Poet Lore (Volume 20) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1909. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... VOLUME XX JULY--AUGUST NUMBER 4 BEFORE DAWN* (VOR SONNENAUFGANG) A social drama By Gerhart Hauptmann Translated by Leonard Bloomfield TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE The naturalistic movement of the latter nineteenth century went to great lengths in Germany. One reason for this was an oppressive censorship that goaded to resistance. Plays that criticized the existing order of things -- which naturalistic plays almost always do -- could not be produced on the public stage; but, as literary movements in Germany are highly conscious and take themselves very seriously, enough enthusiasts were soon found to form a ' Free Stage' society, which, as a private organization, produced and witnessed what plays it liked. The 'Free.Stage' was opened in the fall of 1889 with Ibsen's 'Ghosts'; in October of that year it presented for the first time Hauptmann's first play, ' Vor Sonnenaufgang." With the rugged power of German youth Hauptmann pushed the naturalism of the time to its extreme limits. 'Vor Sonnenaufgang, ' depicts the revolting conditions among the Suddenly enriched peasants of the Silesian coal district with unrelenting fulness of detail, extreme even for those days. The alarmistic theories of heredity that were. current in semi-scientific circles are used to the utmost as the very basis of the tragedy. In short, the play marks an extreme of the past, >n extreme which the generation now in the prime of life remember, in which, indeed, its best men took an enthusiastic part. * But even aside from the historical interest, ' Vor Sonnenaufgang ' is a drama o*' considerable emotional-force. Granting all that was said against it in the bitte polemics of thoseyears--the faults of the play are obvious enough, --the intense powe