THEATER CHRONICLE
65
curtain in .the original; a child is made the witness of his father's death,
where an adult companion was used by Webster; the incest theme is
openly stated and at a particularly harrowing moment, where in Web–
ster it is altogether hidden; the
Lyke Wake Dirge,
a death chant of the
early Tudor period, is introduced to heap the terror of medieval super–
stition upon the barbarism of the Renaissance; and, finally, the selection
of Canada Lee, a Negro in white-face, to play Bosola, goes in the same
direction as these other improvements, though it may not have come from
Auden: that is, it directs this tragedy of blood and passion toward
the ghoulish, the unnatural, the perverse. Auden's
Duchess
is more
Gothic than J.acobean; from this springs a gain in pace and intensity
and a loss of somber seriousness. What is missing from the Auden-Eliza–
beth Bergner version is a certain hardness and realism, a sense of char–
acter that is more modern than Shakespeare's, if less poetic. The Webster
Duchess of Malfi is an advance over Ophelia, on the one hand, and
Lady Macbeth, on the other; she is, in fact, the transition, the connec–
tion, between these two women; she is the whole world of ordinary
women, of which they are but the poles. Unfortunately, Miss Bergner's
acting, while admirable for the tragic scenes, is too heavy for the every–
day ones; furthermore, the cutting done by Auden, while it enhances
the Duchess's plight as the play's victim, misunderstands her character
by making her its dead center. Similarly, the character of Bosola is bru–
talized by Canada Lee's acting; this man, in Webster, is a fiend only in
the sense that every shrewd, purchasable man is a fiend; unlike lago, he
has a heart; he has scruples; he can be shocked-he is not a nature-devil.
If
these four plays in the aggregate constitute an aberration from
some norm of choice, they each individually in their subject matter
contemplate an aberration from some norm of conduct. There is the
incest theme in
The Duchess of Malfi;
in
Lady Windermere's Fan,
the
relations between mother and daughter do violence to family feeling,
and there is a suggestion throughout, which gives the play a certain
spice, that the husband is going from the daughter's bed to the mother's
as regularly as he would go to his club. In
John Gabriel Borkman
twin
sisters are fighting for the possession of a father and a son; the domestic
history of
Henry VIII
is well known, and even in
Cyrano de Bergerac,
which I have not seen, there is the pronounced aberration of the nose,
which cuts the hero off from the norm of love and marriage.
It is as
if
in the closed room of the theater a morbid situation had
suddenly been discovered; the drama, returning to the individual in–
stance, finds
him
poisoned in the library. This predicament is not new to
the novel, but the drama, which is concerned with action and hence
with health, which gives the ability to act, has been obliged to look at
its
borders, in the works of its minor writers, its aging writers, its great
