CIVIC DRAMA, THE, the customary name for the plays of public duty and private attachment which grew from the licensed stage (q.v.) of the Commonwealth. The name describes a prevailing interest, not a single dramatic form. A tragedy of a Roman magistrate, a comedy of a provincial election, and a representation accompanied by music may all belong to it, provided that public conduct supplies the action and is not merely discussed between the acts.
Its earliest resource was the licence obtained by Davenant in 1656 for representations in recitative music. The distinction between speaking and singing preserved dramatic practice during the long closure. The Relicensing of the Stage (q.v.) in 1695 restored the playhouses, but placed them under the Committee of Manners and forbade the representation of a living magistrate. Ancient Rome supplied the writers with an ample company of dead ones. The toga became a device for bringing contemporary difficulties before an audience without bringing contemporary persons before the licenser.
The convention possesses real advantages. An obligation already understood by the spectators need not be laboriously explained; the household and the city can make rival claims upon the same character; and the public decision, because it cannot be postponed indefinitely, gives the action a term. Its recurrent fault is to make each person the custodian of a proposition. Such figures can exchange excellent speeches without affecting one another. The play becomes a debate which the scenery has been invited to attend.
An anonymous tragedy, The Second Consul, printed at London in 1748, shows both the force and the weakness of the manner. Its two consuls have promised incompatible things to the same defeated town. One would keep his word and endanger the republic; the other would keep the republic safe and call his word a private undertaking. Their dispute fills the first acts with argument of considerable address. The play comes alive when the messenger refuses to carry either answer, because his own brother is among those to whom the promise was made. For a brief scene the public question is changed by the person who must perform its consequence. The conclusion restores the consuls to their fine speeches and loses much of what the messenger had won.
Comedy has found the convention less accommodating. A magistrate transferred to antiquity can still be formidable; a fashionable absurdity loses something when its coat is changed. The best civic comedy accordingly attends to the subordinate transactions of public life: the family which has prepared its congratulations too soon, the petitioner who cannot remember which virtue he praised in which candidate. It borrows from the periodical essay (q.v.) the capacity to let vanity disclose itself. Its danger is the easy discovery that every one except the author is a hypocrite.
The relation to oratorio (q.v.) remains visible in the chorus and in the dignity assigned to public lament. But music can sustain a repeated sentiment which spoken drama must develop or abandon. Our playwrights have too often borrowed the repetition without the music. The civic drama has formed habits of serious attention and preserved a place for moral conflict upon the stage; it has not yet produced a master equal to the greatness which its defenders claim for the intention alone. (H. M.)