Description
IN a notice of the performance of this play by the Unnamed Society, in Manchester, the critic of a dramatic weekly referred to it as a “ chronicle play.” This is exactly What Shah-Jahan is not. A chronicle play takes certain scenes from history, with in general an adherence to the facts, so far as these are assumed to be known. There is in consequence no plot, and the action merely happens. It just was so. It is only in rare cases that history apes the imaginative artist, and constructs as carefully as he. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is a chronicle play, so is Drinkwater’s Cromwell, or Abraham Lincoln. In Shah-Jahan I have taken history as merely supplying the raw material of my play, and I have not hesitated to shape that material exactly as I pleased to suit the purposes of the action. If in doing this I have achieved an approximate truth of atmosphere and of character (the latter as I have conceived it) I have done all I intended to do, and as much I maintain as any “chronicle play ” ever does. Nothing can be more misleading than “ the truth of facts,” seeing that the facts are never accurately known, and whatever significance they may have is due to the temperamental content imparted by the historian or the artist.