ABSTRACT
The history of the drama in the nineteenth century has been one of an increasingly proficient commercial theatre, exploiting such avant-garde ideas as seemed fruitful, and either driving out the man of letters or teaching him, as broadcasting has also done, to write the plays that the public will accept. A new and refreshing influence came to the theatre, however, in the shape of Russian drama, which had been slow in making its effect on Western Europe. Bjornson's humanitarianism was matched by the social melodrama of Hermann Sudermann in Germany, and by the serious ventilation of social evils of Eugene Brieux in France, where Zola also applied his theories of naturalism to the theatre. Friedrich Hebbel failure to discover the possibilities of symbolism explored by Ibsen leave him, for all his psychological insights, on the wrong side of the great divide that separates the modern from the melodramatic theatre.
