(1) It was under Ibsen’s influence that serious drama from 1890 onward ceased to deal with themes remote in time or place. Ibsen had taught men that drama, if its themes remote in time or place, Ibsen had taught men that drama, if it was to live a true of its own, must deal with human emotions, with things near and dear to ordinary men and women.
Hence melodramatic romanticism and the treatment of remote historic themes alike disappeared in favour of treatment of actual English life, first of aristocratic life, then of middle-class lives, and finally of labouring conditions, So far as choice of subject-matter is concerned, the break between the drama of romantic period and the naturalistic drama of the late 19th and 20th century is complete.
(2) With the treatment of actual life, the drama became more and more a drama of ideas, which are sometimes veiled in the main action and are sometimes did actively set forth. The ideas were for the most part revolutionary, so that the drama came to form an advanced battle ground for a rising school of young thinkers.
(3) Romantic love, too, came in for its particular onslaughts, with the tearing off of those veils of prudety with which the Victorians had covered the facts of sex, the new dramatistis came to take a definitely scientific view of life, Social convention, common standards of existence, seemed as nothing compared with this tremendous fact; Ann tracks down the father of her children in Man and Suparman, and her sister, Ann Leets in Mr. Granville Barker’s play, throws over Lord John Car[ for the plebeian John Abud.
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(4) The class-war which has found its expression in actual life, was freely dealt with by the newer school, cynically, yet profoundly, by men such as Mr. Bernard Shaw, seriously by men such as Mr. Galsworthy.
(5) The inner quality of the modern theatre was intensified greatly by the recent investigations of psychologists, The new study of the “soul” interested many, and none more than the dramatists, In their plays, therefore, they sought ever more subtly and delicatetlly to depict the most intricate aspects of the human spirit.
(6) To express almost inexpressible ideas, emotions, instincts, which the psychologists have defined for us, the new writers found that ordinary direct words were insufficient. This accounts for the extensive use of symbolism in modern drama. The dramatists found precisely the same difficulty which faced the mystics of countless, centuries before, and they came to employ the same methods for the explaining of their purposes.
(7) With the increased inwardness must be accounted, too, a tendency on the part of some of our living dramatists to make their protagonists not men, but unseen force. Social forces are used as dramatic personages for the purpose of making wider and larger the sphere of drama. The tendency is most pronounced plays of Mr. Galsworthy. It is one of the chief tendencies which separate the earlier romantic theatre from the later naturalistic play.
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(8) It is perfectly natural that the age should be satiric, Satire will always flourish in a society which has become over-civilized, where the artificial life rendered necessary to city existence has driven men, emotionally and morally, to be cut off from elemental conditions and: primitive impulses. All signs indicate that this satire will continue to be marked feature of modern drama.
(9) Role of Georg Bernard Shaw as a Dramatist. No account of the revival of English drama can be complete without a consideration of the contribution of Bernard Shaw. Shaw is a peculiar mixture of Ibsen and Wycherley. His aim is as serious, his analysis is as deep as that of any of the more serious dramatists, yet he clockes that seriousness of purpose with a gaiety and a wit which has rarely been equalled in any time. We may call Shaw’s plays comedies of purpose.
They aim at being as laughable as Congreve’sas stinging as Jonson’s, as profound as Ibsen’s. There is no earlier comedy in English comparable to those of Shaw; he has brought to the English stage a type of drama entirely new-a type, however, which few could follow.
Unquestionably, critics of hundred years hence will regard his plays as one of the most notable contributions to the theatre in our time, but it is probable that they will had only one or two other dramatists with whom to compare him. The comedy of purpose, if it is not to drift into mere sentimentalism, demands a genius not only of a high, but also of a peculiar kind.