The following work was produced in April, 2004 in association with the University of South Florida
In his preface to the first volume of Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898), George Bernard Shaw writes that “one of the worst privations of life in London for persons of intellectual and artistic interests is want of a suitable theatre” (Shaw Plays I: x). His oft-repeated complaint—that “the existing popular drama of the day is quite out of the question for cultivated people accustomed to use their brains”—criticized the actors and managers of the day for not concentrating their efforts on discovering “masterpieces of the New Drama” and “revealing their fascination to the public” (Shaw Plays I: x). Of those whose particular obduracy and short-sightedness Shaw implicated were actor-managers such as Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the enormously popular and financially successful icons of (in Shaw’s view) dramatic “debasement and mutilation” (Shaw Plays I: xx). By avoiding the controversy and risk inherent in staging modern, realistic plays by Ibsen and himself, Shaw believed that the actor-managers adhered to an outmoded theatrical practice which bowed instead to public taste and to their own “growing Conservatism” (Shaw Plays II: xi-xii).
Shaw’s opinions, echoed by his colleague and collaborator William Archer, have largely retained their currency to the present day and account for what critics describe as the actor-managers’ predictable, observable, and necessary decline. With the advent in dramatic writing of naturalism, psychological realism, and issues-oriented themes, “the theatre of the playwright had replaced the theatre of the actor” (Brown xv). Whether locating the beginning of the actor-managers’ decline with the 1889 London premier of Ibsen’s A Doll House, Grein’s subsequent establishment of the Independent Theatre, Shaw’s and Archer’s harshly unfavorable reviews of Irving's and then Tree’s performances (Findlater 141), scholars almost as a body argue that the leading actor-managers clung to traditional repertories in lieu of further reforming the theatre through modern realism and found their acting outdone by the ideas represented in the new plays (Greenfield 256-57). The change in the popular focus from acting to authorship favored Ibsen, Shaw, and their contemporaries while it unseated the great Shakespearean actors of the day (King 57).
But this stance too rigidly casts the actor-managers as obstinate dinosaurs adverse to the meteoric change that eventually surprised and extinguished them. In fact, the actor-managers were already long-established advocates for change in the theatre, not simply out of a transparently self-interested attempt to sustain their economic and cultural hegemony over the medium (Shulz 233), but because they were already responsible for recovering and sustaining the theatre for increasingly diverse and respectable audiences. They considered themselves intellectually discriminating, commercially astute, and inherently adaptable. Citing Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse as examples revealing the poet’s “imaginative genius,” Herbert Beerbohm Tree particularly perceived himself as an independent thinker capable of accommodating any new art that “gives to the artist as to the spectator most opportunities of weaving round the work of the poet the embroidery of his own imagination” (Tree Thoughts 110, 167). Though only marginally aligned aesthetically and philosophically with a movement recognizably gaining currency and momentum, of all the actor-managers Tree especially participated in and encouraged the New Drama’s success by offering it significant support over more than twenty years.
Long before Henry Irving, the Victorian theatre was undergoing important changes. For example, with the growth of the London suburbs and improved access to the city in the 1830s onward, more and wealthier people were in need of entertainment (Schmid 9), and their patronage of the theatre combined favorably with actors William Charles Macready's and Charles Kean's efforts to diminish some of the long-standing prejudices against the art (Hughes 3).[1] Also, Irving's campaign for official recognition, begun in the early 1870s and complemented by a favorable opinion of the theatre delivered by a Church Congress in 1878 (Schmid 9), contributed significantly to public acceptance of the acting profession (Rowell 171). And as people from all social classes began attending performances, more theatres were built and existing theatres were modified to accommodate demands for comfort (Rowell 171-2). By 1882, London contained 57 licensed theatres and 415 music halls (Hughes 2), and the competition resulted in reduced prices for admission (Rowell 172), increased profits, and higher wages for actors (Hughes 2). Furthermore, actors were less frequently treated like "social and artistic outcast[s]" (Sanderson 11): with increased acceptance, their numbers jumped from 4565 in 1881 to 7321 in 1891, and by 1889 fully one third had attended a university (Sanderson 12-15).
In addition to contributing to and capitalizing on many of these changes, Irving mirrored other "modern" theatre manager's derision toward ballad-operas, foreign burlesques, and extravaganzas (Sanderson 24), and concentrated instead on providing a repertory of "so-called realistic melodramas" (Schmid 17). Unlike other managers, however, Irving spared no expense producing his spectacularly picturesque plays, and his romantic interpretations of Shakespeare appealed with unprecedented success to his intelligent audiences' increasing desire for serious drama (Schmid 17). By 1889, therefore, Irving, the acknowledged spokesman for his profession (Hughes 3), had helped reform the theatre by attracting larger, more literate audiences to more theatres than ever before.
Irving’s and Tree’s impact on the business of theatre management and production had numerous tangible consequences. Arguing that “Shakespeare . . . not only foresaw, but desired, the system of production that is now most in public favour,’ i.e., verisimilar sceneic embellishment” (Tree, qtd. in Rusche 4), both men spent remarkable sums of money recreating elaborate costumes and settings with meticulous archaeological accuracy.[2] Success, according to Tree, required the sophistication of modern stagecraft and scholarship, since it was possible to produce the play with “elaborate stage treatment” suggested by Shakespeare himself but unattainable in his day (Tree, “Personal Explanation” 1). To achieve their goals, both managers changed the conventional mechanics of production by developing new gas, lime, and electric lighting techniques to emphasize themes, beauty, and moods (Hughes 16-7), removing tracks for moveable scenery, and even flattening the slight pitch of the stage itself (Bingham Great Lover 87). To keep track of the business, Bram Stoker, Irving’s business manager, eliminated some of the possible financial loss from a failed run by developing an accounting technique to forecast a production’s profits (Pick 12-13). And to increase business and accessibility, Tree reduced seating prices and increased seating capacity in his theatre (Bingham Great Lover 38).
In stagecraft and administration, then, Irving and Tree clearly changed the theatre business—a necessary antecedent, one critic argues, for more sweeping change: the movement from melodramatic spectacles produced by powerful actor-managers like Irving to intellectual plays characterized by "ensemble acting, realistic settings, [and] contemporary themes" (Rowell 171). But the actor-managers’ role in preparing the stage for the New Drama was complicated and subdued by artistic and commercial concerns raised by their critics. As England’s first knighted actor responsible, in the public eye, for “holding up . . . the whole English Stage” (Craig 847), Irving’s aesthetic nevertheless seemed to new writers and playgoers increasingly obtuse next to charges that he inflexibly adhered to producing Shakespeare and melodramas. And Tree, as the “last of the great actor-managers” and Irving’s acknowledged heir (Dietrich 106), suffered the same accusations leveled at Irving that to him “an author [is] but a literary scaffold on which to exhibit his creations” (Shaw “Point of View” 241).
The critical attacks were often deserved, but the accusations were also to some degree opportunistic and often qualified by what actually took place on the stage. Speaking of the rise of the New Drama, one critic points out:
In an increasingly dramatic age, popular taste and its craving for the new had more and more to be considered. And so the major dramatists of the period, though they could now command West End theatres, often found that they had to accommodate West End commercial principles, as in the way Galsworthy introduced elements of the well-made thriller into some of his plays, Maugham and Coward “lightened” their comedies, and Barrie indulged in the sentimental. In some cases, the accommodation was made for them; for example, Shaw’s Pygmalion was given a romantic ending by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. . . . (Dietrich 106)
In other words, what the actor-managers believed suited the public taste—and their box offices—often compelled what the public received in production regardless of a given playwright’s protests. Perplexed and frustrated critics have, then as now, consequently defined Irving and Tree as artistically conservative, commercially self-serving in their catering to the public, and unwilling to take risks. In the process, critics have elided their intellectual elitism and the tension that arises from the playwrights’ necessary but unwilling complicity in accommodating and reinforcing the class structure that defines the actor-managers’ hegemonic control of the theatre system. The significant philosophical differences between the men has consequently been elided. Precisely because of the authors’ complicity with and accommodation of the actor-managers’ demands, Tree, more than any of his contemporaries and unlike Henry Irving, was frequently able to support and promote the New Drama.
According to drama critic William Archer, Henry Irving had the intellect of an actor, not a thinker, whose characterizations were instinctive rather than intellectually understood. Thus, the difference between Irving’s characterization and what audiences likely expected derived from the peculiar individuality of the actor rather than from a significantly new or different interpretation of the role (Archer Henry Irving 89-90). Indeed, Irving's technique of empathizing with a character's motives and passions while trying to maintain objective control of his own artistic abilities, developed from years of trial and error on the stage, stresses the intellect's conceptualizing powers.[3] Irving studied his plays with scholarly precision and enthusiasm (Findlater 138), often researching and rehearsing privately for up to three months before performing all the parts for his cast (Bingham Henry Irving 158). As an actor, he spent much time perfecting nuances in his movement, expression, and articulation; as a director, he "drilled and drilled" his supporting cast with his interpretations of their roles (Donaldson 83-4), sometimes rehearsing up to ten weeks (Rowell 35). He was a perfectionist, envisioning and then demanding that his cast and crew recreate his conception of every part, every tone of voice, and every scene before opening night (Bingham Henry Irving 159).
In "The Art of Acting," an address delivered on 30 March 1885 at Harvard University while he toured America at the height of his career, Irving explains how his method operates on stage:
It is necessary to this art that the mind should have, as it were, a double consciousness, in which all the emotions proper to the occasion may have full swing, while the actor is all the time on the alert for every detail of his method. It may be that his playing will be more spirited one night than another. But the actor who combines the electric force of a strong personality with a mastery of the resources of his art must have a greater power over his audience than the passionless actor who gives a most artistic simulation of the emotions he never experiences. (Irving, qtd. in Young 562)To Irving, performances should elevate the mind toward truth; however, to Archer, Irving’s choice of extravagant productions and flamboyant characters compromised realism to mimetic exaggeration and implausibility (Schmid 47). Irving’s productions did not encourage the same intellectual appreciation as Ibsen’s plays, but ended, like most melodrama, either neatly or coincidentally, or violated realism by distracting with pageantry (Schmid 46-49). In Archer’s view, Irving’s method seemed hardly distinguishable from hypnotism as he presented a “dead drama skilfully [sic] galvanized” by his own personality (Archer Henry Irving 95).
Irving’s emphasis on pleasing the public and his artistic preference for Shakespeare and melodramas largely supported the contention that he placed pleasing the public above challenging them intellectually with the New Drama. From his creation of the villain Rawdon Scudamore in Dion Boucicault's The Two Lives of Mary Leigh (retitled Hunted Down) in 1866, to his death shortly after a performance of Becket in 1905, Irving never produced a play by Ibsen, Wilde, or Shaw, nor distinguished himself as tolerant of the growing emphasis on psychological realism and naturalism. In 1896, despite Shaw’s repeated appeals that Irving produce A Man of Destiny, Irving, injured by Shaw’s recent review of Richard III, simply requested that he leave him alone (Bingham Henry Irving 273-4).[4] Shaw, like Archer, maintained that to the end, Irving remained committed to stale spectacles full of “false morality, sensationalism, artificiality, and hackneyed conventionality” (Greenfield 256).
Despite condemnations that have had such lasting influence on contemporary opinion of Irving and his contemporaries, Irving deserves credit for having contributed to the theatre an unprecedented degree of respectability from which others could profit artistically and commercially. As Gordon Craig (the son of Irving’s former leading lady, Ellen Terry) sentimentally reminisced in 1930, “only Irving determined to reform [the stage] as much as one man could possibly do, while producing plays year in and year out” (847). Irving had generously “opened the flood-gates” for the “general inundation” of actor-managers and playgoers alike (Craig 847).
Among those following Irving was Herbert Beerbohm Tree who, in 1893—ironically, the same year that Irving acted for Queen Victoria in a command performance of Tennyson’s Becket, and two years before Irving was knighted—produced Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Already a seasoned actor-manager following his debut in 1876 and his assumption of management of the Haymarket Theatre in 1887, the man later regarded as Irving’s successor to the actor-manager throne attracted criticism similar to that directed at Irving. As “a romantic actor, delighting in grandiose effects and in the representation of eccentric characters in which his imagination had free play” (Hartnoll qtd. in ArtsWorld), he was among those who embodied, in William Archer’s terms, “the nineteenth-century’s inept overindulgence in passionate, nonrealistic theatre” (Dietrich 13). Like Irving, Tree was accused of exploiting an author’s work as a vehicle for investing characters with his own idiosyncratic and distracting personality (Shaw “Point of View” 240).
Tree did share with Irving the belief that “the first merit of a play is that it shall satisfy the artistic conscience of an audience” (Tree Thoughts 179). In 1902, Tree wrote:
In presenting these works, I have always given the best I could give—for to my mind nothing is too good for the public to accept. It is the public to whom alone I have ever looked and to whom I owe what success I have obtained as an actor and manager.Shaw considered Tree’s point of view terribly problematic, as it seemed that to Tree, as to Irving, pleasing and interesting the audience took precedence over the author’s role of educating or enlightening them (Shaw “Point of View” 240). However, Tree articulated his view of art somewhat differently than Irving. In Tree’s opinion, “true” art admits the imaginative interpretation of the individual (Tree Thoughts 165). That is, true art is neither stagnant nor conceptually monolithic, but permits personal and therefore variable interpretation. Tree continues, “In dramatic literature that work is highest which is most suggestive, which gives to the artist as to the spectator most opportunities of weaving round the work of the poet the embroidery of his own imagination” (Tree Thoughts 110).I believe that when a man reviews his career he will find that his failures are more often due to taking too mean rather than too lofty an estimate of the public taste. For myself I have always maintained that the public taste is on an infinitely higher plane than is dreamed of in the philosophies of most professional critics. I trust that in saying this I shall not be accused of too gross a self-flattery. Anyhow I shall continue to endeavor to act up to that ideal—always remembering that the first commandment for the manager is:
“Thou shalt not bore.” (Bingham Great Lover 120)
To Tree, then, the best dramatic art results from the successful combination of the suggestive literary genius of the writer and the imaginative intellect of the actor. Success, meanwhile, is measured in the actor’s ability to produce a morality that fosters the greatest happiness and habit of mind (Tree Thoughts 31). Such a formula requires literary geniuses, of course: not only the ever-adaptable Shakespeare, but—less predictably, perhaps—authors such as Ibsen, cited for Master Builder, and Maeterlinck, whose “original and forcible treatment” in L’Intruse qualifies the author for such consideration (Tree Thoughts 166-67). These authors, Tree believed, invite the independent-thinking reader’s interpretation without proscribing the imaginative process. Like Dr. Stockmann railing against the “compact Liberal majority” in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Tree extols the free-thinking actor-philosopher who remains “independent of recognised [sic] laws” except those that are “the unwritten laws of the book of nature, illuminated by the imagination” (Tree Thoughts 7-10, 96).
In his definition of art, Tree was not only more versatile in his thinking than previous actor-managers, but he was alone among his colleagues in his positive assessment of the artistic merits of modern Continental theatre (Bingham Great Lover 184-85). Certainly he could be critical of the New Drama—in a discussion of “The Living Shakespeare” Tree writes in 1913 that “What is called ‘the new movement’ is only the passing of dead matter” (Tree Thoughts 72)—but he could also find in these works some of the same intellectual attraction he discovered in Shakespeare. Of Ibsen’s realism (what Tree termed the “drama of perpetual night”), for example, Tree writes, “We have held our nostrils while our gaze has been riveted with wonderment and awe on the crawling brood which the wand of this pitiless magician stirred from the muddy depths” (Tree Thoughts 166). Significantly, Tree found in such suggestive drama works that he, unlike his contemporaries, was willing to produce (Pearson 59).
Shaw and others have regarded Tree’s argument for an unfettered imaginative approach to literary works as merely a rationalization for usurping the author’s role of investing characters with their own personalities and emotions—in effect, as an argument for bad acting (Shaw “Point of View” 240). Some have suspected Tree of applying his definition of art to justify unauthorized revisions to a text to support an overt commercial interest in pleasing his audience (Schulz 241). In fact, both charges are occasionally accurate, though they misrepresent Tree’s roles as actor and manager and obscure his contribution to the modern theatre. As previously noted, Tree might have earned from Archer the same false praise offered to Irving: that personality always intruded, and that “his greatest triumphs are projections of himself, not reflections of the world around him” (Archer Henry Irving 77), but the validity of Tree’s interpretive characterizations have also attracted scholarly praise even today from those who consider him an important innovator in visual representation (Pearce 299-302).[5]
More pointed is the suggestion that Tree’s artistic choices and method (and by implication the question of his support of the New Drama) were determined by commercial concerns. An intriguing study by David Schulz, for example, argues that Tree’s architectural design of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s West End in 1897 signified his willing and conscious complicity in the “spectacularization” of the theatre as commodity—a practice common among fellow actor-managers of the time. Schulz maintains that like most new theatres in the district, Tree’s theatre was designed as a “conspicuous display of wealth, imperialism, and the Edwardian fetishization of French style,” and when considered with the adjoining Carlton hotel that had been designed to match, the intentional impression on the playgoer was of an enormous palace (Schulz 231-38). The effect, Schulz argues, was monolithic representation of cultural hegemony. Actor-managers like Irving and Tree, considered successive Kings of the Theatre (Bingham Great Lover 120), wanted to be regarded as land-owning gentry, and as such were willing to invest their money in architectural embodiments of conspicuous consumption that segregated them from the lower and middle classes. Importantly, this segregation was further reinforced in the physical separation of class-distinct lobbies, seating and concessions.
The implicit assumption was that the actor-managers would maintain a public image as “gentlemanly hosts” of their “homes” where the middle and lower classes felt welcome to participate in the “dream of wealth” by sharing this space with the true elite (Schulz 233). It seems to have worked: Irving earned lavish praise for his generosity during first night stage banquets (Bingham Henry Irving 149-50), and playwright Louis Parker praised Tree’s “open-handed hospitality” as the head of his “household” (Parker 214). In theatres that catered to the elite in characters, costumes, and concerns, all theatre business was implicated in self-interested attempts to sustain the actor-managers’ economic status and control (Schulz 233-34)—precisely the sort of criticism leveled at Tree when, upon revising the ending to Shaw’s Pygmalion, he quipped to the playwright, “My ending makes money; you ought to be grateful” (Tree, qtd. in Pearson 182).
By his own admission Tree would revise a play slightly if he thought such changes would avoid boring or shocking his audience or if he might increase receipts (Dietrich 123). Much has already been written of the pleasing effect of his extravagantly scenic Shakespeare productions, for example. Also, Tree apparently refused Shaw’s The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet in 1909 because its irreverent treatment of God shocked and horrified him, and because he feared “the stalls would rise as a body and walk out of the theatre” (Pearson 174). And with Ibsen’s work, drama critic Desmond MacCarthy reports that Tree was not above introducing some unscripted “foolery” by choosing a strikingly diminutive actor to play the foil next to his physically larger Dr. Stockmann (MacCarthy 223).
But such examples also begin to speak to Tree’s willingness to diverge from conventional repertory Shakespeare and take risks by providing a venue for the new dramatists. Despite the criticism, Tree maintained that commercial success was not “the standard by which artistic endeavor must be gauged” (Tree Thoughts 45). Consequently, we find that his artistic choices often gravitated toward unproven works by modern playwrights—sometimes at a financial loss.
For example, in 1893, three years after his successful mounting of Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse at the Haymarket Theatre, Tree produced A Woman of No Importance, Wilde’s second play (Wilde’s first play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, premiered under George Alexander’s management only the year before). Tree and Wilde got along quite well despite some apparent tension when the actor-manager added gestures, action and lighting to emphasize and interpret the play’s meaning (Jackson 13-14), and the play succeeded. In 1905, however, Tree returned to A Woman of No Importance for a May 20-July 4 revival of forty-four performances that, at the end of the run, resulted in a net loss of £1,231 (Jackson 12-13).
Also in 1893, Tree mounted the premier of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, earning the actor-manager Shaw’s commendation for having the courage and open mind to look beyond conventional theatre for modern plays (Bingham Great Lover 72, 218); and in that same year, Tree produced Henry Arthur Jones’ The Tempter—the playwright’s third work to appear at the Haymarket, and one which, unfortunately, failed on its first night (Pearson 57). In fact, Tree’s repeated productions of Jones’ plays resulted in only one success: The Dancing Girl ran for 300 performances in 1891, whereas Wealth (1889), The Tempter (1893), and Canac Sahib (1899) all flopped.
Tree continued in later years to look beyond Shakespeare and hackneyed melodramas for modern works. One interesting premier in 1909 was Brieux’s False Gods (originally titled La Foi). Set in ancient Egypt, the play symbolically challenges Catholics’ blind faith and belief in miracles. Though Tree might not heave noticed the underlying meaning and chose instead to exploit the spectacle of the play’s exotic setting, it seems more probable given Tree’s artistic temperament that he decided either to ignore the play’s message or to present it in a way that was likelier to please the public. In either case, the critics apparently understood and balked at the author’s message, and the playwright was upset by Tree’s emphasis on visual spectacle (Bingham Great Lover 185-87). The play was, furthermore, a financial success.
In 1913, Tree produced Shaw’s Pygmalion. More than with other playwrights, Tree’s relationship with Shaw was fraught with arguments over production values and vision. In his effort to direct the play, Shaw worked tirelessly to suppress the actors’ personalities with verbal harangues and long written lists of instructions, while Tree seemed intent either on ignoring Shaw or on interpreting the character Higgins with more pleasing effect (Bingham Great Lover 221-27). In Shaw’s words, they had been “treating one another throughout as beginners” (Shaw “Point of View” 242). But the play was a resounding success for both men.
In light of Tree’s willingness to mount plays that were either unproven or “distinguished but uncommercial” (Pearson 60)—that is, plays in which the foremost appeal was their ability to excite Tree’s imagination with their suggestive artistic possibilities—it makes sense to suppose that criticism of Tree’s revisions to playtexts for commercial profit in fact articulated more complicated concerns. In decades-long attacks on expensive and extravagant productions of Shakespeare, the common thread was that commerce as a general rule corrupts art and that the established mode of presenting plays had placed the means of production almost exclusively in the hands of the theatre owners (DiPietro 362). From Irving onward, furthermore, it was not uncommon for actor-managers to maintain their monopolies by buying up new plays simply to forestall production on others’ stages. Thus, Tree found himself leading a class whose financial and popular control over the theatre made him a necessary target for those who would protect dramatic art from the depredations of commerce.
The modern critics and dramatists fought the actor-managers’ tyranny over the theatre by undermining their entrepreneurial productions, by attacking their aesthetic as monolithic, immature, and shortsighted, and by criticizing their elitist exclusivity (DiPietro 358-62). What Tree lauded in his writing as the manager’s ability to shape taste by creating a demand for what is good was in fact the very thing his detractors hoped to staunch, for influence of this sort reinforced a system that made it nearly impossible for others to succeed. The antidote was instead to promote a national theatre subsidized by the state and free from the long-run system (DiPietro 362). Such a solution would transcend the commercial system of theatrical production even while it admitted new work that avoided being subjected to the actor-managers’ bias for pleasing effect.
Tree recognized this effort but refused to ally with it. Reflecting on the dearth of new plays capable of sustaining popular interest and on the unavoidable and costly financial exigencies associated with mounting plays, Tree believed that a subsidized theatre in England would fare no better than those in other countries where “the State machinery is liable to have grown rusty” in the attempt to keep pace with avant-garde theatre (Tree Thoughts 183-86). Among such practical considerations, underlying the proposal for a national theatre was a suggestion that the new repertory had to be selected by an “imaginative minority” of intellectuals potentially no less exclusionary than the actor-managers (DiPietro 363). Tree conceived of his traveling repertory as “a modernizing agent in the intellectual enfranchisement of the lower classes” (DiPietro 364), and that the public was the final arbiter of taste, not an intellectual elite.
During Tree’s production of Pygmalion, Shaw wryly suggested that the “cure for the disease of actor-managership . . . is actor-author-managership”—that by writing his own plays Tree would have empathized with the playwright and avoided the tension and misunderstanding that he and Shaw experienced as autonomous artists (Shaw “Point of View” 251). In Shaw’s words:
The conflict that raged between him and me at the rehearsals in his theatre would then have taken place in his own bosom. He would have taken a parental pride in other parts beside his own. He would have come to care for the play as a play, and to understand that it has powers over the audience even when it is read by people sitting round a table or performed by wooden marionettes. (Shaw “Point of View” 251)But Shaw probably underestimated Tree. Tree repeatedly deferred to the public’s role in identifying good art and the power of that art to please. Further, Tree brought numerous works representing the New Drama to the stage, even if he did occasionally wrap their messages in a pleasing effect. And in the process of supporting it through his habit of mind, Tree not only participated in but encouraged the New Drama’s success.
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