The Integration of Theatre History and Theatre Practice in the University: A Case Study using Ze zivota hmyzu (From the Life of the Insects), by Karel and Josef Capek by Stephen Johnson
NOTE: This article was published in Theatre Topics 4:2 (September 1994) 189-204. It was translated and reprinted in the Czech theatre studies journal, Divadelní revue 4/96. It describes the use of all the elements of research related to a particular theatrical text as a pedagogical tool in teaching through the preparation of a performance, those elements including: translation and adaptation, including comparing previous translations and attempting our own; the review literature for the original productions, along with any difficulties that arose and reaction by the playwrights; contextual information concerning the original production, including and especially the political ideologies of Communism and Fascism, along with Democracy and Capitalism; aesthetic concerns that influenced the early productions, including Futurism and Expressionism, especially manifested in the work of co-author and designer Josef Capek; and, finally, other cultural influences on the work that might not be obviously evident, in this case biology, and the popularization of the Entymology of J. H. Fabre, which postulated a learned social life for insects. What follows, though now dated, may still be of use in any production of this script (see Homepage for information on scripts).
Sections: Pedagogical Goals and Reasons for the Choice of Play General Uses of Research Critical Reception and the Defence against Nihilism Translation and the Provisional Script Visual Style and Interpretive Design Entymology and Acting Complications and Endings Endnotes
PEDAGOGICAL GOALS AND REASONS FOR THE CHOICE OF PLAY
In the university curriculum, a tradition persists that tends to segregate the study of theatre history from the practice of theatrical production.1 It is, perhaps, the difference between a written and a performative culture; certainly a historian in the archive appears to be a long way from the stage, however passionate the effort to understand and interpret the past theatrical event. Perhaps this tendency is a part of the traditional structure of the university, which has defined theatre practice as extracurricular enjoyment, a minor appendage to the study of literature, or training for a commercial industry. Not that any of these defined relationships between theatre practice and the university setting is somehow improper--theatre is an enjoyment, a means to investigate literary value, and a practical skill. Nor would I wish to imply that the documents and skills of theatre history are not consulted when historical texts are produced at university. Of course they are. I suggest, however, that the reading of such documents might be more rigorously incorporated into the curriculum, to the pedagogical advantage of both theatre history and practice. This article describes the results of one recent effort at greater rigour in the use of historical documentation for the preparation of a student production.
I teach in a small university "liberal arts" programme that offers, within an academic degree, a range of courses that focus on theatre practice. Efforts are made to integrate the history, theory, and practice with some success; because I am a theatre historian who directs, it makes sense that I should seek to combine these two aspects of my university job description. Recently I directed my department's major production for the academic year--an event which encompasses the full range of traditional university attitudes toward theatre practice. It was for many students extracurricular enjoyment. For a core of independent study students it was a means to learn the skills of acting, design, production, management, and construction. For the introductory dramatic literature course, attendance was a requirement. What I attempted, with the aid of a portfolio of documents, was to emphasize the connections between the original circumstances of production and our own.2
I chose as my source the original 1922-1923 productions of Ze zivota hmyzu (From the Life of the Insects), by Josef (1887-1945) and Karel Capek (1890-1938). The Capeks were active participants in the world of Czech experimental art and literature during and after the first world war, Josef as a visual artist, Karel as a writer and translator of poetry. After their play Rossum's Universal Robots became an international commercial success, producers from London, New York and the continent presented From the Life of the Insects, and satirical allegory with the following premise. A Tramp leaves the world of man behind and experiences a reverie of the insect world. The butterflies represent a sexually obsessed, narcissistic leisure class. The beetles represent a bourgeois capitalist class that are kind and loving to their own families, and prosper by the misfortune of others. The ants represent a collective tyranny, fairly clearly a reaction to the communist model, that turns into a militaristic bloodletting. This rather episodic display of caricature is observed by the Tramp and by an insect Chrysalis, who repeatedly announces her imminent birth and great works. At the end of the play, a number of flying insects (called Ephemera) dance in anticipation of the birth of the Chrysalis. All, including the Chrysalis, die as they dance. The Tramp wrestles with death himself, loses just as he realizes that life is worth living, and reappears again, at the end, as a more contented Pilgrim.
This was a pragmatic choice for the one full-length play produced each year at a university of 11,000 students--it had a large number of good, small roles, and extraordinary opportunity for creative acting and design. I also chose this "script", however, for the following reasons: (a) its literary qualities, while not easily dismissed, were debatable; (b) the original English translations were unacceptable for contemporary production; (c) it was obvious that the "significance" of any production of this script must, in part, be derived from elements other than language (co-author Josef Capek, for example, designed the first production); and (d) it focussed attention specifically on the experimental theatre and visual arts of the 1920s. As a theatre historian, I wanted to impress upon the students that the new production should be a re-interpretation of the entire original performance event, and not just a re-interpretation of a second-hand adaptation of a Czech playscript. We translated the script, compared adaptations, and created our own adaptation. In addition, we closely examined a portfolio of visual and written evidence relating to the early productions at the Prague National Theatre and on Broadway: photographs of both productions; critical commentary; and source materials for the script.
GENERAL USES OF RESEARCH
As might be expected, this material provided the student designers and actors with a general creative stimulus and assistance in solving practical problems. The lighting designer used the original design's Expressionist shafts of bright light, deep shadows, sudden and striking changes, and simultaneous acting areas. The makeup designer used heavily lined, abstracted faces. The choreographer (a dance and drama student) viewed film footage of Mary Wigman, and read widely in modern dance history, to create the movements of the Ephemera and the labourer-ants. The music director (a music and drama student) explored an assortment of early twentieth century music to accommodate the choreographer--including Georges Antheil's Violinsonate No. 2 for the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Cricket, and Mossolov's The Iron Foundry for the movements of the labourer-ants. The set and costume design, by contrast, focussed more on the Cubist and Futurist disruption of space and flattening of surfaces, in an effort to disrupt the audience's, and the human protagonist's, visual expectations. The student designers created an unreal grotesque world, rather than a world imitative of giant blades of grass. The actors, again by contrast, explored the social satire available through caricature, playing the social gest of the insect in good Brechtian form--the "flighty" arrogance of a butterfly, and the ground-hugging clutching of the capitalist dung beetles.
This general artistic stimulus represents one typical limit of theatre history's influence on production. Documents specific to the original productions are hardly necessary if this is the extent of the discussion. Closer examination of that documentation, however, exposed some complexities of theme and character in the original production that were not obvious from the available scripts. The diverse critical reception to this production, the aggressive re-interpretation of the original Czech in the English adaptations, the variety of design interpretation within and between productions, and the extent to which the popular writings of entymologist J. H. Fabre influenced the Capeks, all spoke against the simplicity of the work, and provided rich sources of intellectual and creative stimulus.
CRITICAL RECEPTION AND THE DEFENCE AGAINST NIHILISM
During our research we accumulated fifteen reviews of the 1922 Broadway opening, one scathing attack on the London production, and excerpts from a variety of Czech reviews of the Prague production. Newspaper reviews are always suspect sources of information. They are more interesting for their assumptions about theatre and society than for any critical detail, and as such are more useful when taken in large doses. In this case, the reviews were wildly mixed in their reaction, by turns praising the innovation and philosophical considerations and attacking the simple-mindedness of the allegory and the nihilism of the message. The contradictory responses by similarly employed, white middle-aged men sitting together at the same performance emphasized to us a contentious, contradictory vein in the production. There were more specific discussions about audience reception generated by the critical writing: one writer's moral reaction against the portrayal of sexual obsession on stage in Act One; and another's patriotic reaction against the negative portrayal of war in Act Three.3 These reinforced the changing ethical standards of the time, and the pervasive obsession with the recent war. By far the most important theme in the criticism, however, was the accusation of, and the resulting defence against, nihilism.
Critics who did not like the production wondered why writers with such a pessimistic world view would bother to communicate at all. St. John Ervine, in an article about the London production reprinted in the Boston Transcript (24 May 1923), was most scathing:
All this is a point of view, of course, but it is an extraordinarily lop-sided point of view. We are brutal and greedy and stupid and mean and cruel and murderous, no doubt; but we are also kind and generous and hopeful and aspiring and noble and heroic; and the trouble with the Brothers Capek is that they have not noticed our good points, because they have been so busy noticing our bad ones.... ...the Brothers Capek, who are destitute of poetic imagination and wit, bring to the play nothing but a one-eyed sort of moral indignation." John Corbin, in The New York Times, made the case more generally:
In Slav countries, one is told, pessimism is a fashion much affected by the very young. Books and plays that have the reputation of inspiring their readers to suicide achieve the greatest vogue. Be it so. A nation that delights in Pollyanna has little ground for complaint. It need only be noted that one may take this mid-European pessimism too seriously.
Even those who praised the play made reference to its negative philosophy; they tended to excuse or defend it as a cautionary tale--a dose of what the audience needed.
The Brothers Capek, as Ervine referred to them, vehemently and publicly disagreed with this assessment of their work. They wrote notes for the Prague programme, a Preface for the published version, comments for the Samuel French edition, and a letter to the New York Herald, all defending their play. The main thrust of their defence can be understood from the Preface:
One American critic wrote that the spectator wonders whether he should cut his throat, if the world is as bad as as it is depicted in this play. the authors entreat their audiences and readers not to do this, for it was not their intention to cut people's throats. Who the devil compels you to identify yourselves with butterflies or beetles, with crickets or ants or ephemerae? Because these creatures are depicted as loafers and self-seekers, as scoundrels and libertines, militarists and parasites, does it therefore follow that they denote people? Does the demonstration that private, family, or state selfishness is petty, insect-like, brutal and lousy, prove that everything human is lousy? Is there not at least one human being opposed to the insects, the tramp, a creature who sees all, judges and searches for a way? Each spectator or reader may attempt to see himself in the wandering tramp; instead of that--disquieted or scandalized--he has taken it for granted that it is his own image or the image of his society which he sees in these vermin, which in fact do represent--true, with a deliberate bias--certain vices. (translated in Harkins, Karel Capek 81-2).
"Identification" with the Tramp was the key to their intention, as they indicated in their other writing. "You, the public of our play," they said in their American editorial, "you yourself are Tramps; you are the living, enduring, truth-seeking consciences, just like our own Tramp. His life was sad only because he remained in the play alone...." (New York Herald 9 March 1923) Defensive they may have been, but they must have seen a legitimate problem as well. They wrote a second ending to their play, in which the Tramp does not die. Instead he wakes up, as if from a dream, and accepts a job from two passing woodcutters. The Capeks mentioned this ending in their American letter, and included it in a published Czech edition, labelled as follows:
For the Director: If the director wishes a more optimistic ending ["smírného konce"], use this variation (beginning with the exit of the Snails).
Our knowledge of the contentious discussion surrounding these early productions could not help but affect a contemporary production of the play. Clearly there was and is a difficulty communicating in production a basic intention of the authors--hope. And yet, because this historical context had been forgotten, the production history of this play has tended to suppress any complex reaction by emphasizing the script's simple comic satire. It has most often been produced as agit-prop, children's theatre, and as high school scene study. We worked to avoid this simplicity and satirical cynicism. We found that for every aspect of the production--translation, design, sources, and acting--the additional historical documentation provided corroborating evidence and the practical means to emphasize the play's complexities.
TRANSLATION AND THE PROVISIONAL SCRIPT
We initially examined two English language adaptations of the play, to judge whether either was suitable for our purpose. One was taken from the original Broadway production in 1922 (published by Samuel French as The World We Live In), the other from the first London production in 1923 (published by Oxford along with R.U.R.). The two were quite different from each other, and satisfied no one involved with the production. We commissioned a word-for-word annotated translation from two students, who subsequently acted as consultants during the process of adaptation. The complexity of translation was driven home to the students involved in two significant ways:
1. The intended sense of some words cannot be translated. This is far from obvious to undergraduate students, who in this case could compare several adaptations with the critical commentary. Example: The flying insects who enter at the end of the play, and dance until they die, are called "moths" in both the Broadway and London adaptations, presumably because they fly toward the light. The Czech word is "jedice", a fly with the Latin name "Ephemera".4 Our translators gave us the following information about these insects: they are quite beautiful; they live briefly and then die (hence the Latin name); and the word is used as a derogatory expression for people who are without value. This last meaning created a deep irony in the Capeks' use of this term that had been completely lost in translation. Our translators could no more find the appropriate word than other adaptors; but the knowledge that, apparently, audiences might have two simultaneous and contrasting responses to these characters coloured our design and acting of them, and clearly complicated our response to them in production.
Example: The translators similarly had some difficulty with the word for the protagonist, "Tulák", translated "Tramp" in London and "Vagrant" in New York. They felt that these words had more negative connotations than the original, which also had the more romantic sense of "Wanderer" or "Vagabond". Certainly there was a sense of aimlessness, which was contrasted in the script with the protagonist's resurrection at the end as a "Poutnik", or "Pilgrim". The questions raised, as with the word "Ephemera", indicated two very different potential attitudes to be taken toward the character. This information served to complicate our response, despite our use of the inadequate "Tramp".
2. Translator/Adaptors make interpretive decisions that have less to do with finding some dynamic equivalent to the original text's intention, than with second-guessing a commercial audience's expectations. The early adaptations of this play provided clear examples, and in fact went some way toward explaining the critical reception. For example, in the original Czech Prologue (and in our version) the Tramp remains alone on stage. Although he may be slightly drunk, he speaks with a rhetorical passion verging on poetry. His lengthy monologue, addressed to a flower and to the world, is interrupted by a comic "Pedant", who is violently searching for Butterfly specimens. The London adaptation removed most of the poetic tone along with the Prologue, except for the Pedant. The Tramp was given a Cockney accent, as part of an emphasis on the class differences in the text. This clearly placed the protagonist on a lower social order than a West End audience in 1923 which, combined with the drunkeness, distanced him from their sympathy. This was a strong statement, not consistent with the original text or with statements by the playwrights. The Broadway adaptation made an even more radical decision. The Prologue in this version is in prose dialogue form between a "Professor" from the city and the "Vagrant". The Vagrant, obviously an outcast from society, is also clearly drunk. The Professor, just as obviously a positive representative of society, kindly offers to help him back to the city. Like the London version, this tends to diminish the protagonist in our eyes. We could only surmise that Owen Davis, the Broadway adaptor, did not believe a mass North American audience would sit still for an opening monologue of some length, or a protagonist as cynically serious as the original indicates. Both versions have made a choice to emphasize one simple view of the Tramp, rather than the more complex view which, as we have seen, the playwrights advocated.
VISUAL STYLE AND INTERPRETIVE DESIGN
Research at New York and Prague archives produced a variety of photographs of the 1922 productions in those cities. The New York set design (nominally by Lee Simonson) was advertised as based on Capek's original designs for Prague (by Josef Capek and the director, Hilar). The photographs show a similar design; but they also show strong interpretive choices both within and between productions. Within each production, the designer had clearly made decisions as to the degree of humanity of each character. Some insects were more human than others--Mr. and Mrs. Cricket moreso than Mr. Fly, for example, and Mr. Fly moreso than Mr. Dung Beetle. Within one species, some characters were more human than others--Felix the untalented poet-butterfly moreso than Ottokar the untalented lover-butterfly. In addition, the different productions altered design in a way that re-interpreted character, perhaps in an effort to second-guess different audience expectations. The appearance of the Dung Beetles in the Broadway production, for example, emphasized their comic personae. The designers made them into oversized burlesque comics, with bowler hats, baggy pants, and what appears to be tramp makeup. By contrast, the Czech Dung Beetle was more obviously a social caricature. While there was no doubt humour in the portrayal, the design emphasized the long grasping fingers and oversized jaw that might best by compared to a political cartoon. Similarly, the Tramp in the Prague and New York productions was quite ordinary in his appearance. He was as human as he could be in a world of insects. One of our translators, however, provided photographs of the very first production of the text in Brno. In this production the figure of the Tramp was fierce and nearly inhuman. His makeup was Expressionist; he reminded the students of their viewing of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari in film class.
Whatever the script indicates, designers can strongly interpret character, and define audience response. Our working theory, based on a comparison of the photographs with the other documentation, consisted of two conflicting audience responses. Our first proposal was that the more human we made the design, the more likely we were of eliciting a sympathetic audience response toward the character--the more insect-like, the more unsympathetic the response. Our second, more complicated proposal was that there were two audience responses to the insect design--the comic and the grotesque. Felix receives more sympathy than Ottokar, whose "insect" appearance in context makes him more ridiculous. Mrs. Cricket receives more sympathy than Mr. Fly, whose "insect" appearance was more unsettling to audiences, primarily because he murders Mrs. Cricket on stage. In the same manner, we postulated that the Brno production intended a more tormented, less human Tramp, and the Prague production a more frightening Dung Beetle. All of this was speculation; but it emphasized, along with the other evidence, that very mixed messages were being presented to the audience. Beginning with an examination of these designs, the degree of humanity of each character became an important consideration for our designers, helping to assess the interpretation of relationships between characters, and between character and audience. We did in fact make Felix more human than Ottokar, and Mrs. Cricket than Mr. Fly. The case of the Tramp was more creative. His makeup was made increasingly expressionist and violent with each act, inspired by the very different interpretations, manifesting an interpretation of character as a descent into an increasingly animalistic state.
This interesting design dialectic led to our use of puppets. Puppetry in this play provided solutions to some design problems--we had some difficulty designing a costume for a snail, for example. It also allowed us to present both human and insect forms at once on stage, exposing the dialectic to the audience. This was best illustrated in the images of Mr. Fly and his daughter, Larva, which we believed were the most grotesque characters. Both sympathy and revulsion could be encouraged at once by presenting two large puppet insects operated by two quite human characters, a businessman and his little girl. This use of puppetry ranged far from the original design; but it was very close, from our reading of the documents, to the original intention.
ENTYMOLOGY AND ACTING
The playtext called for human characters who showed their insect qualities through minor gesture and vocal mannerisms. One eyewitness to the Prague production attested to this, by complaining of the constant "buzzing" that made the actors "all exhausted and sweaty...afterwards." (Jeviste 242-3) As we have seen, however, the designers did not obey the text. As a social satire, the previously mentioned Brechtian "gest" was an appropriate starting point for an actor; however, some dramaturgical research revealed a source that greatly enriched the actors' experience. The Capeks based their play on their reading of the works of J. H. Fabre, a prolific and popular nineteenth century entymologist. His works--discussions of insect life based on his decades of observation--were used in schools, and widely translated. Two series of English language translations were available to us in local libraries. The connection between this writer and the world of the Capeks goes far beyond basic character names. Our advisors from the Biology Department suggested two important characteristics of Fabre's work: (a) his observational skills are still respected; and (b) his theoretical conclusions are wrong. Fabre attributed to insects learned behavour, social skills, and a family life. This basic error of anthropomorphism had a profound effect on his writing, which tended to be narrative, moralistic, family-oriented, and quite personal. These same attitudes pervade the play. We could use this source in three ways during rehearsal that enriched the work.
1. Fabre's work provided the "given circumstances" for some characters that would never have been found in the playtext. To give one example, Fabre writes at length about Dung Beetles. He attributes to the male all the qualities of a "good" father--loving, devoted, self-sacrificing. He also describes the robber-like qualities of this creature; they will, he says, "pretend" to help another dung beetle move its ball and then, at the first distraction, take it for its own. This information is quite persuasive and affecting in the reading, however wrong-headed. In practice, this material was used in rehearsal to explore alternative means of playing the obvious type. Mr. Dung Beetle remains a comic buffoon; but when he has lost his ball, he has lost his whole world. This is no small matter. The actor playing this role briefly created an identifiable loss, and elicited the audience's sympathy. Such moments were used elsewhere, to complicate the audience response, and to prevent ourselves from playing the prevailing nihilism.
2. Fabre's work provided the impetus for a less realistic, more "gestic" development of character in rehearsal. Again, to give one example, the Parasite in Act Two, a hypocritical socialist, has no single original in Fabre, and no specific insect identity in the play. Of all the characters, it appears to have been the one least affected by any entymological reading by the authors. There are, however, several kinds of parasitic insects described in Fabre's work--varieties of wasp, worm, and tic. The company dramaturge, who had accumulated this information, worked with the actress playing the Parasite. In one particularly effective rehearsal he asked her to portray her role as if she were each of these varieties of parasite. They then discussed which variety--which gest--might suit her different social relationships with the Tramp, the Fly, the Chrysalis, and the Larva. This was a far different rehearsal process, and a more varied performance, than would have been possible with only the single caricature visible in the text.
3. Fabre's work brought the world of biology into our production, and this perhaps was our greatest revelation. The Biology Department provided us with information, with encouragement, and with physical examples of everything we were playing. The university connections we made were unprecedented, and the easy familiarity surprising. Biologists knew Fabre; but, to our surprise, they also knew Maurice Maeterlinck. They did not know him as a symbolist playwright, but as the author of a book about bees. Upon further investigation, we found an article by Maeterlinck about Fabre, praising the artistic achievement of his biological writing (Vers et Prose). Our play thus became part of a tradition that united scientific observation and poetic narrative.
COMPLICATIONS AND ENDINGS
The documents used in the preparation of this production took some time and trouble to accumulate. The research was conducted as if a scholarly article would result; instead, a theatrical production was created. No doubt a successful production would have resulted without the benefit of these materials; their inclusion in the process I believe benefitted the teaching of both theatre history and theatre practice. They forced students to treat the potential difficulties in the audience reception of the play. They provided a variety of differing design interpretations for study and imitation. Above all, these materials provided a way into the complexities of the original productions of this work. Without these materials, I do not believe this production would have been a particularly worthwhile pedagogical experience. Unlike the literary works that dominate period theatrical production at university, what might make From the Life of the Insects worth producing and studying simply does not rest in its script.
The troubled final page of this play perhaps provides the best example of the usefulness of this kind of historical dramaturgy. Both endings were complete disasters in rehearsal. Even our most stalwart and serious translator burst out in horror (and laughter) when we followed the directions given in the second ending:
THE WHOLE WORLD: A happy good day! A--happy--good--day!
We improvised and adapted in rehearsal, looking for an image that undercut the nihilism without eliciting laughter. The actor portraying the Tramp found the image that suited our production during rehearsal of a revised ending. In this ending, after the Tramp dies, and the actor backs upstage slowly into the darkness, leaving his coat behind him as a symbol of his "corpse". This "corpse" is found by two woodcutters, who consider what they should do with the body. The actor who has played the Tramp re-enters, now playing a "Pilgrim", as specified by the text. At this rehearsal the actor entered while removing the evening's accumulation of Expressionist makeup from his face. He was positive and happy. He offered to help carry the "corpse" back to town, emphasized the beauty of the morning and his eagerness to get on with the day, and mourned the fact that the dead man (his former self) could not share that beauty. The last image of the play was, then, of an actor/pilgrim, stooping for a moment over the dead Chrysalis, in mourning before rejoining the world. Removing the makeup in full view made the ending work. It suited the intention we had been developing through the rehearsal process, a limited sense of hope in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What is most important in this example, however, is that the actor re-interpreted the ending himself, in a way that I believe would not have been possible without the understanding acquired through an examination of the historical documents.
ENDNOTES
1. In the most recent issue of Theatre Journal Vol 45:4 (December 1993) Jill Dolan notes this segregation more generally between the study the critical theory of "performance under the rubric of theatre studies" and "the most undertheorized theatre practice." In "Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the `Performative'," page 424. 2. A number of artists contributed to the portfolio of documents used in this case study, and to the understanding of the Capeks' work. They include: Vera Dernovsek and Marie Franek, who rendered the Czech into English and advised on the adaptation; Paul Rivers, the Production Dramaturge, who made himself into an authority on J. H. Fabre; the Designers, Christina Rozendaal (Masks/Puppets), Penelope Hammond (Costumes), Lauren McKinley (Set), Stephen Clarke (Make-up), and Taras Cymbalisty (Lighting); the Choreographer (and third Ephemera, last to die), Michelle Hill; the Music Director, Cindy Carey; and the cast, most especially Carl Gambacourt, who created the Tramp with the authors' wishes in his mind's eye. 3. With respect to the portrayal of sexuality, the critic for The New York Post (1 November 1922) described Act One as `objectionably crude' and a `perversion': ...there is not the slightest pretence of any purpose save that of providing a bait to please the commonest and least discriminating class of feeders. The unimaginative crudity of speech and action here might easily have justified a little censorial inquisition. This part of the show is fabricated of the cheapest and most unworthy sort of theatrical stuff.' With respect to the theme of war, The New York Post, for example, praised Act Three for suggesting `the frightful waste of life and labor in the brutal stupidity of war, which has a significance wholly apart from its impressiveness as a stage picture....' The significant exception to this opinion was John Corbin in The New York Times (1 November 1922), who calls Act Three `a travesty conceived in the spirit of the wartime pacifist and peacetime hater of progress.' 4. William E. Harkins, in his book on Karel Çapek, calls these characters ephemerae. Alexander Matu_ka, in his book, calls them mayflies, a species of ephemerae.
Works Cited
Brothers Capek. The Insect Play: "And So, Ad Infinitum". Translated by Paul Selver and adapted by Nigel Playfair and Clifford Bax. Published in R.U.R. and The Insect Play. London: Oxford University Press, 1961,1970. Capek, Karel and Josef. The Life of the Insects. Translated by Paul Selver. In Everyman's Library No. 989: Poetry and Drama--International Modern Plays. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., n.d. Capek, Josef and Karel. The World We Live In. Adapted and arranged for the American stage by Owen Davis. New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1922, 1933, 1960. Capek, Karel and Josef. Ze SpoleÖné Tvorby. Praha: Ceskoslovensk_ Spisovatel, 1982. Corbin, John. "The Play: Libelling the Insects," New York Times 1 November 1922. Ervine, St. John. "Girding at the Capeks," Boston Transcript 24 May 1923. Fabre, Jean-Henri. The Hunting Wasps. Translated by Alexander Teizeira De Mattos. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1924. ---. Life of the Fly. Translated by Alexander Teizeira De Mattos. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1913. ---. The Sacred Beetle and Others. Translated by Alexander Teizeira De Mattos. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1918. ---. Social Life in the Insect World. Translated by Bernard Miall. New York: Century Co., 1920. ---. Souvenirs Entomologiques. Volumes 1-10. Paris: Librarie Delagrave, 1914-24. Harkins, William E. Karel Capek. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962. Maeterlinck, Maurice. "Jean-Henri Fabre," in Vers et Prose, Volume 21 (April-May-June 1910) pages 32-46. ---. "My Theatrical Impressions," Jeviste (No. 3, April-May 1922) pp. 242-3, 315. ---. "'World We Live In' Trivial Stuff," New York Post 1 November 1922.