The Multiple Set in American Drama

Extract

Francis Fergusson suggests that the drama since Shakespeare and until the 1940’s, when The Idea of a Theater was written, is partial in its “perspectives”, each play a “fragment” of Shakespeare’s “great mirror”. Kenneth Burke suggests that there is a close relationship between the nature of a play’s setting and its sense of action (A Grammar of Motives). Taken together, these statements indicate a relationship between the partial perspective of modern drama and the naturalist settings which prevailed in that drama from the Restoration to the Second War. They also indicate a relationship between the multiple set that has become popular in the American theatre since the war and the perspectives which the dramatists are trying to achieve.