Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/22

 within, resulting to the literal-minded in virtual defraudation. More than any other, drama of this type refuses to be read; it is imperative consciously to induce the action if the reader desires to enter into possession of the play. The unwritten action occurs in most highly developed form in drama of the will, where the shocks and conflicts are most powerful, most striking, and most intense, and therefore sharper in outline and emotionally more articulate than in the case in drama of mental states and of ideas. With the pure psychologic drama, this drama of twofold, contrasted action in which the doings of man are projected against the vastness of a universal background, is the most original, as well as the most elusive creation of the Benaventian theatre, treacherous and inhospitable to the unwary, but finely conscriptive of the imagination, opening out into new vistas before those who have eyes to see, receding into unsuspected depths. However modern and metaphysical in form, is it indeed surprising that this most subtle, most subjective of dramas, this theatre of equivocation beneath a world of hard reality, should, after three centuries, have sprung from the stem of Cervantes and the line of Quixote?

"Saturday Night," the most important of the plays contained in the present volume, enjoying with "The Bonds of Interest" and "La Malquerida," wide popular reputation, invites attention as the earliest example of the mature subjective style. It is a composition of peculiar difficulty, the appreciation of which requires both effort and time. Imperia, or ambition, the will, trades upon and then forgets her youth, acquiring wealth and power, at last drawing near the throne of empire of which she has dreamed. Her ambitions already on the road to fulfilment, she turns to recover Donina, her youth, whom she finds amid the blare of a circus, from which she passes to take part in a scene of wild saturnalia, or witches' sabbath, to which all the characters repair. Here, in a striking dramatic crisis, her old life dies at the hand of youth, which is itself exhausted in the blow. Aghast, Imperia summons Leonardo, the imagination to her aid, from whom, long years ago in the dawn of her