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Modernism
The twentieth century really begins before the end of the nineteenth century, across the whole word, and in the face of rapid economic and social changes, radical doubts about the stability of the existing order were expressed. By the end of the nineteenth century the pre-industrial economy and way of life had almost disappeared. In 1911 nearly 70 per cent of the countrys 45 million inhabitants lived in urban areas. The sense of local community was being lost: a greater anonymity of the individual in the urban context was a result. Society became more fragmented and individual identities more fluid. Looking back on the nineteenth century, it is easy to see it as falling into distinct moments: before and after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815; before and after the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 (in effect, she gives her name to almost the whole century); and, in intellectual terms, before and after Darwin. Although On the Origin of Speech was published in 1859; its ideas had been circulating for some thirty years before then, and its currency and effects defines the later years of the century. It is less easy to define the twentieth century. The First and Second World War (1914-1918 and 1939-1945 respectively) mark, in time and in their effects, significant changes on a global scale: this kind of worldwide effect is a phenomenon of the century. Before 1914, English literature and ideas were in many ways still getting back to twentieth century, however after 1918, Modern begins to define the twentieth century. But as literacy increased after 1870 Education Act and, as a result, many more people could read and write, the effect on literature was to expand its field, to fragment its solidity , to enlarge and change its audience, is forms and its subjects matter. From the perspective of the end of the century, a few major names stand out as those who will probably define the 1900s, and it is easier to select such names from the first part of the century than it is from the first part of century. Novelists such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence will probably remain among the most significant of the century; poets from Thomas Hardy and W. B. Yeats to T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden will probably still be read in a hundred years time.

It is more difficult to point out to major dramatists after the Irish theatres flowering with J. M. Synge and Sean OCasey: the plays of Somerset Maugham have lost much of their appeal, and the early comedies of Noel Coward are now often seen as light and insignificant. Modernism is one of the words of the first part of the century. Among its influences were the psychological works of Sigmund Freud and the anthropological writings of Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough (1890-1915). Modernism is essentially post-Darwinian: it is a search to explain mankinds place in the modern world, where religion, social stability and ethics are all called into question. Against Modernism it was that it produced chaotic and difficult writing that it moved beyond the capacity of many readers. Indeed, it is true that readers need background awareness of psychology, history and aesthetics to master some of the literature of the early years of Modernism.

1.1. Modernism in Drama


As a movement, Modernism has been defined in artistic terms through the sculptures of Jacob Epstein or Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the painting of Wassily Kandinsky or Wyndham Lewis, while in literary terms its usage has been restricted to the work of poets and novelists: preeminently T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. At first sight it might seem contradictory to include drama in a discussion of Modernism, indeed, in the various critical studies of the movement published over the last half-century, drama has been featured by its absence. It is true that theatrical developments over the century do not fit in the same chronological frame as that for poetry or the novel, where the two decades from 1910 to 1930 are generally held to mark of the movement, perhaps the main explanation for the omission of drama from the history of Modernism up to this point is that, for various reasons connected with the nature of theatre itself, on the stage of movement has produced extremely diverse work. Certainly the theatre is an institution in a day that publishing houses are not; and writing for performance is very different to writing for a literary magazine or creating art is a studio. Despite this, several of the leading modernist poets- in particular W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot- turned to the theatre, as did the novelist D. H. Lawrence. Even the painter Wyndham Lewis wrote plays, as
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did the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. And with the possible exception of Lewiss The enemy of the Stars, all their dramatic scripts were specifically written for performance. As a close associate of Joyce, Eliot and above all Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis was at the forefront of the modernist movement in England. It is therefore significant that he chose a dramatic form to experiment with in translating the qualities of his vorticist painting into words, and equally significant that this was among his very first literary attempts. Published as an artistic manifesto in the first issue of the vorticits journal Blast, The Enemy of the Stars is a composite of fragmented cubism vision from within the text is a treatise on the egoistic philosophy of Modernism. A quite different application of modernist principles to the stage can be seen to the dramatic work of W. B. Yeats and Gordon Craig respectively Yeats was first of all a poet; but he experimented with drama as an organic development of his verse through most his literary career, writing one series of plays between 1902 and 1908, and another between 1930 and 1938. The elements developed in the first grouping were given their clearest expression eight years later in At the Hawks Well (1916); the second culminated in his play, The Death of Cuchulain (written in 1895). However, once Yeats turned to specifically Irish themes, his drama shifted from nineteenth century symbolism, he adopted the least representation mode, of performance, the dance. These plays for dancers are subjective, the author identifies with his mythological hero, Cuchulian, and the underling subject of the plays is art: the myths are recreated to illustrate the process of mythmaking. Yeasts aim was to create a form so drama in which the dancer would be inseparable from the dance, in a total unity of theme and expression. Yeats hailed Craigs first productions as not drama but the ritual of a lost faith, and together with Ezra Pound in 1912 joined a committee to promote the Art of the Theatre as interpreted by Gordon Craig.1 A year before that Yeats had staged there of his own plays using a scenic system designed by Craig. Craigs real strength was as a painter and designer through in the 1890s he had won recognition as one of the leading
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W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 156.
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young actors in England. The series of Purcell and Handel operas that he directed between 1900 and 1902 were poetically simplified. In each, the action was structured into unified emotion progression; scenes were orchestrated around a single emblematic stage-property; imaginative and evocative lighting synthesized all the element of the performance. After these productions, Craig progressively withdrew from the stage; his last major production was an interiorized interpretation of Hamlet, for Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912. If Yeats and Craig represent the imagist line of Modernism, it might be logical to conclude that the movement was incompatible with theatre, since their artistic principles drove them to withdraw from the stage. The principles of Modernism were adopted by a wide range of other playwrights and directors, who explored alternative ways of expressing the modernist vision. Craig and Yeats might be said to have attempted to direct a translation from poetry and painting to drama. Even when there are clear parallels, with the novel, which is perhaps the most similar in using characterization and narrative techniques- the theatrical forms of Modernism are distinct. For instance, from Proust through James Joyce and Virginia Woolf one major modernist concern was the depiction of interior experience, where reality is the subjective apprehension of the world, and art is an impressionist record of stream of consciousness. In drama the equivalent is expressionism, which seeks to represent the subconscious. While their plays tended to be equally autobiographical, the Expressionists focus on archetypes intrinsically denies the validity of on archetypes intrinsically denies the validity of both the individual ego and intellectual awareness. The rejection of Victorian orthodoxies along with the logical and chronological structures of traditional narrative may be standard for modernists poet. The Expressionists reflected sense of a disintegration, culture, dissociated personalities and fragmented consciousness. It was a short step from the expressionists realm of the collective unconscious to the Surrealism, whose belief that the free flow of imagination would liberate the deepest levels of the psyche led to experiments with automatic writing. The most significant and influential developments of Surrealism in the theatre came with Antonin Artaud, who rejected everything ethereal. Artauds principles are essentially modernisthis aim being specifically to return to the theatre that total liberty which exists in
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[contemporary] music, poetry, or painting, and of which it has been curiously bereft up till now2- but the visionary path he took in realizing modernist aims led in strikingly new directions. In some ways T. S. Eliots first play, Sweeney Agonisties (written in 1925-1926 and first performed in America in 1933), is comparable to Surrealists. Unlike his other drama, this deals with unpleasant lower-class. Eliot was possibly the greatest of the modernist poets, and the figure of apenick Sweeney surfaces recurrently in his poems, representing degraded and aggressive sexuality. Where Yeats sacrificed theatre to his poetry, Eliot might be said to have scarified Modernism to the theatre. Sweeney Agonisties was certainly dramatically viable. Indeed with the exception of Murder in the Cathedral (which as church drama falls into a special category), it has been revived more often than any of Eliots other plays, even though they were consciously written in a more accessible form. Compromises had to be made if viable work was to be produced for the stage; and in drama the most influential practitioners of Modernism are defined by the infusion of a modernist spirit into standard theatrical form. This had been begun by George Shaw, whose refurbishing of traditional melodrama and romance offers a basic example. All Shaws plays have standard narrative structures and retain the semblance of a naturalistic surface, as well as being intellectual. None of Shaws other works moves as far from standard dramatic forms, but the same elements are present in most of his later plays. By far, one of the most influential dramatist of the century was Bertolt Brecht. The type of structure that Brecht developed was just as much a departure from the naturalistic norm. In deliberate contrast to the linear plots of standard dramatic theatre, Brecht used techniques to present events as narrative creating discontinuous action from a montage of scenes. At the same time, from all the extreme positions taken in his theory and in the number of manifestos and essays accompanying his plays too, Brecht is typically modernist-Brechts work mediates between antitraditional form and conventional dramatic content almost to the same degree as
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Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (Paris, 1938), trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 92.
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Shaw. Despite all the avoidance of empathy through distancing techniques, objectification Brechts theatre is by no means purely rational. On the stage, his plays have an exceptionally strong emotional charge. Spectators fainted in 1929 at Baden-Baden Cantata of Acquiescence, where the factual presentation carried a very strong emotional content. Later plays like Mother Courage or The Caucasian Chalk Circle contain moments of tear-jerking melodrama or nail-biting suspense. Perhaps as a result, Brecht is the only dramatist to translate the principles of Modernism to the stage and at the same time create strikingly successful theatre. His plays almost immediately attained the status of modern classics. His plays almost immediately attained the status of modern classics and unlike most modernist experiments, have become as much a part of the theatrical mainstream as Shaws work. In contrast to all Modernists, Brecht gained his own, state-supported theatre where for the last decade of his life he was able to set the style of presentation for his plays. Where the other Modernists were relegated to the theatrical fringes, or (like Shaw) found that the commercial theatre distorted their work, Brecht was unique in having the ability to set his own artistic agenda. Given the public and social nature of stage performance, however, almost all of the playwriters and directors had strong political motivation. Practically the only exceptions are early Imagists, Yeats and CraigShaw embraced Fabiasnism; Brecht and Meyerhold were committed to Marxism. Even Dada and the Surrealism adopted Communism- despite the fundamental contradiction between their aims and the materialist ideology of Marxism. By contrast, this was no such open ideological commitment among Modernists writing in other forms. In general the principle of Modernism, as expressed in poetry and painting, deny the validity of politics. But in drama, stylistic and social revolution went together. Drama is also distinct from other forms of Modernism in that modernist principles are still active. Although the main creative period of modernist theatre occupied the first thirty years of the century, in a sense, Samuel Beckets plays represent a decisive new breakthrough, as does Robert Wilsons work. Yet Brechts theatre gained fresh influence in the late fifties and through the 1960s. An example of the way in which Modernism continues to inform contemporary developments can be seen in the work of Harold Pinter, who is usually seen as a follower of Brecht. Pinter has
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became a standard feature on the commercial stage as well as in the National Theatre; and his example demonstrates the degree to which Modernism has became the norm for drama.

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