We have fairy plays by J. M. Barrie,[239] W. B. Yeats,[240] and Maeterlinck,[241] and the mermaid has even been staged,[242] Bernard Shaw shows us the devil in his own home town, while Hauptmann gives us Hannele's visions of heaven. The Frankenstein theme is used to provoke laughter mixed with thrills.[243] Owen and Robert Davis[244] symbolize man's better angel, while _The Eternal Magdalene_, a dream-drama, shows another piece of symbolic supernaturalism. Lord Dunsany's plays have already been mentioned. [239] _Peter Pan._ [240] _The Land of Heart's Desire._ [241] _The Blue Bird._ [242] _The Mermaid._ [243] In _The Last Laugh_, by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard. [244] In _Any House_. Yet the drama, though showing a definite revival of the supernatural, and illustrating various forms of it, is more restricted than fiction. Many aspects of the occult appear and the psychic drama is popular, but the necessities of presentation on the stage inevitably bar many forms of the ghostly art that take their place naturally in fiction. The closet drama does not come under this limitation, for in effect it is almost as free as fiction to introduce mystical, symbolic, and invisible presences. The closet drama is usually in poetic form and poetry is closer akin to certain forms of the supernatural than is prose, which makes their use more natural. The literary playlet, so popular just now, uses the ghostly in many ways. One shows the Archangel Raphael with his dog, working miracles, while another includes in its _dramatis personæ_ a faun and a moon goddess who insists on giving the faun a soul, at which he wildly protests. As through suffering and human pain he accepts the gift, a symbolic white butterfly poises itself on his uplifted hand, then flits toward Heaven. In another, Padraic yields himself to the fairies' power as the price of bread for the girl he loves. Theodore Dreiser's short plays bring in creatures impossible of representation on the stage, "persistences" of fish, animals, and birds, symbolic Shadows, a Blue Sphere, a Power of Physics, Nitrous Acid, a Fast Mail (though trains have been used on the stage), and so forth. Instances from recent German drama might be given, as the work of August Stramm, who like Rupert Brooke and the ill-starred poets of the Irish revolution has fallen as a sacrifice to the war. An article in the _Literary Digest_ says of Stramm that "he felt behind all the beauty of the world its elemental passions and believed these to be the projections of human passions in the waves of wind and light and water, in flames of earth." He includes among his characters[245] a Spider, Nightingales, Moonlight, Wind, and Blossoms. Carl Hauptmann[246] likewise shows the elemental forces of nature and of super-nature. On the battlefield of death the dead arise to join in one dreadful chant of hate against their enemies. [245] In _Sancta Susanna_.