BOO KS
BAD BY NORTH AND SOUTH
THE ANTIPHON. By Diun/! Bornes. Forror, Strous
&
Cudohy. $3.50.
J.
B. By Archibold MocLeish. Houghton Mifflin. $3.50.
461
NORTH: I've been sent a verse play to review-O, I'll review
it. But don't people know that I'm opposed to plays in verse? I've said
it often enough. From Djuna Barnes's
The Antiphon
I've gotten further
arguments to back up my prejudice. I'm more against the whole enter–
prise of so-called "poetic drama" than ever.
SOUTH: I have a bad verse play to review, too, Archibald Mac–
Leish's
J.B.
But I'm not opposed to verse plays in general, as you are.
After all, even
if
both of these works are as bad as we
think,
that doesn't
mean the form as such is to be condemned. What
if
someone writes a
good verse play?
NORTH: Most unlikely.
SOUTH: What about
Murder in the Cathedral?
NORTH: That was not bad, to be sure. Very good, in fact. It's
about the best thing we have in the genre. Nevertheless, I don't con–
sider it an important play, and as Edmund Wilson noted, the one really
good dramatic scene in it, is in prose....
SOUTH: You told me you're against verse drama, but not why.
NORTH:
The Antiphon
is a perfect example of what is wrong
with this kind of play. You get the impression that each character is
trying to make a poem of his or her feelings; no one is swept into speech
by action or emotion. Now who wants to go to the theater to watch
people writing poetry? In this activity, there is indeed labor and pain,
but not the kind of labor or pain we can enjoy-unless the result is a
poem we ourselves produce.
SOUTH: But do not even Shakespeare's characters sometimes give
the impression that they are writing poems?
NORTH: They do, at times, and at such times, the less Shakes–
pearean they.
SOUTH: I was thinking of Othello's
I t
is
the cause, It
is
the cause, my soul:
Let me not name it to you,
0
chaste stars!
It is the cause. Yet I 'll not shed her blood.
NORTH: Let's take these lines. There is, of course, an element of
"poetry writing" in them, at least in the first two lines, but in the
third Othello quickly comes to the point when he says
