ABSTRACT
In their appeal to the music hall, charade, pantomime and circus the verse dramatists were taking hold of rituals which were less and less part of everyday life, and they were using verse which even in poetry was less and less a dominant medium. There was one institution, also fading, which was an obvious home for verse drama and non-realistic presentation since it lived in two worlds and dealt naturally with the interaction of those worlds by ritual, emblematic colours and elevated language. But the Church faced the problem of being shown to be relevant to contemporary life though the problem was less acute for a dramatist since his audience, a congregation, was not merely accustomed to language and ritual but also was accustomed to being bored or puzzled in the interest of moral uplift or spiritual consolation. The relationship between religion and art is confusing, and verse adds to the confusion, but of course religious verse drama is a coterie theatre and basically irrelevant to the problem of verse in the theatre of our time.
