Twentieth Century Verse Drama

Verse drama is any drama written as verse to be spoken. It has been a dominant form of drama in

Europe from Greek tragedies to Shakespeare’s plays. English Verse Drama contains works acted

on or intended for the stage, which are either wholly or predominantly in verse. The Elizabethan

age was the great age of the poetic drama or verse drama and since its time many attempts were

made by practically all great poets (Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Browning, Arnold, Tennyson)

to revive this literary genre. At the beginning of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot questions the

lack of poetic drama and the failure of its revival in essays such as ‘The Possibility of a Poetic

Drama’ (from The Sacred Wood). He begins the essay by asking vital questions regarding the

absence of such a form and his belief in the need for its revival as can be seen in the quote below.

THE QUESTIONS—why there is no poetic drama to-day, how the stage has lost all hold

on literary art, why so many poetic plays are written which can only be read, and read, if

at all, without pleasure—have become insipid, almost academic. The usual conclusion is

either that “conditions” are too much for us, or that we really prefer other types of

literature, or simply that we are uninspired. As for the last alternative, it is not to be

entertained; as for the second, what type do we prefer?; and as for the first, no one has

ever shown me “conditions,” except of the most superficial.

He concludes in the essay that during the 19th century there were plays written by poets who had

no knowledge of the stage, or by men who knew the stage but were no poets at all. Besides this,

the shadow of Shakespeare was always there. All verse-dramatists tried to use the traditional

blank verse. That is why Galsworthy says, “the shadow of the man Shakespeare was across the

path of all who should attempt verse drama in those days.”

English poetic or verse drama in the twentieth century rose as a reaction to the naturalistic prose

drama of Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy. A number of writers, who had made their first reputation

as poets, and not as dramatists, tried to revive the tradition of verse play for the “Little Theatre”,

i.e. theatre for specialised audiences. Herod, the first poetic-play of Stephen Phillips, appeared in

1901, and this marks the beginning of the revival of poetic drama in the 20th century. However,

it was with works of T.S. Eliot (both in theory and practice) and Christopher Fry that established

a revival of poetic drama in the 20th century.

Eliot took to writing plays comparatively late in his career; he came to theatre as a mature critic

and poet. He had a full understanding of the nature of poetic drama, the difference between verse

drama and prose drama, the causes of the failure of 19th century verse dramatists, the problem,

technical and otherwise, which face a writer of verse plays in the modern age. Through his

critical writings, he tried to demolish many of the misconceptions about verse drama and through

his own practice, he showed that verse drama is possible in the modern age.

Eliot emphasised that there are certain conditions which must be fulfilled before success can be

achieved in this field. First, it must be realised that the difference between prose drama and verse

drama is not merely one of medium. The themes of the two are, and must be different. Poetic

drama has been thought fit only for such themes as cannot be appropriately dealt with by the

naturalistic prose drama T.S. Eliot writes, “…..no play should be written in verse for which prose

is dramatically adequate”. The dramatic adequacy then demands a poignant theme, involving

symbolic characters with imaginative atmosphere; this means a fall back on the elemental,

emotional realities of life in contradistinction to the socio-economic issues which constitute the

realm of the naturalistic prose drama. Through his practice, Eliot solved the thematic problem.

His verse-plays are not concerned with socio-economic problems; they are concerned not with

the outer, but with the inner emotional and psychic realities. Thus the core of his first play,

Murder in the Cathedral (1935), is the psychic struggle of the hero with the temptations offered

to him, and that of The Family Reunion (1939) the psychological guilt-complex of Harry, the

hero of the play; The Cocktail Party (1949) is a study in the awareness of personal inadequacies

of married life in the modern context. In these plays, he has also demonstrated the relevance of

religion to all human activity. They are all Christian plays, the purpose of the dramatist being,

“to train people to be able to think in Christian categories.” In this way, “Eliot has been

contributing to the creation of the kind of wholeness of outlook without which poetic drama

cannot be accepted as the normal mode of drama.”

The second pre-condition for the success of a poetic play is the availability of a form of verse,

the rhythms of which are closer to those of the spoken language, and which is flexible enough to

be organised into the word-order of dialogue. Blank verse was such a verse with the Elizabethan

dramatists. But its continued use or non-dramatic purposes had exhausted its potentialities, so

that by the time the renaissance of poetic drama started, it had become a handicap. T.S. Eliot

achieved success after a lot of experimentation. Murder in the Cathedral marks the first

conspicuous success of his experimentation: with its neutral style and avoidance of the echoes of

Shakespearean blank verse, it had only a negative value in that, “it succeeded in avoiding what

had to be avoided, but it arrived at no positive novelty.” With The Family Reunion he succeeded

in evolving a rhythm-pattern closer to the contemporary spoken language.

The third important condition is that poetry must not be used as a mere decoration. Poetry is not

an embellishment to look at, but a medium to be looked through. The fourth and the last

condition for the successful revival of poetic drama, according to Eliot, is the re-orientation of

the attitude of the audience. The Elizabethan audience accepted with, “willing suspension of

disbelief, the convention of making the high personages speak in verse and the low in prose. No

such frame of mind exists today, with the result that the attention of audience is distracted from

the play to poetry, the moment any character starts speaking in verse. The situation is worsened

by mixture of poetry and prose in the same play, because the transition from the one to the other

mode of speaking makes the audience much more conscious of the difference between the two;

in juxtaposition with the prose, the poetic mode of speaking looks all the more artificial. Thus a

dramatist should avoid any mixture of the two. “As I have said”, writes T.S. Eliot, “people are

prepared to put up with verse from the lips of personages dressed in the fashion of some distant

age; they should be made to hear it from people dressed like ourselves, living in houses and

apartments like ours, and using telephones and motor cars and radio sets what we have to do is to

bring poetry into the world in which the audience lives and to which it returns when it leaves the

theatre; not to transport the audience into some imaginary world totally unlike its own, an unreal

world in which poetry is tolerated……”. It was in keeping with this theory that after The Murder

in the Cathedral, he wrote four plays in contemporary setting with remarkable success. In this

way says T.S. Pearce, “in choosing to write poetic dramas about common, everyday experiences,

Eliot was undertaking the most startling experiment of all his works. At no period, had any

previous writer attempted to do anything like this.”

Finally, Eliot, through his critical writings, demolished the fallacy that in the history of a nation

there can be only one great age of poetic drama. The age of Elizabeth in England, the 5th century

in Greece, and the 17th century in France, were great ages of poetic drama, and there had not

been another greater age of verse plays in any of these countries. Eliot rejected such fatalistic

philosophies, as he called them, and emphasised that verse is the natural language of men at

moments of intense, emotional excitement. A poetic dramatist makes articulate the deeper

passions of men. Besides, he emphasized, “the craving for poetic drama is permanent in human

nature.” Poetic drama, he said, is possible in the 20th century, but, “it cannot be the work of one

man or of one generation working together, but has to evolve by the small contributions of a

number of people in succession, each contributing a little.” Every age has its own requirements

and its own tools. Verse dramatists in the modern age must avoid looking like Shakespeare.

Another popular fallacy was the belief that verse is artificial, and the use of prose is natural and

realistic. He pointed out that prose as used for dramatic dialogue is as different from

conversational speech as verse. The drama itself is an illusion; it is something artificial. Verse is

equally suitable for drama, only the playright should use the contemporary idiom, and try to

make his verse flexible enough to suit all situations and all characters. This flexibility can be

acquired only through long and painstaking efforts. In his own practice, he demonstrated that a

verse can be achieved which allows the dramatist, “to modulate deftly from passages of light and

rapid conversation, in the key of comedy, to passages expressing grave disquiet or, as at the end

of Elder Statesman, grave serenity.”

Christopher Fry was with TS Eliot, the leading figure in the revival of poetic drama that took

place in Britain in the late 1940s. His most popular play, The Lady's Not For Burning, ran for

nine months in the West End in 1949. The Lady... remains Fry's most popular play. One is struck

by the way in which Fry's euphuistic language - at one point, the hero describes himself as a

"perambulating vegetable patched with inconsequential hair" - overtakes the dramatic

action. But in a postwar theatre that had little room for realism, Fry's medieval setting, rich

verbal conceits and self-puncturing irony delighted audiences, and the play became the flagship

for the revival of poetic drama. At the same time, Eliot's The Cocktail Party enjoyed a West End

vogue, and a new movement was born. Though less of a public theorist than Eliot, Fry still

believed passionately in the validity of poetic drama. As he wrote in the magazine, Adam: "In

prose, we convey the eccentricity of things, in poetry their concentricity, the sense of

relationship between them: a belief that all things express the same identity and are all contained

in one discipline of revelation." For a period in the late 1940s and early 50s, Fry helped to revive

English verse drama, to which he brought colour, movement and a stoic gaiety. In the plays of

Christopher Fry there is a substantial body of work characterised, at its best, by both vivacity

(even exuberance) of language and a well-developed theatricality. Plays such as The Lady's Not

for Burning (1948), Venus Observed (1950), A Sleep of Prisoners (1951) and Curtmantle (1961)

display a considerable range. Fry can be funny and moving, dazzling and beautiful. He can also

be verbose and sentimental. Immensely successful - critically and commercially - at the

beginning of his career, Fry's reputation has suffered since.