EARLY NATURALISM

Naturalism in the theatre is hardly the invention of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, but its vigorous exploitation by these great dramatists marks the resuscitation of European drama in the second half of the nineteenth century. With its emergence and astonishing progress over a short period, the dark tones are heard again for the first time since the seventeenth century.

‘Naturalism’ as a dramatic convention should be distinguished from ‘realism’, the content of the drama. Euripides, in trying to reproduce more commonplace human feelings, lays claim to being a great realist, though his plays are founded on the most artificial set of stage conventions Western drama has known. Hamlet investigates the mind and spirit of man with deeper psychological realism than the theatre had known before, but only because the free Elizabethan pattern of action and the supremacy of the soliloquy permitted it. Shaw is an outstanding realist in the sense that he directs all his art against the romantic attitudes of his contemporaries, but he nevertheless writes as mannered a comedy as he pleases.