of Eliot, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender.

Fry seldom sought to come to grips with the modern world by taking it as the arena of his explorations. Rather, he worked by indirection, indicating in the world of his plays the importance of the individual, the meaning of humanity, the futility and needless cruelty of wars, and the possibilities for redeeming life through love. Having demonstrated the vitality latent in the world, Fry believed that he made sufficient comment on the modern situation. This approach is misleading in view of Fry’s claim to be interested in the problems of his own time, for the emphasis in his work appears to be not on modern human beings, but on humankind, as if Fry thought he could best restore human life to its proper heritage not by showing the paltry thing it has become in the twentieth century, but by showing what it has been and yet may be. Thus, Fry’s dramaturgy stemmed from his romanticism, which expressed itself in an undaunted humanism and drew its vocabulary from natural and biblical sources. In Fry, there is little of the peculiarly modern vocabulary that one finds in other contemporary playwrights; as a general rule, the science Fry drew on for his images is that of alchemy or astronomy; his psychology was that of the theory of humors; his textbook, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). It is not surprising, then, to find the charge of romantic escapism leveled against Fry: The dangers inherent in his approach are obvious.

Given his orientation, the problem Fry faced in terms of language is perhaps clearer when one considers that the mainstream of poetic idiom for the modern verse play is that established by Eliot and manipulated by Auden and others. This is an idiom, on the whole, expressive of the modern world as it has appeared to these poets, and such a language could be of little use to Fry. He needed a language not to embody the dreary failure and, at best, partially reclaimed successes of the modern world, but a language to carry as much as possible the wonder, the miracle, the exuberance of a world that, most likely, never was. Against Eliot’s habitual understatement, Fry’s project demands a language of overstatement, resulting in excesses: the riot of images that often impede the dramatic progress of a passage, the wit or whimsy that sometimes seems to exist for the sake of its own good nature, and the verbal coinages that can be effective theater for a time but begin to pall before the end of the third act.

Fry’s linguistic debts have been traced to various and varying sources, and if all of the critics are right in their assumptions about sources, his verse has an impressive (but impossible) cosmopolitan paternity. Fry’s work has been linked to that of the Georgians, but the Elizabethan playwrights as well as the Jacobeans, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, are most often named as his literary ancestors. Fry’s desire to recapture a sense of life and wonder does suggest certain early seventeenth century parallels, as do specific literary borrowings from William Shakespeare’s comedies. In this respect also, Fry’s dominant rhythmic pattern is usually blank verse, although he makes extensive use of variations involving a four-stress line and the anapestic foot, which give his verse its characteristic speed.

Clearly, Fry’s verse drama has taken a direction quite opposite from Eliot’s, and one need only compare Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (pr. 1949) and Fry’s Venus Observed, both published in 1950 and both dealing thematically with the acceptance of limitations and the discovery of identity, to discern the differences in verse and treatment. In the Eliot play, the verse is submerged, approximating in general the common speech of modern people, rising to poetry only in moments of emotional intensity. In the Fry play, the verse is insistent throughout the play. Although both playwrights are concerned with the human being in his social context, the verse of The Cocktail Party seems much more solid, genuinely grounded in an action, which in itself has a depth that the action in the Fry play lacks.

Fry, as a dramatist, did not consistently master the third voice of poetry identified by Eliot in “The Three Voices of Poetry” as “the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse: when he is saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.” Fry’s characters, no matter how exorbitant their humors, generally reveal in their speech the voice of the poet, slightly academic and a little self-conscious, and it is for this reason that so many of Fry’s characters sound alike.