Art as Dramatization

"Dramatise, dramatise!" was the insistent cry that haunted Henry James's artistic genius.' The celebrated novelist knew himself a failure in the theatre; his plays were almost all rejected for production, and one of the only two produced was roundly booed on the London stage. Yet James realized, with brave honesty, that the basic principle of drama nonetheless held the key to artistic greatness. Distinguishing nicely between the terms "Theatre-stuff' and "Dramastuff'-between concrete stage performance and what he called the deeper "divine principle of the Scenario" (equally realizable in novels, films, and television), James turned that essential dramatic principle more consciously to work in composing the later works of fiction that crown his great career: "The scenic method," he wrote, "is my absolute, my imperative, my only salvation." That salvation is evident in his posthumous dramatic success, in the frequent adaptations of his fiction into TV dramas and films, and even into two operas by Benjamin Britten.2 James's assertion of the drama's superiority could have rested on ancient philosophical authority, but it was also not uncommon in his own time, and after. Nietzsche, for example, just a year younger than James, was quick to affirm Richard Wagner's recognition that "the greatest influence of all the arts could be exercised through the theatre."3 Some generations later, James's native countryman and fellow Anglophile, T. S. Eliot, would reaffirm the supremacy of drama as "the ideal medium for poetry." Combining the power of meaningful action with the beauty of musical order, poetic drama could capture two exquisitely precious and different kinds of aesthetic value not easily synthesized in a single form. And through its theatrical performance, Eliot further argued, drama enabled the poet to reach "as large and as miscellaneous an audience as possible."4 Eliot therefore made his own sustained efforts to write for the theatre, where, however, he enjoyed only little more initial success than James. (The Broadway hit Cats, though based on Eliot's light verse, is a posthumous dramatization of poetry that he in fact never intended for theatre, let alone musical theatre.) Considered from the point of view of practicing artists (rather than that of philosophers), drama's preeminence derives not only from its presumed ability to reach more people and move them more powerfully and completely than other arts (something that may be truer today for cinema than for theatre). There is also (dare I say it as an American) the charm that a successful theatre play could bring in the quickest (if not always, ultimately) the greatest income to its author. We know from private correspondence that money was certainly one motive for James's interest in writing for the theatre. But the presence of this motive in no way falsifies the sincerity of his adulation of drama, which he praised as "the noblest" of arts, long before he ever seriously thought of a career in playwriting. James thought drama was noblest because it was the most challenging-combining the gravest formal demands of "masterly structure" with the highest requirement of significance of "subject."'5 In this paper, I want to go beyond these more familiar assertions of drama's preeminent influence and nobility in order to suggest that the concept of drama embodies and unites two of the deepest, most important conditions of art