For my own part, I doubt it. I suspect
that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the
simple reason that verse is easier to make--and to memorize--than prose.
Primitive peoples felt with Goethe--though not quite in the same
sense--that "art is art because it is not nature." Not merely for
emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a
medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life. The drama
"lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Even of so modern a writer
(comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he
"chose" verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose
prose. He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and
methods of the theatre of his time. In familiar passages he broke away
from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a
convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic
personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the
proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of
the modern stage.
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