Percy MacKaye

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MacKaye, Percy [Wallace] (1875–1956),son of Steele MacKaye, was born in New York City, and after graduation from Harvard (1897) and teaching school began to write poetry and plays. The Canterbury Pilgrims (1903) deals with an imaginary sentimental episode between Chaucer and the Prioress, and was made into a libretto for an opera by De Koven (1917). MacKaye wrote two other blank‐verse plays, Jeanne d'Arc (1906) and Sappho and Phaon (1907). The Scarecrow (1908) is a prose play based on a story by Hawthorne. His first play with a modern subject, Mater (1908), was a comedy of American politics, while Anti‐Matrimony (1910) was a satire on the influence of continental playwrights upon naïve Americans, and Tomorrow (1913) was a problem play about eugenics. Yankee Fantasies (1912) is a series of one‐act plays about New England life. Rip Van Winkle (1920) is a libretto for a De Koven opera, and Washington, the Man Who Made Us (1920) is a “ballad play.” MacKaye was consistently interested in large pageants and communal productions of drama, producing the Saint‐Gaudens Masque‐Prologue (1905), followed by a spectacular pageant version of his Canterbury Pilgrims (1909), Sanctuary, a Bird Masque (1913), Caliban, by the Yellow Sands (1916), and The Evergreen Tree (1917), the last concerned with the celebration of Christmas. In 1921 he made the first of several visits to the Kentucky mountains, which resulted in This Fine‐Pretty World (1923), a comedy based on native materials; Tall Tales of the Kentucky Mountains (1926); Kentucky Mountain Fantasies (1928), folk plays; Gobbler of God (1928), a narrative poem based on a mountain legend; and other writings. The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark; or, What We Will, produced in 1949 and published in 1950, is a tetralogy of verse plays meant as a “prologue” to Hamlet, for they develop characters and plot to a point just before the beginning of Shakespeare's drama. Poems and Plays (2 vols., 1916) includes his poetry, and My Lady Dear, Arise! (1940) poems in memory of his wife. Epoch (2 vols., 1927) is a biography of his father.

Mackaye, Percy [Wallace] (1875–1956), playwright. One of the most curious figures in American dramaturgy, he was the son of Steele MacKaye and was born in New York. Upon graduating from Harvard, he began teaching as well as writing poetry and plays. While scholars over the years have admired MacKaye's work, only one of his plays ever found a public: the fantasy The Scarecrow (1911). The rest of his work ranges from historical drama to political satire and spectacle. Such important theatrical figures as E. H. Sothern and Walter Hampden saw fit to mount a few of these, always without success. Shortly before his death he completed a tetralogy, The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark; or, What We Will (1949), which purports to show the events leading up to Shakespeare's play. His books, such as The Playhouse and the Play (1909), The Civic Theatre (1912), and Community Drama (1917), argue for a subsidized, noncommercial theatre and suggest why his theatre pieces today seem more like closet drama.