ENGLISH LITERATURE
Whole
of the English literature is divided into following categories-
1. Chaucer
to Shakespeare
2. Jacobean
to Restoration period
3. Augustan
age:18th century literature
4. Romantic
period
5. Victorian
period
6. Modern
period
7. Contemporary
period
Apart from all these
divisions there are a few more categories worth mentioning here.
1. American
and other non-British literatures
2. Literary
theory and criticism
3. Rhetoric
and prosody
MODERN PEARIOD
1. As
the twentieth century dawned, new values replaced the old ones and shaped the
literature of Great Britain. England fast lost its imperial image as her
colonies revolted and fought for independence. Industrialization progressed by
leaps and bounds and the two World Wars brought economic depression. All this
affected the content of literature. Writers sought new vehicles of expression.
The findings of Sigmund Freud in the realms of psychology took novelists to the
subconscious mind. A great number of writers who became famous men of letters
in English came from Ireland (G. B. Shaw, Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel
Beckett) and from America (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound). Socialism became a
practicing creed and feminism raised her head. Dogmatic Christianity was more
or less ignored. Although great strides were made in scientific inventions,
science could not provide suitable answers to the deep questions of human mind
resulting in ethical philosophy. The age saw the end of feudalism (ancestry).
Victorian reticence (silence) and prudery gave way to decadence in English
literature. English writers came under
the influence of the French Parnassians and symbolists. Scandinavia and Russia
represented by Ibsen and Tolstoy also influenced the British men of letters.
Many a poet wished to fight free from the fixed rules of versification and
wrote in free verse. Many imitated the American poet Walt Whitman. English
literature became more expansive in its concerns. The life and culture of
foreign lands were depicted. Although Kipling was an imperialist, his works go
beyond England. Being born in India, his works give a graphic view of the
country. The great revival under Yeats brought a new strain to English
literature. Finally the theatre, lying dormant for a century, now woke up with
a renewed vigour.
TRENDS IN MODERN LITERATURE
1. Complexity
- Much that is traditional and Victorian still persists in modern poetry, but
the new revolutionary forces become more and more prominent, and it is clear
that the future lies with them. Twentieth century is a curious mixture of the
traditional and the experimental, of the old and the new. It is complex and
many sided.
2. Abundance
of output –The variety and quantity of modern publications is
bewildering. Abundance of output has naturally resulted in the lowering of
quality. Much that is published fails to achieve the highest the standards.
Modern poetry is the revolt against tradition so it is largely experimental.
There is no doubt that the standards of poetic output has gone down, but there
can be no denying the fact that a few modern poets are of outstanding
excellence, and the poems produced by them are of permanent and universal
significance.
3. Revolt
against tradition- The new poetry is poetry of revolt resulting
largely from the impact of science. Increasingly the poet turns away from the
older romantic tradition: a tradition which still persists in Georgian poetry
of early years of the new century. The revolt is best exemplified in the poetry
of T. S. Eliot. The poet sees life in its naked realism, and even the most
prosaic and commonplace subjects are considered suitable. The heavy thud of
bus, creaking of tramcars, the rattling noise of railway trains, the drone of
an airplanes, all these find echo in modern poetry. Dinginess of industrial
civilization is also reflected. After the great wars, poems appear in an ever
increasing number on the destructive means of warfare. The imagery and
vocabulary of the modern poet reflects the influence of science and scientific
inventions. Realism in subject matter has led the modern poet to reject the
highly ornate and artificial poetic style of the romantics in favour of a
language which resembles closely the language of everyday life.
4. Love
of nature – For the modern poet nature is a box of toys which
delights his heart and which is very dear to him. A deep feeling of love and
joy in nature is a prominent characteristic of such poets as Davis, Walter De
La Mare, Edmund Blunden, etc. but the modern poet does not spiritualize nature
like Wordsworth, nor does he intellectualizes her like Shelley.
5. Pity
for the poor and the suffering – modern poet is moved
by the sufferings and makes a forceful plea for a more humane treatment of the
dumb creation. The spread of democracy has made the poet more and conscious of
the dignity of man. Even such outcasts of society as criminals, suicides, prostitutes
and drunkards find a sympathetic treatment in modern poetry. Attention is
focused on their problems and the society is held responsible for their
degeneracy.
6. Disillusionment-
The
tragedy of modern day life has induced in the poet a mood of disillusionment and
so the poetry today is bitter and pessimistic. The Great War was a nerve
shattering experience, man lost faith in accepted values and as a consequence
this note of bitterness is more pronounced after the war. Eliot’s Waste Land
reflects the tragic gloom and despair of the post war world.
7. Loss
of faith in religion – As a result of science and the
spirit of rationalism, the poet are skeptical about god. Hardy laughs
ironically at him and Housman does not hesitate to call him a “brute or a black
guard”. But this does not mean that religion is no longer the source of
inspiration in poetry. In Eliot and Thompson we find a revival of Christian
mysticism. Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy has a religious theme and there
are many fine devotional lyrics scattered all over his work. Even today there
are poets in tradition of Blake and Wordsworth.
8. The
metaphysical note – there has been the revival of
interest in the poetry of Donne and other metaphysical poets of the seventeenth
century. We find the same use of startling, farfetched imagery, the same
bringing together of opposites, the desire to startle and surprise and thus to
capture attention.
9. The
romantic strain – Robert Bridges has left behind him
some fine love lyrics, and W. B. Yeats has been called the greatest love-poet
of the 20th century.
10.
The influence of music and other
fine arts- The modern poet freely uses the
vocabulary and techniques of the other arts. However it is music which has
exercised the profoundest influence. The variations and repetitions in T S
Eliot’s TWL are like the movements of a symphony, so much so that I A Richards
calls his poetry “the music of ideas”, like a musicians phrases hi ideas are
arranged, not that they may tell us something, that they may combine into a coherent
whole of feeling and attitude.
11.
New techniques-The
use of slang and colloquialism has become common, the language and rhythm of
poetry approximate more and more to those of common speech, the bonds of metre
have been loosened, and rules of rhythm and metre are not followed. Verse
rhythm is replaced by sense rhythm. Emphasis has shifted from the externals to
the rendering of soul or psych.
Impressionism,
Imagism, Surrealism are some other innovations in the 20th century.
(the impressionists seek to convey the vague, fleeting sensations passing
through their minds by th use of a novel imagery and metaphor. The imagists
headed by Ezra Pound, aim at clarity of expression through the use of hard,
accurate and definite images to convey their ideas and emotions. The
surrealists try to express whatever passes in the subconscious, without any
control or selection by the conscious. These innovations increase the
complexity of modern poetry and the bafflement of the reader.)
Some
Modern poets
1. Thomas
Hardy- Hardy was a novelist and poet who passed whole of
his life near Dorchester. As a child he was immersed in rustic life legend and
folklore. Therefore he was acquainted with quite early in life the harshness of
rural living. Darwin’s theory impressed him so much that he gave up the idea to
be a country parson and devoted his life to reconcile the motion of generous
god with Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. He also saw
the increasing impoverishment of the south-west part of England which features
so strongly in his novels. His personal experience was bound with the people
and customs, the monuments and institutions of Dorset which he placed
permanently on the literary map by the ancient name of Wessex. The poet’s
largeness, minuteness and intensity of vision are displayed in all his novels.
His genius was entirely of a sculptor. He could chisel and carve not only
impressive figure groups but also vast sculptured landscapes with his masterly
strokes. His emphasis on human tragedy is held in right proportion and
perspective in almost all his novels. In the use of pathos Hardy remains
unsurpassed in the whole realms of English literature. Hardy’s novels and poems
are the work of a man who was extremely dissatisfied with the age he lived in.
2. Housman
– (the poetry of Housman bears a close affinity to that of Hardy). Housman’s poetic
output was small, but it would be difficult to find even a single weak line in
his collected poems. He has left behind him three immortal works—A Shropshire
Lad (1896), Last Poems (1922), More Poems (1936). The prominent in his poetry
is one of “cultured, ironical disillusionment with life. Housman dealt in his
poetry with primitive themes in musical language, with a sweetness broken by
irony and the tang of cruel disillusion. Music came to him under the stress of
emotion, but it was controlled by his scholarly sense for metre. He is
generally regarded as a pessimist. His nature poetry is refreshing.
3. Robert
Bridges- The beauties of nature, the charm of landscape in particular, the joy
and romance of love, memories of an almost idyllic childhood, these are the
themes which he treated with good breeding and absence of passion demanded of a
gentleman. He is a great artist with words- the stamp of the artist’s pen is on
every line of his verse. As a lyric poet he lacked the force and intensity of
Shelley’s lyrics. Compared with Shelley’s lyrics his lyrics are cold and
tranquil; they lack fire and warmth. Bridge’s best love poetry is contained in
The Growth of Love, the sonnet sequence. Bridge is the poet of optimism and
joy. He is in the words of Robert Lynd- a poet of 9 O’ clock in the morning. We
never miss in his poetry the note of joy and cheerfulness. He accepts life with
all its oddities and finds joy in the simplest beauties of life, beauty of
nature, beauty of women and beauty of ideas. As a matter of fact he is the
direct descendant of Keats in his love of beauty. Testament of Beauty is his
monumental work expressing his appreciation of beauty. According to him earthly
beauty is only a reflection of heavenly beauty. His expression of beauty is
simple and direct unaffected by any artificial glow of imagination. There are
no purple patches in his poetry of nature.
Bridges was a great
metrical artist. His effort was to naturalize classical metre in England. He
sought to introduce into the English language some of the richness of vowel
sounds and provoked considerable interest in the study of English prosody.
Robert Bridge was a remarkable parodist and the fist English poet who had a
grasp on phonetic theory.
4. John
Masefield- (1878-1967)- succeeded Bridge as a Poet Laureate in 1930. It was his
Salt Water Ballad which brought out fully his genius as a poet.
The poems in this
volume reveal his love for the sea. Within from first-hand experience, they
blend a sense of the romance and beauty of the sea with a thorough knowledge of
seamen. The Everlasting Merry (1921) is his first really great narrative poem.
It was followed by The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), The Daffodils Field
(1913) and Lolling on Down (1911). With these four poems, Mr Masefield poured
new life into English narrative verse. Masefield’s poetry is charged with his
democratic sympathy for the down-trodden, the poor and the suffering. He is
essentially a poet of the people. Another important feature of his poetry is
his stark realism, and sometimes it becomes coarse and brutal. (dauber,
sea-fever) he loves the English landscape and his poetry gives the many sided
picture of rural England. He is quite conscious of the tragedies of life, but
he bows reverently before its grandeur, its beauty and its greatness, and
communicates his sense of it to his readers. His poetry suffers from many
faults—a coarse brutal realism expressed in slangy and violent phraseology is
his besetting sin. But he would always be read and admired for his narrative
poems, his democratic feeling of sympathy, his love of nature, and his
appreciation of the beauties of the countryside.
5.
Walter De La Mare—stands very high among
the poets of Georgian period. He is essentially the poet of fairyland creating
in his poetry a land of dreams, fantasy and imagination, a world which appeals to
children as well as grown-up people. In The Listener and Others Poems (1912),
Peacock Pie (1913), The Fleeting and Other Poems, Poems for Children (1930),
Bell And Grass (1914), The Traveller (1946) we have some of the greatest poetry
of the era. He has very successfully captured the joys and sorrows of childhood
in his Songs of Childhood. (Come Hither) his vision of childhood is coloured by
the imagination and intellect of a grown adult. He gives his fancy free reign,
and throws to the wind the laws of logic and probability. He is the laureate of
the fairy land. Fairies ghosts and phantoms haunt his poems. He provides an
escape from the problems of life to the world of fairyland. The world in which
he seeks to move, not the world of hard, rugged realities, but a world pieced
together by imagination of childhood, made up of childish memories, of
fairytales, ballads and nursery rhymes. (The Mocking Fairy)
6.
W. H. Davis—immortalized himself through
The Autobiography of a Super Tramp (1908). Davis is essentially a lyric poet.
His lyrics are short and spontaneous. Most of his poems are shorter than those
of any other modern poet. He is a great poet of nature and rural life, innocent
country people living in the lap of nature (cows and sheep, owls and cuckoo, butterflies
and squirrel). There is a note of tender sympathy in Davies’ poems of animals
and children. Davies may have his faults, but we like and enjoy his poetry for
its simplicity and artlessness.
7.
W. B. Yeats- was an Irish man. Tributes
to his greatness have been paid from time to time by eminent poets and critics
of the day. For one thing, Yeats is great by virtue of the bulk and variety of
his poetry, and critics have agreed that very few of his poems can be regarded
as definitely inferior. His work is uniformly good even though he writes on
such varied subjects as ancient legends, mythology, folklore, politics,
history, love and constantly makes new myths of his own. His creative range is
immense, he writes with perfect ease and mastery of themes taken from every
possible sphere of life, and a high standard of performance is maintained
throughout. His early poetry is romantic while the later one is realistic both
in theme and treatment. He began writing verse in the romantic Pre-Raphaelite
tradition. His early poems are frankly escapist and are full of sensuous word
pictures. He takes us to remote fairy-world. This is the reason why he is
called “last of the romantics by Graham Hough and others. But he soon became
dissatisfied with romanticism and turn of the century saw a new Yeats
transformed into a great 20th century realistic poet from a 19th
century romantic.
Yeats was a
symbolist from the beginning to the end of his career so much so that Arthur
Symons regarded him as the chief exponent of the Symbolist Movement in England.
In the early phase of his career, his symbols are elementary are no obstacles
in the way of the readers (rose). But with the passing of time his symbolism
became more complex, personal and individual. The swan, the tower, the winding
stairs, the gyres etc are the recurring symbols of his poems. Same symbols are
treated with different meanings in different poems, so it becomes difficult to
apprehend the meaning. Cleanth Brook regards Yeats as the great myth maker,
richly gifted with a mythopoetic imagination. Yeats invents new myths, uses old
ones, has changed context, or invested them with new significance.
The charges of
obscurity have sometimes been brought against Yeats and it is true to a certain
extent. But his obscurity and difficulty result from profundity of thought and
terseness of expression rather than from any carelessness on the part of the
poet. Yeats was a conscious artist who polished and repolished his verses and
tried to say what he had to say, beautifully, clearly and musically. Like a
true artist he selects his words with reference to both their sense and sound.
He kept on experimenting with a variety of stanzas and verse forms. He kept
away from the verse libre or free
verse and other technical innovations of his day, but he used the traditional
metre and stanza forms with great skill. The octosyllabic couplet he
particularly made his own.
Yeats may not be
a Shakespeare, a Dante or a Milton, but he must certainly with the greatest
poets of all times, his permanence is beyond question.
8. Rupert
Brook—One the eve of the World War I, there was an upsurge of patriotism, and
some poets called upon the people to sacrifice for the sake of the nation. One
such was the soldier poet Rupert Brook (1887-1915). He gave expression to
patriotic fervor in his sonnets particularly in his poem the “Soldier”. When
the war began in 1914, Rupert hailed it with enthusiasm. He wrote a number of
war sonnets expressing his patriotic enthusiasm and noble resolve to serve his
country. He himself enlisted as a soldier, and went to war arena for the sake
of his motherland and was killed there. The marks of greatness in his poems are
few but such marks are there.
9. T.
S. Eliot- (1888-1965) - Eliot was one of the greatest men of English letters of
Modern period. No other English poet of the 20th century has shown
such originality; his greatness is now a recognized fact and no longer requires
any assertion. One of his greatest achievements consists in his having given
expression to the dominant anxieties and worries of his age. Eliot’s poem is a
curious mixture of tradition and individual talent. The English metaphysical
tradition, the French symbolist movement, the poetry of Dante, existential
philosophy, the philosophies of the east, Hindu, Buddhist and others, Christian
tradition and theology, and ancient myths and legends, are only a few of the
many influences which have gone into the making of his poetry. The marks of his
vast scholarship are scattered wide over his works. This makes him a difficult
poet, a poet for a learned few. His poetry is a revolt against the decadent and
exhausted, almost dead, poetry of his day; it makes a complete break from the
thinned out romantic tradition. In course of time the language of poetry goes
far away from the living language of the people. Then a great poet, a genius,
arrives on the scene, who restores to the language its original vitality by
bringing it nearer to the language of everyday use. Donne was one such poet and
Wordsworth another, Eliot too was one such reformer of the English language,
who tried to restore to it life and vitality by bringing it into contact not
only with current speech but also with European literary tradition. In this way
he enriched the English language and reformed it into a suitable instrument for
the expression of the complexities and intricacies of contemporary urban life.
He developed new and effective techniques of communication and in this way
increased the expressive power of poetry. Sometimes whole ages are telescoped
within a single passage, this condensation and compression may result in some
difficulty for the readers but through this technique the present is judged in
its proper historical perspective. In this way he has broken away from the 19th
century tradition and given a new direction to English poetry. In his long
career he experimented with over 40 metres.
10.
W. H. Auden-(1907-1973)- His early
poetry written during the inter-war period, expresses his sense of the,
hollowness of the disintegrating post-war civilization. His early poetry is
expressive of his faith in violent social revolution and his sympathies are
with the unloved and the unlucky. Later he came under the influence of Freud.
He now advocated sympathetic understanding of the problems of the weaker
sections of society rather than a sentimental sympathy for them. More pity can
lead us nowhere; real change of heart is needed for betterment of human life.
He was influenced in many ways by Eliot, Owen, Hopkins and the French
symbolists.
11.
Dylan Thomas- (1914-1953)-- Dylan is the most controversial literary
figure of the modern period. And it is still not easy to make a claim and
dispassionate assessment of his achievement as a poet. Extravagant claims have
been made for him and they have been controverted with equal violence. Eliot’s
estimate of him, “as a poet of considerable importance” is most balanced. 18
poems. He attracted massive audiences with his eloquence and so became a
popular poet as any in our time.
REVIVAL OF DRAMA IN THE MODERN AGE
From the
dramatic point of view, the first half of the 19th century, like the
18th century is completely barren. Many of the great poets had tried
their hands at drama but none of them achieved any success. The greater part of
their work never saw the stage. The professional state of the period was in a
low state. Audiences did nothing to raise the standard, which remained
deplorably low. The popular forms of dramas of the day were melodrama, farces,
and sentimental comedies, which had no literary qualities whatever, were poor
in dialogue and negligible in characterization, and relied for their success
upon sensation, rapid action and spectacles.
The rise of
realistic drama
The
new drama of ideas- in the history of realistic drama Ibsen
and then Shaw, Galsworthy and Barker were paramount importance, and they did
much to create a tradition of natural dialogue. New psychological
investigations increased the interest in character as distinct from plot, and
the realistic drama of the early 20th century aimed at the impartial
presentation of real life, contemporary rather than historical. The weakness of
the new realistic drama of ideas was its lack of anything to fire the
imagination. It lacked poetry in the true sense and its greatest danger was
that it might degenerate into mere social photography. It was Ibsen whose
influence established the drama of ideas as popular drama of the early 20th
century. It was clear that the future lay with this kind of drama.
Foreign
influences: Henrik Ibsen- Norwegian
dramatist- more than any other, Ibsen may claim credit for extending the scope
of the modern dramatist.
Realistic prose
drama-
Poetic
drama --Despite the efforts of the major Victorian poets,
there was no tradition of poetic drama at the beginning of the 20th
century. By 1920 there were signs of a rebirth, but the atmosphere in which
realistic, naturalistic drama throve was uncongenial to a play in verse. At the
Abbey theatre Dublin Yeats attempted to revive poetry on the stage, but he
lacked the essential qualities of the dramatist. Stephen Philips is a more
important figure in the history of poetic drama. He wrote a number of blank
verse plays, including Herod, Ulysses, The Son of David and Nero, but he had
little popular appeal. John Masefield, too, experimented with poetic drama but
had only a limited success, while Gordon Bottomley (1874-1948) who wrote a
number of quite powerful poetic plays, saw hope for this form only in the
amateur theatre. It was also during this period that John Drinkwater (1882-1937)
began his career with poetic dramas, and achieved popularity with such kinds of
plays as The Storm, The God of Quiet, and X=O, A Night of the Trojan War. But
true poetic drama was that of J. M. Synge, which though not in verse, had all
the qualities which others lacked. (the glittering gate-by Lord Dunsany)
G. B. Shaw
(1856-1950)
(Arms and the
Man, Man and Superman, Saint Joan, Candida, Caesar and Cleopatra, The Apple
Cart, Back to Methuselah etc)
His
drama of ideas and social criticism- he is serious but his
seriousness comes out with wit which has rarely been equaled in any time. A
number of contemporary problems and evils are subjected to discussion. His
plays aim at being as laughable as Congreve’s, as stinging as Jonson’s, and as
profound as Ibsen’s. Unquestionably, critics of a hundred years will regard his
plays as one of the most notable contributions to the theatre of our time, but
it is probably that they will find only one or two other dramatists with whom
to compare him.
A
fresh conception of characterization- Instead of timid
heroines we find intellectually daring women; instead of strong heroes, men
lacking in power and sell-will, instead of fantastically model clergymen who
feel more at ease in buff-coat and jack-boats, instead of impossible villains,
men who are themselves the tools of society.
Imparted
literary qualities to the drama- He has imparted new
methods of fusing fantasy and reality; he has been constantly experimenting in
fresh dramatic devices. Above all, he has made the drama, more than ever
before, literature. Without taking away even a bit from the theatrical quality
of his work, he has added to stage directions and to preface such additional
matter that even in our easy-chair study his works take shape before us. For
coping up with novels he goes to explain in detail the settings and contexts of
his plays, he goes into the past history of his characters as well.
Increased
popularity of drama- plays pleasant and unpleasant (1898),
and plays for puritans (1900)- Shaw
Shaw’s
sense of stagecraft- it has been said by many that Shaw was
not a born dramatist, that he has merely seized on the theatre because it gave
him the platform from which to preach his sermons, that his plays are little
more than illustrations of his prefaces. Shaw is a playwright not a
philosopher.
JOHN
GALSWORTHY
(1867-1933)
J S was one of
those prominent artists who discussed the various problems of modern life in
one work after another. His plays are so many pieces of criticism of
contemporary life, Justice, Strife, Silver Box, Loyalties, The Mob, The Eldest
Son, all focus attention on some one problem or the other.
Problem
Plays- Social criticism- problems of marriage, sex, labour
disputes, and administration of law, solitary confinement, cast or class
prejudices.
His
realism- he is a thought provoking writer. His plays are so
many question marks, compelling us to think out an answer. No other dramatist
has given such an unbiased and faithful picture of England, as it was before
and after the world war as is given by Galsworthy in his plays. He was wedded
to reality, and his realism is fully brought out if we compare him in this
respect with B Shaw. He was faithful to life as he saw it.
His
impartiality- he examines both sides of the case with
equal carefulness and presents them without expressing any personal opinions.
He keeps himself in the background; he does not allow his own personality to
intrude into his dramas. He might be emotionally sympathetic to this character
or that, to this class or the other, but as a dramatist he never swayed by such
personal sympathies and antipathies.
Sympathy
for the poor and the suffering- a deeper reading of
his plays brings out his sympathies for the downtrodden, and the underdog of
the society. His sympathy extends even to animals. There is hardly any one of
his play which does not convey a message or suggest a reform.
Art
of characterization- Galsworthy’s prominent characters are
drawn from the middle class or the lower strata of the society. They range from
the accidental thief and the middle class member of parliament, to the workman
and the company director, the charwoman and the Colonel’s wife. His range is
wide but he never presents great heroes from the aristocratic class. His
personages are all ordinary men and women such as we might meet with in
everyday life.
Plot
construction- plots are faultlessly constructed and
have dramatic effectiveness. Every word bears on the action or reveals
characters or suggests the attitude which Galsworthy desires his spectators to
take. The same mastery is seen in his stage directions. He never elaborates too
much, but at the same time he never omits any single detail which is important.
He can visualize a scene with a few deft touches; he has the rare gift of
knowing when to stop.
Conclusion
–
he lacks the gift of humour; the atmosphere of his plays is too serious and
tragic for the taste of the average reader and play-goer. Therefore he could
never achieve so much popularity as was achieved by his great contemporary GBS.
T s Eliot and the revival of poetic
drama
English poetic drama in
the present century arose as a reaction to the naturalistic prose drama of
Ibsen, Shaw, and Galsworthy. By the second decade of the 20th
century this prose drama had reached a dead end. On the whole, this poetic
drama, in a decadent stage after the best work of Shaw, failed to grasp the
depth, tension and complexity of contemporary life. It was a mere entertainment
and did not attain high level. It concerned itself entirely with the social and
economic problems to the entire exclusion of deeper and more fundamental
issues. It aimed at photographic realism, avoided the romantic and the poetic
and had grown too intellectual and sophisticated. It appealed to mind rather
than to heart. The result was that a number of writers, who had made their
first reputation as poets, and not as dramatists, tried to revive the tradition
of verse play for the ‘Little Theater’ i.e. theatre for specialized audiences.
Eliot took to writing plays comparatively later in his career; he came to
theater as a mature critic and poet. He had a full understanding of the nature
of poetic drama, the difference between verse drama and prose drama, the cause
of the failure of the 19th century verse dramatists, the problems
technical and otherwise which face the writer of a verse play in the modern age.
Through his critical writings he tried to demolish many of the misconceptions
about verse drama and emphasized its superiority over prose drama. Eliot
emphasized that there are certain conditions which must be fulfilled before
success can be achieved in this field. First it must be realizes that the
difference between prose drama and poetic drama is not merely one of medium.
The themes of the two are and must be different. Eliot solved the thematic
problem. His verse plays are not concerned with socio-economic problems; they
are not concerned with outer but the inner emotional and psychic realities.
Thus the core of his play Murder in Cathedral is the psychic struggle of the
hero with the temptations offered to him and that of The Family Reunion the psychological
guilt complex of Harry, the hero of the play; The Cocktail Party is a study in
the awareness of personal inadequacies of married life in the modern context.
In these plays he had also demonstrated the relevance of religion to all human
activity.
Evolved
suitable medium of communication – a form of verse, the
rhythms of which are closer to those of the spoken language, and which is
flexible enough to be organized into word-order of a dialogue. Blank verse was
such a verse with the Elizabethan dramatists. With TFR he succeeded in evolving
a rhythm-pattern closer to the contemporary spoken language.
Emphasized
the functional value of poetry—the third important
condition is that the poetry must not be the mere object of decoration. Poetry
is not an embellishment to look at but a medium to be looked through. The
contention that poetry should become a medium and not a decoration implies that
it should help in the revelation of the personality pattern of the characters;
secondly, through poetic symbolism it should work out the implications of the
theme; thirdly the scenic setting of the play should be revealed through poetic
manipulations of references.
Poetic
plays on contemporary themes: conditioned the response of the audience—and
the last condition is the re-orientation of the attitude of the audience. The
Elizabethan audiences accepted with “willing suspension of disbelief” the
convention of making the high personages speak in verse and the low in prose.
No such frame of mind exists today, with the result that the attention of
audience is distracted from the play to poetry, the moment any character starts
speaking in verse. The situation is worsened by mixture of poetry and prose in
the some play because the transition from the one to the other mode of speaking
makes the audience much more conscious of the difference between the two; in
juxtaposition with the prose, the poetic mode of speaking looks all the more
artificial. Thus the dramatist must avoid any mixture of the two.
Demonstrated
the wide range of poetic drama—further he emphasized
that instead of limiting the emotional range, the use of verse enlarges the
appeal and influence of the play. Verse drama can appeal to the most varied
audience.
Enlarged
the scope and solved its problems –he demonstrated that
contemporary setting and themes can be the subjects of modern poetic drama, and
in this way enlarged the scope of verse play. He solved the problem of the
medium of communication. He succeeded in developing a verse-form which has
grown from contemporary idiom, which suggests the contemporary environment,
which approaches prose very closely—yet remains sufficiently far from it.
20th
century Novelists
Samuel
Butler- he was the literary bad boy of Victorians whom he scandalized
almost as badly as his namesake had scandalized the Puritans and for the same
reason because he understood neither their idealism nor the moral earnestness
from which it sprang. He was not widely known or even discovered until the
Victorian age had passed into history. The fame of Samuel Butler rests chiefly
on three novels, Erewhon(1872), and its sequel Erewhon Revisited and The Way of
All Flesh(1930). Butler exercised considerable influence on the younger
novelists who were bent upon flouting Victorian taboos and conventions. Butler
is an original thinker and a great iconoclast, though not a great technician.
Rudyard
Kipling-(1865-1936)- was a prolific and versatile writer.
He was a poet, a novelist, a journalist, a story teller. He was both a realist
and a romancer. He was a realist in his setting and character, which are,
however, romantically treated. He is an impressionist whose pictures of reality
are coloured by his own personal impression and so are tinged with romance.
Instead of finding romance in the past and the middle ages, he finds romances
in the present realities of life. Kipling was an imperialist and his tales are
so many glorifications of the British rule and British Empire.
Arnold
Bennett- (1867-1931)- was essentially a realist and a
regionalist. (The Five Towns, The Old Wive’s Tale, Clayhanger, Imperial Palace
are among his best known novels). The life of materialism is well portrayed in
his novels. The internal economy of houses and hotels down to their plumbing,
food as bought, prepared and eaten, clothes and their fashions, means of
transport, indeed all the machinery, equipment and paraphernalia of living,
claimed Bennett’s absorbed interest. Bennett became an interpreter of the life
and society of a particular region, the Five Towns, which knew well. He did not
aim at any propaganda or moral preaching through the medium of his art.
H.
G. Wells- (1866-1946)- was a prolific writer and thinker,
who produced novels, pamphlets, historical stories and romances with unceasing
regularity. He had his own ideas about nature and function of fiction. For him
novel was not a mere matter of relaxation and entertainment, he considered it
as a powerful instrument of moral and social suggestion and propaganda. His novels
such as Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The First Man in The Moon, The Food of
The Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreu, deal with scientific subjects in an
imaginative way. The imagination of novelist is fired by some scientific
invention or discovery, and he proceeds to explore imaginatively its full
significance. The result is a delicious fantasy. Full possibilities of
contemporary science are imaginatively brought out. Wells did not remain in the
world of scientific fantasies for long and soon drifted away from the world of
scientific drama to the wider field of social life. He became a social critic
and attacked social evils with the vehemence of and inspired reformer. In The
History of Mr. Polly he exposed educational impostures and in Tono Bungay he attacked
modern commercialism. His method as a social reformer is different from that of
Dickens. Whereas Dickens attempted to gain his objects of social reform through
persuasion, Wells adopted a more aggressive attitude.
Joseph
Conrad- (1857-1924) - was the contemporary of such
traditional novelists as Arnold Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, and yet his work
is entirely different from theirs. Not only are his settings exotic but his
approach is entirely different from theirs, in spirit as well as in the technique
of story-telling. He is not a materialist at all. Conrad wrote with the vision
and spirit of a poet. He wrote of the conflict of the man and nature, of the
mysteries of human soul. He belonged to no single country; he is the citizen of
the world. The sea, the West Indies, specially the Malayan Archipelago Congo in
the very centre of the Dark Continent, even South America provides the settings
to the best of his works. His characters are drawn from many nations, the
negroes, the Germans and the Dutch and people of many other lands, move across
his pages and are painted with deep insight and sympathy. They have national
differences yet basically they are the same. They are the foreign because they
move in the remote atmosphere, but they are actuated by the common passion of
humanity because they acquire larger than life stature in their conflict with
the hostile forces of nature. They often appear as immovable objects
withstanding some irresistible hostile forces and yet they represent something
basic and universal in man. Romantic realism is the keynote of his work; he is
a romantic because of his exotic setting, because he is the narrator of the
tales of adventure and heroism amidst the wildest surroundings and of the most
outlandish type of humanity. At the same time he is realist because these
settings are described with most meticulous accuracy and because autobiography
is the stuff out of which his tales are made. He did not invent his plots; he
was unable to do such inventions. His material was reality subjected to the
transmitting process of lively imagination. Seeds of fact planted in his mind
germinated under the light of his imaginative temperament. Conrad’s aesthetic
conscientious never relaxed after he had once determined his creed. Conrad was
the conscious artist who imparted to the English novel the dignity and
seriousness of a great art-form. The organic unity of his novels is amazing.
Character, setting and language all contribute to the total effect aimed at by
the novelist. The story element was secondary in his mind. Conrad was much
concerned with the evil he saw Evil within man, as well as in environment in
which he lived and had his being. Conrad is the laureate of the sea, partly
because he had personal contact with it and it was the most powerful influence
which entered his life. One of his main themes is the corrupting effect of the
East on the white men who lived there. He means that the character is destiny.
What a man is in his heart, determines his fate. His purpose was to analyze the
intricacies and complexities of the human soul and the technique which he uses
for the purpose is equally complex.
Somerset
Maugham- (1874-1965)- is one of the prominent novelists,
and short story writers of the 20th century. The Moon and Six Pence,
Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale and The Razor’s Edge are among his
masterpieces. The setting of his novels is cosmopolitan; they are not confined
to any one country or climate. Maugham is interested in three problems- the
problems of renunciation and materialistic craze for possession, the problem of
love and predicament, the futility and meaninglessness of human life. In his
treatment of love, Maugham presents the tragedy of love rather than its
triumph. Love does not come out successful and happy in his novels. Life seems
to him “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Maugham’s greatness lies in his thoughts. As a thinker he is original and
provoking. He gives jerks to our self complacent ideologies, and focus to view
life in a philosophic way.
E.
M. Forster- (1879-1070)- as a novelist Forster is
rather difficult to understand because of the symbolism that works its way
through his work and partly because of the manner in which he seeks to impart
his message. Passage to India is his masterpiece. He is a symbolist and what
could not be expressed adequately through words is suggested to Forster through
symbols. In The Longest Journey, he employs the symbol of the Train,
representing salvation and the passing away of evil and wickedness. In Howard’s
End motor car is the symbol of the rush and recklessness to modern fast moving
civilization. In APTI symbolism is presented in the very title. “Passage” is
symbolic of ‘link’ or ‘connection’, and by giving this title, the author
advocates a link or connection between the Anglo-Indians and the natives of
India. Forster was a social critic and reformer who used symbolism as a means
of his purpose. In so doing, he added poetry to English novel.
D. H. Lawrence- (1885-1930)- is one of the most
disputed geniuses in the history of the modern English novel. He has been
excessively praised and excessively abused. His pre-occupation with sex has
resulted in his being condemned as a sex maniac, and there are many who still
regard him as a turner out of cheap sex novels. His novels like The Rainbow and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover were proscribed on grounds of immorality; his Sons and
Lovers was condemned as a mass of sexuality and mother-love and the controversy
raised as a consequence has come in the way of a fair and impartial assessment
of his worth as a novelist. Even eminent critics like Eliot have condemned him
as an uncultured man, insensitive to, “ordinary social morality” and I A
Richards has found fault with him for holding “magical belief in the age of
science. Lawrence is one of those artists who writ because of internal
compulsion and in this way seek relief for their inner problems by
externalizing them in fiction. He had to endure great emotional stresses in
youth and face many urgent personal problems, and his writings are an
expression of his inner suffering, frustration and emotional complexes. They
are all in the nature of personal revelation, some more, some less, but the
autobiographical note runs through them all. Lawrence’s environment as a child
and as a young man played an important part in conditioning the novelist of the
future. The home was torn by parental conflict and as a result he came to
consider the relationship between men and women as a form of conflict and not a
natural expression of harmony. That is why sex conflict assumes such a gigantic
part in his novels. The over-possessive love of his mother imposed an abnormal
strain on the emotions of the adolescent and hence in his works he counters any
threatened domination by women with almost hysterical violence. This early
experience made him an anti-feminist. In his treatment of sex there is nothing
in him of the Victorian prudery and inhibitions. He was certainly not than had
hitherto been done. Lawrence is an original and powerful genius, who has made
significant contribution to the development of the English novel. His thought
or philosophy is mystical and poetic rather than rational and logical and this
fact, along with his pre-occupation with sex, has come in the way of a true and
impartial appreciation of his genius. His novels are something new and not mere
copies of earlier novels.
Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1964) is one of the most subtle and intellectual of modern writers. His
work presents satirically the disillusionment and frustration with contemporary
social life. (Crome Yellow,). Point Counter Point (1928) is a serious novel
representing satirically the conflict between reason and passion and the
foolishness of sticking to only one point of view without ever caring to look at
the other side of the picture. This novel adopts a special technique which may
be called, “the musicalization of fiction” it is rich in witty and satirical
epigrams.
In The Brave New
World (1932) Huxley satirizes a scientific utopia in which everything is
controlled by science and even mind, body, poetry, art and literature are all
conditioned by considerations of scientific uniformity. The satire lies in the
fact that he fails to persuade the inhabitants of his scientific world to live
up to his ideal of a free, spiritual life. Huxley is a novelist with a mission
and a message. In PCP he lays emphasis on synthesis and harmony between sense
and reason. In Eyeless in Gaza we have the message of non-attachment.
James Joyce-
(1882-1941)- is the main exponent of the stream of conscious novel and his
Ulysses is the finest example of the use of this technique in modern
fiction. In Joyce “the twentieth century
passion for experiment in literary form reached its climax”. Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a
Youngman, and Finnegan’s Wake are among his more important works. In Dubliners
(1914) he throws light on the lives of the slum-dwellers of Dublin. The stories
are written in simple and direct style. A Portrait……. Is an autobiographical
work and the artist Dedalus the chief protagonist, stands for the novelist. As
a revelation of Joyce’s power to explore the psychology of his own nature with
detachment and scientific curiosity this work in unparalleled in a period rich
in self-analysis. In Ulysses (1922) his masterpiece the stream of consciousness
technique finds its best exposition. It narrates in a rambling manner i.e. the
wanderings of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through Dublin on one
particular day. The novel is extremely formless, loose and incoherent. It is an
example of the extreme subjective method. However, its style is marked with
rare ingenuity, witticism and satirical flashes. The novel has been called a
“comic-epic” in which the novelist went deeper and further than any other novelist
in the handling of the interior monologue and the stream of conscious
technique. In Finnegan’s Wake (1939) subtlety and complexity produce
incomprehensibility. It is the study of the history of the human race from its
earliest beginnings, as seen through the incoherent dreams of one Mr.
Earwicker. The use of an inconsecutive narrative and of a private vocabulary
adds to the confusion, but it cannot conceal the poetic fervor, the power and
brilliant verbal skill of the work.
Virginia
Woolf- (1882-1941)- is one of those great novelists of the
20th century who had the courage to break free from tradition, and
then to give a new direction, a new form and a new spiritual awareness to the
English novel. She began writing in the
established tradition of the novel: her first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day are largely traditional. But soon
she realized the inadequacies of the traditional novel and adapted the stream
of consciousness technique in Jacob’s Room, her third novel. Her art rapidly
matured and her next three novels Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and The
Waves, represent the very consummation of the novel of subjectivity. It is in
her novels that the SOC technique finds its balance; she did much to throw
light on its technique, and to bring out its superiority to the conventional
novel. She represents poetization and musicalization of the English novel. She
realized that the very atmosphere of the mind the chaotic welter of sensation
and emotions that the human mind is, cannot be recreated with the ordinary
resources of prose. Therefore, in order to enrich her language, she used vivid
metaphors and symbols which are peculiar to poetry. Her novels are composed
like a musical symphony, the apparently discordant notes within them forming a
single harmony. Mrs Woolf is a spiritualist as contrasted with the materialists
like Arnold Bennett, H G Wells, John Galsworthy. She rejects traditional modes
of expression, and concentrates her attention on the rendering of inner
reality. The novel in her hands is not just an entertainment, or propaganda or
vehicle of some fixed ideas or theories or a social document but a voyage of
exploration to find out how life is lived. By showing men and women in all
sorts of combinations, she explores the truth about life. Human life as it
really is was her theme and nothing else was of interest to her. She takes us
directly to the minds of her characters, and shows the chaotic flow of ideas,
sensations and impressions, and in this way she brings us closer to their inner
psyche, than can ever be possible by the use of conventional methods of
characterization. She does not give us merely the externals of the characters,
but renders the very souls of her personages with intensity and immediacy. She
has thus created a number of memorable many sided and round figures, which are
among the immortals of literature. Her fiction is a well-stored picture-gallery
of vivid and memorable men and women. She was a woman, and in her novels she
gives us the woman’s point of view. She relies more on intuition than on
reason. She is interested not only in the relations of men and women, or men
with men, but also of women with women. She is more fascinated with the life of
nature, even the life of snails and trees, than with political, social and
economic movements of the day. She has a woman’s dislikes for the world of
societies, churches, banks and schools, her picture of life does not include
sordidness and vice, brutality and criminality. They are excluded from her
novels, for a sheltered female in her day was not supposed to have any
knowledge of such sordid realities. It is as she was afraid of public censure,
of social criticism and so eliminated such unpleasant details from her novels.
She thus represents the feminization of the English novel. Her range, no doubt,
is limited in various other ways also. For example she could paint only upper
middle-class life, and only certain type of character. But greatness, artistic
perfection is achieved by a clear recognition of these limitations, and by
working within them. She may not be one of the greatest English novelists, but
there can be no denying the fact that, she is a delicate and subtle artist, who
upheld spiritual and aesthetic values in a coarse materialistic age.
SOME ESSAYISTS OF THE
20TH CENTURY
The 20th
century is a great age of fiction writing. But despite the unprecedented
popularity of the novels, the essay continues to live and thrive. All types of
topics under the sun are dealt with by the modern essayists; nothing is too low
or too high for him. His style is usually informal even conversational, but at
the same time dignified; as a matter of fact his language is made up of a judicious
selection from the language of daily use. Brevity, simplicity, lucidity,
clarity and flexibility are some of the characteristic of modern essayists.
E
V Lucas- (1868-1933) - among the 20th century
essayists Lucas is one who is generally regarded as the true inheritor of the
manner of Lamb. He is one of the most prolific essayists of the 20th
century. His most representative and popular collection of essays is entitled
The Character and Comedy (1907). Lucas has followed in the footsteps of Lamb.
He has Lamb’s humanity, his all- embracing sympathy, his humour and
whimsicality and his confidential tone as well as his pensive yearning for the
beauty and charm of the old things and personalities. But he has widely avoided
the extravagances of Lamb as well as his many mannerisms of style. He has the
virtues of Lamb without his faults. Lucas has the remarkable power of accurate
observation and an equally remarkable capacity for discovering beauty and
mystery in the commonplace things and objects of life. He is one of those
essayists who have fully exploited the poetic possibilities of English prose to
describe the beauty and glory of the familiar and the uncommon.
G.
K. Chesterton-(1874-1936)- his essays reveal an extraordinary
range of mind; there was no subject on which he could not have found something
original, and if possible challenging, to say from the fundamental basis of
morals to the proper way of eating cheese. Originality and ingenuity in thought
and approach are the leading characteristics of his essays. Often he makes use
of witty paradox which delights and surprises as well as provokes thoughts. His
style is highly brilliant, self- conscious and idiosyncratic, replete with
alliteration, balance, antithesis and paradox. (The uses of diversity,
tremendous trifles, etc)
Hillaire
Belloc- (1870-1953) – his reputation as an essayist rests
securely on several volumes, a few among which are entitled as Something;
Nothing; Everything. Belloc himself observes, and lets his readers observe
novelty in the real and familiar things of everyday life. His range of mood,
subject and theme is very wide. (Cheese, The Good Woman). In his prose style,
it is his transparent clarity which strikes attention most immediately. He is
the master at once of the simple, chaste, direct and homely manner, relying
mostly on familiar words and precise epithets, on sentences which are generally
simple and brief and which follow each other in quick succession. His rapidity
of movement from one mood to another in the same essay is remarkable.
A G Gardiner- (1865-1946)
– was a journalist and essayist of the school of Montaigne and Lamb. He is better known by
his pen name Alpha of the Plough. He was a prolific essayist and his
collections of essays are entitled The Pillars of Society, Pebbles on the
Shore, Leaves in the Wind, etc. his style is easy, flexible and lucid. He
modulates his prose to his changing moods. His vocabulary is drawn from common
everyday speech, and his language is dignified, and yet mostly within the reach
even of moderately read. But when he has to render his impressions of the
beauty, matter and sublimity of nature, his words are clothed with beauty,
colour and picturesqueness; the sentences have amplitude and rhythm and the
images became more frequent, vivid and of refreshing charm and grace. He is one
of the greatest stylists of the English language.
Robert
Lynd-(1879-1949) - follows in the footsteps of Lamb,
Stevenson and Goldsmith. A large range and variety of mood and emotion is
possible for him. He may be light-hearted, humorous, whimsical and amusingly philosophical,
reflective, frankly personal and autobiographical. The language is equally
dignified and beautiful, it has no purple patches, no heightening of colour.
Its colours meet and blend together to produce that unity of tone and
atmosphere which is the soul of a true essay as much as of a lyric.
Max
Beerbohm-(1872-1956)- who won wide popularity by his novel Zuleika Dobson
(1900) was a delightful essayist and a witty parodist. He was never tired of
exposing the follies and foibles of his great contemporaries. He was perfect
both in manner and matter.
CONTEMPORARY
ENGLISH WRITERS
Contemporary –Modern Poets
Ted Hughes (1930-98)-
Geoffrey Hill (1932-)-
Seamus Heaney (1939-)-
Basil Bunting
(1900-85)-
Philip Larkin
(1922-85)-
John Betjeman
(1906-84)-
Stevie Smith (1902-71)-
Douglas Dunn (1942-)
Andrew Motion (1932-)-
CONTEMPORARY
ENGLISH DRAMATISTS
Arnold
Wesker (1932-) - is concerned to show the realities of
everyday life for ordinary people, but with a clearer note of social criticism.
The Kitchen (1960) shows the kitchen of a large restaurant and the people who
work in it. His three plays Chicken Soup with Barley (1959), Roots (1959), and I’m
Talking about Jerusalem (1960) show the lives of members of the same family
from 1930s to 1950s. “Chips with Everything” (1962) shows the British class
system at work in the Air Force. A rich man’s son wishes to be only an ordinary
airman instead of an officer as part of his personal fight against his father.
Wesker’s later plays Their Very Own and Golden City (1966), The Friends (1970),
The Merchant 1977) and Caritas (1981) moved further away from a realistic
representation of real life.
Samuel
Bekkett- (1906-89) - was born in Ireland but spent most of
his adult life in France and wrote many of his works in French before
translating them into English. As a young man he was a friend of James Joyce
and like him was fascinated by words; but unlike Joyce he sees language as
building a wall between human beings which stops them communicating. His play
Waiting for Godot (1954) is one of the most influential works in English
written in the 20th century. It takes away the surface details from
the situations it presents and shows their real nature. It describes the
essence of the human nature. The play represents the two tramps, Vladimir and
Estragon, who are waiting for the arrival of the mysterious Godot to give their
lives some purpose and direction. But Godot does not come, and may not even
exist. The play shows the pain and fear as well as the humour of two men as
they despairingly try to use. Of the two, Estragon is more determined that they
should wait for Godot as they have been told to do so. Endgame (1957) also
shows characters in a closed situation which they continually fight against. As
in Waiting for Godot, the surface details are cut to the bare essentials; it is
set in no particular place at no particular time and the characters play games
with words which they intend only to pass the time but which take on a meaning
they had never thought of. Krapp’s Last Tape (1959) has only one character, an
old man sitting in a closed room with a tape recorder, playing the tapes he had
made at earlier points in his life and reflecting on the thoughts and
impressions he had as a younger man. In Happy Days (1961) the main character is
a woman, Winnie. The characters in Beckett’s earlier plays were despairing and
lost. Fighting against the emptiness of her life, and her loss of hope, Winnie
is resigned to her fate with cheerfulness, which is almost more frightening
than her despair. Beckett is interested in those characters that refuse not
only love but any relationship with anyone else; they are lost and unhappy, and
have only the pleasure of language left. Beckett’s language is very carefully used,
and there is much more humour in his plays than the despair of their theme
might suggest. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969.
Harold
Pinter- (1930-)- the plays of Harold Pinter have a theme
the impossibility of communication between characters in a closed situation,
although in his early plays the closed situation is often a room whose comfort
and safety is compared with the dangers of the world and the strangers outside.
The Birthday Party(1957) presents the closed comfortable situation of a small
lodging – house and the effect of the arrival of two mysterious strangers who
have come to ‘collect’ one of the people living there. The feeling of danger is
made stronger both by the suggestions of violence and the fact that the reason
why the strangers have come to collect him is never fully explained. The
Caretaker (1960) also presents a closed situation (two brothers in a house) and
the arrival of a stranger (an old tramp), but in this case it is the stranger
who is the victim. In The Homecoming (1964) the danger comes from inside the
home and the victim again comes from outside although this time he is the
member of the family. No Man’s Land (1975) shows the meeting of two old men who
had known each other when they were young; one is now rich and successful,
while the other is in many ways a failure. In some ways it is the rich and
successful who is the real failure, because in his heart he is living in the
‘no man’s land’ with no feelings and no hope. In Pinter’s work, as in Beckett’s
work, it is not only the words that are said are important; the silences and
the words which are not said are also important. Pinter has said that there are
two sorts of silence – one where no word is spoken, and the other where a flood
of language is being used, and his plays reflect the difficulty of
communication between people as this statement suggests.
John Osborne (1929-) –
the production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger by the Royal Court Theatre
in 1956 marked the opening of an important new phase in 20th century
English drama. It exploded on the English dramatic scene with enormous force
because of the radically new kind of vitality in its dialogue and because its
theme managed to some of the deepest anxieties and frustrations of Britain’s
new educated class. This class, young people who had grown up after the Second
World War and were the beneficiaries of Education Act of 1944 and of the
welfare state brought into being by the Labour Government elected in 1945. LBA
is more important as a cultural phenomenon than as a work of literature in its
own right it spoke for a generation (the first generation, it might be added,
to grow up in the shadow of atom bomb) and in doing so brought a new vitality
to English drama. Osborne’s later plays A Portrait For Me (1965), Inadmissible
Evidence (1965), and his adaption from a play by Lope De Vega, A Bond Honoured
(1966) shows him experimenting, with varying degree of success, with new kinds
of technique, new kind of dramatic situation, new ways of counterpointing
realistic and symbolic action. His restless, innovating mind, his feeling for
spoken prose, and his highly theatrical craftsmanship are qualities which still
promise well for English drama.
John
Arden-(1930) - his Lives Like Pigs (1958), a play
about the resettlement of the gypsies in housing – estate, explores anti –
social behavior. It leaves the firm impression that ‘respectability’ and its
official guardians, the police, were ultimately far more damaging to society
than the unconventional mores of the play’s gypsies. (Sergeant Musgrave’s
dance-19959; Left Handed Liberty (1965); The Hero Rises Up (1968); The Island
of the Mighty (1972)
Joe
Orton (1933-67) – Loot (1968). All his plays suggest
that Orton has quite as refined a sense of the potential of the state, its
institutions, and its human instruments to oppress the citizen as has Pinter.
He had good reason to distrust the political system under which he lived, and
by extension all authorities and control. He was an active, not to say
promiscuous, homosexual in a period when homosexual acts between the consenting
males were still regarded as the criminal offence. He was himself brutally
murdered by his long term companion, and erstwhile collaborator, Kenneth Halliwell. The five major comedies that Orton completes
before his death- Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), Loot (1966), The Ruffian on
The Stair, The Erpingham Camp (both 1967), and What the Butler Saw (1969)- were
calculated to outrage. When in whimsical mood, he took to writing to the press
and to theatre managers. Orton never simply hid behind jokes. His comedy served
not simply to expose the folly of the fool, the double standard of the
hypocrite, or the unbalanced humours of everyman, but to disrupt the very
status quo. Pompous asses though they may be, Orton’s villains, such as
Eepingham, are not fools.
Tom
Stoppard (1937-) – where Orton’s comedy is explosive,
untidy, and unresolved, that of Tom Stoppard (born Czechoslovakia )is
implosive, symmetrical and logical. Where Orton disorders the traditional
elements of farce, Stoppard takes a fresh delight in all these. In an age which
has exhibited a fascination with the often extraordinary patterning of
mathematical theory, he has emerged as almost exemplary artist, one with an
appeal to the pragmatic and the speculative alike. At their most brilliant, his
plays are carefully plotted, logical mystery tours which systematically find
their ends in their beginnings. (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, If
You’re Glad I’ll be Frank-1966, The Real Inspector Hound-1968, Jumpers, Every
Good Boy Deserves Favour – 1977, Professional Foul -1978, Hapgood – 1988,
Arcadia – 1984, The Inventions of Love). Stoppards shapes his own play around
echoes, parodies, and inversions of Wilde’s comedy and to a lesser extent, of
Joyce’s Ulysses.
Edward
Bond (1934 - ) – Bond has always rigorously cultivated
plainness in both expression and design. The Pope’s wedding (1962) and Saved
(1965), the first of his own plays to be performed, concentrate on a Woyzeck
like inarticulacy and on an inherited lexical and emotional poverty in English
working-class life which finds a natural expression in violence. Bond shows
violence as the inescapable consequence of the brutalization of the working
class in an uncaring, stratified, industrial society.
Caryl Churchill (1938 -
)- Churchill’s works has been rooted in opposition to a social system based on
exploitation. Her woman characters emerge as the victims of a culture which has
regarded them merely as commodities or which has conditioned them to submit to masculine
social rules. Her plays have systematically thrown down challenges either by
reversing conventional representations of male and female behavior (as in the
Ortonian Owners of 1972) or by drawing disconcerting parallels between colonial
and sexual oppression (as in Cloud Nine of 1979), with its ostensibly farcical
shifts of gender and racial roles. In the multilayered Top Girls (1982) Churchill
explores the superficial ‘liberation’ of women by contrasting the lifestyle of
Marlene, a pushy, urban, woman executive, with that of her articulate, rural,
stay-at-home sister.
Shelagh Stephenson
(1955-)- The most distinctive and sharp-witted new woman playwright to emerge
in the late 1990s is SS, whose early work was, like so much inventive and
original work of the second half of the century. (In Memory of Water)
