The Allegorical Theatre of Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Abstract

In an essay, written in 1924, Mr. T. S. Eliot pointed to the effects in the English drama of an unlimited aim at realism. He saw that without a form to arrest the flow of spirit, without unrealistic conventions, the drama was bound to end in an “exact likeness to the reality which is perceived by the most commonplace mind.” Perhaps in only one play, Everyman, he thought, we had a drama within the limitations of art. In fact, one may say that the unchecked attempt at realism, the attempt “to escape the conditions of art,” has paradoxically become a limitation for die artist. The realistic theatre itself developed in time such stringent conventions that modern playwrights, at least since Ibsen, have sought to escape them. And some serious dramatists have looked for more than purely formal solutions (like the techniques of expressionism) to liberate the stage. They wanted to enlarge the scene in order to regain the scope of the great theatres of the past.