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THE FATHER OF THE DRAMA.

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many imagine. He was the God of the Vine, doubtless, but he was honored for qualities distinct from ideas of sensual indulgence. Solemn temples were erected to his worship by a temperate people, and it is thus that with the name of this god the performances of the earliest professional actor are associated. As civilization advanced Eschylus rose-the father of the Drama. He was, like Shakspeare, an actor as well as a poet, and 'no Athenian of his day was so honored as Eschylus, for he created the Drama.' They bound his brows with laurel, and when he walked forth at noon they sprung arches of oak over his head. Sophocles, Euripides. and Aristophanes followed Eschylus, and some of their works live yet, unapproached by human effort-an imperishable and somewhat humiliating proof that whatever strides science may have taken in the world, the sublime genius of letters—mature at its birth-has denied the honor to succeeding generations of adding any thing to its brilliancy. This divine tells us that the Drama has commenced its retreat, and will soon pass away.' Nothing can be more evidently opposite to the truth than both the assertion and the prediction. At no period of the world were theatres and actors so numerous as now. In most of the civilized nations of Europe the Drama is under the special protection of the crown, and in those countries where letters are most cultivated, and where refinement has attained its highest polish, the theatre is supported by the government. In this country, 'tis true, the recent commercial distress, pervading as it did all classes of the community, reached theatrical amusements, and prostrated several establishments whose capital was too slender to bear the shock. **** 'The claims of the theatre to holiness will not be insisted on.' No; the theatre lays as few claims to holiness as the Church does to comedy-each has its appropriate sphere. The Church is built upon the Rock of Ages, and

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the Drama is built upon the human heart; the divine truth of the one, and the sublime morality of the other, will find a living response in that heart as long as it beats with a single attribute of the Deity. The doctor complains that ministers of religion are brought upon the stage to be ridiculed as 'dolts, pedants, or dullards.' The reply is that there exist ministers who are stupid, pedantic, and dull; and should these be exempt from censure or ridicule more than the rest of mankind? Should 'such divinity hedge' all who wear the black robe, that they should not be held amenable to the laws by which other men are governed? If there are reverend gentlemen who disgrace their holy calling by seduction, adultery, forgery, simony, or hypocrisy, should our awe of the cloth they pollute screen them from the punishment with which the law should visit their crimes, or the satire with which the stage should lash their vices? * "What school-houses, academies, or colleges has it (the theatre) built?' If the theatre added to its other important powers the building or endowing of educational institutions, it would surpass as an instrument of good all human inventions. But, unhappily, its ability is not equal to such attempts. Its means of doing good are crippled by the pulpit. 'What streams of knowledge has it diffused? What science cultivated or explained?' Plays, for the most part, are founded on remarkable events in history, ancient and modern. Of the thirty-seven written by Shakspeare, twenty-four may for our present purpose be called poetical versions of well-authenticated historical passages. From no single historian can a tenth part of the truth of any event dramatized by Shakspeare be gathered. The immortal poet frequently drew his knowledge from sources which have not come down to our day. We can nowhere obtain so clear an insight into the characters, motives,

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HISTORY ENDOWED WITH LIFE.

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passions, and politics of the men who fought the wars of the Roses as in the plays of this author. Who ever saw, except their own contemporaries, the heroes of antiquity, until Shakspeare introduced them to us face to face-the living, breathing, speaking inhabitants of Greece and Rome, their warriors, sages, orators, patriarchs, and plebians? To the man who reads history only, Marius, Sylla, Nero, and Caligula have none of the features of humanity about them. The chief acts of their lives being exhibited unrelieved by a statement of the means by which their deeds were accomplished, they appear like the grotesque figures in a phantasmagoria-fearful from their indistinctness, horrible from their mysterious burlesque on human nature, and alike hideous whether we laugh or shudder at the monstrous chimera. Turn to the page of Shakspeare, or behold his swelling scene at the theatre, and these men-seen, arriving at natural ends by natural means,-teach the eternal truth that the heart of man is the same in all ages, and that vice has produced misery and virtue happiness, from the beginning of the world. The doctor quotes Plato as averse to the theatre. Every man who has not forgotten his school-boy classics can quote passages in Plato which would make the doctor feel that he calculated too much on the ignorance of his hearers. And Aristotle, too, the divine drags into the argument. Why, every tyro knows that the only laws acknowledged, even to this day, for constructing comedies are those of this philosopher, who declares that 'tragedy is intended to purge our passions by means of terror and pity.' And 'Tacitus says the German manners were guarded by having no play-houses among them.' If that be true, the Germans have thought better on the subject since. the time of Tacitus; for one of the modern writers of that nation (Zingerman) says, 'We are greatly a dramatic people. Nothing but good can result from the

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VULNERABLE POINTS.

widest indulgence of this taste among us, unless it happen that the sedentary and imaginative student should, through his diseased appetite, draw poison from the stage, as the serpent distils venom from the nutritious things of nature.' The doctor next invokes Ovid to his aid. Surely nothing but a design to frighten us with an array of classical names could induce the preacher to bolster his argument with the opinion of the most licentious poet of ancient or modern times. Ovid calling the theatre dissolute! and advising its suppression! Why, 'tis like Satan denouncing heaven from the burning lake, or like a pickpocket advising the suppression of the penal code. Next we have a list of the formidable opinions of the early fathers of the Church, who were unanimous in the condemnation of the theatre. Doubtless. So they were in the condemnation and burning of martyrs and witches. However pious were many of them, according to their unchristian and ferocious notions of piety, their sentiments on the subject of the Drama are not worth a moment's discussion. The doctor here arrives at a point where the stage seems indeed vulnerable. He alludes to the bars for the sale of liquors, and to the third row. * Bars are no more necessary to the theatre than to the pulpit. I am old enough to remember the time when men would assemble at the tavern nearest the church as soon as the service was over, and there discuss the merits of the sermon and of brandy and water at the same time. The Temperance movement, however, wrought wonders, and I believe the same men do not drink now,—at least not until they reach home. The other charge is a graver one-the third tier. This evil is no more essential to the Drama than the bars; nor is it 'an inseparable concomitant of the theatre.' The separation has taken place in many towns of this country." And at the present time, I may add, the separation is complete throughout the whole

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land. In a future chapter I shall refer more at length to this subject, and show how the theatre can be purged of vice and indecency, by proper effort. My father concludes: "Those periods in history in which the Drama declined are marked by bigotry, violence, and civil war. All the theatres in London were closed by order of Oliver Cromwell, and ten days afterward the head of Charles the First rolled from the block! Terror and gloom hung over the kingdom. The Drama was interdicted-the arts perished-the woof rotted in the loom-the plow rusted in the furrow, and men's hearts were strung to the ferocity of fanaticism. Fathers and sons shed each other's blood; and in the intervals of lust and murder, wild riot howled through the wasted land. Even if permitted by the laws, the theatre could not exist amid such horrors. But the actors were outlawed, and the bigoted Roundheads fixed that stigma upon the profession of a player which illiterate and narrow-minded people attach to it even to this day. The Pulpit too often depicts Virtue in austere and forbidding colors, and strips her of every attractive grace. The path of duty is made a rugged and toilsome way-narrow and steep; and the fainting pilgrim is sternly forbidden to turn aside his bleeding feet to tread, even for a moment, the soft and pleasant greensward of Sin, which smiles alluring on every side. The Stage paints Virtue in her holiday garments; and though storms sometimes gather round her radiant head, the countenance of the heavenly maid, resigned, serene, and meek, beams forth, after a season of patient suffering, with ineffable refulgence. Vice constantly wears his hideous features, and in the sure, inevitable, punishment of the guilty we behold the type of that Eternal Justice, before whose fiat the purest of us shall tremble when the curtain falls on the Great Drama of Life."

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