Theatrical Arts

Abstract

One of Hardy’s earliest ambitions was to write plays in blank verse. As a young man in the 1860s, he even sought experience as an actor on the London stage, believing that this would teach him the techniques of drama. Forty years later he fulfilled his ambition in a manner he could hardly have anticipated, in his epic-drama, The Dynasts. In the intervening years, certainly from 1875 onwards, this work was being dreamed over, planned, prepared, and finally written — the magnum opus compared with which Hardy seems to have felt, like Milton similarly setting his sights on Paradise Lost, that in his prose works he had the use of his left hand only. Meanwhile, however, the dramatic talents which had to wait so long to burst out into sudden blaze found an outlet in the despised prose itself.