind or nature, governs the relation. Why Dublin?—one would like to know. The question recurs whenever one thinks of how much poetry and drama has come from that mediocre city in the last hundred years: Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Sean O'Casey—to say nothing of their lesser brothers inside or outside the Abbey Theatre: an unlikely but unmistakable golden age.

If we look at O'Casey, now its chief survivor, the mystery turns into paradox. For although commonly accounted a leading dramatist of the age, he commands no theatre and is rarely played. He is clearly in the Abbey tradition, but the Abbey rejected him early in his career.