other
foreign dramatists of national or international importance. He will give
attention to those other Scandinavians, Strindberg, Drachman and
Bjoernson; to the Russians, Tolstoy, Tchekoff and Gorky; to Frenchmen
like Rostand and Maeterlinck, Becque, Hervieu, Lavedan, Donnay and
Brieux; to the Germans and Austrians, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Wedekind,
Hofmansthal and Schnitzler; to the Italian, D'Annunzio, and the Spanish
Echgeragay,--to mention but a few. It may even be that, once aroused to
the value of the expression of the Present in these representative
writers for the stage, he will wish to trace the dramatic history behind
them in their respective countries, as he has (supposedly) already done
with the dramatists of his own tongue. If he do so, the play-goer will
surely add greatly not only to his general literary culture but to his
power of true appreciation of the play of the moment he may be
witnessing. For all this reading and reflection and comparison will tend
to make him a critic-in-the-seat who settles the fate of plays to-day
because he knows the plays of yesterday and yesteryear.

CHAPTER VI

THE PLAY AS THEME AND PERSONAL VIEW

We may now come directly to a consideration of the play regarded as a
work of art and a piece of life. After all, this is the central aim in
the attempt to become intelligent in our play-going. A play may properly
be thought of as a theme; it has a definite subject, which involves a
personal opinion about life on the author's part; a view of human beings
in their complex interrelations the sum of which make up man's existence
on this globe.

The play has a story, of course, and that story is so handled as to
constitute a plot: meaning a tangle of circumstances in which the fates
of a handful of human beings are involved, a tangle to which it is the
business of the plot to give meaning and direction. But back of the
story, in any drama that rises to some worth, there is a theme, in a
sense. Thus, the theme of _Macbeth_ is the degenerating effect of sin
upon the natures of the king and his spouse; and the theme of Ibsen's _A
Doll's House_ is the evil results of treating a grown-up woman as if she
were a mere puppet with little or no relation to life's serious
realities.

The thing that gives dignity and value to any play is to be found just
here: a distinctive theme, which is over and above the interest of
story-plot, sinks into the consciousness of the spectator or re