For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more
excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are
ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than
the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he
renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to
produce that cumbrous nondescript, a "closet drama." Of such we do not
speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form
which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described
by the sailor, "cannot live on land and dies in the water"?
To return to our immediate topic, the poet who essays dramatic
composition on mere abstract impulse, because other poets have done so,
or because he is told that it pays, is only too likely to produce
willy-nilly a "closet drama." Let him beware of saying to himself, "I
will gird up my loins and write a play. Shall it be a Phaedra, or a
Semiramis, or a Sappho, or a Cleopatra? A Julian, or an Attila, or a
Savanarola, or a Cromwell?" A drama conceived in this reach-me-down
fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it.
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