The most effective moments in the theatre are those that appeal
to basic and commonplace emotions--love of woman, love of home,
love of country, love of right, anger, jealousy, revenge,
ambition, lust, and treachery. From the viewpoint of analytic
psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be
considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass
complex. Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but
its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground
is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. It is
remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed everyone is at a
play. We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is
wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment. To treat a
big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an
evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped
at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of
which the difficulty looms large. The theatre is the involuntary
reflex of the ideas of the c