It is an unfortunate fact that the two leading German-speaking dramatists of the present day are all but unknown in the United States. Friedrich Duerrenmatt is known only through The Visit, the success of which has been due mainly to its sensationalism rather than to its more solid dramatic and philosophical qualities; and Max Frisch is not known at all. None of Frisch's plays has been produced in the United States. So far, only one, The Chinese Wall, has appeared in translation. Yet in his best plays (he is far more uneven in quality than Duerrenmatt), Frisch is every bit the equal of his more famous countryman. In this paper I would like to examine the plays of both these Swiss dramatists with a view to showing the significance of their themes and placing them in their proper position in the mainstream of the modern drama.

The so-called avant-garde theatre in the United States and England is generally a case of new wine in old bottles. The plays of most of the young Anglo-American playwrights do not break new ground. Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, to begin with one of the better known examples, is essentially a realistic psychological melodrama. His Sandbox and The American Dream utilize conventions of the traditional non-realistic theatre. Jack Gelber's The Connection explores a segment of society that has been previously unexplored in the theatre except in terms of melodrama, but the manner of presentation goes back to Pirandello. Jack Richardson brings to The Prodigal a unique intelligence and virtuosity but uses familiar techniques. In England as well, there is vitality within traditional forms. Although John Osborne's observations of the temper of postwar England are vividly realistic, he blazes no new paths of dramaturgy.

Each of Harold Pinter's four plays ends in the virtual annihilation of an individual. In Pinter's first play, The Room, after a blind Negro is kicked into inertness, the heroine, Rose, is suddenly stricken with blindness. In The Dumb Waiter, the curtain falls as Gus and his prospective murderer stare at each other. Stanley Webber, the hero of The Birthday Party, is taken from his refuge for “special treatment.” In The Caretaker, the final curtain falls on an old man's fragmentary (and unheeded) pleas to remain in his refuge.

As Pinter focuses more sharply on the wriggle for existence, each of his successive hero-victims seems more vulnerable than the last. Villain assaults victim in a telling and murderous idiom.

The pastoral ethic is that set of ameliorative principles in La devotión de la cruz (Devotion to the Cross) and El alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of Zalamea) working to assuage the intolerable burden of fear and vengeance exacted by the autocratic honor code. These principles receive maximum dramatic range, with the happiest consequences, in The Phantom Lady. The issue is not so much the honor of a woman in danger of losing it, though this hazard is real and accounts for much of the play's dramatic interest. It is rather the clandestine yet clearly approved means by which a lady of rank asserts her rights as a woman in love. Without knowing the odierwise fatal role of honor in Calderonian drama, a casual reader would miss these positive implications of the theme so tfiat the play would seem little more than an auspicious forerunner of Restoration comedy, which indeed it influenced.

In the eighteenth century a theory of acting is formulated for the first time. We have just traced the development of the art form from its obscure origin up to its new maturation in connection with the appearance of the geniuses Shakespeare and Molière. The art is liberated from dilettantism; new relationships are developed with society on the one hand, and with literature on the other! The person who play-acts is first of all an amateur—and can become a dilettante—then a professional actor, and finally becomes an artist. If we must set a date for the complete transformation it is the year 1750. About this time two books appear in Paris, epoch-making for the theatre and consequently for the new style of acting.

Danton's Death is the first play of a twenty-one year old German revolutionary who died before he had lived another three years. Written in secrecy during five weeks of 1835, it may well be the most remarkable first play ever composed. It breaks through prevailing patterns of dramaturgy to a new form, creates the first passive hero in the history of tragedy, and strikingly foreshadows surrealism, expressionism and naturalism. Its author, a youth who short weeks previously had barely escaped arrest for his own revolutionary writings and organizational activities, proceeded to concentrate, in this study of the decline of the French Revolution during Danton's last days, on the antinomy of his passionate desire for social change and his calm knowledge that revolution could not succeed in Germany in his time.

Yeats stands out among the poets of this century who have attempted poetic drama because of his life-long struggle to make the drama serve both his own and his country's purposes. From Vivien and Time (1884) to The Death of Cuchulain (1939) he labored at the often uncongenial task of giving voice (or mask) to conflicting attitudes within the scope of a dramatic action. The dramatic discipline he came to see as a necessity for his own development as a man and poet, and as a possible means of transforming the vulgar or sentimental patriotism he despised into a defense of the Irish heroic ideal which could arouse his countrymen and earn the respect of his literary friends and rivals too.

The fashionable view of Tennessee Williams at the moment is to see through him, to be above his sort of thing. Miss Signi Falk strikes the note in a recent article in Modern Drama when she says of his characters, “Most of them according to discriminating critics have been more deeply affected by the theatre than by life.” This position is an easy one just at present for two reasons. It has a certain degree of truth, and it has the support of most contemporary critics, discriminating or otherwise. Its danger, the danger of most easy positions, is that it tends to simplify Williams and make of him not a serious writer at all but a sensation monger. Henry Popkin would go so far as to say that he discloses only “the monstrosities of the nightmare, embellished by the playful ingenuity of a Gothic temperament.”

In Kleist's Robert Guiscard there appear to be three main centers of interest: Guiscard himself, his army, and the members of his family. Undoubtedly Guiscard was to occupy a dominating position in the dramatic action; the fortunes of his family and of his army were to be of secondary importance compared with his own. Nevertheless, the army and the family were not a mere background of the tragic action, they were an essential part of it. This is shown by the vivid and emphatic description of the army surging around Guiscard's tent like the tempestuous sea around a rock, and by the clear-cut characterization of such figures as the old warrior, Abelard and Guiscard's son Robert.