Afterthoughts and Final Words – The Epilogue

The ability and power to observe, to penetrate, and to reproduce character accurately is an inherent gift. You have it, or not. It can’t be acquired nor theoretically learned, but certain skills can be honed. The previous technical discussions may be helpful towards the effective presentment of character, which is the goal of construction in drama.

The average quality of modern dialogue bears witness to the extraordinary progress made by drama in the English language. The playwright realizes that it is possible to combine naturalness with vivacity, vigor and verbal wit, and get away from the labored, flowery dramatic writing that English plays suffered under for ages. Language then was a newly discovered and irresistibly fascinating playground for the fancy and had to be thick-strewn with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every description, else it was deemed unworthy to be spoken on the stage. Shakespeare freely yielded to this convention, and so helped to establish it. His genius helped him to present it delightfully, b0075t in most of the Elizabethans it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when modern light talk came into being in the coffee houses, it became fashionable to strain after wit, and the dramatists did the same. There was a keen desire to write brilliantly – if it wasn’t successful, then it was for lack of talent.

Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, “The War-God”, has put blank verse to a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He managed to use modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity, while at the same time he is able to give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages. In passages of argument, he can achieve that clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called “stichomythy,” and which the French dramatists sometimes produce in rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Zangwill’s practice suggested that blank verse, to be justified in drama, should be lyrical. His verse is a product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is measured prose and if it ever tries to be more, it fails. He has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic drama - no small literary feat.