DRAMATIC LITERATURE The theatrical literature of the period under consideration is surveyed elsewhere (see DRAMA), but some reference may be permitted here to certain works which were widely read as well as acted. In 1911 the "realistic" movement in the drama, largely influenced by Ibsen, was in full swing. The word did not neces sarily imply any approximation to reality, though it was meant to do so. What it really implied was the substitution of a novel set of conventions for a set of which people had grown tired. West-End drawing-rooms were replaced by the homes of suburban j clerks ; rosy sentimentalism was replaced by cynicism, a prophetic pessimism or a detached irony of presentation; speeches gave way to silences or pregnant ejaculations; "social problems" broke in upon a theatre which had ignored them.
The born dramatist could work within this convention as within another, assuming the fashionable trappings, but relying, as he must, for his effect upon the audience, on his ability to excite and amuse them by surprise, to charm them by the presen tation of "humours," to exalt them with passion and courage, to "purge" them rather than depress by the display of failure and pain; and, where a play of this school succeeded, it was not because it was arguing for prison reform, votes for women, better housing or better drains. The restrictions, however, could not endure ; humanity craves in the theatre for more splendid language than it ever uses and more splendid scenes than it habitually lives among; and the end of the period saw ample signs of a return to the stage of poetry and eloquence, vivid colour and symbolism, to the universal and the particular as contrasted with the mere mundane and temporal generalization which ob scures individual character without connoting anything eternal.
Chief among living British dramatists, Bernard Shaw was per ennially active, moved with the times and remained obstinately himself. His method in his early plays recalled now Sheridan, now Ibsen ; the wit, the paradox, the irony, the odd "angle on life" were his own. Of his last I1 plays, long and short, the most inter esting were the last three: Heartbreak House (1919), Back to Methuselah (1921) and Saint Joan (1924). In the first picture of social fecklessness, the influence of Tchekhov and the Russians was evident; in Saint Joan, notable for the great trial scene of Jeanne d'Arc and the detachment with which • both sides of the argument were presented, Shaw wrote a chronicle play. Back to Methuselah, a cycle taking five nights to play, was all his own; a prodigiously ambitious play, which opens with Adam, Eve and the Serpent in the Garden and ends with human beings "as far as thought can reach," who live beautifully and very long and are born, mature, out of eggs. The earlier and later scenes con tained fine, even poetical, passages; the middle was marred by political topicality.
Sir James Barrie in Dear Brutus Mary Rose (192o) and seven short plays continued to charm a large public with his pecu liar vein of humour, sentiment and fantasy, and John Galsworthy, with The Skin Game (192o) and Loyalties (1922), also did effective work in his established manner. A greater development was noticeable in the work of W. Somerset Maugham, whose long series of witty social comedies culminated (1923) in Our Betters, the most effective, if the bitterest, of them all. Henry Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur Pinero, the dominant dramatists of the pre vious period, did little to modify their reputations; and H. Gran ville-Barker, who had shown great promise with The Voysey Inheritance (1909), was largely preoccupied first with produc tion and then with editing Shakespeare. Arnold Bennett's The Great Adventure (1913) was a delightful comedy; the comedies of A. A. Milne also had distinction. G. K. Chesterton's solitary dramatic work Magic (1913) was agreeably individual in manner.
The effort to restore "poetic drama" to the stage from the "closet" was increasingly noticeable. Flecker's Hassan (1922) was written before the War; Rupert Brooke was making his first dramatic experiments when the War broke out. A series of verse plays by Gordon Bottomley, the best, perhaps, being The Riding to Lithend (19o9) and King Lear's Wife (1915), though retaining traces of the "reading play" had considerable dramatic power; Herbert Trench's Napoleon (1919) was on the verge of greatness; and there was grace and charm in Clifford Bax's Midsummer Mad ness (192;), a ballad opera to which C. Armstrong Gibbs wrote music. Other dramatists conspicuous in the period were Noel Coward, Clemence Dane, John Drinkwater, St. John Ervine, "Ian Hay," John Masefield, Alfred Sutro and Israel Zangwill.