Word: themes
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Dates: during 1900-1909
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...will be a dedication prologue, "The Scarecrow," written especially for the Dramatic Club by C. D. Clifton '12, leader of the orchestra. Unlike the overture to "The Promised Land," composed last fall by P. G. Clapp '09, this prologue will not so much provide a mere epitome of the theme of the play as attempt to picture the relations of the motives and characters of the drama proper. There are four ideas, fantasy, love, grotesqueness, and aspiration; each of these will be treated with respect to its relative importance. The prologue is, however, from the standpoint of the musical analyst...
...here the poets and story-writers take up the theme. The two stories are no better, and not much worse, than the run of college football tales. Mr. Moore's "A Pack of Cards" lumbers heavily over a comedy situation, with inadequate characterization and conventional dialogue. "Me and Her" goes to the other extreme, being rather cleverly written about little or nothing. The reader, however, becomes weary of the coquettish parentheses addressed to him. "The Spectators" is weak description wherein exaggeration does duty as humor...
...Scarecrow" is based on Hawthorne's tale of "Feathertop," but is in no way a dramatization of it. "Starting with the same basic theme," Mr. MacKaye writes in his introduction to the published play, "I have sought to elaborate it, by my own treatment, to a different and more inclusive issue." He builds from Hawthorne's satire of coxcombry and charlatanism, "a tragedy of the ludicrous." In Hawthorne, "the scarecrow Feathertop is ridiculous, as the emblem of a superficial fop;" in Mr. MacKaye's play, "the scarecrow Ravensbane is pitiful, as the emblem of human bathos." The play...
...this sounds very serious, indeed, but the underlying tragedy of the theme comes to the surface only at intervals. The prevailing note is comedy, and there is much rich humor of character and situation. The first act, in the blacksmith shop of Goody Rickby, the witch, in a seventeenth century Massachusetts village, shows the creation and early training of the scarecrow, who, under the title of Lord Ravensbane, is sent into the world to avenge on Rachel, the daughter of Justice Merton, the wrong that the latter in his youth has inflicted on the witch. Attended by Dickon, "a Yankee...
...with poetic delicacy of sentiment. Mr. E. E. Hunt's prize poem, "John Milton," may be regarded as a welcome addition to what seemed to some of us our inadequate celebration of the poet's tercentenary; and it deserves the high praise of being called worthy of its lofty theme. Mr. George Meredith, whom also we ought particularly to delight to honor, since Harvard men were among the first to recognize his peculiar genius, is the subject of the ablest article in the issue. It is not a criticism which can be termed original, learned, or profoundly analytical...