A play is a representation, by actors, on a stage, before an audience, of a
struggle between individual human wills, motivated by emotion rather than
by intellect, and expressed in terms of objective action.




II

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THEATRE AUDIENCES


I

The drama is the only art, excepting oratory and certain forms of music,
that is designed to appeal to a crowd instead of to an individual. The
lyric poet writes for himself, and for such selected persons here and there
throughout the world as may be wisely sympathetic enough to understand his
musings. The essayist and the novelist write for a reader sitting alone in
his library: whether ten such readers or a hundred thousand ultimately read
a book, the writer speaks to each of them apart from all the others. It is
the same with painting and with sculpture. Though a picture or a statue may
be seen by a limitless succession of observers, its appeal is made always
to the individual mind. But it is different with a play. Since a drama is,
in essence, a story devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an
audience, it must necessarily be designed to appeal at once to a multitude
of people. We have to be alone in order to appreciate the _Venus of Melos_
or the _Sistine Madonna_ or the _Ode to a Nightingale_ or the _Egoist_ or
the _Religio Medici_; but who could sit alone in a wide theatre and see