I
In the eighteenth century, both in England and in France, every stately
and ponderous tragedy and every self-respecting comedy obeyed the
obligation imposed by long tradition and duly stretched itself out to
the full measure of five acts, no more and no less. It felt bound thus
to distend itself, even tho its theme might be far too frail for so huge
a frame, and even tho the unfortunate author often found himself at his
wit's end to piece out his play's end. Any one who has had occasion to
read widely in the works of the eighteenth century playwrights cannot
fail to feel abundant sympathy for the harassed poet who plaintively
called on Parliament to pass a law abolishing fifth acts altogether.
This unduly distressed dramatist was an Englishman; but about the same
time a Frenchman, weary of contemplating the frequent emptiness of the
contemporary tragic stage, sarcastically remarked that, after all, it
must be very easy _not_ to write a tragedy in five acts.
Yet if tragedy was to be written at all, it had to have five acts, since
a smaller number would not seem proportionate to a truly tragic subject.
But why five acts? Why has five the number sacred to the tragic muse?
Why did even the comic muse demand it? Why does George Meredith,
discussing comedy, declare that "five is dignity with a trailing robe;
whereas one, or two, or three acts would be short skirts, and
degrading." Why not three acts, or seven? Why was it that any other
number of acts was unthinkable--or at least never thought of?
Questions like these seem to have floated before the mind of the Abbe
d'Aubignac, writing in the seventeenth century, and he came very near
putting to himself the query which serves as a title for this chapter.
"Poets have generally agreed that all Drammas regularly should have
neither more nor less than Five Acts; and the Proof of this is the
general observation of it; but for the Reason, I do not know whether
there be any founded in Nature. Rhetorick has this advantage over Poetry
in the Parts of Oration, that the Exord, Narration, Confirmation and
Peroration are founded upon a way of discoursing natural to all Men....
But for the Five Acts of the Drammatick Poem, they have not been framed
upon any sound ground."
That the division of a drama into five parts was accepted in every
civilized country as the only possible division, seems very strange
indeed, when we consider that there is really no artistic justification
for it, nor any logical necessity. Like every other work of art a play
ought to have a single subject, a clearly defined topic; in other words,
it ought to have Unity of Action. There is no denying that some of the
greatest artists have, now and again, been tempted to deal with two
themes at the same time, combining these as best they could in a single
work at the risk of leaving us a little in doubt as to their intention;
but in the immense majority of acknowledged masterpieces the interest is
carefully centered in a single object. In these masterpieces the action
is single and unswerving, sweeping forward irresistibly to its
inevitable end.
If, therefore, we accept the Unity of Action as a general rule, binding
upon all artists, we can hardly deny that the most obviously natural
arrangement for the story is to set it forth in one act, without any
intermission or subdivision whatsoever--a single action in a single act.
Yet it is the play in three acts which we are bound to recognize at once
as possessing the ideal form, since it enables the dramatist to set
apart the three divisions, which Aristotle declared to be essential to a
well-constructed tragedy--the beginning, the middle, and the end--each
presented in an act of its own. To put a play into more than three acts
is possible only by halving one or another of these three essential
parts. In a four-act play, the beginning may be split into two acts; and
in a five-act play the middle may also be subdivided.
The logic of the three-act form, and the convenience of it also, are so
obvious that ever since the tyranny of the Procrustean framework in five
acts was abolished in the middle years of the nineteenth century,
practical playwrights of all countries have favored it more and more.
The young Dumas used it in his later plays, and so did Ibsen, that
consummate master of stagecraft, emancipated from empty traditions, but
profiting shrewdly by every available device of his immediate
predecessors. If the four-act form is also popular to-day, this seems to
be because the modern dramatist, intending a play in three acts, finds
himself forced by sheer press of matter, to subdivide one of the
essential members, as Sir Arthur Pinero had to do in the 'Second Mrs.
Tanqueray' and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones in the 'Liars.' Even the opera,
which liked the larger framework of five acts when Scribe was writing
librettos for Halevy and Meyerbeer, is now content with only three,
since Wagner revealed his skill as a librettist.
It is true that Freytag, in his sadly old-fashioned treatise on 'Technic
of the Drama,' accepted without cavil the five-act form, and even
attempted to justify it by asserting that there are in fact five
divisions of a tragic action. He symbolized the arrangement of a drama
in a pyramidal structure, declaring that it ascends from the
Introduction to the Climax, and then descends to the Catastrophe.
Obviously these are only different terms for the beginning, the middle,
and the end. But he vainly imagined two other members, the Rise, which
intervenes between the Introduction and the Climax, and the Fall, which
he inserted between the Climax and the Catastrophe. Obviously, again,
this is an explanation after the event; and it seems to have its origin
solely in his acceptance of the five-act form. And Freytag was forced to
abandon his own theory when he considered honestly certain of the
masterpieces of the modern drama. He admitted it to be "impossible that
the single acts should correspond entirely to the five great divisions
of the action." He asserted that "in the Rising Action, the first stage
was usually in the first act, the last sometimes in the third; of the
Falling Action the beginning and the end were sometimes taken in the
third and fifth acts." Yet he failed to see that if he made this
admission, he cut the ground from under his feet, and that there was no
longer any acceptable reason for his insistence upon the five-act form.
Freytag had no doubt at all as to the necessity of the division into
five acts. He received it with blind faith, as tho it had been
prescribed by divine authority. Yet if he had chosen to explore the
early history of the drama in his own tongue, he would have found Hans
Sachs sometimes extending his plays into six acts, and even into seven.
And if he had cared to consider the drama of the Spaniards he would have
seen that the most of the plays of Calderon are in three acts--a
division which the great dramatic poet of Spain had taken over, as he
had taken over so much else, from his masterful predecessor, Lope de
Vega. In his interesting and illuminating little treatise on the art of
writing plays, Lope de Vega gave the credit of establishing the
three-act form to Virues. Plays had previously been written in four
acts; as Lope puts it pleasantly: "The drama had gone on all fours, like
a child, and truly it was then in its infancy."
Freytag ignored or was ignorant of Hans Sachs and Calderon. His mind was
fixed on Goethe and on Schiller, altho his vision also included
Shakspere, upon whom the two German poets had more or less modeled
themselves. The tradition of the five-act form might not obtain in the
earliest German drama, as it did not obtain in the Spanish; but it was
firmly established in the later German drama, in the English, and in the
French. It is easy to see that the later Germans derived it from the
French and the English; but where did the French and the English get it?
Where could they get it? No such division existed in the medieval drama,
in the mysteries and in the miracle-plays, out of which the drama of
every modern language has been developed. No such division existed in
the Greek drama, which has served as a standard and as a stimulus to the
drama of every modern literature. A Greek tragedy was represented
without any intermission in a single, long unbroken act; and if a
sequence of three plays was sometimes performed, one after another, on
the same day, and dealing with successive periods of the same story,
this trilogy might suggest a division into three parts. Nor is any hint
of the duty of dividing a tragedy into five parts to be discovered
anywhere in Aristotle.