Drama and the People

BY Dr. AMARESH DATTA, M.A., Ph.D.

(University of Saugor)

Drama has been hailed by literary critics all over the world as the highest form of literature. Comparing it with the epic, Aristotle found enough reasons to assert its superiority even over that form of poetry in which Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton excelled. The very fact that Bharata’s Natya Sastra, the earliest extant compilation of the principles of Indian dramaturgy, was called the fifth Veda, goes to show the position it held in the domain of Indian Literature.

Among the reasons that established the supremacy of drama, the most important is its inherent capacity to maintain the closest relation to life. For, drama, to be true to its character, must be stage-worthy. It has certainly a poetic or literary aspect, but the stage and its appurtenances are designed to accentuate it, neither to flatten its appeal nor to put a limitation on its scope. And even if the stage should ever set up any boundary, it should do so only to lend the drama a structural beauty or decorum which is the hallmark of all great art. It is for this reason, most of the greatest realists in literature are playwrights. A poet may roam in a fancy-utopia singing merely of life as it should be rather than of life as it is; a novelist may talk of the ‘shape of things to come’ or indulge in pleasant fantasies, but a dramatist, even if he wishes to let the reins of his fancy loose, must always be cautious lest he, in disregard, should trample over the life that his audience represent.

In a sense, though rather paradoxically, literature in general is both for the few and for the masses. For the few, because with its technical subtleties and profundity of ideas, it leaves those who cannot understand for themselves–or are uninterested in the subject–unconcerned. For the masses, because it deals with the general trend of life in a particular century or under certain particular circumstances with, to be more precise, a harmonised sum-total of various outlooks on life. But it is not the relation between the drama and the people on this basis that I am writing about. With regard to drama such relation is quite different, and is really worthy of being taken into consideration from various angles of vision.

Drama is, indeed, the most democratic of all arts. To attain to its full stature it must count on the services rendered by an author, actors, painters, musicians, and audience at the same time. Obviously, therefore, it absorbs, on the one hand, the services of different professionals, and on the other, of the people, all and sundry who form one of its most indispensable parts, the audience. Leaving aside the contributions of other allied arts to the making of drama, we shall now concentrate on the mutual relation between drama and the audience, because this is the main theme of this article. Needless to say, we are excluding, for convenience, all writings poetic or otherwise in dramatic form, which are exclusively meant for mere reading. We refuse to call any dialogic writing a drama, though, in this connection, consistent attention should be paid to the fact that drama is not subservient to the stage. What is really important and true is that the business of interpretation of the spirit of the play is carried out by both.

Of late, it has been contended, and rightly too, that literature should not divorce itself from the social background of life, in order to maintain its power of eternal and universal appeal. Society has not only moulded the outlook of the artist; it has also changed, in different ages, the entire character of art itself and maintained its protean variety. Every other branch of literature may moon into the twilight of escapism, but drama cannot, without some emphatic loss, uproot itself from the soil. Even if sometimes it interprets life allegorically or symbolically, the reality is suggested by bold implications. As a matter of fact, it comes into being by the collective demand of the people. A poet or a novelist writes mainly because he feels the urge from within, but when a dramatist commits himself to writing, the demand comes from all corners,–from actors, musicians, painters, managers,–in short, from the people. In the very beginning poetry was, of course, the popular art, because it was not characterised by exclusiveness, because it was read out to the people. Gradually poetry moved towards lyrical esotericism, and though for a long time it stuck to its narrative character, mere reading out was not considered sufficient to satisfy the whole gamut of aesthetic appetite. Even in the epic age significant references have been made to dramatic representations. So with poetry moving towards its attainment of a somewhat exclusive character, drama replaced it more successfully, for it combines in itself the salient elements of all branches of literature, poetry, novel, story and so on. It brought poetry from the unlively atmosphere of classrooms and bookshelves and ‘academics’ to the vast open vistas of life. Drama is, thus, literature read out,–read out by voice, gesture, colour and tune. We know how profoundly the lyrical lilt of Aeschylus, the supreme artistry of Sophocles, the intellectual virility of Euripides and the subtle and pungent humour of Aristophanes appealed to the Periclean Greeks. It does not require a vast range of imagination to visualise an England where Shakespearean masterpieces were enjoyed in hearty cooperation by playwright and actors and audience, and the spirit of the dramas “showered from spectator to player and from player to spectator in a carnival of delight”. Nor is it a myth that Kalidasa with his poetic grandeur, Bhavabhuti with his artistry and idealism, and Sudraka with his deep insight into life and reality, held their audiences, comprised of people from every layer of society, in ecstatic rapture. But imagine, how stale and limited had been their appeal if these masterpieces were written in a form other than dramatic, or written in a dramatic form with an intention other than that of catering to the people. It is only recently that a ‘Brand’, a ‘Faust’ or a ‘Blue Bird’ has been earmarked for the intelligentsia, neither because the people have been comparatively less sensitive to this art than they were formerly, nor because they are debased in their power of understanding and enjoyment, but mainly because the artists themselves have changed their attitude,–which perhaps they are bound to do in the social circumstances under which they live.

Whenever there was a marked unbalance of economic power, creative and intellectual pursuits were usurped by a certain section of the people. There was even a faith in the divine right of artistic heredity, and, for certain periods, artists were actually lords or barons, men from the highest strata of Society. Though, as chance exceptions, artists sometimes emerged from among the masses, their chief aim was to flatter the sentiments of the upper classes,–the aim which actually paid both in cash and kind. And the worshippers of learning with ample leisure to chalk out the ramifications of artistic sensibilities, with vast property which yielded all earthly comforts and power, and love for patronisation and also with the convention of honour achieved through rendering of inspiration, looked upon these artists as their proteges or foster-children. Then there were set literary principles which encouraged the ideal of spiritual oneness and the artists themselves found sufficient justification for their, perhaps unconscious, vindication of upper class ideals, in the name of those principles. The more revolutionary among them tossed for a while between different ideals and at last sang of escapism, utopia and millennium. It was the absence of the democratic basis of Greek society in the 5th Century B.C. and the absence of humanism during the early English Renaissance that actually checked the growth of the drama, which generally wilts when divorced from its relation with the people. Most fortunately, the literary outlook, of late, has undergone a vital change. The Gorkis and Silanappas and Sholokhovs had not to barter or betray the life they lived for literary fame. On the other hand the relation between art and the people has been well-defined and closely knit. The next literary age will be mainly an age of drama. It will be an age when poets and dramatists will sing of the aspirations of the common man, and in a language which will vastly expand its scope by adapting its common forms; for, the medium of expression must also change,–and the only desirable and inevitable change is towards orientation or ‘literalisation’ of the common speech. If Wordsworth failed to work up to his poetic theory, it was not because his theory was wrong; it was mainly because he wanted to use the common words without the necessary modifications. And when the question of common speech arises, it is drama, of all the branches of literature, that is most concerned, because drama is the art of direct narration–its language is the language of the people. Shakespeare may have written mostly in blank-verse, but the turns of his expression, its grammatical forms and constructions are Elizabethan; and the imagery his dramas invoked captured the imagination of the Elizabethan public. Maybe all his artistic subtleties were not appreciated by the masses,–but may not we ask how many of the educated have actually appreciated them? The fact is, when the economic equilibrium of a society is intact, love for art is sure to grow, and by constant, though sometimes a little artificial, attachment to art, the people can ultimately acquire artistic sensibilities. The belief that the power of appreciation, like the power of creation, is an inborn quality is conditioned by the system of society. When a society becomes outmoded, it affords very little scope for the cultivation of this appreciative power.

The language of literature also, in spite of its elevation and flavour, does not set any obstacle in the way of enjoyment by the people. As a matter of fact, as suggested above, the language of literature, especially when it is used by a dramatist, widens its scope by adopting the people’s language. The very fact that Shakespeare knew and used twenty-one thousand words as against the eight thousand known and used by Milton, the most scholarly of English Poets, bears eloquent testimony to my contention.

Even a poem written in an avowedly ornate style, when read out and explained, may be more appealing to the masses than to the students in a university classroom, where it is dissected to an unsung and unlamented death. To take a random instance, is it improbable that Keats’ vivid incarnation of Autumn as one,

“...sitting careless on a granary floor

The hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind,

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep

Drows’d with the fume of poppies while his hook

Spears the next swath and all its twined flowers,

And sometimes like a gleaner he does keep

Steady his laden head across a brook

Or, by a ciderpress, with patient look

He watches the past oozings, hour by hour”

will be liked and enjoyed more by a peasant, who can see the poet’s imaginative autumn in his own self, than by a typical college student who has seen life only through books?

But a dramatist, as we have already said, can start with certain advantages. He is privileged to have a direct and immediate contact with the people and, in his hands, language is capable of unlimited expansion. The vast variety of life can come under his comprehension because, both by expression and ideas, his only aim is to ‘hold the mirror up to nature’. His grand style is not a rigid sustenance of a particular standard; it is marked by the flexibility of life, by its different tones and colours and shades. Take for instance the soliloquy of Hamlet that begins with “To be or not to be, that is the question”. Mark the movement of ideas and their range. From the most philosophic and fundamental question of “to be or not to be” they move towards and centre round “the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune,” and then at last round “the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of dispiz’d love, the Law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.” Similarly mark also the comparative variety of Sanskrit drama, both in ideas and language, produced by the use of different dialects and the representation of different ‘rasas’ or sentiments, as against the somewhat unvaried note of the other branches of Sanskrit literature. And it is certainly unreasonable to deny that such colourful variety of drama is possible simply because its only and immediate concern is the people.

Now to change our point of view: Drama is not only a mirror of life as it is, but also of life as it should be; it is not merely a pleasant pastime–it is an institution, an academy where great and new ideas are born. It aims not merely at pleasure, but both pleasure and profit. Preachers and reformers in different countries, at different ages, have used it and are still using it as a great and effective instrument for the dissemination of their ideas. When people, due to social prejudices, have refused to subscribe to new ideals, it has forced them to change with the time-spirit. Chekhov has convinced his audience of the principles of ‘The New Theatre’. Ibsen set the world thinking anew on all the fundamental issues of life in the context of new circumstances. Bernard Shaw compelled his audience not to leave behind their brains at home while witnessing his dramas. The Russians, in the most critical hour of their national life, have inspired their soldiers by enacting the lives of their heroes in every war-front. Conversely, oppressors and tyrants and enemies of progress have found it necessary to stop theatrical institutions in order to keep the people in ignorance and subjection. In ages long gone by, many playwrights and actors were excommunicated and denied even Christian burial. Even recently, in spite of a fundamental change in world outlook, Ibsen had to live the life of an exile. So we can even summarily conclude: “Suppress theatrical institutions, and you can suppress Revolution.”

It is clear that social conditions determine and quicken the natural growth and the fulfillment of the perennial possibilities of this most important branch of literature. Sophocles required a Periclean Greece, Shakespeare, an Elizabethan England, Kalidasa a golden age of the Gupta Dynasty. But it does not follow that social conditions are not changed and moulded men; and who else among artists can better mould them than playwrights?

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