II

And yet we must go back to the Greek theater if we want to see why it is

that the 'Femmes Savantes' of Moliere and the 'School for Scandal' of

Sheridan are each of them in five acts. But it is not from a Greek that

we get the law that this division was obligatory on all self-respecting

dramatists; it is from a Roman, writing at a time when the drama of his

own language had been ousted from the stage by pantomimic spectacle and

by gladiatorial combat. It is Horace, who, in his epistle on the art of

poetry, declares the necessity of five acts:

Ne brevior, neu sit quinto productior actu

Fabula quae posci vult et spectata reponi.

Sir Theodore Martin rendered this in an English rimed couplet, which

does not completely convey the meaning of the two Latin lines, but which

will serve to show the rigidity of the rule laid down by the Roman poet:

Five acts a play must have, nor more nor less,

To keep the stage and have a marked success.

But this still leaves us groping in the dark. Why did Horace declare

this law? What warrant had he? What put the idea into his head? These

are questions answered by a French scholar, M. Weil; in one of his

ingenious and learned 'Etudes sur le Drame Antique,' he explains that

Horace derived much of his theory of the poetic art from the Alexandrian

critics, and more particularly from the writings of a certain

Neoptolemus of Parium. Probably the Alexandrian authors of tragedy had

been led to adopt a division into five acts by following the example of

Euripides, whose practise was not uniform, but who tended to reduce to

four the number of the lyric odes in his tragedies, thus separating the

purely dramatic passages into five parts.

In Athens the drama had been slowly evolved out of the tragic songs; and

in the surviving tragedies of AEschylus, the earliest of the three great

dramatic poets of Greece, we discover that the choral odes are more

abundant than the dialog which carries on the plot. In the extant plays

of his mighty successor, Sophocles, the drama is seen emerging

triumphant, but the lyrical passages are still frequent and important.

In the later pieces of Euripides, the third and most modern of the Attic

tragedians, we note that the drama has almost wholly disengaged itself

from the lyric out of which it sprang. In AEschylus and in Sophocles the

number of choral odes and the number of episodes, of purely dramatic

passages in dialog, is never fixed, varying from play to play as the

plot might demand. But in Euripides the choral odes are more detached

from the drama; beautiful in themselves, they seem to exist rather for

their own sake than in any integral relation to the play itself. And

apparently Euripides was far more interested in his play, in his plot,

and in his characters, than in these extraneous lyric passages, so he

reduced them to the lowest possible number, generally to four, serving,

so to speak, as exquisite interact music, separating the pathetic play

into five episodes in dialog.

The Alexandrian tragedians came long after Euripides, and to their

sophisticated taste his pathetic and emotional plays appealed far more

than the austerer and manlier masterpieces of his two great

predecessors. Apparently they accepted his form as final; they may even

have left out the choruses altogether; and then their tragedies had five

separate episodes--in other words, five acts. It is these lost

Alexandrian tragedies, composed in the decadent days of the Greek drama,

which seem to have served as the model for Seneca, the eloquent

rhetorician--even tho he frequently took over the theme and often more

or less of the structure of certain of the dramas of Euripides.

The tragedies of Seneca are to be considered rather as dramatic poems

than as poetic dramas, since they were intended not really for

performance by actors, in a theater, before an audience, but for

recitation by a single elocutionist in a private house--much as a

professional reader of our own time might recite unaided a more or less

dramatic poem by Shelley or Byron or Browning. Coming long after Horace,

Seneca unhesitatingly accepted all of the restrictions insisted upon by

the Latin lyrist--including the purely academic limitation of the number

of speakers taking part in any dialog to three, a limitation absolutely

absurd in a poem not intended for actual acting and not forced to

conform to the accidental conditions of the Attic stage. Obeying also

the other rule which he found in Horace's codification of the laws of

dramatic poetry, the Hispano-Roman rhetorician was careful always to cut

up his play into five parts. But he saw his profit in retaining the

chorus, since this could be made to serve as the appropriate mouthpiece

for the elaborate passages of elocutionary splendor in which he

delighted.

It is not to be wondered at that the Italian scholars of the Renascence

followed the precept of Horace and the practise of Seneca. They were far

more at home in Latin than they were in Greek; and they could hardly

help reading into the literature of Athens what they were already

familiar with in the authors of Rome. To them Seneca was as imposing as

Sophocles, and Horace was almost as weighty as Aristotle. So it is that

Scaliger and Minturno prescribe five acts, and that Castelvetro (always

more practical in his point of view) points out that poets seem to have

found the five-act form most suitable. When an Italian scholar-poet

turned from criticism to creation, the tragedies he conscientiously

composed obeyed all the rules, and his dramatic poems were as academic

as those of Seneca, in that they were intended not for production by

professional actors in a regular theater before spectators who had paid

their way in, but only for an occasional performance by the author

himself assisted by a few of his friends before a little group of

cultivated admirers of antiquity, contemptuous of the real public. These

soulless dramatic poems, devised for declamation by amateurs before a

gathering of dilettants, are now perceived to be merely literary

curiosities, having little connection with the real drama made for the

regular theater and its myriad-minded body of playgoers.

Just as the Italian dramatic poems were imitations of Seneca, so the

French dramatic poems, composed a little later, were imitations of these

Italians, and also of Seneca, more or less indirectly. They were the

imitations of an imitation, aping the outward form of the drama, but

empty of all genuine dramatic spirit, artificial in passion and

high-flown in rhetoric. And there are early English attempts at this

same sort of academic tragedy, more imitative still, since we can see in

them the commingled influence of the French and of the Italians

immediately, and also of the remoter Seneca, whom they revered as the

exemplar of true tragedy. Such a play is 'Gorboduc,' belauded by the

scholarly Sidney--and even on one occasion acted, by main strength. In

all of these imitations, English and French and Italian, we find the

stately chorus abounding in lofty rhetoric; and we find also, and

always, the division into five acts. But in the folk-theater, which the

scholar-poets scorned, and out of which the living drama was to be

developed, there is no trace of any division into acts. In the mysteries

and the miracle-plays, and in the chronicle-plays which grew out of

them, there are numberless episodes, each complete in itself, and never

combined artificially into acts. The composer of any one of these

folk-dramas conceived his story as a continuous narrative shown in

action; and he gave no thought to the number of divisions, of episodes,

of separate scenes, or of acts that it might seem to have.