Theatre Arts Author:Sheldon Cheney Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: January, 1920 Number i 1)rama By Kenneth Macgowan American theatre is passing through the most ificant period of its history. It has come out vlonial... more » dramas, history plays and minstrel shows, nas, Civil War melodramas and Wall Street 11-town comedy from Broadway to Oshkosh, 1 bedroom farces. It has passed through the , the star-stock company, the touring repertory Daly-Wallack-Frohman organizations, the star, long- g systems. To-day—thanks to a more or less mys- n of the war, economics and the uncharted surge tive spirit—the American theatre is rushing ahead at a k (and-pocketbook) speed into the most picturesque t active professional theatre in the world. It seems about T forth theatre organizations to match its producers and And there are signs of plays and playwrights to justify go Jones .... Shakespeare. lias been the nightmare of all thinking lovers and prop- lists of the new stagecraft. Are we following the carpenters tead of the poets? Is Gordon Craig the prophet of a god with t of papier-mache? Shakespeare played his eternal dramas sunlit hustings. Inigo Jones created his mechanical marvels it of all the resources of a royal court. Shakespeare lives to-day, liile Gordon Craig worries the problem of how to create "the urable theatre." Can the artists make it without playwrights? Can they make it even with poets? The final disquietude of all of us lovers of the new scenic art is the thought that when Inigo Jones did get hold of a real creator, the outcome was the same as when he bossed some tu'penny rhymster. The genius of Ben chapter{Section 4Jonson was crushed beneath the canvas tomb of The Masque of Blackness. Shakespeare, 1564-1616 . . . Inigo Jones, 1573-1652. Here is hope: Inigo Jones came after the great days. Robert Jones may be coming befo...« less