Abstract
Towards the end of his essay, ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, first published in The Dial in 1920, T. S. Eliot says:
The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which wanted entertainment of a crude sort, but would stand a good deal of poetry; our problem should be to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art. Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best material.1
Don’t worry about laughter and jokes. There’s always somebody who’s going to tell you what’s funny and how it’s funny and why it’s funny. Don’t worry about that. If it’s funny, it’s funny, if it’s not, it’s not. Aristotle tried it and he failed miserably, and he was a pretty smart cat, you know that. Aristotle, Aristotle, poor old Aristotle. You know, there’s a peculiar thing, they say that he died in Chalsis, Nubia. I disagree, I think he died — of — Chalsis Nubia.(Shelley Berman)
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Notes
Harold Manning, ‘Holder’s and Day’s: Two Early Birmingham Music Halls’,Alta 2 (1969) 92–4. Holder’s Rodney Inn and Concert Hall is also illustrated in David Cheshire, Music Hall in Britainp. 18.
Interview with Ronald Hayman,The TimesSaturday Review (24 June 1972 ) p. 11.
Jeanne de Casalis,Mrs Feather’s Diary( London, 1936 ). This adapts the technique to printed form.
Martin Esslin,Pinter: a Study of his Plays(2nd edn, 1973) p. 176.
Harold Pinter, ‘Writing for the Theatre’,Evergreen Review33 (Aug/Sept, 1964 ) 80.
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© 1982 Peter Davison
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Davison, P. (1982). The Music-Hall Tradition. In: Contemporary Drama and the Popular Dramatic Tradition in England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05177-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05177-9_2
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