There is a tendency nowadays to downgrade the thirties. The reason for this is that the prevailing mood of the thirties was what used to be called “left of center.” Beginning with the late forties— from the time the phrase about the “iron curtain” became part of the common vocabulary—our “intelligentsia” sounded the retreat. The Roosevelt administration, subjected to sharp criticism not infrequently close to slander, seemed to be in bad odor. “Left of center” might be construed as something worse than liberalism. To be “radical” implied that one might be tainted with some degree of “pink.“

A good many of the writers, artists and theatre folk in the thirties were inclined to radicalism. (Had not the Roosevelt administration sponsored the Projects for writers, artists and theatre?) In the early forties the fervor of the thirties was gradually absorbed by the pressures of the war.

The Riddles Of Oedipus.

The central intuition of Greek tragedy, as of psychoanalysis, is that there is one, unique fact which each individual anxiously struggles to conceal from himself, and this is the very fact that is the root of his identity. Kierkegaard describes a type of despair in which the self “wills desperately to be itself—with the exception, however, of one particular, with respect to which it wills despairingly not to be itself.” Action is heroic when, in addition to displaying courage, fidelity, etc., it involves an overcoming of this automatic will to ignorance, when it reverses the process that repels the one particular and forces the actor to embrace it.

Tragedy is the willful movement toward the hidden fact by which the hero is identified. The hero does not know what his action will disclose but he is impelled to the disclosure.

It is a strange fact that although Hamlet has spoken with unique force to the most diverse audiences for over three centuries, and has been so incorporated into our lives that it is, as the joke goes, a patchwork of quotations, yet the majority of contemporary critics agree with T. S. Eliot in finding it essentially incoherent. Mr. Eliot, says, “Here Shakespeare tackled a problem that was too much for him… Nothing that [he] can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him.” Another critic concurs: “The spirit of the tragedy is … imperfect in its clarity of conception“; and another: “The dramatist never succeeded in finding a dramatic form that could completely express his idea“; another: “What is seen is a series of pictures, vivid, brief, isolated“; another: “No play, doubtless, is so ill constructed … and all efforts to reduce it to unity fail.”

Conceptions of Bertolt Brecht's own staging of his play The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the “Berliner Ensemble am Schiffbauerdamm” (premiere on 7 October 1954) differ from the performance in Frankfort-on-the-Main (directed by Harry Buckwitz, premiere on 27 April 1955) in this respect, among others, that in Berlin the Prologue was performed, whereas in Frankfort it was deleted before rehearsals began.

The Prologue is an integral part of The Caucasian Chalk Circle and the play has never been published without it. In it Brecht shows how two Grusinian Kolchoses settle an argument over the possession of a valley claimed by both villages. The valley is obtained by those who give promise of administering it best, i.e., those who will irrigate it in order to make it produce more fruit.

The goat-raising Kolchos “Galinsk” had been evacuated from the valley by a government order when Hitler's armies were advancing.

Yeats’ difficulty in becoming a successful playwright is not surprising or unexpected. His own views on the public theatre precluded success, and it would have surprised Yeats as much as anyone if at any time in his career he had achieved much widespread popularity. His growth as a playwright was always away from the “pit” and the appearance of Four Plays for Dancers, The Only Jealousy of Emer, At the Hawk's Well, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Calvary (the first of which was produced in 1916), is in many ways a predictable outcome of much of his opinion of what drama should be. In a note to At the Hawk's Well in 1916 he had written:

One of the leading Spanish scholars of the past hundred years, Menéndez y Pelayo, had this to say of Fuenteovejuna: “Peribáñez and El mejor alcalde, el rey . . . have to do with personal justice or private vengeance. In Fuente Ovejuna what we witness is the vengeance of a whole town; there is no individual protagonist; there is no hero but the demos, the town council of Fuente Ovejuna: when the Royal power intervenes, it is only to sanction and consolidate the revolutionary deed. There is no more democratic play in the whole Castilian theatre” (Vol. V, p. 198). “A drama which is reality itself, brutal and throbbing, but magnified and exalted by the historical genius of the poet… . In Fuente Ovejuna the soul of the people found expression without danger, thanks to the.happy state of political unconsciousness in which the poet and his public lived.

The opposition of modern technique—or perhaps, more precisely, of modern technique's laziness—to the conception of art during classical periods is explosively evident if we compare Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise with Calderón's play as presented by Charles Dullin at the Théâtre de l'atelier. To say that the modern play is primarily psychological is ah inadequate formulation of the differences in genre. There is a deeply searching psychology in The Surgeon of his Own Honor, but where all the modern dramatist's virtuosity is used in interweaving ideas, and where the modern play's complexity tends increasingly to stay on the intellectual plane, its action so reduced as to be little more than linear, in the classical period—at least in the plays of the Elizabethan and Spanish theatres and in Corneille's early work—it is the action itself which is the object of the dramatist's entire concern.

The prefatory note to the volume, Three Plays by Thornton Wilder, states that he is regarded by many as America's greatest living playwright. We may discount this considerably as a publisher's exaggeration, but there is no question that his name will appear on almost anyone's list of major contemporary American playwrights—and probably nearer the top than the bottom.

This is a little surprising when one stops to think that his reputation rests almost entirely on three plays, one of them an adaptation. True, he has written a number of one-act plays, one or two of which have become classics of the amateur theatre. He has translated André Obey's Lucrèce for Katharine Cornell and he has adapted A Doll's House for Ruth Gordon.

I was visiting my friend Labiche at his princely estate in Sologne, which is so unlike our cheerful countryside of Seine-et-Oise. Nevertheless, I enjoyed myself very much there with my old friend's delightful family, surrounded by the bustling activity of rural pursuits so new to me. A simple flower gardener myself, I derived great pleasure from following this tiller of the soil across the extensive fields which he had reclaimed from sand and briar and replenished with wheat, pine trees, cattle and sheep. And in the presence of this splendid yeoman who strode along the roadways, hobnailed stick in hand, his legs encased in leather gaiters, master of all he surveyed, I found myself completely forgetting the author of so many merry caprices, the grand master of laughter, our first producer of laughing gas.