rather
than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new
life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact
that for at least two centuries--from 1700 to 1900--not a single
blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,[2] on
the stage of to-day.

I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I
believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that
it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century
before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a
great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with
the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the
great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The
great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was
because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a
vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing
lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in _Paolo and Francesca_
the dawn of a new art. Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still
believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak
in the lyric quarter of the heavens. The very summits of Shakespeare's
achievement are his glorious lyrical passages. Think of the exquisite
elegiacs of Macbeth! Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra! If
verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric
beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical "elevation" of
blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things
with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines
highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite
possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our
idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from
legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy--themes which can be steeped
from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as _Tristan und Isolde_
is steeped in an atmosphere of music. Of historic themes, I would
counsel this hypothetical genius to beware. If there are any which can
fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the
outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and
legend. The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula
of Chapman or of Rowe. That a new historic drama awaits us in the
fu