By applying the negative principle of economy of attention, the dramatist
may, as we have noticed, prevent his auditors at any moment from diverting
their attention to the subsidiary features of the scene; but it is
necessary for him also to apply the positive principle of emphasis in order
to force them to focus their attention on the one most important detail of
the matter in hand. The principle of emphasis, which is applied in all the
arts, is the principle whereby the artist contrives to throw into vivid
relief those features of his work which incorporate the essence of the
thing he has to say, while at the same time he gathers and groups within a
scarcely noticed background those other features which merely contribute in
a minor manner to the central purpose of his plan. This principle is, of
course, especially important in the acted drama; and it may therefore be
profitable to examine in detail some of the methods which dramatists employ
to make their points effectively and bring out the salient features of
their plays.
It is obviously easy to emphasise by position. The last moments in any act
are of necessity emphatic because they are the last. During the
intermission, the minds of the spectators will naturally dwell upon the
scene that has been presented to them most recently. If they think back
toward the beginning of the act, they must first think through the
concluding dialogue. This lends to curtain-falls a special importance of
which our modern dramatists never fail to take advantage.
It is interesting to remember that this simple form of emphasis by position
was impossible in the Elizabethan theatre and was quite unknown to
Shakespeare. His plays were produced on a platform without a curtain; his
actors had to make an exit at the end of every scene; and usually his plays
were acted from beginning to end without any intermission. It was therefore
impossible for him to bring his acts to an emphatic close by a clever
curtain-fall. We have gained this advantage only in recent times because of
the improved physical conditions of our theatre.
A few years ago it was customary for dramatists to end every act with a
bang that would reverberate in the ears of the audience throughout the
_entr'-acte_. Recently our playwrights have shown a tendency toward more
quiet curtain-falls. The exquisite close of the first act of _The Admirable
Crichton_ was merely dreamfully suggestive of the past and future of the
action; and the second act ended pictorially, without a word. But whether
a curtain-fall gains its effect actively or passively, it should, if
possible, sum up the entire dramatic accomplishment of the act that it
concludes and foreshadow the subsequent progress of the play.
Likewise, the first moments in an act are of necessity emphatic because
they are the first. After an intermission, the audience is prepared to
watch with renewed eagerness the resumption of the action. The close of the
third act of _Beau Brummel_ makes the audience long expectantly for the
opening of the fourth; and whatever the dramatist may do after the raising
of the curtain will be emphasised because he does it first. An exception
must be made of the opening act of a play. A dramatist seldom sets forth
anything of vital importance during the first ten minutes of his piece,
because the action is likely to be interrupted by late-comers in the
audience and other distractions incident to the early hour. But after an
intermission, he is surer of attention, and may thrust important matter
into the openings of his acts.
The last position, however, is more potent than the first. It is because of
their finality that exit speeches are emphatic. It has become customary in
the theatre to applaud a prominent actor nearly every time he leaves the
stage; and this custom has made it necessary for the dramatist to precede
an exit with some speech or action important enough to justify the
interruption. Though Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew nothing of the
curtain-fall, they at least understood fully the emphasis of exit speeches.
They even tagged them with rhyme to give them greater prominence. An actor
likes to take advantage of his last chance to move an audience. When he
leaves the stage, he wants at least to be remembered.
In general it may be said that any pause in the action emphasises by
position the speech or business that immediately preceded it. This is true
not only of the long pause at the end of an act: the point is illustrated
just as well by an interruption of the play in mid-career, like Mrs.
Fiske's ominous and oppressive minute of silence in the last act of _Hedda
Gabler_. The employment of pause as an aid to emphasis is of especial
importance in the reading of lines.
It is also customary in the drama to emphasise by proportion. More time is
given to significant scenes than to dialogues of subsidiary interest. The
strongest characters in a play are given most to say and do; and the extent
of the lines of the others is proportioned to their importance in the
action. Hamlet says more and does more than any other character in the
tragedy in which he figures. This is as it should be; but, on the other
hand, Polonius, in the same play, seems to receive greater emphasis by
proportion than he really deserves. The part is very fully written.
Polonius is often on the stage, and talks incessantly whenever he is
present; but, after all, he is a man of small importance and fulfils a
minor purpose in the plot. He is, therefore, falsely emphasised. That is
why the part of Polonius is what French actors call a _faux bon rôle_,--a
part that seems better than it is.
In certain special cases, it is advisable to emphasise a character by the
ironical expedient of inverse proportion. Tartufe is so emphasised
throughout the first two acts of the play that bears his name. Although he
is withheld from the stage until the second scene of the third act, so much
is said about him that we are made to feel fully his sinister dominance
over the household of Orgon; and at his first appearance, we already know
him better than we know any of the other characters. In Victor Hugo's
_Marion Delorme_, the indomitable will of Cardinal Richelieu is the
mainspring of the entire action, and the audience is led to feel that he
may at any moment enter upon the stage. But he is withheld until the very
final moment of the drama, and even then is merely carried mute across the
scene in a sedan-chair. Similarly, in Paul Heyse's _Mary of Magdala_, the
supreme person who guides and controls the souls of all the struggling
characters is never introduced upon the scene, but is suggested merely
through his effect on Mary, Judas, and the other visible figures in the
action.
One of the easiest means of emphasis is the use of repetition; and this is
a favorite device with Henrik Ibsen. Certain catch-words, which incorporate
a recurrent mood of character or situation, are repeated over and over
again throughout the course of his dialogue. The result is often similar to
that attained by Wagner, in his music-dramas, through the iteration of a
_leit-motiv_. Thus in _Rosmersholm_, whenever the action takes a turn that
foreshadows the tragic catastrophe, allusion is made to the weird symbol of
"white horses." Similarly, in _Hedda Gabler_--to take another instance--the
emphasis of repetition is flung on certain leading phrases,--"Fancy that,
Hedda!" "Wavy-haired Thea," "Vine-leaves in his hair," and "People don't do
such things!"
Another obvious means of emphasis in the drama is the use of
antithesis,--an expedient employed in every art. The design of a play is
not so much to expound characters as to contrast them. People of varied
views and opposing aims come nobly to the grapple in a struggle that
vitally concerns them; and the tensity of the struggle will be augmented if
the difference between the characters is marked. The comedies of Ben
Jonson, which held the stage for two centuries after their author's death,
owed their success largely to the fact that they presented a constant
contrast of mutually foiling personalities. But the expedient of antithesis
is most effectively employed in the balance of scene against scene. What is
known as "comic relief" is introduced in various plays, not only, as the
phrase suggests, to rest the sensibilities of the audience, but also to
emphasise the solemn scenes that come before and after it. It is for this
purpose that Shakespeare, in _Macbeth_, introduces a low-comic soliloquy
into the midst of a murder scene. Hamlet's ranting over the grave of
Ophelia is made more emphatic by antithesis with the foolish banter that
precedes it.
This contrast of mood between scene and scene was unknown in ancient plays
and in the imitations of them that flourished in the first great period of
the French tragic stage. Although the ancient drama frequently violated the
three unities of action, time, and place, it always preserved a fourth
unity, which we may call unity of mood. It remained for the Spaniards and
the Elizabethan English to grasp the dramatic value of the great antithesis
between the humorous and the serious, the grotesque and the sublime, and to
pass it on through Victor Hugo to the contemporary theatre.
A further means of emphasis is, of course, the use of climax. This
principle is at the basis of the familiar method of working up an entrance.
My lady's coach is heard clattering behind the scenes. A servant rushes to
the window and tells us that his mistress is alighting. There is a ring at
the entrance; we hear the sound of footsteps in the hall. At last the door
is thrown open, and my lady enters, greeted by a salvo of applause.
A first entrance unannounced is rarely seen upon the modern stage.
Shakespeare's _King John_ opens very simply. The stage direction reads,
"Enter King John, Queen Elinor, Pembroke, Essex, Salisbury and others, with
Chatillon"; and then the king speaks the opening line of the play. Yet when
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree revived this drama at Her Majesty's Theatre in
1899, he devised an elaborate opening to give a climacteric effect to the
entrance of the king. The curtain rose upon a vaulted room of state,
impressive in its bare magnificence. A throne was set upon a dais to the
left, and several noblemen in splendid costumes were lingering about the
room. At the back was a Norman corridor approached by a flight of lofty
steps which led upward from the level of the stage. There was a peal of
trumpets from without, and soon to a stately music the royal guards marched
upon the scene. They were followed by ladies with gorgeous dresses sweeping
away in long trains borne by pretty pages, and great lords walking with
dignity to the music of the regal measure. At last Mr. Tree appeared and
stood for a moment at the top of the steps, every inch a king. Then he
strode majestically to the dais, ascended to the throne, and turning about
with measured majesty spoke the first line of the play, some minutes after
the raising of the curtain.
But not only in the details of a drama is the use of climax necessary. The
whole action should sweep upward in intensity until the highest point is
reached. In the Shakespearean drama the highest point came somewhat early
in the piece, usually in the third act of the five that Shakespeare wrote;
but in contemporary plays the climax is almost always placed at the end of
the penultimate act,--the fourth act if there are five, and the third act
if there are four. Nowadays the four-act form with a strong climax at the
end of the third act seems to be most often used. This is the form, for
instance, of Ibsen's _Hedda Gabler_, of Mr. Jones's _Mrs. Dane's Defense_,
and of Sir Arthur Pinero's _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, _The Notorious Mrs.
Ebbsmith_, and _The Gay Lord Quex_. Each begins with an act of exposition,
followed by an act of rising interest. Then the whole action of the play
rushes upward toward the curtain-fall of the third act, after which an act
is used to bring the play to a terrible or a happy conclusion.
A less familiar means of emphasis is that which owes its origin to
surprise. This expedient must be used with great delicacy, because a sudden
and startling shock of surprise is likely to diseconomise the attention of
the spectators and flurry them out of a sane conception of the scene. But
if a moment of surprise has been carefully led up to by anticipatory
suggestion, it may be used to throw into sharp and sudden relief an
important point in the play. No one knows that Cyrano de Bergerac is on the
stage until he rises in the midst of the crowd in the Hôtel de Bourgogne
and shakes his cane at Montfleury. When Sir Herbert Tree played D'Artagnan
in _The Musketeers_, he emerged suddenly in the midst of a scene from a
suit of old armor standing monumental at the back of the stage,--a _deus ex
machina_ to dominate the situation. American playgoers will remember the
disguise of Sherlock Holmes in the last act of Mr. Gillette's admirable
melodrama. The appearance of the ghost in the closet scene of _Hamlet_ is
made emphatic by its unexpectedness.
But perhaps the most effective form of emphasis in the drama is emphasis by
suspense. Wilkie Collins, who with all his faults as a critic of life
remains the most skilful maker of plots in English fiction, used to say
that the secret of holding the attention of one's readers lay in the
ability to do three things: "Make 'em laugh; make 'em weep; make 'em wait."
There is no use in making an audience wait, however, unless you first give
them an inkling of what they are waiting for. The dramatist must play with
his spectators as we play with a kitten when we trail a ball of yarn before
its eyes, only to snatch it away just as the kitten leaps for it.
This method of emphasising by suspense gives force to what are known
technically as the _scènes à faire_ of a drama. A _scène à faire_--the
phrase was devised by Francisque Sarcey--is a scene late in a play that is
demanded absolutely by the previous progress of the plot. The audience
knows that the scene must come sooner or later, and if the element of
suspense be ably managed, is made to long for it some time before it comes.
In _Hamlet_, for instance, the killing of the king by the hero is of course
a _scène à faire_. The audience knows before the first act is over that
such a scene is surely coming. When the king is caught praying in his
closet and Hamlet stands over him with naked sword, the spectators think at
last that the _scène à faire_ has arrived; but Shakespeare "makes 'em wait"
for two acts more, until the very ending of the play.
In comedy the commonest _scènes à faire_ are love scenes that the audience
anticipates and longs to see. Perhaps the young folks are frequently on the
stage, but the desired scene is prevented by the presence of other
characters. Only after many movements are the lovers left alone; and when
at last the pretty moment comes, the audience glows with long-awaited
enjoyment.
It is always dangerous for a dramatist to omit a _scène à faire_,--to raise
in the minds of his audience an expectation that is never satisfied.
Sheridan did this in _The School for Scandal_ when he failed to introduce a
love scene between Charles and Maria, and Mr. Jones did it in _Whitewashing
Julia_ when he made the audience expect throughout the play a revelation of
the truth about the puff-box and then left them disappointed in the end.
But these cases are exceptional. In general it may be said that an
unsatisfied suspense is no suspense at all.
One of the most effective instances of suspense in the modern drama is
offered in the opening of _John Gabriel Borkman_, one of Ibsen's later
plays. Many years before the drama opens, the hero has been sent to jail
for misusing the funds of a bank of which he was director. After five years
of imprisonment, he has been released, eight years before the opening of
the play. During these eight years, he has lived alone in the great gallery
of his house, never going forth even in the dark of night, and seeing only
two people who come to call upon him. One of these, a young girl, sometimes
plays for him on the piano while he paces moodily up and down the gallery.
These facts are expounded to the audience in a dialogue between Mrs.
Borkman and her sister that takes place in a lower room below Borkman's
quarters; and all the while, in the pauses of the conversation, the hero is
heard walking overhead, pacing incessantly up and down. As the act
advances, the audience expects at any moment that the hero will appear. The
front door is thrown open; two minor characters enter; and still Borkman is
heard walking up and down. There is more talk about him on the stage; the
act is far advanced, and soon it seems that he must show himself. From the
upper room is heard the music of the Dance of Death that his young girl
friend is playing for him. Now to the dismal measures of the dance the
dialogue on the stage swells to a climax. Borkman is still heard pacing in
the gallery. And the curtain falls. Ten minutes later the raising of the
curtain discloses John Gabriel Borkman standing with his hands behind his
back, looking at the girl who has been playing for him. The moment is
trebly emphatic,--by position at the opening of an act, by surprise, and
most of all by suspense. When the hero is at last discovered, the audience
looks at him.
Of course there are many minor means of emphasis in the theatre, but most
of these are artificial and mechanical. The proverbial lime-light is one of
the most effective. The intensity of the dream scene in Sir Henry Irving's
performance of _The Bells_ was due largely to the way in which the single
figure of Mathias was silhouetted by a ray of light against a shadowy and
inscrutable background ominous with voices.
In this materialistic age, actors even resort to blandishments of costume
to give their parts a special emphasis. Our leading ladies are more richly
clad than the minor members of their companies. Even the great Mansfield
resorted in his performance of Brutus to the indefensible expedient of
changing his costume act by act and dressing always in exquisite and subtle
colors, while the other Romans, Cassius included, wore the same togas of
unaffected white throughout the play. This was a fault in emphasis.
A novel and interesting device of emphasis in stage-direction was
introduced by Mr. Forbes-Robertson in his production of _The Passing of the
Third Floor Back_. This dramatic parable by Mr. Jerome K. Jerome deals with
the moral regeneration of eleven people, who are living in a Bloomsbury
boarding-house, through the personal influence of a Passer-by, who is the
Spirit of Love incarnate; and this effect is accomplished in a succession
of dialogues, in which the Stranger talks at length with one boarder after
another. It is necessary, for reasons of reality, that in each of the
dialogues the Passer-by and his interlocutor should be seated at their
ease. It is also necessary, for reasons of effectiveness in presentation,
that the faces of both parties to the conversation should be kept clearly
visible to the audience. In actual life, the two people would most
naturally sit before a fire; but if a fireplace should be set in either the
right or the left wall of the stage and two actors should be seated in
front of it, the face of one of them would be obscured from the audience.
The producer therefore adopted the expedient of imagining a fireplace in
the fourth wall of the room,--the wall that is supposed to stretch across
the stage at the line of the footlights. A red-glow from the central lamps
of the string of footlights was cast up over a brass railing such as
usually bounds a hearth, and behind this, far forward in the direct centre
of the stage, two chairs were drawn up for the use of the actors. The right
wall showed a window opening on the street, the rear wall a door opening on
an entrance hall, and the left wall a door opening on a room adjacent; and
in none of these could the fireplace have been logically set. The unusual
device of stage-direction, therefore, contributed to the verisimilitude of
the set as well as to the convenience of the action. The experiment was
successful for the purposes of this particular piece; it did not seem to
disrupt the attention of the audience; and the question, therefore, is
suggested whether it might not, in many other plays, be advantageous to
make imaginary use of the invisible fourth wall.