ABSTRACT
True satire offers both a more fantastically distorted vision and a sharper criticism of life than the traditional stage comedy can support if it is to meet its audience's expectations. The other difficulty about combining satire with the stage is that all satire is to some degree allegorical; its characters have to stand for something beyond the literal level. They may be personae for the satirist himself or they may be fantastic monsters cloaking abstract moral ideas. Stage drama tends to avoid allegory, for good reasons. The naturalistic drama of the nineteenth century laid down much stricter criteria for judging the illusion, but the earlier drama, whether classical or Renaissance, also had strict rules aimed at producing some kind of realism. The finest satire of the nineteenth century is in Ibsen's mature drama, although Ibsen's genius is too great to be confined to satire at any single point.
