be handled with caution. One can
say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are
problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.

To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature
nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into
the realm of pure aesthetics. 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.

And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an
overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after
a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from
their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference
between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just
after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed
couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was
too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back
upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy
mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the
century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles.
One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life
and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The
worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated
in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic