The fact is that Shakspere was a professional playwright, and that he
had no merely academic theories. In composing his plays he followed
unhesitatingly the principles that had guided his immediate
predecessors. He was seeking ever to give the playgoing public what it
had been accustomed to enjoy in the theater, better in degree, no
doubt, but the same in kind. Like these predecessors, he kept to the
traditions inherited from the medieval mysteries; and he thought in
terms, not of acts and of scenes, as a modern playwright is forced to
do, but of a continuous narrative shown in action. In doing so he
resembles Herodotus, whose history has also been cut up by later
editors, dividing it into nine books, altho, as Professor Bury has
reminded us, "such divisions had not yet come into fashion" in the
historian's own day. There is no reason to suppose that Shakspere would
have approved of the attempt of the editors of the folio to subdivide
his plays, each into five acts. There is every reason to suppose that he
would have been greatly annoyed if he could have foreseen the way in
which later editors have chosen further to chop up the acts into an
infinity of scenes.
Nowadays, we have been so accustomed to read Shakspere in one or another
of the trim and tidy modern editions, with a wanton division into acts
and into scenes, each of which indicates a change of place, and each of
which seems to suggest a change of scenery, that it is only by a
resolute effort of the will that we are able to shake off the
prepossessions derived from this unfortunate and confusing presentation
of his text. Probably even to-day a majority of those who enjoy reading
Shakspere would be surprised to be told that there is no warrant
whatever for these alleged changes of scene, and for these superabundant
subdivisions of his story. Many of these readers would be taken aback by
the unexpected discovery that all this cutting up of Shakspere's text
was the work of his commentators, with Rowe at the head of the
procession. Some of these readers would feel as tho they were deprived
of a precious possession, if they had only an edition in which all this
useless machinery was swept away.
And yet this is just the edition which is demanded by the present state
of Shaksperian scholarship, and which is now made possible by our new
understanding of the Elizabethan theater, with its rude platform thrust
out into the yard, so different from our modern theaters, in which the
stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame. The Tudor platform-stage is
wholly unlike the picture-frame stage of to-day; but it is very like the
"pageant," or the scaffold on which the mysteries and miracle-plays were
presented. It was to the simple conditions of his semi-medieval theater
that Shakspere adjusted himself, rude as those conditions may now appear
to us who are accustomed to the sumptuous picturesqueness of our own
luxuriant playhouses.
In accepting the theater as he found it, and in availing himself of all
its possibilities, such as they were, Shakspere showed his usual common
sense. Only by striving to reconstruct for ourselves in our mind's eye,
as it were, the playhouse where he plied his trade and earned his
living, can we come to any adequate appreciation of his art, of his
craftsmanship as a playwright, of his dramaturgic skill. And in any
honest effort to understand how his mighty dramas were originally
produced by himself and by his fellow actors in the round O of the
wooden Globe Theater, unroofed and unlighted except by the dingy
daylight of northern Europe, we need always to keep fast in our mind the
fact that all preconceptions are false that may be derived from our
memory of latter-day performances in theaters of a type which the
Elizabethan dramatists could not foresee, and of which the conditions
are often the exact opposite of those they accepted without hesitation.
That is to say, the most profitable way to reconstruct mentally the
Tudor playhouse is to banish from our minds every impression made by our
modern theater, with its elaborate complexity, and to study out for
ourselves the simple circumstances of performance in the Middle Ages.
And as a first step toward the proper standpoint, we must cast out our
traditional belief that Shakspere always accepted the classicist formula
of five acts, proclaimed by Horace, and employed by Seneca. That he did
use it in one or two plays seems indisputable, and he may very well have
employed it in a few others, but there is no reason to suppose that he
would have submitted himself any more willingly to the rule of five acts
than he did to the rule of the three unities.
It may be doubted also whether not a few dramatists, writing later than
Shakspere, would not have done well to claim the liberty he and Lope de
Vega chose to exercise at will. Racine, for one, had sadly to stretch
his 'Athalie' to fill out the five-act framework which he had blindly
accepted, altho he had earlier limited 'Esther' to three acts. Schiller,
for another, would have gained a swifter compactness for his play if he
had left out the needless fifth act of his 'William Tell' and rolled his
fourth act into his third. Victor Hugo had to manufacture a fourth act
for his 'Ruy Blas,' so slightly related to his main story that it was
cut out of the English adaptation acted by Fechter and Booth. Ibsen, it
may be added, composed his first tragedy, 'Catiline,' in three acts,
altho it was in blank verse, thus early revealing his characteristic
independence of tradition.
(1907.)
P. S.--Since this paper was written I have found two opinions as to the
number of acts a play ought to have which were unknown to me when I
undertook the discussion. The first is in the 'Dasarupa,' the Hindu
treatise on the craft of play-making: "There are five stages of the
action which is set on foot by those that strive after a result:
Beginning, Effort, Prospect of Success, Certainty of Success, Attainment
of the Result."
The second is in the commentary made by Robert Louis Stevenson during
his methodical perusal of the dramas of the elder Dumas. After reading
'Henri III et sa Cour,' Stevenson declares that here in Dumas's first
piece "is the cloven foot; a fourth act that has no part or lot in the
play; a fourth act that is a mere incubus and interruption--that takes
the eye off the action, and between two spirited and palpitating scenes
interjects a damned sermon on the history of France. Poor Tribonian had
a sore job to make up the fifty books of the Pandects; what was that to
the labor of a dramatist bent on filling his five acts? I go as far as
this: the natural division of the normal play is four: Act I,
exposition; Act II, the problem produced; Act III, the problem argued;
Act IV, the way out of it."
(1916.)
V