Poetic Drama

Poetic Drama, term applied to plays written in verse or in a heightened, ‘poetic’ form of prose, which in the 19th and 20th centuries constituted an attempt to restore the medium of poetry to the stage. In earlier times all plays throughout Europe were in verse, and tragedy continued to be so written long after prose had become the accepted medium for comedy. Shakespeare interpolated comic scenes in prose into his great poetic plays; and by the time of Dryden, prose comedies existed side by side with tragedies in verse. As the theatre increasingly attracted a mass audience, prose (with a greater or lesser approximation to everyday speech) became the accepted mode of expression for all plays. Works written by poets in dramatic form— Lord Byron's Werner (1830), Browning's A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843), Shelley's The Cenci (1886), and Tennyson's Becket (1893)—had some success, but on the whole the public preferred the rhetorical dramas of Sheridan Knowles and Bulwer-Lytton. Stephen Phillips briefly revived blank verse in the commercial theatre in London, but he was the last of the poetic dramatists in the tradition of the 19th century.

About the turn of the century, poetic drama, under such diverse influences as the nō plays of Japan, Ibsen (whose ‘realism’ is fundamentally that of a poet), and the writings of the French Symbolist poets, became more assured, and its authors were encouraged to think in terms of a theatre of their own. The leaders of the Irish literary revival, Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory, produced plays of great poetic beauty combined with sound dramatic structure. They did not, however, establish the poetic theatre that had been hoped for, though Yeats's integrity as a poet and dramatist raised the standards of poetic drama and deeply influenced his Irish and English contemporaries. Synge's plays, though written in prose, are the work of a true poet, as are those of O'Casey.

Among the English poetic dramas of the early 20th century John Masefield's The Tragedy of Nan (1908), in poetic prose, John Drinkwater's Rebellion (1914), Gordon Bottomley's Gruach, and Flecker's Hassan (both 1923) were the most important. In the 1930s a number of poets broke away from the traditional verse play, employing free verse and the concepts of modern symbolism. T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935) was notable for its fine poetry, and has frequently been revived, while The Dog beneath the Skin (1936) and The Ascent of F.6 (1937) by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood were valued in their day for their wit, satire, and social criticism.

The first important American poetic dramatist was William Vaughn Moody. Maxwell Anderson carried on a long and valiant fight to establish poetic drama on the American stage. Other American poets have written plays, for the most part characterized by great individuality and a considerable degree of experiment, but only a few have been produced. On the whole the production of poetic drama in the 20th-century theatre has had to depend on university theatres, drama schools, and groups specifically formed to present them. In England in the 1930s a number of plays in verse were staged at Canterbury and other cathedrals, including The Zeal of Thy House (1937) by Dorothy L. Sayers, which later had a London run, and Christ's Comet (1938) by Christopher Hassall. After the Second World War the Mercury Theatre was for a time exclusively devoted to poetic drama, and it returned to the commercial theatre again with the production of new plays by Christopher Fry and T. S. Eliot, while Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (1953), written for radio, had many stage readings and performances; but these were isolated phenomena.

After the collapse of the Federal Theatre Project in the USA in 1939, the Poets' Theatre, founded in 1951 in Cambridge, Mass., became one of the most important agencies for commissioning and producing poetic drama. Richard Eberhart, its founder and first president, wrote The Apparition (1951) and The Visionary Farm (1952), both well received; Archibald MacLeish's poetic J.B. (1958; London, 1961) had a long run on Broadway. During the 1950s and 1960s adaptations in English of poetic plays by Anouilh and Giraudoux, and later those of Beckett and Ionesco, which combine poetry of a high order with Surrealism and the world of dreams, were commercially successful in London and New York, but poetic drama has during the past decades become increasingly identified with experimental work, and the theatre as a whole remains firmly committed to prose.