If you cannot save your blank verse from
monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you
cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite
of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern
stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back
again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness.
We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, "Look you now!
I am going to be eloquent and impressive!" The most destructive fault a
dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of
art, from one plane of convention to another.[3]
* * * * *
We must now consider for a moment the question--if question it can be
called--of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone
far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all
self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then
to defend them.
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