Book Description

Excerpt from Theatre Arts Magazine, Vol. 5: An Illustrated Quarterly Drama breeds not only imagination but courage. The veriest coward caught in the activity of an audience, surely and deliberately handled by a dramatist, cannot but be swept out of his fears, though it be only for the space of an hour or two, from which he may afterwards suffer a terrible reaction. The memory of it will endure, and he will come back to the theatre for more of the succor it has given him. Such a drama, of course, cannot live in a theatre designed to flatter and amuse audiences of the dull and over-comfortable, though it is not the audiences that are at fault but those who prey upon them. Any audience is a good audience, if it be rightly handled; and even dull and comfortable people are human beings, though they may not know it. There is no such thing as an audience that cannot be moved by the spectacle of human beings loving, hating, weeping, laughing, lying, intriguing, swindling, in terms of life which is just enough beyond their existence to necessitate an effort of the imagination, difficult perhaps for the individual, but easy enough for the group. The imagination is forward-looking. It can understand the past but without any very passionate interest. The true dramatist senses life as it is becoming. As he is more conscious than the people of his time, so will his characters be just a little more conscious than himself... In the theatre there is intensified the process by which human society is sustained. Here is an instrument that was used in ancient days for the revelation of those gods whom men conceived as being superior to and separate from themselves, when free men might have souls - as though the soul could be possessed - while slaves were part of the surrounding scenery, an unpleasant necessity. And now, when humanity is aching in its hunger for the soul, not to possess but to be possessed by it, to learn the process by which every minute, every hour, every day may be devoted to its release, there is no other instrument, no other means by which the veil of consciousness can be stripped away from the beauty that quivers through it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.