29 - Theories of drama

Summary

Underpinned by the social philosophy of Saint-Simon and the theories of Auguste Comte, the Social Realist tendency enters French literary criticism through Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Taine, finding its first dramatists in Emile Augier and Alexandre Dumas fils. Hermann Hettner notes the discrepancy between the revolutionary political programme of the dramatists of Young Germany and the aesthetic conventionality of their routine techniques of melodrama and intrigue. Underlying his work, however, is a decline in the belief in the political function of a drama of effective action, which had informed dramatic theory before the failed revolution of 1848. Zola's theories were initially concerned with the novel, but after the failure of the first naturalist dramas in the 1870s, his attention shifted to the theatre. The modern drama must show causes rather than effects. In Shakespeare's plays George Bernard Shaw recognizes the product of unconscious vision, where he demands philosophical understanding.