Date of Award

6-1927

Degree Type

Bachelors Essay

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Literatures, Languages, and Cultures

First Advisor

Thomas P. Whelan

Second Advisor

William M. Magee

Abstract

If poetry be “emotion remembered in tranquillity," as Wordsworth said, then drama is, or must seem to be, emotion visualized in action. Drama, by its nature,- can come into being only when men are moved powerfully and suddenly to record the circumstances of life; for the dramatic form is the most exacting of literary forms, demanding a high and sustained emotion in the author. The great ages of drama have thus been those when life has been raised to an unusual intensity, or viewed with an excited surprise. The artist may take what he desires from life, and, letting all else drop away, may raise this to a sudden height; or, he may wind himself into life like a skein of silk about its heart. The dramatist is for striking out his words and actions in the round, as it were; his people must stand by virtue of their own concreteness - like chessmen ready to a player’s hand, rather than figures marked in silk on an arras. Everything felt by the dramatist shall go into them and find expression through their mouths only; in his high mood, all else but direct speech and visible action is tiresome and redundant. Thus the dramatist lifts his art out of literary, and may escape, as Ibsen’s Master Builder wished to escape when his own imagination moved him from the "irrelevancy" of books in a library. The motive and the cue for the dramatist’s passion, then, is this quick desire to make real his imagings - under the influence of surprise; of pleased or excited surprise. The method of realization need not be rapid - so only that the finished work stand quick and eager, leaping to the spectator’s imagination, a thing of essentials only. The dramatist’s impatience is with in essentials, his disposition is to eliminate them; in actual fact, a patient process, if he go on to observe the critical canon of Hamlet, and "use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness.

Comments

A Thesis submitted partially to fulfill the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Philosophy, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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