The changing drama Author:Archibald Henderson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA "In order to survive, a literary form must be assimilated by society, must demonstrate its utility by expressing better that s... more »ociety's view of what is real and true in life."—John Peeston Hoskins. Ant profound study of the evolution of the drama in relation to its formal development inevitably leads to a readjustment of view in regard to those marvelous, hypothetical formulas which the night-by-night chronicler of the passing show glibly and unquestioningly terms the " laws of the drama." Less than a century ago, prior to Darwin's formulation of the theory of evolution, and long antecedent to De Vries' exposition of the phenomena of mutation, and William James' enunciation of the doctrine of Pragmatism, such hampering restrictions as the postulates of the three unities stood virtually unchallenged as obligatory laws of the drama. Only three decades ago, Brunetiere dogmatically enunciated the " unique law of the drama." And to-day, the dead hand of formalism in drama still weighs heavily, a retarding force upon a noble art. Authority,masked in the garb of Aristotle, of Lessing, of Freytag, of Brunetiere, is invoked to crush the new movement toward freedom—the freedom for the exercise of the creative function in the production of new forms. The drama is a life form, as well as an art form. As such, it is a function of the human spirit. Science, then, includes it within its survey; and properly regards it as a species subject to variation and mutation. A vast domain opens before the new art criticism, which shall draw its analogies from the field of biological science— these analogies modified in accordance with the peculiar restrictions of the work of art as a life form. History affords innumerable illustrations of the variations of literary ...« less