THEATRE CHRONICLE
169
The revival itself is not new. What did seem to come in with the war is
another kind of borrowing, more abject, and more desperate than the
appropriation, which is perfectly legitimate, of a treasure from the col–
lective storehouse. Actors, after all, must work, and producers must
produce; no doubt it is better all around for their talents to be employed
on the good and old, rather than on the bad and new. The habit, how–
ever, has spread; the playwrights have taken it up; they do not imitate
the masters; they lift quotations, particularly from the poets, to do what
ought to be their own work.
Last year Mr. Thornton Wilder used quotations from Spinoza,
Plato, Aristotle and the Bible (spoken, incidentally, again by Negro
actors) to finish a play for which he himself had no outcome; the device
was perhaps forgivable since the subject of the play was the history of
culture, and since the words were beautifully spoken and dramatically
introduced. And in
The Eve -of St. Mark
Mr. Maxwell Anderson, having
already taken his title from Keats, presented one of his characters with
the whole of Eliot's
Sweeney Among the Nightingales,
which was recited
twice
and served once to bring down a curtain which might otherwise
have stayed up forever; the lines were badly read and their appropriate–
ness to the situation on the stage was never indicated (it is true that
young men sometimes recite poems but, in the particular case, why Eliot,
why
Sweeney?--{)ne
was left with the hypothesis that Eliot was the most
poetic
poet and
Sweeney
the most
poetic
poem that Mr. Anderson could
think of). This year quotation from the poets has become a mania on
the stage: Milton and Shakespeare and the Bible make their appearance
in
The Voice of the Tur;tle,
and in
Winged Victory
a poem from an
unknown source carries a crucial scene, symbolizing, rather inadequately,
for the audience the values for which the Air Forces are fighting; while
in
Over Twenty-one,
by Ruth Gordon, it is the corpus of Dorothy
Parker's work, as it exists, not in quotation, but in the memory of the
audience, that provides the
donnee
of the play, and what the spectators
laugh at is not so much the rather heavy quips of Miss Gordon as the
light and legendary quips they themselves have heard ascribed to the
wit of Miss Parker.
All this is merely symptomatic. In theory there is nothing against
the use of quotation in drama; it might well serve as it formerly did in
the essay as decoration or embellishment; it cannot, however, support
the dramatic structure, provide curtains, assert values, define character–
a quotation from Milton or Shakespeare does not in itself guarantee the
bona fides
of the juvenile; the man with a verse on his lips is quite as
likely as not to be a scoundrel, a professional seducer, an intellectual
climber. Quotation has been used by Eliot and Pound to do some of the
poetic work; but in these cases, particularly in Eliot's, the use of the
quotation is itself part of the subject of the poem, and there is deliberate
pathos and irony in the fact that the artist has had to resort to quotation:
