A question that continues to agitate literary circles is whether it is possible to write tragedy in modern times and whether indeed it has been possible to produce tragedies at all ever since Ibsen's generation abandoned romanticism. The subject has become a veritable vested interest of academic criticism, but has also involved non-academic critics and creative writers. It has been impossible to declare a moratorium on the question because it thrusts itself into the foreground of discussions of the worth and pretensions of the modern theatre. Playwrights and critics who deplore the vogue of realism or the absence of poetry on the stage are especially inclined to make the impossibility of writing tragedy for the commercial theatre an article of faith. And it appears to be an absolute conviction on the part of some commentators that modern drama should be excluded from the aristocracy of letters altogether.

The students and critics of Pirandello are almost unanimous in their assertions that a chief, if not the chief, contribution of his dramatic works lies in his reevaluation of the nature of man and his reassessment of conceptions of reality. Joseph Wood Krutch, for example, in his Messenger Lectures delivered at Cornell University in October of 1952 and later published under the title “Modernism” in the Modern Drama,: places Pirandello among the chief four or five modern dramatists and among the foremost contributors to modernism chiefly because his plays are centrally concerned with the “dissolution of the ego” and hence sets Pirandello centrally in that main stream of modern thought about the nature of man represented likewise by the novels of Proust and James Joyce, among others.

I USE this title, because not only is Sartre a philosophical dramatist, but he is also a dramatic philosopher. I mean, that when he philosophizes he dramatizes his philosophical concepts. You cannot fully understand his philosophical drama unless you have an inkling of his dramatic philosophy. That is why when “existentialism” was all the rage in France (and elsewhere) about eleven years ago, but of course nobody had read L'Etre et le Néant, it was possible to get such a totally wrong idea of what Sartre was trying to do. (You will remember the story he himself tells of the young woman who utters a rude word and then exclaims “Ah, je crois que je deviens existentialiste.“) I must start, therefore, with the briefest account of his philosophical system, for the sake of those unfamiliar with it.

In her “Note on the Film” in Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer suggests that “… the novel lends itself more readily to screen dramatization than the drama. The fact is, I think, that a story narrated does not require as much ‘breaking down’ to become screen apparition, because it has no framework itself of fixed space, as the stage has…” But Miss Langer overlooks an essential similarity betwen the drama and the novel which, in a basic way, sets both media apart from the cinema: both are fundamentally composed of verbal forms. Hamlet can be grasped by an audience in a reading from the lectern, the actors immaculate in evening clothes; Thomas Wolfe can affect us in our own silent reading or in Charles Laughton's recitation. Both have existences apart from stage space, apart from vision, even.