The Celtic Dawn; A Survey of the Renascence in Ireland, 1889-1916 - Lloyd R Morris

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917. Excerpt: ... THE DRAMA IT was during the late eighties and early nineties of the last century that a revival of interest in the arts of the theater began to evidence itself in England. Two of the contributing forces that operated in creating a more serious attitude plays of Ibsen, and the foundation of the Independent Theater. The plays of Ibsen, and later those of other continental dramatists, set literary men to thinking of the drama as an essentially social force embodying a philosophic reaction to life in terms of social criticism, and as such an almost wholly new literary form in which to express themselves. They felt that the theater offered them a wider audience than they could ever hope to reach with the printed page, and therefore that the drama was the most democratic of the arts and the most direct in its appeal. They began to discuss the function of the theater, and to hope for a drama which, besides revealing drama were the translations of the a serious reading of life, would be graced, like that of Ibsen, by literary distinction. Their activities took tangible form in the foundation of the Independent Theater, an association formed with the purpose of producing plays that would not have obtained a hearing in the "commercial" theater. In their anxiety to approach life directly and reflect it accurately, the new playwrights wrote very realistic plays, making their appeal rather to the intellect than to the emotions of the audience. In the meanwhile the technique production succumbed to a similar wSWWR ism; it was found consistent with the naturalism of the plays themselves to exactly reproduce the environment of life, and the minute and detailed naturalism of production against which there is so strong a revolt today was ubiquitous, both in the "commercial...