ACT I.--THE INCURABLE OPTIMIST.--Dr. Stockmann announces his

PLAY-MAKING

_A Manual of Craftsmanship_

by William Archer

1912

PREFATORY NOTE

This book is, to all intents and purposes, entirely new. No considerable

portion of it has already appeared, although here and there short

passages and phrases from articles of bygone years are embedded

--indistinguishably, I hope--in the text. I have tried, wherever

it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the

student may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason,

among others, which led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of

my illustrations, was that they are the most generally accessible of

playwrights.

If the reader should feel that I have been over lavish in the use of

footnotes, I have two excuses to allege. The first is that more than

half of the following chapters were written on shipboard and in places

where I had scarcely any books to refer to; so that a great deal had to

be left to subsequent enquiry and revision. The second is that several

of my friends, dramatists and others, have been kind enough to read my

manuscript, and to suggest valuable afterthoughts.

LONDON

_January_, 1912

To

Brander Matthews

Guide Philosopher and Friend

CONTENTS

BOOK I

PROLOGUE

_CHAPTER I_ INTRODUCTORY

_CHAPTER II_ THE CHOICE OF A THEME

_CHAPTER III_ DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC

_CHAPTER IV_ THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION

_CHAPTER V_ DRAMATIS PERSONAE

BOOK II

THE BEGINNING

_CHAPTER VI_ THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN

_CHAPTER VII_ EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS

_CHAPTER VIII_ THE FIRST ACT

_CHAPTER IX_ "CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST"

_CHAPTER X_ FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING

BOOK III

THE MIDDLE

_CHAPTER XI_ TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION

_CHAPTER XII_ PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST

_CHAPTER XIII_ THE OBLIGATORY SCENE

_CHAPTER XIV_ THE PERIPETY

_CHAPTER XV_ PROBABILITY, CHANCE AND COINCIDENCE

_CHAPTER XVI_ LOGIC

_CHAPTER XVII_ KEEPING A SECRET

BOOK IV

THE END

_CHAPTER XVIII_ CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX

_CHAPTER XIX_ CONVERSION

_CHAPTER XX_ BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS

_CHAPTER XXI_ THE FULL CLOSE

BOOK V

EPILOGUE

_CHAPTER XXII_ CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY

_CHAPTER XXIII_ DIALOGUE AND DETAILS

_BOOK I_

PROLOGUE

_CHAPTER I_

INTRODUCTORY

There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down

negative recommendations--to instruct the beginner how _not_ to do it.

But most of these "don'ts" are rather obvious; and those which are not

obvious are apt to be questionable. It is certain, for instance, that if

you want your play to be acted, anywhere else than in China, you must

not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who

needs a text-book to tell him that? On the other hand, most theorists of

to-day would make it an axiom that you must not let your characters

narrate their circumstances, or expound their motives, in speeches

addressed, either directly to the audience, or ostensibly to their

solitary selves. But when we remember that, of all dramatic openings,

there is none finer than that which shows Richard Plantagenet limping

down the empty stage to say--

"Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried"--

we feel that the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no

absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest

common sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse,

classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists. He

said, "you had better" rather than "you must." It was Horace, in an age

of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian

formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas

of art.

How comes it, then, that there is a constant demand for text-books of

the art and craft of drama? How comes it that so many people--and I

among the number--who could not write a play to save their lives, are

eager to tell others how to do so? And, stranger still, how comes it

that so many people are willing to sit at the feet of these instructors?

It is not so with the novel. Popular as is that form of literature,

guides to novel-writing, if they exist at all, are comparatively rare.

Why are people possessed with the idea that the art of dramatic fiction

differs from that of narrative fiction, in that it can and must

be taught?

The reason is clear, and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to

justify, such works as the present. The novel, as soon as it is legibly

written, exists, for what it is worth. The page of black and white is

the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain.

Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal: it does not

alter its nature. But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at

all, must be run through a highly complex piece of mechanism--the

theatre--the precise conditions of which are, to most beginners, a

fascinating mystery. While they feel a strong inward conviction of their

ability to master it, they are possessed with an idea, often exaggerated

and superstitious, of its technical complexities. Having, as a rule,

little or no opportunity of closely examining or experimenting with it,

they are eager to "read it up," as they might any other machine. That is

the case of the average aspirant, who has neither the instinct of the

theatre fully developed in his blood, nor such a congenital lack of that

instinct as to be wholly inapprehensive of any technical difficulties or

problems. The intelligent novice, standing between these extremes,

tends, as a rule, to overrate the efficacy of theoretical instruction,

and to expect of analytic criticism more than it has to give.

There is thus a fine opening for pedantry on the one side, and quackery

on the other, to rush in. The pedant, in this context, is he who

constructs a set of rules from metaphysical or psychological first

principles, and professes to bring down a dramatic decalogue from the

Sinai of some lecture-room in the University of Weissnichtwo. The quack,

on the other hand, is he who generalizes from the worst practices of the

most vulgar theatrical journeymen, and has no higher ambition than to

interpret the oracles of the box-office. If he succeeded in so doing,

his function would not be wholly despicable; but as he is generally

devoid of insight, and as, moreover, the oracles of the box-office vary

from season to season, if not from month to month, his lucubrations are

about as valuable as those of Zadkiel or Old Moore.[1]

What, then, is the excuse for such a discussion as is here attempted?

Having admitted that there are no rules for dramatic composition, and

that the quest of such rules is apt to result either in pedantry or

quackery, why should I myself set forth upon so fruitless and foolhardy

an enterprise? It is precisely because I am alive to its dangers that I

have some hope of avoiding them. Rules there are none; but it does not

follow that some of the thousands who are fascinated by the art of the

playwright may not profit by having their attention called, in a plain

and practical way, to some of its problems and possibilities. I have

myself felt the need of some such handbook, when would-be dramatists

have come to me for advice and guidance. It is easy to name excellent

treatises on the drama; but the aim of such books is to guide the

judgment of the critic rather than the creative impulse of the

playwright. There are also valuable collections of dramatic criticisms;

but any practical hints that they may contain are scattered and

unsystematic. On the other hand, the advice one is apt to give to

beginners--"Go to the theatre; study its conditions and mechanism for

yourself"--is, in fact, of very doubtful value. It might, in many cases,

be wiser to warn the aspirant to keep himself unspotted from the

playhouse. To send him there is to imperil, on the one hand, his

originality of vision, on the other, his individuality of method. He may

fall under the influence of some great master, and see life only through

his eyes; or he may become so habituated to the current tricks of the

theatrical trade as to lose all sense of their conventionality and

falsity, and find himself, in the end, better fitted to write what I

have called a quack handbook than a living play. It would be ridiculous,

of course, to urge an aspirant positively to avoid the theatre; but the

common advice to steep himself in it is beset with dangers.

It may be asked why, if I have any guidance and help to give, I do not

take it myself, and write plays instead of instructing others in the

art. This is a variant of an ancient and fallacious jibe against

criticism in general. It is quite true that almost all critics who are

worth their salt are "stickit" artists. Assuredly, if I had the power, I

should write plays instead of writing about them; but one may have a

great love for an art, and some insight into its principles and methods,

without the innate faculty required for actual production. On the other

hand, there is nothing to show that, if I were a creative artist, I

should be a good mentor for beginners. An accomplished painter may be

the best teacher of painters; but an accomplished dramatist is scarcely

the best guide for dramatists. He cannot analyse his own practice, and

discriminate between that in it which is of universal validity, and that

which may be good for him, but would be bad for any one else. If he

happened to be a great man, he would inevitably, even if unconsciously,

seek to impose upon his disciples his individual attitude towards life;

if he were a lesser man, he would teach them only his tricks. But

dramatists do not, as a matter of fact, take pupils or write

handbooks.[2] When they expound their principles of art, it is generally

in answer to, or in anticipation of, criticism--with a view, in short,

not to helping others, but to defending themselves. If beginners, then,

are to find any systematic guidance, they must turn to the critics, not

to the dramatists; and no person of common sense holds it a reproach to

a critic to tell him that he is a "stickit" playwright.

If questions are worth discussing at all, they are worth discussing

gravely. When, in the following pages, I am found treating with all

solemnity matters of apparently trivial detail, I beg the reader to

believe that very possibly I do not in my heart overrate their

importance. One thing is certain, and must be emphasized from the

outset: namely, that if any part of the dramatist's art can be taught,

it is only a comparatively mechanical and formal part--the art of

structure. One may learn how to tell a story in good dramatic form: how

to develop and marshal it in such a way as best to seize and retain the

interest of a theatrical audience. But no teaching or study can enable a

man to choose or invent a good story, and much less to do that which

alone lends dignity to dramatic story-telling--to observe and portray

human character. This is the aim and end of all serious drama; and it

will be apt to appear as though, in the following pages, this aim and

end were ignored. In reality it is not so. If I hold comparatively

mechanical questions of pure craftsmanship to be worth discussing, it is

because I believe that only by aid of competent craftsmanship can the

greatest genius enable his creations to live and breathe upon the stage.

The profoundest insight into human nature and destiny cannot find valid

expression through the medium of the theatre without some understanding

of the peculiar art of dramatic construction. Some people are born with

such an instinct for this art, that a very little practice renders them

masters of it. Some people are born with a hollow in their cranium where

the bump of drama ought to be. But between these extremes, as I said

before, there are many people with moderately developed and cultivable

faculty; and it is these who, I trust, may find some profit in the

following discussions.[3] Let them not forget, however, that the topics

treated of are merely the indispensable rudiments of the art, and are

not for a moment to be mistaken for its ultimate and incommunicable

secrets. Beethoven could not have composed the Ninth Symphony without a

mastery of harmony and counterpoint; but there are thousands of masters

of harmony and counterpoint who could not compose the Ninth Symphony.

The art of theatrical story-telling is necessarily relative to the

audience to whom the story is to be told. One must assume an audience of

a certain status and characteristics before one can rationally discuss

the best methods of appealing to its intelligence and its sympathies.

The audience I have throughout assumed is drawn from what may be called

the ordinary educated public of London and New York. It is not an ideal

or a specially selected audience; but it is somewhat above the average

of the theatre-going public, that average being sadly pulled down by the

myriad frequenters of musical farce and absolutely worthless melodrama.

It is such an audience as assembles every night at, say, the half-dozen

best theatres of each city. A peculiarly intellectual audience it

certainly is not. I gladly admit that theatrical art owes much, in both

countries, to voluntary organizations of intelligent or would-be

intelligent[4] playgoers, who have combined to provide themselves with

forms of drama which specially interest them, and do not attract the

great public. But I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its

chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art,

and is content to address itself to coteries, however "high-browed."

Shakespeare did not write for a coterie: yet he produced some works of

considerable subtlety and profundity. Molière was popular with the

ordinary parterre of his day: yet his plays have endured for over two

centuries, and the end of their vitality does not seem to be in sight.

Ibsen did not write for a coterie, though special and regrettable

circumstances have made him, in England, something of a coterie-poet. In

Scandinavia, in Germany, even in America, he casts his spell over great

audiences, if not through long runs (which are a vice of the merely

commercial theatre), at any rate through frequently-repeated

representations. So far as I know, history records no instance of a

playwright failing to gain the ear of his contemporaries, and then being

recognized and appreciated by posterity. Alfred de Musset might,

perhaps, be cited as a case in point; but he did not write with a view

to the stage, and made no bid for contemporary popularity. As soon as it

occurred to people to produce his plays, they were found to be

delightful. Let no playwright, then, make it his boast that he cannot

disburden his soul within the three hours' limit, and cannot produce

plays intelligible or endurable to any audience but a band of adepts. A

popular audience, however, does not necessarily mean the mere riff-raff

of the theatrical public. There is a large class of playgoers, both in

England and America, which is capable of appreciating work of a high

intellectual order, if only it does not ignore the fundamental

conditions of theatrical presentation. It is an audience of this class

that I have in mind throughout the following pages; and I believe that a

playwright who despises such an audience will do so to the detriment,

not only of his popularity and profits, but of the artistic quality

of his work.

Some people may exclaim: "Why should the dramatist concern himself about

his audience? That may be all very well for the mere journeymen of the

theatre, the hacks who write to an actor-manager's order--not for the

true artist! He has a soul above all such petty considerations. Art, to

him, is simply self-expression. He writes to please himself, and has no

thought of currying favour with an audience, whether intellectual or

idiotic." To this I reply simply that to an artist of this way of

thinking I have nothing to say. He has a perfect right to express

himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be

studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end.

But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression

stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the

sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,[5] but

the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a

portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home

to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. "The

public," it has been well said, "constitutes the theatre." The moment a

playwright confines his work within the two or three hours' limit

prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is

currying favour with an audience. That limit is imposed simply by the

physical endurance and power of sustained attention that can be demanded

of Western human beings assembled in a theatre. Doubtless an author

could express himself more fully and more subtly if he ignored these

limitations; the moment he submits to them, he renounces the pretence

that mere self-expression is his aim. I know that there are

haughty-souls who make no such submission, and express themselves in

dramas which, so far as their proportions are concerned, might as well

be epic poems or historical romances.[6] To them, I repeat, I have

nothing to say. The one and only subject of the following discussions is

the best method of fitting a dramatic theme for representation before an

audience assembled in a theatre. But this, be it noted, does not

necessarily mean "writing down" to the audience in question. It is by

obeying, not by ignoring, the fundamental conditions of his craft that

the dramatist may hope to lead his audience upward to the highest

intellectual level which he himself can attain.

These pages, in short, are addressed to students of play-writing who

sincerely desire to do sound, artistic work under the conditions and

limitations of the actual, living playhouse. This does not mean, of

course, that they ought always to be studying "what the public wants."

The dramatist should give the public what he himself wants--but in such

form as to make it comprehensible and interesting in a theatre.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: It is against "technic" in this sense of the term that the

hero of Mr. Howells's admirable novel, _The Story of a Play_, protests

in vigorous and memorable terms. "They talk," says Maxwell, "about a

knowledge of the stage as if it were a difficult science, instead of a

very simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities

anyone may see at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is

claptrap, pure and simple.... They think that their exits and entrances

are great matters and that they must come on with such a speech, and go

off with another; but it is not of the least importance how they come or

go, if they have something interesting to say or do." Maxwell, it must

be remembered, is speaking of technic as expounded by the star actor,

who is shilly-shallying--as star actors will--over the production of his

play. He would not, in his calmer moments, deny that it is of little use

to have something interesting to say, unless you know how to say it

interestingly. Such a denial would simply be the negation of the very

idea of art.]

[Footnote 2: A dramatist of my acquaintance adds this footnote: "But, by

the Lord! They have to give advice. I believe I write more plays of

other people's than I do of my own."]

[Footnote 3: It may be hoped, too, that even the accomplished dramatist

may take some interest in considering the reasons for things which he

does, or does not do, by instinct.]

[Footnote 4: This is not a phrase of contempt. The would-be intelligent

playgoer is vastly to be preferred to the playgoer who makes a boast of

his unintelligence.]

[Footnote 5: In all the arts, however, the very idea of craftsmanship

implies some sort of external percipient, or, in other words, some sort

of an audience. In point of sheer self-expression, a child's scrabblings

with a box of crayons may deserve to rank with the most masterly canvas

of Velasquez or Vermeer. The real difference between the dramatist and

other artists, is that they can be _their own audience_, in a sense in

which he cannot.]

[Footnote 6: Let me guard against the possibility that this might be

interpreted as a sneer at _The Dynasts_--a great work by a great poet.]

_CHAPTER II_

THE CHOICE OF A THEME

The first step towards writing a play is manifestly to choose a theme.

Even this simple statement, however, requires careful examination before

we can grasp its full import. What, in the first place, do we mean by a

"theme"? And, secondly, in what sense can we, or ought we to,

"choose" one?

"Theme" may mean either of two things: either the subject of a play, or

its story. The former is, perhaps, its proper or more convenient sense.

The theme of _Romeo and Juliet_ is youthful love crossed by ancestral

hate; the theme of _Othello_ is jealousy; the theme of _Le Tartufe_ is

hypocrisy; the theme of _Caste_ is fond hearts and coronets; the theme

of _Getting Married_ is getting married; the theme of _Maternité_ is

maternity. To every play it is possible, at a pinch, to assign a theme;

but in many plays it is evident that no theme expressible in abstract

terms was present to the author's mind. Nor are these always plays of a

low class. It is only by a somewhat artificial process of abstraction

that we can formulate a theme for _As You Like It_, for _The Way of the

World_, or for _Hedda Gabler_.

The question now arises: ought a theme, in its abstract form, to be the

first germ of a play? Ought the dramatist to say, "Go to, I will write a

play on temperance, or on woman's suffrage, or on capital and labour,"

and then cast about for a story to illustrate his theme? This is a

possible, but not a promising, method of procedure. A story made to the

order of a moral concept is always apt to advertise its origin, to the

detriment of its illusive quality. If a play is to be a moral apologue

at all, it is well to say so frankly--probably in the title--and aim,

not at verisimilitude, but at neatness and appositeness in the working

out of the fable. The French _proverbe_ proceeds on this principle, and

is often very witty and charming.[1] A good example in English is _A

Pair of Spectacles_, by Mr. Sydney Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche.

In this bright little comedy every incident and situation bears upon the

general theme, and pleases us, not by its probability, but by its

ingenious appropriateness. The dramatic fable, in fact, holds very much

the same rank in drama as the narrative fable holds in literature at

large. We take pleasure in them on condition that they be witty, and

that they do not pretend to be what they are not.

A play manifestly suggested by a theme of temporary interest will often

have a great but no less temporary success. For instance, though there

was a good deal of clever character-drawing in _An Englishman's Home_,

by Major du Maurier, the theme was so evidently the source and

inspiration of the play that it will scarcely bear revival. In America,

where the theme was of no interest, the play failed.

It is possible, no doubt, to name excellent plays in which the theme, in

all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the

author's mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr.

Galsworthy's _Strife_ and _Justice_. The French plays, in my judgment,

suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme--that

is to say, the abstract element--over the human and concrete factors in

the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art

eludes this danger, at any rate in _Strife_. We do not remember until

all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is,

one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme does,

as a matter of fact, come first in the author's conception, he will do

well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the

_proverbe_, or to take care that, as in _Strife_, it be not suffered to

make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.[2] No outside force

should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.

The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle,

but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another.

The author's primary object in such a case is, not to portray any

individual character or tell any definite story, but to transfer to the

stage an animated picture of some broad aspect or phase of life, without

concentrating the interest on any one figure or group. There are

theorists who would, by definition, exclude from the domain of drama any

such cinematograph-play, as they would probably call it; but we shall

see cause, as we go on, to distrust definitions, especially when they

seek to clothe themselves with the authority of laws. Tableau-plays of

the type here in question may even claim classical precedent. What else

is Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew Fair_? What else is Schiller's

_Wallensteins Lager_? Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann's _Die Weber_

and Gorky's _Nachtasyl_ are perhaps the best examples of the type. The

drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform to this or that

canon of art, but that it needs an exceptional amount of knowledge and

dramaturgic skill to handle them successfully. It is far easier to tell

a story on the stage than to paint a picture, and few playwrights can

resist the temptation to foist a story upon their picture, thus marring

it by an inharmonious intrusion of melodrama or farce. This has often

been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist,

or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting

plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic

picture of rural life, entitled _Shore Acres_, a melodramatic scene in a

lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play.

The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to

be able to transfer its characteristic incidents to the stage, may be

advised to defy both critical and managerial prejudice, and give his

tableau-play just so much of story as may naturally and inevitably fall

within its limits.

One of the most admirable and enthralling scenes I ever saw on any stage

was that of the Trafalgar Square suffrage meeting in Miss Elizabeth

Robins's _Votes for Women_. Throughout a whole act it held us

spellbound, while the story of the play stood still, and we forgot its

existence. It was only within a few minutes of the end, when the story

was dragged in neck and crop, that the reality of the thing vanished,

and the interest with it.

* * * * *

If an abstract theme be not an advisable starting-point, what is? A

character? A situation? Or a story? On this point it would be absurd to

lay down any rule; the more so as, in many cases, a playwright is quite

unable to say in what form the germ of a play first floated into his

mind. The suggestion may come from a newspaper paragraph, from an

incident seen in the street, from an emotional adventure or a comic

misadventure, from a chance word dropped by an acquaintance, or from

some flotsam or jetsam of phrase or fable that has drifted from the

other end of history. Often, too, the original germ, whatever it may be,

is transformed beyond recognition before a play is done.[3] In the mind

of the playwright figs grow from thistles, and a silk purse--perhaps a

Fortunatus' purse--may often be made from a sow's ear. The whole

delicate texture of Ibsen's _Doll's House_ was woven from a commonplace

story of a woman who forged a cheque in order to redecorate her

drawing-room. Stevenson's romance of _Prince Otto_ (to take an example

from fiction) grew out of a tragedy on the subject of Semiramis!

One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence: whatever may

be the germ of a play--whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what

not--the play will be of small account as a work of art unless

character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its

development. The story which is independent of character--which can be

carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets--is essentially

a trivial thing. Unless, at an early stage of the organizing process,

character begins to take the upper hand--unless the playwright finds

himself thinking, "Oh, yes, George is just the man to do this," or,

"That is quite foreign to Jane's temperament"--he may be pretty sure

that it is a piece of mechanism he is putting together, not a drama with

flesh and blood in it. The difference between a live play and a dead one

is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the

latter the plot controls the characters. Which is not to say, of course,

that there may not be clever and entertaining plays which are "dead" in

this sense, and dull and unattractive plays which are "live."

A great deal of ink has been wasted in controversy over a remark of

Aristotle's that the action or _muthos_, not the character or _êthos_,

is the essential element in drama. The statement is absolutely true and

wholly unimportant. A play can exist without anything that can be called

character, but not without some sort of action. This is implied in the

very word "drama," which means a doing, not a mere saying or existing.

It would be possible, no doubt, to place Don Quixote, or Falstaff, or

Peer Gynt, on the stage, and let him develop his character in mere

conversation, or even monologue, without ever moving from his chair. But

it is a truism that deeds, not words, are the demonstration and test of

character; wherefore, from time immemorial, it has been the recognized

business of the theatre to exhibit character in action. Historically,

too, we find that drama has everywhere originated in the portrayal of an

action--some exploit or some calamity in the career of some demigod or

hero. Thus story or plot is by definition, tradition, and practical

reason, the fundamental element in drama; but does it therefore follow

that it is the noblest element, or that by which its value should be

measured? Assuredly not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the fundamental

element in the human organism. It can exist, and, with a little

assistance, retain its form, when stripped of muscle and blood and

nerve; whereas a boneless man would be an amorphous heap, more helpless

than a jelly-fish. But do we therefore account the skeleton man's

noblest part? Scarcely. It is by his blood and nerve that he lives, not

by his bones; and it is because his bones are, comparatively speaking,

dead matter that they continue to exist when the flesh has fallen away

from them. It is, therefore, if not a misreading of Aristotle,[4] at any

rate a perversion of reason, to maintain that the drama lives by action,

rather than by character. Action ought to exist for the sake of

character: when the relation is reversed, the play may be an ingenious

toy, but scarcely a vital work of art.

* * * * *

It is time now to consider just what we mean when we say that the first

step towards play-writing is the "choice" of a theme.

In many cases, no doubt, it is the plain and literal fact that the

impulse to write some play--any play--exists, so to speak, in the

abstract, unassociated with any particular subject, and that the

would-be playwright proceeds, as he thinks, to set his imagination to

work, and invent a story. But this frame of mind is to be regarded with

suspicion. Few plays of much value, one may guess, have resulted from

such an abstract impulse. Invention, in these cases, is apt to be

nothing but recollection in disguise, the shaking of a kaleidoscope

formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once, in some momentary

access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of

a long country walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a

dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of

coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and

contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to

seem vaguely familiar. "Where have I seen this story before?" I asked

myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes

that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's _Hedda Gabler_. Thus, when we

think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in

fact, ransacking the store-house of memory. The plot which chooses us

is much more to be depended upon--the idea which comes when we least

expect it, perhaps from the most unlikely quarter, clamours at the gates

of birth, and will not let us rest till it be clothed in dramatic flesh

and blood.[5] It may very well happen, of course, that it has to

wait--that it has to be pigeon-holed for a time, until its due turn

comes.[6] Occasionally, perhaps, it may slip out of its pigeon-hole for

an airing, only to be put back again in a slightly more developed form.

Then at last its convenient season will arrive, and the play will be

worked out, written, and launched into the struggle for life. In the

sense of selecting from among a number of embryonic themes stored in his

mind, the playwright has often to make a deliberate choice; but when,

moved by a purely abstract impulse, he goes out of set purpose to look

for a theme, it may be doubted whether he is likely to return with any

very valuable treasure-trove.[7]

The same principle holds good in the case of the ready-made poetic or

historical themes, which are--rightly or wrongly--considered suitable

for treatment in blank verse. Whether, and how far, the blank verse

drama can nowadays be regarded as a vital and viable form is a question

to be considered later. In the meantime it is sufficient to say that

whatever principles of conception and construction apply to the modern

prose drama, apply with equal cogency to the poetic drama. The

verse-poet may perhaps take one or two licenses denied to the

prose-poet. For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more

excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are

ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than

the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he

renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to

produce that cumbrous nondescript, a "closet drama." Of such we do not

speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form

which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described

by the sailor, "cannot live on land and dies in the water"?

To return to our immediate topic, the poet who essays dramatic

composition on mere abstract impulse, because other poets have done so,

or because he is told that it pays, is only too likely to produce

willy-nilly a "closet drama." Let him beware of saying to himself, "I

will gird up my loins and write a play. Shall it be a Phaedra, or a

Semiramis, or a Sappho, or a Cleopatra? A Julian, or an Attila, or a

Savanarola, or a Cromwell?" A drama conceived in this reach-me-down

fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other

hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading,

some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be

interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting

on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means

yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The

real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it

with the hope of producing a live play, not a long-drawn rhetorical

anachronism, whether of the rotund or of the spasmodic type.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: For instance, _Il ne faut jurer de rien. Il faut qu'une

porte soit ouverte ou fermée. Un bienfait n'est jamais perdu._ There is

also a large class of pieces of which the title, though not itself a

proverb, makes direct allusion to some fable or proverbial saying: for

example, _Les Brebis de Panurge, La Chasse aux Corbeaux, La Cigale chez

les Fourmis_.]

[Footnote 2: I learn, on the best authority, that I am wrong, in point

of fact, as to the origin of _Strife_. The play arose in Mr.

Galsworthy's mind from his actually having seen in conflict the two men

who were the prototypes of Anthony and Roberts, and thus noted the waste

and inefficacy arising from the clash of strong characters unaccompanied

by balance. It was accident that led him to place the two men in an

environment of capital and labour. In reality, both of them were, if not

capitalists, at any rate on the side of capital. This interesting

correction of fact does not invalidate the theory above stated.]

[Footnote 3: Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes to me: "Sometimes I start

with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play

splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a

concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge

from its first idea." An interesting account of the way in which two

very different plays by M. de Curel: _L'Envers d'une Sainte_ and

_L'Invitée_,--grew out of one and the same initial idea, may be found in

_L'Année Psychologique_, 1894, p. 121.]

[Footnote 4: In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified

Aristotle's position. He appears to make action the essential element in

tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character. "In a play,"

he says, "they do not act in order to portray the characters, they

include the characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the

action in it, _i.e._ its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of

the tragedy, and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Besides this, a

tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without

character." (Bywater's Translation.) The last sentence is, in my view,

the gist of the matter; the preceding sentences greatly overstate the

case. There was a lively controversy on the subject in the _Times_

Literary Supplement in May, 1902. It arose from a review of Mr.

Phillips's _Paolo and Francesco_, and Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton

Collins, and Mr. A.B. Walkley took part in it.]

[Footnote 5: "Are the first beginnings of imaginative conception

directed by the will? Are they, indeed, conscious at all? Do they not

rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?" A.B.

Walkley, _Drama and Life_, p. 85.]

[Footnote 6: Sardou kept a file of about fifty _dossiers_, each bearing

the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it.

Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to

think of another. See _L'Année Psychologique_, 1894, pp. 67, 76.]

[Footnote 7: "My experience is," a dramatist writes to me, "that you

never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and

suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual

irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this

your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play." Again be writes:

"It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has

so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind,

that he must express it, and in dramatic form."]

_CHAPTER III_

DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC

It may be well, at this point, to consider for a little what we mean

when we use the term "dramatic." We shall probably not arrive at any

definition which can be applied as an infallible touchstone to

distinguish the dramatic from the undramatic. Perhaps, indeed, the

upshot may rather be to place the student on his guard against troubling

too much about the formal definitions of critical theorists.

The orthodox opinion of the present time is that which is generally

associated with the name of the late Ferdinand Brunetière. "The theatre

in general," said that critic, "is nothing but the place for the

development of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed to it by

destiny, fortune, or circumstances." And again: "Drama is a

representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers

or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown

living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against

social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need

be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the

malevolence of those who surround him."[1]

The difficulty about this definition is that, while it describes the

matter of a good many dramas, it does not lay down any true

differentia--any characteristic common to all drama, and possessed by no

other form of fiction. Many of the greatest plays in the world can with

difficulty be brought under the formula, while the majority of romances

and other stories come under it with ease. Where, for instance, is the

struggle in the _Agamemnon_? There is no more struggle between

Clytemnestra and Agamemnon than there is between the spider and the fly

who walks into his net. There is not even a struggle in Clytemnestra's

mind. Agamemnon's doom is sealed from the outset, and she merely carries

out a pre-arranged plot. There is contest indeed in the succeeding plays

of the trilogy; but it will scarcely be argued that the _Agamemnon_,

taken alone, is not a great drama. Even the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles,

though it may at first sight seem a typical instance of a struggle

against Destiny, does not really come under the definition. Oedipus, in

fact, does not struggle at all. His struggles, in so far as that word

can be applied to his misguided efforts to escape from the toils of

fate, are all things of the past; in the actual course of the tragedy he

simply writhes under one revelation after another of bygone error and

unwitting crime. It would be a mere play upon words to recognize as a

dramatic "struggle" the writhing of a worm on a hook. And does not this

description apply very closely to the part played by another great

protagonist--Othello to wit? There is no struggle, no conflict, between

him and Iago. It is Iago alone who exerts any will; neither Othello nor

Desdemona makes the smallest fight. From the moment when Iago sets his

machination to work, they are like people sliding down an ice-slope to

an inevitable abyss. Where is the conflict in _As You Like It_? No one,

surely, will pretend that any part of the interest or charm of the play

arises from the struggle between the banished Duke and the Usurper, or

between Orlando and Oliver. There is not even the conflict, if so it can

be called, which nominally brings so many hundreds of plays under the

Brunetière canon--the conflict between an eager lover and a more or less

reluctant maid. Or take, again, Ibsen's _Ghosts_--in what valid sense

can it be said that that tragedy shows us will struggling against

obstacles? Oswald, doubtless, wishes to live, and his mother desires

that he should live; but this mere will for life cannot be the

differentia that makes of _Ghosts_ a drama. If the reluctant descent of

the "downward path to death" constituted drama, then Tolstoy's _Death of

Ivan Ilytch_ would be one of the greatest dramas ever written--which it

certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against

obstacles, the classic to turn to is not _Hamlet_, not _Lear_, but

_Robinson Crusoe_; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a

drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in _Paradise Lost_,

in _John Gilpin_, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there

is none in _Hannele_, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama.

Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from _Clarissa

Harlowe_ to _The House with the Green Shutters_; whereas in many plays

the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for

instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest

resides in something quite different.

The plain truth seems to be that conflict is _one_ of the most dramatic

elements in life, and that many dramas--perhaps most--do, as a matter

of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another. But it is clearly an

error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to

insist--as do some of Brunetière's followers--that the conflict must be

between will and will. A stand-up fight between will and will--such a

fight as occurs in, say, the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides, or Racine's

_Andromaque_, or Molière's _Tartufe_, or Ibsen's _Pretenders_, or

Dumas's _Françillon_, or Sudermann's _Heimat_, or Sir Arthur Pinero's

_Gay Lord Quex_, or Mr. Shaw's _Candida_, or Mr. Galsworthy's

_Strife_--such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest

forms of drama. But it is comparatively rare at any rate as the formula

of a whole play. In individual scenes a conflict of will is frequent

enough; but it is, after all, only one among a multitude of equally

telling forms of drama. No one can say that the Balcony Scene in _Romeo

and Juliet_ is undramatic, or the "Galeoto fú il libro" scene in Mr.

Stephen Phillips's _Paolo and Francesca_; yet the point of these scenes

is not a clash, but an ecstatic concordance, of wills. Is the

death-scene of Cleopatra undramatic? Or the Banquet scene in _Macbeth_?

Or the pastoral act in _The Winter's Tale_? Yet in none of these is

there any conflict of wills. In the whole range of drama there is

scarcely a passage which one would call more specifically dramatic than

the Screen Scene in _The School for Scandal_; yet it would be the

veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect

arises from the clash of will against will. This whole comedy, indeed,

suffices to show the emptiness of the theory. With a little strain it is

possible to bring it within the letter of the formula; but who can

pretend that any considerable part of the attraction or interest of the

play is due to that possibility?

The champions of the theory, moreover, place it on a metaphysical basis,

finding in the will the essence of human personality, and therefore of

the art which shows human personality raised to its highest power. It

seems unnecessary, however, to apply to Schopenhauer for an explanation

of whatever validity the theory may possess. For a sufficient account of

the matter, we need go no further than the simple psychological

observation that human nature loves a fight, whether it be with clubs or

with swords, with tongues or with brains. One of the earliest forms of

mediaeval drama was the "estrif" or "flyting"--the scolding-match

between husband and wife, or between two rustic gossips. This motive is

glorified in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, degraded in the

patter of two "knockabout comedians." Certainly there is nothing more

telling in drama than a piece of "cut-and-thrust" dialogue after the

fashion of the ancient "stichomythia." When a whole theme involving

conflict, or even a single scene of the nature described as a

"passage-at-arms," comes naturally in the playwright's way, by all means

let him seize the opportunity. But do not let him reject a theme or

scene as undramatic merely because it has no room for a clash of

warring wills.

There is a variant of the "conflict" theory which underlines the word

"obstacles" in the above-quoted dictum of Brunetière, and lays down the

rule: "No obstacle, no drama." Though far from being universally valid,

this form of the theory has a certain practical usefulness, and may well

be borne in mind. Many a play would have remained unwritten if the

author had asked himself, "Is there a sufficient obstacle between my two

lovers?" or, in more general terms, "between my characters and the

realization of their will?" There is nothing more futile than a play in

which we feel that there is no real obstacle to the inevitable happy

ending, and that the curtain might just as well fall in the middle of

the first act as at the end of the third. Comedies abound (though they

reach the stage only by accident) in which the obstacle between Corydon

and Phyllis, between Lord Edwin and Lady Angelina, is not even a defect

or peculiarity of character, but simply some trumpery

misunderstanding[2] which can be kept afoot only so long as every one

concerned holds his or her common sense in studious abeyance. "Pyramus

and Thisbe without the wall" may be taken as the formula for the whole

type of play. But even in plays of a much higher type, the author might

often ask himself with advantage whether he could not strengthen his

obstacle, and so accentuate the struggle which forms the matter of his

play. Though conflict may not be essential to drama, yet, when you set

forth to portray a struggle, you may as well make it as real and intense

as possible.

It seems to me that in the late William Vaughn Moody's drama, _The Great

Divide_, the body of the play, after the stirring first act, is weakened

by our sense that the happy ending is only being postponed by a violent

effort. We have been assured from the very first--even before Ruth

Jordan has set eyes on Stephen Ghent--that just such a rough diamond is

the ideal of her dreams. It is true that, after their marriage, the

rough diamond seriously misconducts himself towards her; and we have

then to consider the rather unattractive question whether a single act

of brutality on the part of a drunken husband ought to be held so

unpardonable as to break up a union which otherwise promises to be quite

satisfactory. But the author has taken such pains to emphasize the fact

that these two people are really made for each other, that the answer to

the question is not for a moment in doubt, and we become rather

impatient of the obstinate sulkiness of Ruth's attitude. If there had

been a real disharmony of character to be overcome, instead of, or in

addition to, the sordid misadventure which is in fact the sole barrier

between them, the play would certainly have been stronger, and perhaps

more permanently popular.

In a play by Mr. James Bernard Fagan, _The Prayer of the Sword_, we have

a much clearer example of an inadequate obstacle. A youth named Andrea

has been brought up in a monastery, and destined for the priesthood; but

his tastes and aptitudes are all for a military career. He is, however,

on the verge of taking his priestly vows, when accident calls him forth

into the world, and he has the good fortune to quell a threatened

revolution in a romantic Duchy, ruled over by a duchess of surpassing

loveliness. With her he naturally falls in love; and the tragedy lies,

or ought to lie, in the conflict between this earthly passion and his

heavenly calling and election. But the author has taken pains to make

the obstacle between Andrea and Ilaria absolutely unreal. The fact that

Andrea has as yet taken no irrevocable vow is not the essence of the

matter. Vow or no vow, there would have been a tragic conflict if Andrea

had felt absolutely certain of his calling to the priesthood, and had

defied Heaven, and imperilled his immortal soul, because of his

overwhelming passion. That would have been a tragic situation; but the

author had carefully avoided it. From the very first--before Andrea had

ever seen Ilaria--it had been impressed upon us that he had no priestly

vocation. There was no struggle in his soul between passion and duty;

there was no struggle at all in his soul. His struggles are all with

external forces and influences; wherefore the play, which a real

obstacle might have converted into a tragedy, remained a sentimental

romance--and is forgotten.

* * * * *

What, then, is the essence of drama, if conflict be not it? What is the

common quality of themes, scenes, and incidents, which we recognize as

specifically dramatic? Perhaps we shall scarcely come nearer to a

helpful definition than if we say that the essence of drama is _crisis_.

A play is a more or less rapidly-developing crisis in destiny or

circumstance, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a crisis, clearly

furthering the ultimate event. The drama may be called the art of

crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments. It is the

slowness of its processes which differentiates the typical novel from

the typical play. If the novelist does not take advantage of the

facilities offered by his form for portraying gradual change, whether in

the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order

to trespass on the domain of the dramatist. Most great novels embrace

considerable segments of many lives; whereas the drama gives us only the

culminating points--or shall we say the intersecting culminations?--two

or three destinies. Some novelists have excelled precisely in the art

with which they have made the gradations of change in character or

circumstance so delicate as to be imperceptible from page to page, and

measurable, as in real life, only when we look back over a considerable

period. The dramatist, on the other hand, deals in rapid and startling

changes, the "peripeties," as the Greeks called them, which may be the

outcome of long, slow processes, but which actually occur in very brief

spaces of time. Nor is this a merely mechanical consequence of the

narrow limits of stage presentation. The crisis is as real, though not

as inevitable, a part of human experience as the gradual development.

Even if the material conditions of the theatre permitted the

presentation of a whole _Middlemarch_ or _Anna Karénine_--as the

conditions of the Chinese theatre actually do--some dramatists, we

cannot doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of prolixity, in

order to cultivate an art of concentration and crisis. The Greek drama

"subjected to the faithful eyes," as Horace phrases it, the culminating

points of the Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of

theatrical presentment the culminating points of modern experience.

But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic. A serious

illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage,

may be a crisis in a man's life, without being necessarily, or even

probably, material for drama. How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic

from a non-dramatic crisis? Generally, I think, by the fact that it

develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor

crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible,

the vivid manifestation of character. Take, for instance, the case of a

bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the _Gazette_ do not go

through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension,

special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in

their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small

vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take

lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state

of their liver. In this average process of financial decline, there may

be--there has been--matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a

drama. That admirable chapter in _Little Dorrit,_ wherein Dickens

describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows

how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite

impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage. So, too, with the

bankruptcy of Colonel Newcome--certain emotional crises arising from it

have, indeed, been placed on the stage, but only after all Thackeray's

knowledge of the world and fine gradations of art had been eliminated.

Mr. Hardy's _Mayor of Casterbridge_ has, I think, been dramatized, but

not, I think, with success. A somewhat similar story of financial ruin,

the grimly powerful _House with the Green Shutters_, has not even

tempted the dramatiser. There are, in this novel, indeed, many

potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous

and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment.

Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,[3]

a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright.

In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of

slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently

suited for treatment in fiction rather than in drama.

But bankruptcy sometimes occurs in the form of one or more sudden, sharp

crises, and has, therefore, been utilized again and again as a dramatic

motive. In a hundred domestic dramas or melodramas, we have seen the

head of a happy household open a newspaper or a telegram announcing the

failure of some enterprise in which all his fortune is embarked. So

obviously dramatic is this incident that it has become sadly hackneyed.

Again, we have bankruptcy following upon a course of gambling, generally

in stocks. Here there is evident opportunity, which has been frequently

utilized, for a series of crises of somewhat violent and commonplace

emotion. In American drama especially, the duels of Wall Street, the

combats of bull and bear, form a very popular theme, which clearly falls

under the Brunetière formula. Few American dramatists can resist the

temptation of showing some masterful financier feverishly watching the

"ticker" which proclaims him a millionaire or a beggar. The "ticker" had

not been invented in the days when Ibsen wrote _The League of Youth_,

otherwise he would doubtless have made use of it in the fourth act of

that play. The most popular of all Björnson's plays is specifically

entitled _A Bankruptcy_. Here the poet has had the art to select a

typical phase of business life, which naturally presents itself in the

form of an ascending curve, so to speak, of emotional crises. We see the

energetic, active business man, with a number of irons in the fire,

aware in his heart that he is insolvent, but not absolutely clear as to

his position, and hoping against hope to retrieve it. We see him give a

great dinner-party, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the world, and

to secure the support of a financial magnate, who is the guest of

honour. The financial magnate is inclined to "bite," and goes off,

leaving the merchant under the impression that he is saved. This is an

interesting and natural, but scarcely a thrilling, crisis. It does not,

therefore, discount the supreme crisis of the play, in which a cold,

clear-headed business man, who has been deputed by the banks to look

into the merchant's affairs, proves to him, point by point, that it

would be dishonest of him to flounder any longer in the swamp of

insolvency, into which he can only sink deeper and drag more people down

with him. Then the bankrupt produces a pistol and threatens murder and

suicide if the arbiter of his fate will not consent to give him one more

chance; but his frenzy breaks innocuous against the other's calm,

relentless reason. Here we have, I repeat, a typically dramatic theme: a

great crisis, bringing out vivid manifestations of character, not only

in the bankrupt himself, but in those around him, and naturally

unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises, which we call

interesting and moving scenes. The play is scarcely a great one, partly

because its ending is perfunctory, partly because Björnson, poet though

he was, had not Ibsen's art of "throwing in a little poetry" into his

modern dramas. I have summarized it up to its culminating point, because

it happened to illustrate the difference between a bankruptcy, dramatic

in its nature and treatment, and those undramatic bankruptcies to which

reference has been made. In _La Douloureuse_, by Maurice Donnay,

bankruptcy is incidentally employed to bring about a crisis of a

different order. A ball is proceeding at the house of a Parisian

financier, when the whisper spreads that the host is ruined, and has

committed suicide in a room above; whereupon the guests, after a moment

of flustered consternation, go on supping and dancing![4] We are not at

all deeply interested in the host or his fortunes. The author's purpose

is to illustrate, rather crudely, the heartlessness of plutocratic

Bohemia; and by means of the bankruptcy and suicide he brings about what

may be called a crisis of collective character.[5]

* * * * *

As regards individual incidents, it may be said in general that the

dramatic way of treating them is the crisp and staccato, as opposed to

the smooth or legato, method. It may be thought a point of inferiority

in dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to the nerves,

and should appeal by preference, wherever it is reasonably possible, to

the cheap emotions of curiosity and surprise. But this is a criticism,

not of dramatic art, but of human nature. We may wish that mankind took

more pleasure in pure apprehension than in emotion; but so long as the

fact is otherwise, that way of handling an incident by which the

greatest variety of poignancy of emotion can be extracted from it will

remain the specifically dramatic way.

We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called

primary and secondary suspense or surprise--that is to say between

suspense or surprise actually experienced by the spectator to whom the

drama is new, and suspense or surprise experienced only sympathetically,

on behalf of the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is

to follow. The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not

distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term

"dramatic." It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion

must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any

ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the

larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it

beforehand, in outline, if not in detail.

As a typical example of a dramatic way of handling an incident, so as to

make a supreme effect of what might else have been an anti-climax, one

may cite the death of Othello. Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem.

Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture;

how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut

of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a

mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In

no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius

more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. We all remember

how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture,

and thus addresses them:

"Soft you; a word or two, before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know 't;

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;

And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

I took by the throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him--thus!"

What is the essence of Shakespeare's achievement in this marvellous

passage? What is it that he has done? He has thrown his audience, just

as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a

sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation. In

other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly,

and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.

Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be

found in the first act of Ibsen's _Little Eyolf_. The lame boy, Eyolf,

has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water,

and been drowned. This is the bare fact: how is it to be conveyed to the

child's parents and to the audience?

A Greek dramatist would probably have had recourse to a long and

elaborately worked-up "messenger-speech," a pathetic recitation. That

was the method best suited to the conditions, and to what may be called

the prevailing tempo, of the Greek theatre. I am far from saying that it

was a bad method: no method is bad which holds and moves an audience.

But in this case it would have had the disadvantage of concentrating

attention on the narrator instead of on the child's parents, on the mere

event instead of on the emotions it engendered. In the modern theatre,

with greater facilities for reproducing the actual movement of life, the

dramatist naturally aims at conveying to the audience the growing

anxiety, the suspense and the final horror, of the father and mother.

The most commonplace playwright would have seen this opportunity and

tried to make the most of it. Every one can think of a dozen commonplace

ways in which the scene could be arranged and written; and some of them

might be quite effective. The great invention by which Ibsen snatches

the scene out of the domain of the commonplace, and raises it to the

height of dramatic poetry, consists in leaving it doubtful to the father

and mother what is the meaning of the excitement on the beach and the

confused cries which reach their ears, until one cry comes home to them

with terrible distinctness, "The crutch is floating!" It would be hard

to name any single phrase in literature in which more dramatic effect is

concentrated than in these four words--they are only two words in the

original. However dissimilar in its nature and circumstances, this

incident is comparable with the death of Othello, inasmuch as in each

case the poet, by a supreme felicity of invention, has succeeded in

doing a given thing in absolutely the most dramatic method conceivable.

Here we recognize in a consummate degree what has been called the

"fingering of the dramatist"; and I know not how better to express the

common quality of the two incidents than in saying that each is touched

with extraordinary crispness, so as to give to what in both cases has

for some time been expected and foreseen a sudden thrill of novelty and

unexpectedness. That is how to do a thing dramatically.[6]

And now, after all this discussion of the "dramatic" in theme and

incident, it remains to be said that the tendency of recent theory, and

of some recent practice, has been to widen the meaning of the word,

until it bursts the bonds of all definition. Plays have been written,

and have found some acceptance, in which the endeavour of the dramatist

has been to depict life, not in moments of crisis, but in its most level

and humdrum phases, and to avoid any crispness of touch in the

presentation of individual incidents. "Dramatic," in the eyes of writers

of this school, has become a term of reproach, synonymous with

"theatrical." They take their cue from Maeterlinck's famous essay on

"The Tragic in Daily Life," in which he lays it down that: "An old man,

seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside

him--submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his

destiny--motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more

human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his

mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who

'avenges his honour.'" They do not observe that Maeterlinck, in his own

practice, constantly deals with crises, and often with violent and

startling ones.

At the same time, I am far from suggesting that the reaction against the

traditional "dramatic" is a wholly mistaken movement. It is a valuable

corrective of conventional theatricalism; and it has, at some points,

positively enlarged the domain of dramatic art. Any movement is good

which helps to free art from the tyranny of a code of rules and

definitions. The only really valid definition of the dramatic is: Any

representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting

an average audience assembled in a theatre. We must say "representation

of imaginary personages" in order to exclude a lecture or a prize-fight;

and we must say "an average audience" (or something to that effect) in

order to exclude a dialogue of Plato or of Landor, the recitation of

which might interest a specially selected public. Any further attempt to

limit the content of the term "dramatic" is simply the expression of an

opinion that such-and-such forms of representation will not be found to

interest an audience; and this opinion may always be rebutted by

experiment. In all that I have said, then, as to the dramatic and the

non-dramatic, I must be taken as meaning: "Such-and-such forms and

methods have been found to please, and will probably please again. They

are, so to speak, safer and easier than other forms and methods. But it

is the part of original genius to override the dictates of experience,

and nothing in these pages is designed to discourage original genius

from making the attempt." We have already seen, indeed, that in a

certain type of play--the broad picture of a social phenomenon or

environment--it is preferable that no attempt should be made to depict a

marked crisis. There should be just enough story to afford a plausible

excuse for raising and for lowering the curtain.[7]

Let us not, however, seem to grant too much to the innovators and the

quietists. To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the

presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no

means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention. It is to make at once an

induction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and a

deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical

presentation. The fact that theatrical conditions often encourage a

violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life

does not make these elements any the less real or any the less

characteristically dramatic. It is true that crispness of handling may

easily degenerate into the pursuit of mere picture-poster situation; but

that is no reason why the artist should not seek to achieve crispness

within the bounds prescribed by nature and common sense. There is a

drama--I have myself seen it--in which the heroine, fleeing from the

villain, is stopped by a yawning chasm. The pursuer is at her heels, and

it seems as though she has no resource but to hurl herself into the

abyss. But she is accompanied by three Indian servants, who happen, by

the mercy of Providence, to be accomplished acrobats. The second climbs

on the shoulders of the first, the third on the shoulders of the second;

and then the whole trio falls forward across the chasm, the top one

grasping some bush or creeper on the other side; so that a living bridge

is formed, on which the heroine (herself, it would seem, something of an

acrobat) can cross the dizzy gulf and bid defiance to the baffled

villain. This is clearly a dramatic crisis within our definition; but,

no less clearly, it is not a piece of rational or commendable drama. To

say that such-and-such a factor is necessary, or highly desirable, in a

dramatic scene, is by no means to imply that every scene which contains

this factor is good drama. Let us take the case of another heroine--Nina

in Sir Arthur Pinero's _His House in Order_. The second wife of Filmer

Jesson, she is continually being offered up as a sacrifice on the altar

dedicated to the memory of his adored first wife. Not only her husband,

but the relatives of the sainted Annabel, make her life a burden to her.

Then it comes to her knowledge--she obtains absolute proof--that

Annabel was anything but the saint she was believed to be. By a single

word she can overturn the altar of her martyrdom, and shatter the

dearest illusion of her persecutors. Shall she speak that word, or shall

she not? Here is a crisis which comes within our definition just as

clearly as the other;[8] only it happens to be entirely natural and

probable, and eminently illustrative of character. Ought we, then, to

despise it because of the element it has in common with the

picture-poster situation of preposterous melodrama? Surely not. Let

those who have the art--the extremely delicate and difficult art--of

making drama without the characteristically dramatic ingredients, do so

by all means; but let them not seek to lay an embargo on the judicious

use of these ingredients as they present themselves in life.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: _Etudes Critiques_, vol. vii, pp. 153 and 207.]

[Footnote 2: In the most aggravated cases, the misunderstanding is

maintained by a persevering use of pronouns in place of proper names:

"he" and "she" being taken by the hearer to mean A. and B., when the

speaker is in fact referring to X. and Y. This ancient trick becomes the

more irritating the longer the _quiproquo_ is dragged out.]

[Footnote 3: The Lowland Scottish villager. It is noteworthy that Mr.

J.M. Barrie, who himself belongs to this race, has an almost unique gift

of extracting dramatic effect out of taciturnity, and even out

of silence.]

[Footnote 4: There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch's play,

_The Moth and the Flame_.]

[Footnote 5: _Les Corbeaux_, by Henri Becque, might perhaps be classed

as a bankruptcy play, though the point of it is that the Vigneron family

is not really bankrupt at all, but is unblushingly fleeced by the

partner and the lawyer of the deceased Vigneron, who play into each

other's hands.]

[Footnote 6: "Dramatic" has recently become one of the most overworked

words in the vocabulary of journalism. It constantly appears, not only

in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on

bulletin-boards. When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr.

Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of

peers, should it prove necessary for the passing of the Parliament Bill,

one paper published the news under this head-line: "DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT

BY THE PRIME MINISTER," and the parliamentary correspondent of another

paper wrote: "With dramatic suddenness and swiftness, the Prime Minister

hurled his thunderbolt at the wavering Tory party yesterday." As a

matter of fact, the letter was probably not "hurled" more suddenly or

swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its

contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably

the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these

writers as "dramatic." The letter put an end to all dubiety with a

"short, sharp shock." It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however,

"dramatic" is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather

pretentious synonym for the still more hackneyed "startling."]

[Footnote 7: As a specimen, and a successful specimen, of this new

technic, I may cite Miss Elizabeth Baker's very interesting play,

_Chains_. There is absolutely no "story" in it, no complication of

incidents, not even any emotional tension worth speaking of. Another

recent play of something the same type, _The Way the Money Goes_, by

Lady Bell, was quite thrilling by comparison. There we saw a workman's

wife bowed down by a terrible secret which threatened to wreck her whole

life--the secret that she had actually run into debt to the amount of

£30. Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very

much as Nora's situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad's

letter is in Helmer's hands. But in _Chains_ there is not even this

simple form of excitement and suspense. A city clerk, oppressed by the

deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to

Australia--and doesn't go: that is the sum and substance of the action.

Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony

and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a

middle-aged widower--and doesn't do it. If any one had told the late

Francisque Sarcey, or the late Clement Scott, that a play could be made

out of this slender material, which should hold an audience absorbed

through four acts, and stir them to real enthusiasm, these eminent

critics would have thought him a madman. Yet Miss Baker has achieved

this feat, by the simple process of supplementing competent observation

with a fair share of dramatic instinct.]

[Footnote 8: If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing

can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both

the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others. There is an

element of choice in all action which is, or seems to be, the product of

free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two

alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a

mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the

conflicting interests. Such scenes are _Coriolanus_, v. 3, the scene

between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in the last act of _The Lady

from the Sea_, and the concluding scene of _Candida_.]

_CHAPTER IV_

THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION

As no two people, probably, ever did, or ever will, pursue the same

routine in play-making, it is manifestly impossible to lay down any

general rules on the subject. There are one or two considerations,

however, which it may not be wholly superfluous to suggest to beginners.

An invaluable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the

scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen's _Efterladte

Skrifter_. The most important of these "fore-works," as he used to call

them, have now been translated under the title of _From Ibsen's

Workshop_ (Scribner), and may be studied with the greatest profit. Not

that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of

composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The

great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should

be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become

immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has

had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest

individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had

reached a point of development at which many authors would have held the

process of gestation ended, and the work of art ripe for birth. Among

these inspired afterthoughts may be reckoned Nora's great line,

"Millions of women have done that"--the most crushing repartee in

literature--Hedvig's threatened blindness, with all that ensues from it,

and Little Eyolf's crutch, used to such purpose as we have already seen.

This is not to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not

to be one of the playwright's first proceedings. Indeed, if he is able

to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is

so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry

in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme.

Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps

even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in

a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance,

and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is

almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an

architect. There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes

working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along.

That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have no

absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for

_Getting Married_ or _Misalliance_, he has sedulously concealed the

fact--to the detriment of the plays.[1]

The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a

dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian _commedia dell'

arte_ wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to

do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as

one or two MS. "Plats," designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant

to testify. The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scenario

to the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of

the German stage. It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may

have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation,

that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits,

and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy

prompted. So, at least, the copious fluency of their dialogue seems to

suggest. But the typical modern play is a much more close-knit organism,

in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by

playwrights who stood near to the days of improvisation, and could

indulge in "the large utterance of the early gods." Consequently it

would seem that, until a play has been thought out very clearly and in

great detail, any scheme of entrances and exits ought to be merely

provisional and subject to indefinite modification. A modern play is not

a framework of story loosely draped in a more or less gorgeous robe of

language. There is, or ought to be, a close interdependence between

action, character and dialogue, which forbids a playwright to tie his

hands very far in advance.

As a rule, then, it would seem to be an unfavourable sign when a drama

presents itself at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline.

The result may be a powerful, logical, well-knit piece of work; but the

breath of life will scarcely be in it. Room should be left as long as

possible for unexpected developments of character. If your characters

are innocent of unexpected developments, the less characters they.[2]

Not that I, personally, have any faith in those writers of fiction, be

they playwrights or novelists, who contend that they do not speak

through the mouths of their personages, but rather let their personages

speak through them. "I do not invent or create" I have heard an eminent

novelist say: "I simply record; my characters speak and act, and I write

down their sayings and doings." This author may be a fine psychologist

for purposes of fiction, but I question his insight into his own mental

processes. The apparent spontaneity of a character's proceedings is a

pure illusion. It means no more than that the imagination, once set in

motion along a given line, moves along that line with an ease and

freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural and almost

uncanny.[3]

Most authors, however, who have any real gift for character-creation

probably fall more or less under this illusion, though they are sane

enough and modest enough to realize that an illusion it is.[4] A

character will every now and then seem to take the bit between his teeth

and say and do things for which his creator feels himself hardly

responsible. The playwright's scheme should not, then, until the latest

possible moment, become so hard and fast as to allow his characters no

elbow room for such manifestations of spontaneity. And this is only one

of several forms of afterthought which may arise as the play develops.

The playwright may all of a sudden see that a certain character is

superfluous, or that a new character is needed, or that a new

relationship between two characters would simplify matters, or that a

scene that he has placed in the first act ought to be in the second, or

that he can dispense with it altogether, or that it reveals too much to

the audience and must be wholly recast.[5]

These are only a few of the re-adjustments which have constantly to be

made if a play is shaping itself by a process of vital growth; and that

is why the playwright may be advised to keep his material fluid as long

as he can. Ibsen had written large portions of the play now known to us

as _Rosmersholm_ before he decided that Rebecca should not be married to

Rosmer. He also, at a comparatively late stage, did away with two

daughters whom he had at first given to Rosmer, and decided to make her

childlessness the main cause of Beata's tragedy.

Perhaps I insist too strongly on the advisability of treating a dramatic

theme as clay to be modelled and remodelled, rather than as wood or

marble to be carved unalterably and once for all. If so, it is because

of a personal reminiscence. In my early youth, I had, like everybody

else, ambitions in the direction of play-writing; and it was my

inability to keep a theme plastic that convinced me of my lack of

talent. It pleased me greatly to draw out a detailed scenario, working

up duly to a situation at the end of each act; and, once made, that

scenario was like a cast-iron mould into which the dialogue had simply

to be poured. The result was that the play had all the merits of a

logical, well-ordered essay. My situations worked out like the Q.E.D.'s

of Euclid. My characters obstinately refused to come to life, or to take

the bit between their teeth. They were simply cog-wheels in a

pre-arranged mechanism. In one respect, my two or three plays were

models--in respect of brevity and conciseness. I was never troubled by

the necessity of cutting down--so cruel a necessity to many

playwrights.[6] My difficulty was rather to find enough for my

characters to say--for they never wanted to say anything that was not

strictly germane to the plot. It was this that made me despair of

play-writing, and realize that my mission was to teach other people how

to write plays. And, similarly, the aspirant who finds that his people

never want to say more than he can allow them to say--that they never

rush headlong into blind alleys, or do things that upset the balance of

the play and have to be resolutely undone--that aspirant will do well

not to be over-confident of his dramatic calling and election. There may

be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is said (on rather

poor evidence)[7] to have done, without blotting a line; but I believe

them to be rare. In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be

he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two.

There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays

as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty

with great rhetorical force and fluency. The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu

have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration. One

imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the

careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule.[8]

But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M.

Hervieu's dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The

dramatist should aim at _being_ logical without _seeming_ so.[9]

It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play

backwards, and even to write his last act first.[10] This doctrine

belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as

the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the

unforgivable sin. Nowadays, we do not insist that every play should end

with a tableau, or with an emphatic _mot de la fin_. We are more willing

to accept a quiet, even an indecisive, ending.[11] Nevertheless it is

and must ever be true that, at a very early period in the scheming of

his play, the playwright ought to assure himself that his theme is

capable of a satisfactory ending. Of course this phrase does not imply a

"happy ending," but one which satisfies the author as being artistic,

effective, inevitable (in the case of a serious play), or, in one word,

"right." An obviously makeshift ending can never be desirable, either

from the ideal or from the practical point of view. Many excellent plays

have been wrecked on this rock. The very frequent complaint that "the

last act is weak" is not always or necessarily a just reproach; but it

is so when the author has clearly been at a loss for an ending, and has

simply huddled his play up in a conventional and perfunctory fashion. It

may even be said that some apparently promising themes are deceptive in

their promise, since they are inherently incapable of a satisfactory

ending. The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run

up against one of these blind-alley themes.[12] He should, at an early

point, see clearly the end for which he is making, and be sure that it

is an end which he actively desires, not merely one which satisfies

convention, or which "will have to do."

Some dramatists, when a play is provisionally mapped out, do not attempt

to begin at the beginning and write it as a coherent whole, but make a

dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which

specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must

obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one

can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity.

It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to

it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite

modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find

short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been

assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came

to him, as it were, ready dramatized. One would be tempted to hope much

of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus "lisped in dialogue

for the dialogue came."

Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to

have the details of its scene clearly before him? Ought he to draw out a

scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character

is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the

settee, or _vice versa_? There is no doubt that furniture, properties,

accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than

they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the

early-Victorian stage. Some of us, who are not yet centenarians, can

remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except

two or three chairs "painted on the flat." Under such conditions, it was

clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture,

and even "positions" might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal.

This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible.

Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all),

scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which

the figures stand out in high relief. The stage now aims at presenting a

complete picture, with the figures, not "a little out of the picture,"

but completely in it. This being so, the playwright must evidently, at

some point in the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture

in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists

do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the

topography of their scenes, and the shifting "positions" of their

characters. The question is: at what stage of the process of composition

ought this visualization to occur? Here, again, it would be absurd to

lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically

and from what can be gathered of the practice of the best dramatists,

that it is wisest to reserve it for a comparatively late stage. A

playwright of my acquaintance, and a very remarkable playwright too,

used to scribble the first drafts of his play in little notebooks, which

he produced from his pocket whenever he had a moment to spare--often on

the top of an omnibus. Only when the first draft was complete did he

proceed to set the scenes, as it were, and map out the stage-management.

On the other hand, one has heard of playwrights whose first step in

setting to work upon a particular act was to construct a complete model

of the scene, and people it with manikins to represent the characters.

As a general practice, this is scarcely to be commended. It is wiser,

one fancies, to have the matter of the scene pretty fully roughed-out

before details of furniture, properties, and position are arranged.[14]

It may happen, indeed, that some natural phenomenon, some property or

piece of furniture, is the very pivot of the scene; in which case it

must, of course, be posited from the first. From the very moment of his

conceiving the fourth act of _Le Tartufe_, Molière must have had clearly

in view the table under which Orgon hides; and Sheridan cannot have got

very far with the Screen Scene before he had mentally placed the screen.

But even where a great deal turns on some individual object, the

detailed arrangements of the scene may in most cases be taken for

granted until a late stage in its working out.

One proviso, however, must be made; where any important effect depends

upon a given object, or a particular arrangement of the scene, the

playwright cannot too soon assure himself that the object comes well

within the physical possibilities of the stage, and that the arrangement

is optically[15] possible and effective. Few things, indeed, are quite

impossible to the modern stage; but there are many that had much better

not be attempted. It need scarcely be added that the more serious a play

is, or aspires to be, the more carefully should the author avoid any

such effects as call for the active collaboration of the

stage-carpenter, machinist, or electrician. Even when a mechanical

effect can be produced to perfection, the very fact that the audience

cannot but admire the ingenuity displayed, and wonder "how it is done,"

implies a failure of that single-minded attention to the essence of the

matter in hand which the dramatist would strive to beget and maintain. A

small but instructive example of a difficult effect, such as the prudent

playwright will do well to avoid, occurs in the third act of Ibsen's

_Little Eyolf_. During the greater part of the act, the flag in

Allmers's garden is hoisted to half-mast in token of mourning; until at

the end, when he and Rita attain a serener frame of mind, he runs it up

to the truck. Now, from the poetic and symbolic point of view, this flag

is all that can be desired; but from the practical point of view it

presents grave difficulties. Nothing is so pitifully ineffective as a

flag in a dead calm, drooping nervelessly against the mast; and though,

no doubt, by an ingenious arrangement of electric fans, it might be

possible to make this flag flutter in the breeze, the very fact of its

doing so would tend to set the audience wondering by what mechanism the

effect was produced, instead of attending to the soul-struggles of Rita

and Allmers. It would be absurd to blame Ibsen for overriding theatrical

prudence in such a case; I merely point out to beginners that it is

wise, before relying on an effect of this order, to make sure that it

is, not only possible, but convenient from the practical point of view.

In one or two other cases Ibsen strained the resources of the stage. The

illumination in the last act of _Pillars of Society_ cannot be carried

out as he describes it; or rather, if it were carried out on some

exceptionally large and well-equipped stage, the feat of the mechanician

would eclipse the invention of the poet. On the other hand, the abode of

the Wild Duck in the play of that name is a conception entirely

consonant with the optics of the theatre; for no detail at all need be,

or ought to be, visible, and a vague effect of light is all that is

required. Only in his last melancholy effort did Ibsen, in a play

designed for representation, demand scenic effects entirely beyond the

resources of any theatre not specially fitted for spectacular drama, and

possible, even in such a theatre, only in some ridiculously

makeshift form.

There are two points of routine on which I am compelled to speak in no

uncertain voice--two practices which I hold to be almost equally

condemnable. In the first place, no playwright who understands the

evolution of the modern theatre can nowadays use in his stage-directions

the abhorrent jargon of the early nineteenth century. When one comes

across a manuscript bespattered with such cabalistic signs as "R.2.E.,"

"R.C.," "L.C.," "L.U.E.," and so forth, one sees at a glance that the

writer has neither studied dramatic literature nor thought out for

himself the conditions of the modern theatre, but has found his dramatic

education between the buff covers of _French's Acting Edition_. Some

beginners imagine that a plentiful use of such abbreviations will be

taken as a proof of their familiarity with the stage; whereas, in fact,

it only shows their unfamiliarity with theatrical history. They might as

well set forth to describe a modern battleship in the nautical

terminology of Captain Marryat. "Right First Entrance," "Left Upper

Entrance," and so forth, are terms belonging to the period when there

were no "box" rooms or "set" exteriors on the stage, when the sides of

each scene were composed of "wings" shoved on in grooves, and entrances

could be made between each pair of wings. Thus, "R. 1 E." meant the

entrance between the proscenium and the first "wing" on the right, "R. 2

E." meant the entrance between the first pair of "wings," and so forth.

"L.U.E." meant the entrance at the left between the last "wing" and the

back cloth. Now grooves and "wings" have disappeared from the stage. The

"box" room is entered, like any room in real life, by doors or French

windows; and the only rational course is to state the position of your

doors in your opening stage-direction, and thereafter to say in plain

language by which door an entrance or an exit is to be made. In exterior

scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a

measure to the old "wings," the old terminology may not be quite

meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to

avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a

stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of

the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when

the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered

and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb

his illusion.

A still more emphatic warning must be given against another and more

recent abuse in the matter of stage-directions. The "L.U.E.'s," indeed,

are bound very soon to die a natural death. The people who require to be

warned against them are, as a rule, scarcely worth warning. But it is

precisely the cleverest people (to use clever in a somewhat narrow

sense) who are apt to be led astray by Mr. Bernard Shaw's practice of

expanding his stage-directions into essays, disquisitions, monologues,

pamphlets. This is a practice which goes far to justify the belief of

some foreign critics that the English, or, since Mr. Shaw is in

question, let us say the inhabitants of the British Islands, are

congenitally incapable of producing a work of pure art. Our

novelists--Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot--have been sufficiently,

though perhaps not unjustly, called over the coals for their habit of

coming in front of their canvas, and either gossiping with the reader or

preaching at him. But, if it be a sound maxim that the novelist should

not obtrude his personality on his reader, how much more is this true of

the dramatist! When the dramatist steps to the footlights and begins to

lecture, all illusion is gone. It may be said that, as a matter of fact,

this does not occur: that on the stage we hear no more of the

disquisitions of Mr. Shaw and his imitators than we do of the curt, and

often non-existent, stage-directions of Shakespeare and his

contemporaries. To this the reply is twofold. First, the very fact that

these disquisitions are written proves that the play is designed to be

printed and read, and that we are, therefore, justified in applying to

it the standard of what may be called literary illusion. Second, when a

playwright gets into the habit of talking around his characters, he

inevitably, even if unconsciously, slackens his endeavour to make them

express themselves as completely as may be in their own proper medium of

dramatic action and dialogue. You cannot with impunity mix up two

distinct forms of art--the drama and the sociological essay or lecture.

To Mr. Shaw, of course, much may, and must, be forgiven. His

stage-directions are so brilliant that some one, some day, will

assuredly have them spoken by a lecturer in the orchestra while the

action stands still on the stage. Thus, he will have begotten a bastard,

but highly entertaining, form of art. My protest has no practical

application to him, for he is a standing exception to all rules. It is

to the younger generation that I appeal not to be misled by his

seductive example. They have little chance of rivalling him as

sociological essayists; but if they treat their art seriously, and as a

pure art, they may easily surpass him as dramatists. By adopting his

practice they will tend to produce, not fine works of art, but inferior

sociological documents. They will impair their originality and spoil

their plays in order to do comparatively badly what Mr. Shaw has done

incomparably well.

The common-sense rule as to stage directions is absolutely plain; be

they short, or be they long, they ought always to be _impersonal_. The

playwright who cracks jokes in his stage-directions, or indulges in

graces of style, is intruding himself between the spectator and the work

of art, to the inevitable detriment of the illusion. In preparing a play

for the press, the author should make his stage-directions as brief as

is consistent with clearness. Few readers will burden their memory with

long and detailed descriptions. When a new character of importance

appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress

may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal.

Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or

acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first,

such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader's mental

vision. And here I may mention a principle, based on more than mere

convenience, which some playwrights observe with excellent results. Not

merely in writing stage-directions, but in visualizing a scene, the idea

of the stage should, as far as possible, be banished from the author's

mind. He should see and describe the room, the garden, the sea-shore, or

whatever the place of his action may be, not as a stage-scene, but as a

room, garden, or sea-shore in the real world. The cultivation of this

habit ought to be, and I believe is in some cases, a safeguard against

theatricality.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas _fils_

held it a waste of time to do so. Pailleron wrote "enormous" scenarios,

Meilhac very brief ones, or none at all. Mr. Galsworthy, rather to my

surprise, disdains, and even condemns, the scenario, holding that a

theme becomes lifeless when you put down its skeleton on paper. Sir

Arthur Pinero says: "Before beginning to write a play, I always make

sure, by means of a definite scheme, that there is _a_ way of doing it;

but whether I ultimately follow that way is a totally different matter."

Mr. Alfred Sutro practically confesses to a scenario. He says: "Before I

start writing the dialogue of a play, I make sure that I shall have an

absolutely free hand over the entrances and exits: in other words, that

there is ample and legitimate reason for each character appearing in any

particular scene, and ample motive for his leaving it." Mr. Granville

Barker does not put on paper a detailed scenario. He says: "I plan the

general scheme, and particularly the balance of the play, in my head;

but this, of course, does not depend entirely on entrances and exits."

Mr. Henry Arthur Jones says: "I know the leading scenes, and the general

course of action in each act, before I write a line. When I have got the

whole story clear, and divided into acts, I very carefully construct the

first act, as a series of scenes between such and such of the

characters. When the first act is written I carefully construct the

second act in the same way--and so on. I sometimes draw up twenty

scenarios for an act before I can get it to go straight."]

[Footnote 2: A friend of the late Clyde Fitch writes to me: "Fitch was

often astonished at the way in which his characters developed. He tried

to make them do certain things: they did others."]

[Footnote 3: This account of the matter seems to find support in a

statement, by M. François de Curel, an accomplished psychologist, to the

effect that during the first few days of work at a play he is "clearly

conscious of creating," but that gradually he gets "into the skin" of

his characters, and appears to work by instinct. No doubt some artists

are actually subject to a sort of hallucination, during which they seem

rather to record than to invent the doings of their characters. But this

somewhat morbid condition should scarcely be cultivated by the

dramatist, whose intelligence should always keep a light rein on his

more instinctive mental processes. See _L'Année Psychologique_, 1894.

p. 120.]

[Footnote 4: Sir Arthur Pinero says: "The beginning of a play to me is a

little world of people. I live with them, get familiar with them, and

_they_ tell me the story." This may sound not unlike the remark of the

novelist above quoted; but the intention was quite different. Sir Arthur

simply meant that the story came to him as the characters took on life

in his imagination. Mr. H.A. Jones writes: "When you have a character or

several characters you haven't a play. You may keep these in your mind

and nurse them till they combine in a piece of action; but you haven't

got your play till you have theme, characters, and action all fused. The

process with me is as purely automatic and spontaneous as dreaming; in

fact it is really dreaming while you are awake."]

[Footnote 5: "Here," says a well-known playwright, "is a common

experience. You are struck by an idea with which you fall in love. 'Ha!'

you say. 'What a superb scene where the man shall find the missing will

under the sofa! If that doesn't make them sit up, what will?' You begin

the play. The first act goes all right, and the second act goes all

right. You come to the third act, and somehow it won't go at all. You

battle with it for weeks in vain; and then it suddenly occurs to you,

'Why, I see what's wrong! It's that confounded scene where the man finds

the will under the sofa! Out it must come!' You cut it out, and at once

all goes smooth again. But you have thrown overboard the great effect

that first tempted you."]

[Footnote 6: The manuscripts of Dumas _fils_ are said to contain, as a

rule, about four times as much matter as the printed play! (Parigot:

_Génie et Métier_, p. 243). This probably means, however, that he

preserved tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most

playwrights destroy as they go along.]

[Footnote 7: Lowell points out that this assertion of Heminge and

Condell merely shows them to have been unfamiliar with the simple

phenomenon known as a fair copy.]

[Footnote 8: Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is

correct, at any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu's plays.]

[Footnote 9: See Chapters XIII and XVI.]

[Footnote 10: This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas _fils_

in the preface to _La Princesse Georges_. "You should not begin your

work," he says, "until you have your concluding scene, movement and

speech clear in your mind. How can you tell what road you ought to take

until you know where you are going?" It is perhaps a more apparent than

real contradiction of this rule that, until _Iris_ was three parts

finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling

of Iris by Maldonado. The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though

Iris is not actually killed.]

[Footnote 11: See Chapter XVIII.]

[Footnote 12: See Chapter XX.]

[Footnote 13: Most of the dramatists whom I have consulted are opposed

to the principle of "roughing out" the big scenes first, and then

imbedding them, as it were, in their context. Sir Arthur Pinero goes the

length of saying: "I can never go on to page 2 until I am sure that page

1 is as right as I can make it. Indeed, when an act is finished, I send

it at once to the printers, confident that I shall not have to go back

upon it." Mr. Alfred Sutro says: "I write a play straight ahead from

beginning to end, taking practically as long over the first act as over

the last three." And Mr. Granville Barker: "I always write the beginning

of a play first and the end last: but as to writing 'straight ahead'--it

sounds like what one may be able to do in Heaven." But almost all

dramatists, I take it, jot down brief passages of dialogue which they

may or may not eventually work into the texture of their play.]

[Footnote 14: One is not surprised to learn that Sardou "did his

stage-management as he went along," and always knew exactly the position

of his characters from moment to moment.]

[Footnote 15: And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the

impossibility of a scene in Zola's _Pot Bouille_ in which the so-called

"lovers," Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret

in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard

outside discussing their intrigue. In order that the comments of the

servants might reach the ears of the audience, they had to be shouted in

a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.]

_CHAPTER V_

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The theme being chosen, the next step will probably be to determine what

characters shall be employed in developing it. Most playwrights, I take

it, draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious

work of construction. Ibsen seems always to have done so; but, in some

of his plays, the list of persons was at first considerably larger than

it ultimately became. The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters

rejected from one play, and used them in another. Thus Boletta and Hilda

Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and

Beata; and the delightful Foldal of _John Gabriel Borkman_ was a

character left over from _The Lady from the Sea_.

The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without

determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to

employ. There are in every play essential characters, without whom the

theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the

theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on

the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is

essential or auxiliary--it depends upon how we define the theme. In

_Hamlet_, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly

essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain

temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and

murderer of his father. But is Ophelia essential, or merely auxiliary?

Essential, if we consider Hamlet's pessimistic feeling as to woman and

the "breeding of sinners" a necessary part of his character; auxiliary,

if we take the view that without this feeling he would still have been

Hamlet, and the action, to all intents and purposes, the same. The

remaining characters, on the other hand, are clearly auxiliary. This is

true even of the Ghost: for Hamlet might have learnt of his father's

murder in fifty other ways.

Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, and the rest might all have been utterly

different, or might never have existed at all, and yet the essence of

the play might have remained intact.

It would be perfectly possible to write a _Hamlet_ after the manner of

Racine, in which there should be only six personages instead of

Shakespeare's six-and-twenty: and in this estimate I assume Ophelia to

be an essential character. The dramatis personae would be: Hamlet, his

confidant; Ophelia, her confidant; and the King and Queen, who would

serve as confidants to each other. Indeed, an economy of one person

might be affected by making the Queen (as she naturally might) play the

part of confidant to Ophelia.

Shakespeare, to be sure, did not deliberately choose between his own

method and that of Racine. Classic concentration was wholly unsuited to

the physical conditions of the Elizabethan stage, on which external

movement and bustle were imperatively demanded. But the modern

playwright has a wide latitude of choice in this purely technical

matter. He may work out his plot with the smallest possible number of

characters, or he may introduce a crowd of auxiliary personages. The

good craftsman will be guided by the nature of his theme. In a broad

social study or a picturesque romance, you may have as many auxiliary

figures as you please. In a subtle comedy, or a psychological tragedy,

the essential characters should have the stage as much as possible to

themselves. In Becque's _La Parisienne_ there are only four characters

and a servant; in Rostand's _Cyrano de Bergerac_ there are fifty-four

personages named in the playbill, to say nothing of supernumeraries. In

_Peer Gynt_, a satiric phantasmagory, Ibsen introduces some fifty

individual characters, with numberless supernumeraries; in _An Enemy of

the People_, a social comedy, he has eleven characters and a crowd; for

_Ghosts_ and _Rosmersholm_, psychological tragedies, six persons apiece

are sufficient.

It can scarcely be necessary, at this time of day, to say much on the

subject of nomenclature. One does occasionally, in manuscripts of a

quite hopeless type, find the millionaire's daughter figuring as "Miss

Aurea Golden," and her poor but sprightly cousin as "Miss Lalage Gay";

but the veriest tyro realizes, as a rule, that this sort of punning

characterization went out with the eighteenth century, or survived into

the nineteenth century only as a flagrant anachronism, like

knee-breeches and hair-powder.

A curious essay might be written on the reasons why such names as Sir

John Brute, Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, Sir Peter Teazle, Sir Anthony Absolute,

Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Lord Foppington, Lord Rake, Colonel Bully,

Lovewell, Heartfree, Gripe, Shark and the rest were regarded as a matter

of course in "the comedy of manners," but have become offensive to-day,

except in deliberate imitations of the eighteenth-century style. The

explanation does not lie merely in the contrast between "conventional"

comedy and "realistic" drama. Our forefathers (whatever Lamb may say)

did not consciously place their comedy in a realm of convention, but

generally considered themselves, and sometimes were, realists. The

fashion of label-names, if we may call them so, came down from the

Elizabethans, who, again, borrowed it from the Mediaeval Moralities.[1]

Shakespeare himself gave us Master Slender and Justice Shallow; but it

was in the Jonsonian comedy of types that the practice of advertising a

"humour" or "passion" in a name (English or Italian) established itself

most firmly. Hence such strange appellatives as Sir Epicure Mammon, Sir

Amorous La Foole, Morose, Wellbred, Downright, Fastidius Brisk, Volpone,

Corbaccio, Sordido, and Fallace. After the Restoration, Jonson, Beaumont

and Fletcher, and Massinger were, for a time, more popular than

Shakespeare; so that the label-names seemed to have the sanction of the

giants that were before the Flood. Even when comedy began to deal with

individuals rather than mere incarnations of a single "humour," the

practice of giving them obvious pseudonyms held its ground. Probably it

was reinforced by the analogous practice which obtained in journalism,

in which real persons were constantly alluded to (and libelled) under

fictitious designations, more or less transparent to the initiated. Thus

a label-name did not carry with it a sense of unreality, but rather,

perhaps, a vague suggestion of covert reference to a real person. I must

not here attempt to trace the stages by which the fashion went out. It

could doubtless be shown that the process of change ran parallel to the

shrinkage of the "apron" and the transformation of the platform-stage

into the picture-stage. That transformation was completed about the

middle of the nineteenth century; and it was about that time that

label-names made their latest appearances in works of any artistic

pretension--witness the Lady Gay Spanker of _London Assurance_, and the

Captain Dudley (or "Deadly") Smooth of _Money_. Faint traces of the

practice survive in T.W. Robertson, as in his master, Thackeray. But it

was in his earliest play of any note that he called a journalist Stylus.

In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are

characteristic without eccentricity or punning. One feels that Eccles in

_Caste_ could not possibly have borne any other name. How much less

living would he be had he been called Mr. Soaker or Mr. Tosspot!

Characteristic without eccentricity--that is what a name ought to be. As

the characteristic quality depends upon a hundred indefinable,

subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any

principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that

the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key

of the play--that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in

farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate

names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are

habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would

often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play,

until at last he arrived at one which seemed absolutely to fit the

character; but the appropriateness of his names is naturally lost upon

foreign audiences.

One word may perhaps be said on the recent fashion--not to say fad--of

suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of "Dramatis

Personae." Björnson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am

aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know

whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, or

whether they arrived independently at the same austere principle, by

sheer force of individual genius. The matter is a trifling one--so

trifling that the departure from established practice has something of

the air of a pedantry. It is not, on the whole, to be approved. It adds

perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking

up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and

appreciable pleasure of anticipation. There is a peculiar and not

irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and

thinking: "In the course of three hours, I shall know these people: I

shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a

great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever."

It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist's calling that

he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot

commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us

feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of

conversational novel. A list of characters, it is true, may also affect

one with acute anticipations of boredom; but I have never yet found a

play less tedious by reason of the suppression of the "Dramatis

Personae."

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity;

but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names.

Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant

characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque

appellations employed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature

made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time

probable enough in daily life. For example, a slave might be called

Onesimus, "useful," or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function;

but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.]

_BOOK II_

THE BEGINNING

_CHAPTER VI_

THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN

Though, as we have already noted, the writing of plays does not always

follow the chronological sequence of events, in discussing the process

of their evolution we are bound to assume that the playwright begins at

the beginning, and proceeds in orderly fashion, by way of the middle, to

the end. It was one of Aristotle's requirements that a play should have

a beginning, middle and end; and though it may seem that it scarcely

needed an Aristotle to lay down so self-evident a proposition, the fact

is that playwrights are more than sufficiently apt to ignore or despise

the rule.[1] Especially is there a tendency to rebel against the

requirement that a play should have an end. We have seen a good many

plays of late which do not end, but simply leave off: at their head we

might perhaps place Ibsen's _Ghosts_. But let us not anticipate. For the

moment, what we have to inquire is where, and how, a play ought

to begin.

In life there are no such things as beginnings. Even a man's birth is a

quite arbitrary point at which to launch his biography; for the

determining factors in his career are to be found in persons, events,

and conditions that existed before he was ever thought of. For the

biographer, however, and for the novelist as a writer of fictitious

biography, birth forms a good conventional starting-point. He can give a

chapter or so to "Ancestry," and then relate the adventures of his hero

from the cradle onwards. But the dramatist, as we have seen, deals, not

with protracted sequences of events, but with short, sharp crises. The

question for him, therefore, is: at what moment of the crisis, or of its

antecedents, he had better ring up his curtain? At this point he is like

the photographer studying his "finder" in order to determine how much of

a given prospect he can "get in."

The answer to the question depends on many things, but chiefly on the

nature of the crisis and the nature of the impression which the

playwright desires to make upon his audience. If his play be a comedy,

and if his object be gently and quietly to interest and entertain, the

chances are that he begins by showing us his personages in their normal

state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and

relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our

eyes. If, on the other hand, his play be of a more stirring description,

and he wants to seize the spectator's attention firmly from the start,

he will probably go straight at his crisis, plunging, perhaps, into the

very middle of it, even at the cost of having afterwards to go back in

order to put the audience in possession of the antecedent circumstances.

In a third type of play, common of late years, and especially affected

by Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which

is presently found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic

condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, it

may be for many years.

Let us glance at a few of Shakespeare's openings, and consider at what

points he attacks his various themes. Of his comedies, all except one

begin with a simple conversation, showing a state of affairs from which

the crisis develops with more or less rapidity, but in which it is as

yet imperceptibly latent. In no case does he plunge into the middle of

his subject, leaving its antecedents to be stated in what is technically

called an "exposition." Neither in tragedy nor in comedy, indeed, was

this Shakespeare's method. In his historical plays he relied to some

extent on his hearers' knowledge of history, whether gathered from books

or from previous plays of the historical series; and where such

knowledge was not to be looked for, he would expound the situation in

good set terms, like those of a Euripidean Prologue. But the

chronicle-play is a species apart, and practically an extinct species:

we need not pause to study its methods. In his fictitious plays, with

two notable exceptions, it was Shakespeare's constant practice to bring

the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a

point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be

conveyed in a few casual words. The exceptions are _The Tempest_ and

_Hamlet_, to which we shall return in due course.

How does _The Merchant of Venice_ open? With a long conversation

exhibiting the character of Antonio, the friendship between him and

Bassanio, the latter's financial straits, and his purpose of wooing

Portia. The second scene displays the character of Portia, and informs

us of her father's device with regard to her marriage; but this

information is conveyed in three or four lines. Not till the third scene

do we see or hear of Shylock, and not until very near the end of the act

is there any foreshadowing of what is to be the main crisis of the play.

Not a single antecedent event has to be narrated to us; for the mere

fact that Antonio has been uncivil to Shylock, and shown disapproval of

his business methods, can scarcely be regarded as a preliminary outside

the frame of the picture.

In _As You Like It_ there are no preliminaries to be stated beyond the

facts that Orlando is at enmity with his elder brother, and that Duke

Frederick has usurped the coronet and dukedom of Rosalind's father.

These facts being made apparent without any sort of formal exposition,

the crisis of the play rapidly announces itself in the wrestling-match

and its sequels. In _Much Ado About Nothing_ there is even less of

antecedent circumstance to be imparted. We learn in the first scene,

indeed, that Beatrice and Benedick have already met and crossed swords;

but this is not in the least essential to the action; the play might

have been to all intents and purposes the same had they never heard of

each other until after the rise of the curtain. In _Twelfth Night_ there

is a semblance of a retrospective exposition in the scene between Viola

and the Captain; but it is of the simplest nature, and conveys no

information beyond what, at a later period, would have been imparted on

the playbill, thus--

"Orsino, Duke of Illyria, in love with Olivia.

Olivia, an heiress, in mourning for her brother,"

and so forth. In _The Taming of the Shrew_ there are no antecedents

whatever to be stated. It is true that Lucentio, in the opening speech,

is good enough to inform Tranio who he is and what he is doing

there--facts with which Tranio is already perfectly acquainted. But this

was merely a conventional opening, excused by the fashion of the time;

it was in no sense a necessary exposition. For the rest, the crisis of

the play--the battle between Katherine and Petruchio--begins, develops,

and ends before our very eyes. In _The Winter's Tale_, a brief

conversation between Camillo and Archidamus informs us that the King of

Bohemia is paying a visit to the King of Sicilia; and that is absolutely

all we need to know. It was not even necessary that it should be

conveyed to us in this way. The situation would be entirely

comprehensible if the scene between Camillo and Archidamus were omitted.

It is needless to go through the whole list of comedies. The broad fact

is that in all the plays commonly so described, excepting only _The

Tempest_, the whole action comes within the frame of the picture. In

_The Tempest_ the poet employs a form of opening which otherwise he

reserves for tragedies. The first scene is simply an animated tableau,

calculated to arrest the spectator's attention, without conveying to him

any knowledge either of situation or character. Such gleams of character

as do, in fact, appear in the dialogue, are scarcely perceived in the

hurly-burly of the storm. Then, in the calm which ensues, Prospero

expounds to Miranda in great detail the antecedents of the crisis now

developing. It might almost seem, indeed, that the poet, in this, his

poetic last-will-and-testament, intended to warn his successors against

the dangers of a long narrative exposition; for Prospero's story sends

Miranda to sleep. Be this as it may, we have here a case in which

Shakespeare deliberately adopted the plan of placing on the stage, not

the whole crisis, but only its culmination, leaving its earlier stages

to be conveyed in narrative.[2] It would have been very easy for him to

have begun at the beginning and shown us in action the events narrated

by Prospero. This course would have involved no greater leap, either in

time or space, than he had perpetrated in the almost contemporary

_Winter's Tale_; and it cannot be said that there would have been any

difficulty in compressing into three acts, or even two, the essentials

of the action of the play as we know it. His reasons for departing from

his usual practice were probably connected with the particular occasion

for which the play was written. He wanted to produce a masque rather

than a drama. We must not, therefore, attach too much significance to

the fact that in almost the only play in which Shakespeare seems to have

built entirely out of his own head, with no previous play or novel to

influence him, he adopted the plan of going straight to the catastrophe,

in which he had been anticipated by Sophocles (_Oedipus Rex_), and was

to be followed by Ibsen (_Ghosts_, _Rosmersholm_, etc.).

Coming now to the five great tragedies, we find that in four of them

Shakespeare began, as in _The Tempest_, with a picturesque and stirring

episode calculated to arrest the spectator's attention and awaken his

interest, while conveying to him little or no information. The opening

scene of _Romeo and Juliet_ is simply a brawl, bringing home to us

vividly the family feud which is the root of the tragedy, but informing

us of nothing beyond the fact that such a feud exists. This is, indeed,

absolutely all that we require to know. There is not a single

preliminary circumstance, outside the limits of the play, that has to be

explained to us. The whole tragedy germinates and culminates within what

the prologue calls "the two hours' traffick of the stage." The opening

colloquy of the Witches in _Macbeth_, strikes the eerie keynote, but

does nothing more. Then, in the second scene, we learn that there has

been a great battle and that a nobleman named Macbeth has won a victory

which covers him with laurels. This can in no sense be called an

exposition. It is the account of a single event, not of a sequence; and

that event is contemporary, not antecedent. In the third scene, the

meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the Witches, we have what may be

called an exposition reversed; not a narrative of the past, but a

foreshadowing of the future. Here we touch on one of the subtlest of the

playwright's problems--the art of arousing anticipation in just the

right measure. But that is not the matter at present in hand.[3]

In the opening scene of _Othello_ it is true that some talk passes

between Iago and Roderigo before they raise the alarm and awaken

Brabantio; but it is carefully non-expository talk; it expounds nothing

but Iago's character. Far from being a real exception to the rule that

Shakespeare liked to open his tragedies with a very crisply dramatic

episode, _Othello_ may rather be called its most conspicuous example.

The rousing of Brabantio is immediately followed by the encounter

between his men and Othello's, which so finely brings out the lofty

character of the Moor; and only in the third scene, that of the Doge's

Council, do we pass from shouts and swords to quiet discussion and, in a

sense, exposition. Othello's great speech, while a vital portion of the

drama, is in so far an exposition that it refers to events which do not

come absolutely within the frame of the picture. But they are very

recent, very simple, events. If Othello's speech were omitted, or cut

down to half a dozen lines, we should know much less of his character

and Desdemona's, but the mere action of the play would remain perfectly

comprehensible.

_King Lear_ necessarily opens with a great act of state, the partition

of the kingdom. A few words between Kent and Gloucester show us what is

afoot, and then, at one plunge, we are in the thick of the drama. There

was no opportunity here for one of those picturesque tableaux, exciting

rather than informative, which initiate the other tragedies. It would

have had to be artificially dragged in; and it was the less necessary,

as the partition scene took on, in a very few lines, just that

arresting, stimulating quality which the poet seems to have desired in

the opening of a play of this class.

Finally, when we turn to _Hamlet_, we find a consummate example of the

crisply-touched opening tableau, making a nervous rather than an

intellectual appeal, informing us of nothing, but exciting a vivid,

though quite vague, anticipation. The silent transit of the Ghost,

desiring to speak, yet tongue-tied, is certainly one of Shakespeare's

unrivalled masterpieces of dramatic craftsmanship. One could pretty

safely wager that if the _Ur-Hamlet_, on which Shakespeare worked, were

to come to light to-morrow, this particular trait would not be found in

it. But, oddly enough, into the middle of this admirable opening

tableau, Shakespeare inserts a formal exposition, introduced in the most

conventional way. Marcellus, for some unexplained reason, is ignorant of

what is evidently common knowledge as to the affairs of the realm, and

asks to be informed; whereupon Horatio, in a speech of some twenty-five

lines, sets forth the past relations between Norway and Denmark, and

prepares us for the appearance of Fortinbras in the fourth act. In

modern stage versions all this falls away, and nobody who has not

studied the printed text is conscious of its absence. The commentators,

indeed, have proved that Fortinbras is an immensely valuable element in

the moral scheme of the play; but from the point of view of pure drama,

there is not the slightest necessity for this Norwegian-Danish

embroilment or its consequences.[4] The real exposition--for _Hamlet_

differs from the other tragedies in requiring an exposition--comes in

the great speech of the Ghost in Scene V. The contrast between this

speech and Horatio's lecture in the first scene, exemplifies the

difference between a dramatized and an undramatized exposition. The

crisis, as we now learn, began months or years before the rise of the

curtain. It began when Claudius inveigled the affections of Gertrude;

and it would have been possible for the poet to have started from this

point, and shown us in action all that he in fact conveys to us by way

of narration. His reason for choosing the latter course is abundantly

obvious.[5] Hamlet the Younger was to be the protagonist: the interest

of the play was to centre in his mental processes. To have awakened our

interest in Hamlet the Elder would, therefore, have been a superfluity

and an irrelevance. Moreover (to say nothing of the fact that the Ghost

was doubtless a popular figure in the old play, and demanded by the

public) it was highly desirable that Hamlet's knowledge of the usurper's

crime should come to him from a supernatural witness, who could not be

cross-questioned or called upon to give material proof. This was the

readiest as well as the most picturesque method of begetting in him that

condition of doubt, real or affected, which was necessary to account for

his behaviour. But to have shown us in action the matter of the Ghost's

revelation would have been hopelessly to ruin its effect. A repetition

in narrative of matters already seen in action is the grossest of

technical blunders.[6] Hamlet senior, in other words, being

indispensable in the spirit, was superfluous in the flesh. But there was

another and equally cogent reason for beginning the play after the

commission of the initial crime or crimes. To have done otherwise would

have been to discount, not only the Ghost, but the play-scene. By a

piece of consummate ingenuity, which may, of course, have been conceived

by the earlier playwright, the initial incidents of the story are in

fact presented to us, in the guise of a play within the play, and as a

means to the achievement of one of the greatest dramatic effects in all

literature. The moment the idea of the play-scene presented itself to

the author's mind, it became absolutely unthinkable that he should, to

put it vulgarly, "queer the pitch" for the Players by showing us the

real facts of which their performance was to be the counterfeit

presentment. The dramatic effect of the incidents was incalculably

heightened when they were presented, as in a looking-glass, before the

guilty pair, with the eye of the avenger boring into their souls. And

have we not here, perhaps, a clue to one of the most frequent and

essential meanings of the word "dramatic"? May we not say that the

dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety[7] and

intensity of the emotions involved in it?

All this may appear too obvious to be worth setting forth at such

length. Very likely it never occurred to Shakespeare that it was

possible to open the play at an earlier point; so that he can hardly be

said to have exercised a deliberate choice in the matter. Nevertheless,

the very obviousness of the considerations involved makes this a good

example of the importance of discovering just the right point at which

to raise the curtain. In the case of _The Tempest_, Shakespeare plunged

into the middle of the crisis because his object was to produce a

philosophico-dramatic entertainment rather than a play in the strict

sense of the word. He wanted room for the enchantments of Ariel, the

brutishnesses of Caliban, the humours of Stephano and Trinculo--all

elements extrinsic to the actual story. But in _Hamlet_ he adopted a

similar course for purely dramatic reasons--in order to concentrate his

effects and present the dramatic elements of his theme at their

highest potency.

In sum, then, it was Shakespeare's usual practice, histories apart, to

bring the whole action of his plays within the frame of the picture,

leaving little or nothing to narrative exposition. The two notable

exceptions to this rule are those we have just examined--_Hamlet_ and

_The Tempest_. Furthermore, he usually opened his comedies with quiet

conversational passages, presenting the antecedents of the crisis with

great deliberation. In his tragedies, on the other hand, he was apt to

lead off with a crisp, somewhat startling passage of more or less

vehement action, appealing rather to the nerves than to the

intelligence--such a passage as Gustav Freytag, in his _Technik des

Dramas_, happily entitles an _einleitende Akkord_, an introductory

chord. It may be added that this rule holds good both for _Coriolanus_

and for _Julius Caesar_, in which the keynote is briskly struck in

highly animated scenes of commotion among the Roman populace.

Let us now look at the practice of Ibsen, which offers a sharp contrast

to that of Shakespeare. To put it briefly, the plays in which Ibsen gets

his whole action within the frame of the picture are as exceptional as

those in which Shakespeare does not do so.

Ibsen's practice in this matter has been compared with that of the Greek

dramatists, who also were apt to attack their crisis in the middle, or

even towards the end, rather than at the beginning. It must not be

forgotten, however, that there is one great difference between his

position and theirs. They could almost always rely upon a general

knowledge, on the part of the audience, of the theme with which they

were dealing. The purpose even of the Euripidean prologue is not so much

to state unknown facts, as to recall facts vaguely remembered, to state

the particular version of a legend which the poet proposes to adopt, and

to define the point in the development of the legend at which he is

about to set his figures in motion. Ibsen, on the other hand, drew upon

no storehouse of tradition. He had to convey to his audience everything

that he wanted them to know; and this was often a long and complex

series of facts.

The earliest play in which Ibsen can be said to show maturity of

craftsmanship is _The Vikings at Helgeland_. It is curious to note that

both in _The Vikings_ and in _The Pretenders_, two plays which are in

some measure comparable with Shakespearean tragedies, he opens with a

firmly-touched _einleitende Akkord_. In _The Vikings_, Ornulf and his

sons encounter and fight with Sigurd and his men, very much after the

fashion of the Montagues and Capulets in _Romeo and Juliet_. In _The

Pretenders_ the rival factions of Haakon and Skule stand outside the

cathedral of Bergen, intently awaiting the result of the ordeal which is

proceeding within; and though they do not there and then come to blows,

the air is electrical with their conflicting ambitions and passions. His

modern plays, on the other hand, Ibsen opens quietly enough, though

usually with some more or less arresting little incident, calculated to

arouse immediate curiosity. One may cite as characteristic examples the

hurried colloquy between Engstrand and Regina in _Ghosts_; Rebecca and

Madam Helseth in _Rosmersholm_, watching to see whether Rosmer will

cross the mill-race; and in _The Master Builder_, old Brovik's querulous

outburst, immediately followed by the entrance of Solness and his

mysterious behaviour towards Kaia. The opening of _Hedda Gabler_, with

its long conversation between Miss Tesman and the servant Bertha, comes

as near as Ibsen ever did to the conventional exposition of the French

stage, conducted by a footman and a parlour-maid engaged in dusting the

furniture. On the other hand, there never was a more masterly opening,

in its sheer simplicity, than Nora's entrance in _A Doll's House_, and

the little silent scene that precedes the appearance of Helmer.

Regarding _The Vikings_ as Ibsen's first mature production, and

surveying the whole series of his subsequent works in which he had stage

presentation directly in view,[8] we find that in only two out of the

fifteen plays does the whole action come within the frame of the

picture. These two are _The League of Youth_ and _An Enemy of the

People_. In neither of these have any antecedents to be stated; neither

turns upon any disclosure of bygone events or emotions. We are, indeed,

afforded brief glimpses into the past both of Stensgaard and of

Stockmann; but the glimpses are incidental and inessential. It is

certainly no mere coincidence that if one were asked to pick out the

pieces of thinnest texture in all Ibsen's mature work, one would

certainly select these two plays. Far be it from me to disparage _An

Enemy of the People_; as a work of art it is incomparably greater than

such a piece as _Pillars of Society_; but it is not so richly woven,

not, as it were, so deep in pile. Written in half the time Ibsen usually

devoted to a play, it is an outburst of humorous indignation, a _jeu

d'esprit_, one might almost say, though the _jeu_ of a giant _esprit_.

Observing the effect of comparative tenuity in these two plays, we

cannot but surmise that the secret of the depth and richness of texture

so characteristic of Ibsen's work, lay in his art of closely

interweaving a drama of the present with a drama of the past. _An Enemy

of the People_ is a straightforward, spirited melody; _The Wild Duck_

and _Rosmersholm_ are subtly and intricately harmonized.

Going a little more into detail, we find in Ibsen's work an

extraordinary progress in the art of so unfolding the drama of the past

as to make the gradual revelation no mere preface or prologue to the

drama of the present, but an integral part of its action. It is true

that in _The Vikings_ he already showed himself a master in this art.

The great revelation--the disclosure of the fact that Sigurd, not

Gunnar, did the deed of prowess which Hiördis demanded of the man who

should be her mate--this crucial revelation is brought about in a scene

of the utmost dramatic intensity. The whole drama of the past,

indeed--both its facts and its emotions--may be said to be dragged to

light in the very stress and pressure of the drama of the present. Not a

single detail of it is narrated in cold blood, as, for example, Prospero

relates to Miranda the story of their marooning, or Horatio expounds the

Norwegian-Danish political situation. I am not holding up _The Vikings_

as a great masterpiece; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of

method; but in this particular art of indistinguishably blending the

drama of the present with the drama of the past, it is already

consummate. _The Pretenders_ scarcely comes into the comparison. It is

Ibsen's one chronicle-play; and, like Shakespeare, he did not shrink

from employing a good deal of narrative, though his narratives, it must

be said, are always introduced under such circumstances as to make them

a vital part of the drama. It is when we come to the modern plays that

we find the poet falling back upon conventional and somewhat clumsy

methods of exposition, which he only by degrees, though by rapid

degrees, unlearns.

_The League of Youth_, as we have seen, requires no exposition. All we

have to learn is the existing relations of the characters, which appear

quite naturally as the action proceeds. But let us look at _Pillars of

Society_. Here we have to be placed in possession of a whole antecedent

drama: the intrigue of Karsten Bernick with Dina Dorf's mother, the

threatened scandal, Johan Tönnesen's vicarious acceptance of Bernick's

responsibility, the subsidiary scandal of Lona Hessel's outburst on

learning of Bernick's engagement to her half-sister, the report of an

embezzlement committed by Johan before his departure for America. All

this has to be conveyed to us in retrospect; or, rather, in the first

place, we have to be informed of the false version of these incidents

which is current in the little town, and on which Bernick's moral and

commercial prestige is built up. What device, then, does Ibsen adopt to

this end? He introduces a "sewing-bee" of tattling women, one of whom

happens to be a stranger to the town, and unfamiliar with its gossip.

Into her willing ear the others pour the popular version of the Bernick

story; and, this impartment effected, the group of gossips disappears,

to be heard of no more. These ladies perform the function, in fact, of

the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and

pseudo-Elizabethan plays.[9] They are not quite so artless in their

conventionality, for they bring with them the social atmosphere of the

tattling little town, which is an essential factor in the drama.

Moreover, their exposition is not a simple narrative of facts. It is to

some extent subtilized by the circumstance that the facts are not facts,

and that the gist of the drama is to lie in the gradual triumph of the

truth over this tissue of falsehoods. Still, explain it as we may, the

fact remains that in no later play does Ibsen initiate us into the

preliminaries of his action by so hackneyed and unwieldy a device. It is

no conventional canon, but a maxim of mere common sense, that the

dramatist should be chary of introducing characters who have no personal

share in the drama, and are mere mouthpieces for the conveyance of

information. Nowhere else does Ibsen so flagrantly disregard so obvious

a principle of dramatic economy.[10]

When we turn to his next play, _A Doll's House_, we find that he has

already made a great step in advance. He has progressed from the First,

Second, and Third Gentlemen of the Elizabethans to the confidant[11] of

the French classic drama. He even attempts, not very successfully, to

disguise the confidant by giving her a personal interest, an effective

share, in the drama. Nothing can really dissemble the fact that the long

scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden, which occupies almost one-third of

the first act, is simply a formal exposition, outside the action of the

play. Just as it was providential that one of the house-wives of the

sewing-bee in _Pillars of Society_ should have been a stranger to the

town, so it was the luckiest of chances (for the dramatist's

convenience) that an old school-friend should have dropped in from the

clouds precisely half-an-hour before the entrance of Krogstad brings to

a sudden head the great crisis of Nora's life. This happy conjuncture of

events is manifestly artificial: a trick of the dramatist's trade: a

point at which his art does not conceal his art. Mrs. Linden does not,

like the dames of the sewing-bee, fade out of the saga; she even,

through her influence on Krogstad, plays a determining part in the

development of the action. But to all intents and purposes she remains a

mere confidant, a pretext for Nora's review of the history of her

married life. There are two other specimens of the genus confidant in

Ibsen's later plays. Arnholm, in _The Lady from the Sea_, is little

more; Dr. Herdal, in _The Master Builder_, is that and nothing else. It

may be alleged in his defence that the family physician is the

professional confidant of real life.

In _Ghosts_, Ibsen makes a sudden leap to the extreme of his

retrospective method. I am not one of those who consider this play

Ibsen's masterpiece: I do not even place it, technically, in the first

rank among his works. And why? Because there is here no reasonable

equilibrium between the drama of the past and the drama of the present.

The drama of the past is almost everything, the drama of the present

next to nothing. As soon as we have probed to the depths the Alving

marriage and its consequences, the play is over, and there is nothing

left but for Regina to set off in pursuit of the joy of life, and for

Oswald to collapse into imbecility. It is scarcely an exaggeration to

call the play all exposition and no drama. Here for the first time,

however, Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic

interest to the unveiling of the past. While in one sense the play is

all exposition, in another sense it may quite as truly be said to

contain no exposition; for it contains no narrative delivered in cold

blood, in mere calm retrospection, as a necessary preliminary to the

drama which is in the meantime waiting at the door. In other words, the

exposition is all drama, it _is_ the drama. The persons who are tearing

the veils from the past, and for whom the veils are being torn, are

intensely concerned in the process, which actually constitutes the

dramatic crisis. The discovery of this method, or its rediscovery in

modern drama,[12] was Ibsen's great technical achievement. In his best

work, the progress of the unveiling occasions a marked development, or

series of changes, in the actual and present relations of the

characters. The drama of the past and the drama of the present proceed,

so to speak, in interlacing rhythms, or, as I said before, in a rich,

complex harmony. In _Ghosts_ this harmony is not so rich as in some

later plays, because the drama of the present is disproportionately

meagre. None the less, or all the more, is it a conspicuous example of

Ibsen's method of raising his curtain, not at the beginning of the

crisis, but rather at the beginning of the catastrophe.

In _An Enemy of the People_, as already stated, he momentarily deserted

that method, and gave us an action which begins, develops, and ends

entirely within the frame of the picture. But in the two following

plays, _The Wild Duck_ and _Rosmersholm_, he touched the highest point

of technical mastery in his interweaving of the past with the present. I

shall not attempt any analysis of the fabric of these plays. The process

would be long, tedious, and unhelpful; for no one could hope to employ a

method of such complexity without something of Ibsen's genius; and

genius will evolve its methods for itself. Let me only ask the reader to

compare the scene between old Werle and Gregers in the first act of _The

Wild Duck_ with the scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden in the first act

of _A Doll's House_, and mark the technical advance. Both scenes are, in

a sense, scenes of exposition. Both are mainly designed to place us in

possession of a sequence of bygone facts. But while the _Doll's House_

scene is a piece of quiet gossip, brought about (as we have noted) by

rather artificial means, and with no dramatic tension in it, the _Wild

Duck_ scene is a piece of tense, one might almost say fierce, drama,

fulfilling the Brunetière definition in that it shows us two characters,

a father and son, at open war with each other. The one scene is outside

the real action, the other is an integral part of it. The one belongs to

Ibsen's tentative period, the other ushers in, one might almost say, his

period of consummate mastery.[13]

_Rosmersholm_ is so obviously nothing but the catastrophe of an

antecedent drama that an attempt has actually been made to rectify

Ibsen's supposed mistake, and to write the tragedy of the deceased

Beata. It was made by an unskilful hand; but even a skilful hand would

scarcely have done more than prove how rightly Ibsen judged that the

recoil of Rebecca's crime upon herself and Rosmer would prove more

interesting, and in a very real sense more dramatic, than the somewhat

vulgar process of the crime itself. The play is not so profound in its

humanity as _The Wild Duck_, but it is Ibsen's masterpiece in the art of

withdrawing veil after veil. From the technical point of view, it will

repay the closest study.

We need not look closely at the remaining plays. _Hedda Gabler_ is

perhaps that in which a sound proportion between the past and the

present is most successfully preserved. The interest of the present

action is throughout very vivid; but it is all rooted in facts and

relations of the past, which are elicited under circumstances of high

dramatic tension. Here again it is instructive to compare the scene

between Hedda and Thea, in the first act, with the scene between Nora

and Mrs. Linden. Both are scenes of exposition: and each is, in its way,

character-revealing; but the earlier scene is a passage of quite

unemotional narrative; the later is a passage of palpitating drama. In

the plays subsequent to _Hedda Gabler_, it cannot be denied that the

past took the upper hand of the present to a degree which could only be

justified by the genius of an Ibsen. Three-fourths of the action of _The

Master Builder_, _Little Eyolf_, _John Gabriel Borkman_, and _When We

Dead Awaken_, consists of what may be called a passionate analysis of

the past. Ibsen had the art of making such an analysis absorbingly

interesting; but it is not a formula to be commended for the practical

purposes of the everyday stage.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: Writing of _Le Supplice d'une Femme_, Alexandre Dumas

_fils_ said: "This situation I declare to be one of the most dramatic

and interesting in all drama. But a situation is not an idea. An idea,

has a beginning, a middle and an end: an exposition, a development, a

conclusion. Any one can relate a dramatic situation: the art lies in

preparing it, getting it accepted, rendering it possible, especially in

untying the knot."]

[Footnote 2: This is what we regard as peculiarly the method of Ibsen.

There is, however, this essential difference, that, instead of narrating

his preliminaries in cold blood, Ibsen, in his best work, _dramatizes_

the narration.]

[Footnote 3: See Chapter XII.]

[Footnote 4: This must not be taken to imply that, in a good

stage-version of the play, Fortinbras should be altogether omitted. Mr.

Forbes Robertson, in his Lyceum revival of 1897, found several

advantages in his retention. Among the rest, it permitted the retention

of one of Hamlet's most characteristic soliloquies.]

[Footnote 5: I omit all speculation as to the form which the story

assumed in the _Ur-Hamlet_. We have no evidence on the point; and, as

the poet was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit,

even in following his original he was making a deliberate

artistic choice.]

[Footnote 6: Shakespeare committed it in _Romeo and Juliet_, where he

made Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, retell the whole story of

the tragedy. Even in so early a play, such a manifest redundancy seems

unaccountable. A narrative of things already seen may, of course, be a

trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it

will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in

buckram). Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the

characters to whom the narration is addressed. But in these cases its

purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience--it belongs,

not to the "intelligence department," but to the department of

analysis.]

[Footnote 7: I say "variety" rather than complexity because I take it

that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very

complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly

increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the

King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.]

[Footnote 8: This excludes _Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt_, and

_Emperor and Galilean_.]

[Footnote 9: See, for example, _King Henry VIII_, Act IV, and the

opening scene of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_.]

[Footnote 10: This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group

of characters performing something like the function of the antique

Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less

disinterested point of view. The function of _Kaffee-Klatsch_ in

_Pillars of Society_ is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that

of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.]

[Footnote 11: It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in

_La Gioconda_, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention,

by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a

crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated

by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be

interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of

the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.]

[Footnote 12: Dryden, in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, represents this

method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic

poet, he says, "set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race

is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing

the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you

not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you."

Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by "the rule

of time."]

[Footnote 13: It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one

cannot help wondering how he would have planned _A Doll's House_ had he

written it in the 'eighties instead of the 'seventies. One can imagine a

long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the

necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have

heightened by contrast the effect of the great final duologue as we now

possess it. Such information as could not possibly have been conveyed in

dialogue with Helmer might, one would think, have been left for Nora's

first scene with Krogstad, the effect of which it would have enhanced.

Perhaps Mrs. Linden might with advantage have been retained, though not

in her present character of confidant, in order to show Nora in relation

to another woman.]

_CHAPTER VII_

EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS

We have passed in rapid survey the practices of Shakespeare and Ibsen in

respect of their point and method of attack upon their themes. What

practical lessons can we now deduce from this examination?

One thing is clear: namely, that there is no inherent superiority in one

method over another. There are masterpieces in which the whole crisis

falls within the frame of the picture, and masterpieces in which the

greater part of the crisis has to be conveyed to us in retrospect, only

the catastrophe being transacted before our eyes. Genius can manifest

itself equally in either form.

But each form has its peculiar advantages. You cannot, in a

retrospective play like _Rosmersholm_, attain anything like the

magnificent onward rush of Othello, which moves--

"Like to the Pontick sea

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

To the Propontick and the Hellespont."

The movement of _Rosmersholm_ is rather like that of a winding river,

which flows with a full and steady current, but seems sometimes to be

almost retracing its course. If, then, you aim at rapidity of movement,

you will choose a theme which leaves little or nothing to retrospect;

and conversely, if you have a theme the whole of which falls easily and

conveniently within the frame of the picture, you will probably take

advantage of the fact to give your play animated and rapid movement.

There is an undeniable attraction in a play which constitutes, so to

speak, one brisk and continuous adventure, begun, developed, and ended

before our eyes. For light comedy in particular is this a desirable

form, and for romantic plays in which no very searching character-study

is attempted. _The Taming of the Shrew_ no doubt passed for a light

comedy in Shakespeare's day, though we describe it by a briefer name.

Its rapid, bustling action is possible because we are always ready to

take the character of a shrew for granted. It would have been a very

different play had the poet required to account for Katharine's

peculiarities of temper by a retrospective study of her heredity and

upbringing. Many eighteenth-century comedies are single-adventure plays,

or dual-adventure plays, in the sense that the main action sometimes

stands aside to let an underplot take the stage. Both _She Stoops to

Conquer_ and _The Rivals_ are good examples of the rapid working-out of

an intrigue, engendered, developed, and resolved all within the frame of

the picture. Single-adventure plays of a more modern type are the elder

Dumas's _Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, the younger Dumas's _Francillon_,

Sardou's _Divorçons_, Sir Arthur Pinero's _Gay Lord Quex_, Mr. Shaw's

_Devil's Disciple_, Oscar Wilde's _Importance of Being Earnest_, Mr.

Galsworthy's _Silver Box_. Widely as these plays differ in type and

tone, they are alike in this, that they do not attempt to present very

complex character-studies, or to probe the deeps of human experience.

The last play cited, _The Silver Box_, may perhaps be thought an

exception to this rule; but, though the experience of the hapless

charwoman is pitiful enough, hers is a simple soul, so inured to

suffering that a little more or less is no such great matter. The play

is an admirable genre-picture rather than a searching tragedy.

The point to be observed is that, under modern conditions, it is

difficult to produce a play of very complex psychological, moral, or

emotional substance, in which the whole crisis comes within the frame of

the picture. The method of attacking the crisis in the middle or towards

the end is really a device for relaxing, in some measure, the narrow

bounds of theatrical representation, and enabling the playwright to deal

with a larger segment of human experience. It may be asked why modern

conditions should in this respect differ from Elizabethan conditions,

and why, if Shakespeare could produce such profound and complex

tragedies as _Othello_ and _King Lear_ without a word of exposition or

retrospect, the modern dramatist should not go and do likewise? The

answer to this question is not simply that the modern dramatist is

seldom a Shakespeare. That is true, but we must look deeper than that.

There are, in fact, several points to be taken into consideration. For

one thing--this is a minor point--Shakespeare had really far more

elbow-room than the playwright of to-day. _Othello_ and _King Lear_, to

say nothing of _Hamlet_, are exceedingly long plays. Something like a

third of them is omitted in modern representation; and when we speak of

their richness and complexity of characterization, we do not think

simply of the plays as we see them compressed into acting limits, but of

the plays as we know them in the study. It is possible, no doubt, for

modern playwrights to let themselves go in the matter of length, and

then print their plays with brackets or other marks to show the

"passages omitted in representation." This is, however, essentially an

inartistic practice, and one cannot regret that it has gone out of

fashion. Another point to be considered is this: are Othello and Lear

really very complex character-studies? They are extremely vivid: they

are projected with enormous energy, in actions whose violence affords

scope for the most vehement self-expression; but are they not, in

reality, colossally simple rather than complex? It is true that in Lear

the phenomena of insanity are reproduced with astonishing minuteness and

truth; but this does not imply any elaborate analysis or demand any

great space. Hamlet is complex; and were I "talking for victory," I

should point out that _Hamlet_ is, of all the tragedies, precisely the

one which does not come within the frame of the picture. But the true

secret of the matter does not lie here: it lies in the fact that Hamlet

unpacks his heart to us in a series of soliloquies--a device employed

scarcely at all in the portrayal of Othello and Lear, and denied to the

modern dramatist.[1] Yet again, the social position and environment of

the great Shakespearean characters is taken for granted. No time is

spent in "placing" them in a given stratum of society, or in

establishing their heredity, traditions, education, and so forth. And,

finally, the very copiousness of expression permitted by the rhetorical

Elizabethan form came to Shakespeare's aid. The modern dramatist is

hampered by all sorts of reticences. He has often to work rather in

indirect suggestion than in direct expression. He has, in short, to

submit to a hundred hampering conditions from which Shakespeare was

exempt; wherefore, even if he had Shakespeare's genius, he would find it

difficult to produce a very profound effect in a crisis worked out from

first to last before the eyes of the audience.

Nevertheless, as before stated, such a crisis has a charm of its own.

There is a peculiar interest in watching the rise and development out of

nothing, as it were, of a dramatic complication. For this class of play

(despite the Shakespearean precedents) a quiet opening is often

advisable, rather than a strong _einleitende Akkord_. "From calm,

through storm, to calm," is its characteristic formula; whether the

concluding calm be one of life and serenity or of despair and death. To

my personal taste, one of the keenest forms of theatrical enjoyment is

that of seeing the curtain go up on a picture of perfect tranquillity,

wondering from what quarter the drama is going to arise, and then

watching it gather on the horizon like a cloud no bigger than a man's

hand. Of this type of opening, _An Enemy of the People_ provides us with

a classic example; and among English plays we may cite Mr. Shaw's

_Candida_, Mr. Barker's _Waste_, and Mr. Besier's _Don_, in which so

sudden and unlooked-for a cyclone swoops down upon the calm of an

English vicarage. An admirable instance of a fantastic type may be found

in _Prunella_, by Messrs. Barker and Housman.[2]

There is much to be said, however, in favour of the opening which does

not present an aspect of delusive calm, but shows the atmosphere already

charged with electricity. Compare, for instance, the opening of _The

Case of Rebellious Susan_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, with that of a

French play of very similar theme--Dumas's _Francillon_. In the latter,

we see the storm-cloud slowly gathering up on the horizon; in the

former, it is already on the point of breaking, right overhead. Mr.

Jones places us at the beginning, where Dumas leaves us at the end, of

his first act. It is true that at the end of Mr. Jones's act he has not

advanced any further than Dumas. The French author shows his heroine

gradually working up to a nervous crisis, the English author introduces

his heroine already at the height of her paroxysm, and the act consists

of the unavailing efforts of her friends to smooth her down. The upshot

is the same; but in Mr. Jones's act we are, as the French say, "in full

drama" all the time, while in Dumas's we await the coming of the drama,

and only by exerting all his wit, not to say over-exerting it, does he

prevent our feeling impatient. I am not claiming superiority for either

method; I merely point to a good example of two different ways of

attacking the same problem.

In _The Benefit of the Doubt_, by Sir Arthur Pinero, we have a crisply

dramatic opening of the very best type. A few words from a contemporary

criticism may serve to indicate the effect it produced on a first-night

audience--

We are in the thick of the action at once, or at least in the thick

of the interest, so that the exposition, instead of being, so to

speak, a mere platform from which the train is presently to start,

becomes an inseparable part of the movement. The sense of dramatic

irony is strongly and yet delicately suggested. We foresee a

"peripety," apparent prosperity suddenly crumbling into disaster,

within the act itself; and, when it comes, it awakens our sympathy

and redoubles our interest.

Almost the same words might be applied to the opening of _The Climbers_,

by the late Clyde Fitch, one of the many individual scenes which make

one deeply regret that Mr. Fitch did not live to do full justice to his

remarkable talent.

One of the ablest of recent openings is that of Mr. Galsworthy's _Silver

Box_. The curtain rises upon a solid, dull, upper-middle-class

dining-room, empty and silent, the electric lights burning, the tray

with whiskey, siphon and cigarette-box marking the midnight hour. Then

we have the stumbling, fumbling entrance of Jack Barthwick, beatifically

drunk, his maudlin babble, and his ill-omened hospitality to the haggard

loafer who follows at his heels. Another example of a high-pitched

opening scene may be found in Mr. Perceval Landon's _The House

Opposite_. Here we have a midnight parting between a married woman and

her lover, in the middle of which the man, glancing at the lighted

window of the house opposite, sees a figure moving in such a way as to

suggest that a crime is being perpetrated. As a matter of fact, an old

man is murdered, and his housekeeper is accused of the crime. The hero,

if so he can be called, knows that it was a man, not a woman, who was in

the victim's room that night; and the problem is: how can he give his

evidence without betraying a woman's secret by admitting his presence in

her house at midnight? I neither praise nor blame this class of story; I

merely cite the play as one in which we plunge straight into the crisis,

without any introductory period of tranquillity.

The interest of Mr. Landon's play lay almost wholly in the story. There

was just enough character in it to keep the story going, so to speak.

The author might, on the other hand, have concentrated our attention on

character, and made his play a soul-tragedy; but in that case it would

doubtless have been necessary to take us some way backward in the

heroine's antecedents and the history of her marriage. In other words,

if the play had gone deeper into human nature, the preliminaries of the

crisis would have had to be traced in some detail, possibly in a first

act, introductory to the actual opening, but more probably, and better,

in an exposition following the crisply touched _einleitende Akkord_.

This brings us to the question how an exposition may best be managed.

It may not unreasonably be contended, I think, that, when an exposition

cannot be thoroughly dramatized--that is, wrung out, in the stress of

the action, from the characters primarily concerned--it may best be

dismissed, rapidly and even conventionally, by any not too improbable

device. That is the principle on which Sir Arthur Pinero has always

proceeded, and for which he has been unduly censured, by critics who

make no allowances for the narrow limits imposed by custom and the

constitution of the modern audience upon the playwrights of to-day. In

_His House in Order_ (one of his greatest plays) Sir Arthur effects part

of his exposition by the simple device of making Hilary Jesson a

candidate for Parliament, and bringing on a reporter to interview his

private secretary. The incident is perfectly natural and probable; all

one can say of it is that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the

dramatist's task.[3] _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ requires an unusual

amount of preliminary retrospect. We have to learn the history of Aubrey

Tanqueray's first marriage, with the mother of Ellean, as well as the

history of Paula Ray's past life. The mechanism employed to this end has

been much criticized, but seems to me admirable. Aubrey gives a farewell

dinner-party to his intimate friends, Misquith and Jayne. Cayley

Drummle, too, is expected, but has not arrived when the play opens.

Without naming the lady, Aubrey announces to his guests his approaching

marriage. He proposes to go out with them, and has one or two notes to

write before doing so. Moreover, he is not sorry to give them an

opportunity to talk over the announcement he has made; so he retires to

a side-table in the same room, to do his writing. Misquith and Jayne

exchange a few speeches in an undertone, and then Cayley Drummle comes

in, bringing the story of George Orreyd's marriage to the unmentionable

Miss Hervey. This story is so unpleasant to Tanqueray that, to get out

of the conversation, he returns to his writing; but still he cannot help

listening to Cayley's comments on George Orreyd's "disappearance"; and

at last the situation becomes so intolerable to him that he purposely

leaves the room, bidding the other two "Tell Cayley the news." The

technical manipulation of all this seems to me above reproach

--dramatically effective and yet life-like in every detail. If

one were bound to raise an objection, it would be to the coincidence

which brings to Cayley's knowledge, on one and the same evening, two

such exactly similar misalliances in his own circle of acquaintance. But

these are just the coincidences that do constantly happen. Every one

knows that life is full of them.

The exposition might, no doubt, have been more economically effected.

Cayley Drummle might have figured as sole confidant and chorus; or even

he might have been dispensed with, and all that was necessary might have

appeared in colloquies between Aubrey and Paula on the one hand, Aubrey

and Ellean on the other. But Cayley as sole confidant--the "Charles, his

friend," of eighteenth-century comedy--would have been more plainly

conventional than Cayley as one of a trio of Aubrey's old cronies,

representing the society he is sacrificing in entering upon this

experimental marriage; and to have conveyed the necessary information

without any confidant or chorus at all would (one fancies) have strained

probability, or, still worse, impaired consistency of character. Aubrey

could not naturally discuss his late wife either with her successor or

with her daughter; while, as for Paula's past, all he wanted was to

avert his eyes from it. I do not say that these difficulties might not

have been overcome; for, in the vocabulary of the truly ingenious

dramatist there is no such word as impossible. But I do suggest that the

result would scarcely have been worth the trouble, and that it is

hyper-criticism which objects to an exposition so natural and probable

as that of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, simply on the ground that

certain characters are introduced for the purpose of conveying certain

information. It would be foolish to expect of every work of art an

absolutely austere economy of means.

Sometimes, however, Sir Arthur Pinero injudiciously emphasizes the

artifices employed to bring about an exposition. In _The Thunderbolt_,

for instance, in order that the Mortimores' family solicitor may without

reproach ask for information on matters with which a family solicitor

ought to be fully conversant, it has to be explained that the senior

partner of the firm, who had the Mortimore business specially in hand,

has been called away to London, and that a junior partner has taken his

place. Such a rubbing-in, as it were, of an obvious device ought at all

hazards to be avoided. If the information cannot be otherwise imparted

(as in this case it surely could), the solicitor had better be allowed

to ask one or two improbable questions--it is the lesser evil of

the two.

When the whole of a given subject cannot be got within the limits of

presentation, is there any means of determining how much should be left

for retrospect, and at what point the curtain ought to be raised? The

principle would seem to be that slow and gradual processes, and

especially separate lines of causation, should be left outside the frame

of the picture, and that the curtain should be raised at the point where

separate lines have converged, and where the crisis begins to move

towards its solution with more or less rapidity and continuity. The

ideas of rapidity and continuity may be conveniently summed up in the

hackneyed and often misapplied term, unity of action. Though the unities

of time and place are long ago exploded as binding principles--indeed,

they never had any authority in English drama--yet it is true that a

broken-backed action, whether in time or space, ought, so far as

possible, to be avoided. An action with a gap of twenty years in it may

be all very well in melodrama or romance, but scarcely in higher and

more serious types of drama.[4] Especially is it to be desired that

interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not

be frittered away on subsidiary or preliminary personages. Take, for

instance, the case of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. It would have been

theoretically possible for Sir Arthur Pinero to have given us either (or

both) of two preliminary scenes: he might have shown us the first Mrs.

Tanqueray at home, and at the same time have introduced us more at large

to the characters of Aubrey and Ellean; or he might have depicted for us

one of the previous associations of Paula Ray--might perhaps have let us

see her "keeping house" with Hugh Ardale. But either of these openings

would have been disproportionate and superfluous. It would have excited,

or tried to excite, our interest in something that was not the real

theme of the play, and in characters which were to drop out before the

real theme--the Aubrey-Paula marriage--was reached. Therefore the

author, in all probability, never thought of beginning at either of

these points. He passed instinctively to the point at which the two

lines of causation converged, and from which the action could be carried

continuously forward by one set of characters. He knew that we could

learn in retrospect all that it was necessary for us to know of the

first Mrs. Tanqueray, and that to introduce her in the flesh would be

merely to lead the interest of the audience into a blind alley, and to

break the back of his action. Again, in _His House in Order_ it may seem

that the intrigue between Maurewarde and the immaculate Annabel, with

its tragic conclusion, would have made a stirring introductory act. But

to have presented such an act would have been to destroy the unity of

the play, which centres in the character of Nina. Annabel is "another

story"; and to have told, or rather shown us, more of it than was

absolutely necessary, would have been to distract our attention from the

real theme of the play, while at the same time fatally curtailing the

all-too-brief time available for the working-out of that theme. There

are cases, no doubt, when verbal exposition may advantageously be

avoided by means of a dramatized "Prologue"--a single act, constituting

a little drama in itself, and generally separated by a considerable

space of time from the action proper. But this method is scarcely to be

commended, except, as aforesaid, for purposes of melodrama and romance.

A "Prologue" is for such plays as _The Prisoner of Zenda_ and _The Only

Way_, not for such plays as _His House in Order_.

The question whether a legato or a staccato opening be the more

desirable must be decided in accordance with the nature and

opportunities of each theme. The only rule that can be stated is that,

when the attention of the audience is required for an exposition of any

length, some attempt ought to be made to awaken in advance their general

interest in the theme and characters. It is dangerous to plunge straight

into narrative, or unemotional discussion, without having first made the

audience actively desire the information to be conveyed to them.

Especially is it essential that the audience should know clearly who are

the subjects of the discussion or narrative--that they should not be

mere names to them. It is a grave flaw in the construction of Mr.

Granville Barker's otherwise admirable play _Waste_, that it should open

with a long discussion, by people whom we scarcely know, of other people

whom we do not know at all, whose names we may or may not have noted on

the playbill.

Trebell, Lord Charles Cantelupe, and Blackborough ought certainly to

have been presented to us in the flesh, however briefly and summarily,

before we were asked to interest ourselves in their characters and the

political situation arising from them.

There is, however, one limitation to this principle. A great effect is

sometimes attained by retarding the entrance of a single leading figure

for a whole act, or even two, while he is so constantly talked about as

to beget in the audience a vivid desire to make his personal

acquaintance. Thus Molière's Tartufe does not come on the stage until

the third act of the comedy which bears his name. Ibsen's John Gabriel

Borkman is unseen until the second act, though (through his wife's ears)

we have already heard him pacing up and down his room like a wolf in his

cage. Dubedat, in _The Doctor's Dilemma_, is not revealed to us in the

flesh until the second act. But for this device to be successful, it is

essential that only one leading character[5] should remain unseen, on

whom the attention of the audience may, by that very fact, be riveted.

In _Waste_, for instance, all would have been well had it suited Mr.

Barker's purpose to leave Trebell invisible till the second act, while

all the characters in the first act, clearly presented to us, canvassed

him from their various points of view. Keen expectancy, in short, is the

most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long

as the expectancy be not ultimately disappointed. But there is no less

desirable mental attitude than that of straining after gleams of

guidance in an expository twilight.

The advantage of a staccato opening--or, to vary the metaphor, a brisk,

highly aerated introductory passage--is clearly exemplified in _A Doll's

House_. It would have been quite possible for Ibsen to have sent up his

curtain upon Nora and Mrs. Linden seated comfortably before the stove,

and exchanging confidences as to their respective careers. Nothing

indispensable would have been omitted; but how languid would have been

the interest of the audience! As it is, a brief, bright scene has

already introduced us, not only to Nora, but to Helmer, and aroused an

eager desire for further insight into the affairs of this--to all

appearance--radiantly happy household. Therefore, we settle down without

impatience to listen to the fireside gossip of the two old

school-fellows.

The problem of how to open a play is complicated in the English theatre

by considerations wholly foreign to art. Until quite recently, it used

to be held impossible for a playwright to raise his curtain upon his

leading character or characters, because the actor-manager would thus be

baulked of his carefully arranged "entrance" and "reception," and,

furthermore, because twenty-five per cent of the audience would probably

arrive about a quarter of an hour late, and would thus miss the opening

scene or scenes. It used at one time to be the fashion to add to the

advertisement of a play an entreaty that the audience should be

punctually in their seats, "as the interest began with the rise of the

curtain." One has seen this assertion made with regard to plays in

which, as a matter of fact, the interest had not begun at the fall of

the curtain. Nowadays, managers, and even leading ladies, are a good

deal less insistent on their "reception" than they used to be. They

realize that it may be a distinct advantage to hold the stage from the

very outset. There are few more effective openings than that of _The

Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, where we find Aubrey Tanqueray seated squarely

at his bachelor dinner-table with Misquith on his right and Jayne on his

left. It may even be taken as a principle that, where it is desired to

give to one character a special prominence and predominance, it ought,

if possible, to be the first figure on which the eye of the audience

falls. In a Sherlock Holmes play, for example, the curtain ought

assuredly to rise on the great Sherlock enthroned in Baker Street, with

Dr. Watson sitting at his feet. The solitary entrance of Richard III

throws his figure into a relief which could by no other means have been

attained. So, too, it would have been a mistake on Sophocles' part to

let any one but the protagonist open the _Oedipus Rex_.

So long as the fashion of late dinners continues, however, it must

remain a measure of prudence to let nothing absolutely essential to the

comprehension of a play be said or done during the first ten minutes

after the rise of the curtain. Here, again, _A Doll's House_ may be

cited as a model, though Ibsen, certainly, had no thought of the British

dinner-hour in planning the play. The opening scene is just what the

ideal opening scene ought to be--invaluable, yet not indispensable. The

late-comer who misses it deprives himself of a preliminary glimpse into

the characters of Nora and Helmer and the relation between them; but he

misses nothing that is absolutely essential to his comprehension of the

play as a whole. This, then, would appear to be a sound maxim both of

art and prudence: let your first ten minutes by all means be crisp,

arresting, stimulating, but do not let them embody any absolutely vital

matter, ignorance of which would leave the spectator in the dark as to

the general design and purport of the play.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: See Chapter XXIII.]

[Footnote 2: Henri Becque's two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two

types of opening. In _Les Corbeaux_ we have almost an entire act of calm

domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to

Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In _La Parisienne_ Clotilde and Lafont

are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for

ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, "Prenez garde,

voilà mon mari!"--and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but

wife and lover.]

[Footnote 3: Mrs. Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes") opened her very

successful play, _The Ambassador_, with a scene between Juliet

Desborough and her sister Alice, a nun, who apparently left her convent

specially to hear her sister's confession, and then returned to it for

ever. This was certainly not an economical form of exposition, but it

was not unsuited to the type of play.]

[Footnote 4: In that charming comedy, _Rosemary_, by Messrs. Parker and

Carson, there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its

predecessor; but the so-called last act is only an "epi-monologue."]

[Footnote 5: Or at most two closely connected characters: for instance,

a husband and wife.]

_CHAPTER VIII_

THE FIRST ACT

Both in the theory and in practice, of late years, war has been declared

in certain quarters against the division of a play into acts. Students

of the Elizabethan stage have persuaded themselves, by what I believe to

be a complete misreading of the evidence, that Shakespeare did not, as

it were, "think in acts," but conceived his plays as continuous series

of events, without any pause or intermission in their flow. It can, I

think, be proved beyond any shadow of doubt that they are wrong in this;

that the act division was perfectly familiar to Shakespeare, and was

used by him to give to the action of his plays a rhythm which ought not,

in representation, to be obscured or falsified. It is true that in the

Elizabethan theatre there was no need of long interacts for the change

of scenes, and that such interacts are an abuse that calls for remedy.

But we have abundant evidence that the act division was sometimes marked

on the Elizabethan stage, and have no reason to doubt that it was always

more or less recognized, and was present to Shakespeare's mind no less

than to Ibsen's or Pinero's.

Influenced in part, perhaps, by the Elizabethan theorists, but mainly by

the freakishness of his own genius, Mr. Bernard Shaw has taken to

writing plays in one continuous gush of dialogue, and has put forward,

more or less seriously, the claim that he is thereby reviving the

practice of the Greeks. In a prefatory note to _Getting Married_,

he says--

"There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this

play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused,

and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the

ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, _The Doctor's

Dilemma_, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and

the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year.

No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the

ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice

that the Greek form is inevitable when the drama reaches a certain

point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on

my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the

spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable

to it, which turned out to be the classical form."

It is hard to say whether Mr. Shaw is here writing seriously or in a

mood of solemn facetiousness. Perhaps he himself is not quite clear on

the point. There can be no harm, at any rate, in assuming that he

genuinely believes the unity of _Getting Married_ to be "a return to the

unity observed in," say, the _Oedipus Rex_, and examining a little into

so pleasant an illusion.

It is, if I may so phrase it, a double-barrelled illusion. _Getting

Married_ has not the unity of the Greek drama, and the Greek drama has

not the unity of _Getting Married_. Whatever "unity" is predicable of

either form of art is a wholly different thing from whatever "unity" is

predicable of the other. Mr. Shaw, in fact, is, consciously or

unconsciously, playing with words, very much as Lamb did when he said to

the sportsman, "Is that your own hare or a wig?" There are, roughly

speaking, three sorts of unity: the unity of a plum-pudding, the unity

of a string or chain, and, the unity of the Parthenon. Let us call them,

respectively, unity of concoction, unity of concatenation, and

structural or organic unity. The second form of unity is that of most

novels and some plays. They present a series of events, more or less

closely intertwined or interlinked with one another, but not built up

into any symmetrical interdependence. This unity of longitudinal

extension does not here concern us, for it is not that of either Shaw or

Sophocles. Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand--the unity of a number

of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain

consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour--that

is precisely the unity of _Getting Married_. A jumble of ideas,

prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of

marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous

fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at

once lose the coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from

without. In a quite real sense, the comparison does more than justice to

the technical qualities of the play; for in a good plum-pudding the due

proportions of the ingredients are carefully studied, whereas Mr. Shaw

flings in recklessly whatever comes into his head. At the same time it

is undeniably true that he shows us a number of people in one room,

talking continuously and without a single pause, on different aspects of

a given theme. If this be unity, then he has achieved it. In the

theatre, as a matter of fact, the plum-pudding was served up in three

chunks instead of one; but this was a mere concession to human weakness.

The play had all the globular unity of a pill, though it happened to be

too big a pill to be swallowed at one gulp.

Turning now to the _Oedipus_--I choose that play as a typical example of

Greek tragedy--what sort of unity do we find? It is the unity, not of a

continuous mass or mash, but of carefully calculated proportion, order,

interrelation of parts--the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or

even of a living organism. The inorganic continuity of _Getting Married_

it does not possess. If that be what we understand by unity, then Shaw

has it and Sophocles has not. The _Oedipus_ is as clearly divided into

acts as is _Hamlet_ or _Hedda Gabler_. In modern parlance, we should

probably call it a play in five acts and an epilogue. It so happened

that the Greek theatre did not possess a curtain, and did possess a

Chorus; consequently, the Greek dramatist employed the Chorus, as we

employ the curtain, to emphasize the successive stages of his action, to

mark the rhythm of its progress, and, incidentally, to provide

resting-places for the mind of the audience--intervals during which the

strain upon their attention was relaxed, or at any rate varied. It is

not even true that the Greeks habitually aimed at such continuity of

time as we find in _Getting Married_. They treated time ideally, the

imaginary duration of the story being, as a rule, widely different from

the actual time of representation. In this respect the _Oedipus_ is

something of an exception, since the events might, at a pinch, be

conceived as passing within the "two hours' traffick of the stage"; but

in many cases a whole day, or even more, must be understood to be

compressed within these two hours. It is true that the continuous

presence of the Chorus made it impossible for the Greeks to overleap

months and years, as we do on the modern stage; but they did not aim at

that strict coincidence of imaginary with actual time which Mr. Shaw

believes himself to have achieved.[1] Even he, however, subjects the

events which take place behind the scenes to a good deal of "ideal"

compression.

Of course, when Mr. Shaw protests that, in _Getting Married_, he did not

indulge in a "deliberate display of virtuosity of form," that is only

his fun. You cannot well have virtuosity of form where there is no form.

What he did was to rely upon his virtuosity of dialogue to enable him to

dispense with form. Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of opinion

which does not at present concern us. The point to be noted is the

essential difference between the formless continuity of _Getting

Married_, and the sedulous ordering and balancing of clearly

differentiated parts, which went to the structure of a Greek tragedy. A

dramatist who can so develop his story as to bring it within the

quasi-Aristotelean "unities" performs a curious but not particularly

difficult or valuable feat; but this does not, or ought not to, imply

the abandonment of the act-division, which is no mere convention, but a

valuable means of marking the rhythm of the story. When, on the other

hand, you have no story to tell, the act-division is manifestly

superfluous; but it needs no "virtuosity" to dispense with it.

It is a grave error, then, to suppose that the act is a mere division of

convenience, imposed by the limited power of attention of the human

mind, or by the need of the human body for occasional refreshment. A

play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is a higher

artistic organism than a play with no act-structure, just as a

vertebrate animal is higher than a mollusc. In every crisis of real life

(unless it be so short as to be a mere incident) there is a rhythm of

rise, progress, culmination and solution. We are not always, perhaps not

often, conscious of these stages; but that is only because we do not

reflect upon our experiences while they are passing, or map them out in

memory when they are past. We do, however, constantly apply to real-life

crises expressions borrowed more or less directly from the terminology

of the drama. We say, somewhat incorrectly, "Things have come to a

climax," meaning thereby a culmination; or we say, "The catastrophe is

at hand," or, again, "What a fortunate _dénouement_!" Be this as it may,

it is the business of the dramatist to analyse the crises with which he

deals, and to present them to us in their rhythm of growth, culmination,

solution. To this end the act-division is--not, perhaps, essential,

since the rhythm may be marked even in a one-act play--but certainly of

enormous and invaluable convenience. "Si l'acte n'existait pas, il

faudrait l'inventer"; but as a matter of fact it has existed wherever,

in the Western world, the drama has developed beyond its rudest

beginnings.

It was doubtless the necessity for marking this rhythm that Aristotle

had in mind when he said that a dramatic action must have a beginning, a

middle and an end. Taken in its simplicity, this principle would

indicate the three-act division as the ideal scheme for a play. As a

matter of fact, many of the best modern plays in all languages fall into

three acts; one has only to note _Monsieur Alphonse, Françillon, La

Parisienne, Amoureuse, A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Master Builder,

Little Eyolf, Johannisfeuer, Caste, Candida, The Benefit of the Doubt,

The Importance of Being Earnest, The Silver Box_; and, furthermore, many

old plays which are nominally in five acts really fall into a triple

rhythm, and might better have been divided into three. Alexandrian

precept, handed on by Horace, gave to the five act division a purely

arbitrary sanction, which induced playwrights to mask the natural rhythm

of their themes beneath this artificial one.[2] But in truth the

three-act division ought no more to be elevated into an absolute rule

than the five-act division. We have seen that a play consists, or ought

to consist, of a great crisis, worked out through a series of minor

crises. An act, then, ought to consist either of a minor crisis, carried

to its temporary solution, or of a well-marked group of such crises; and

there can be no rule as to the number of such crises which ought to

present themselves in the development of a given theme. On the modern

stage, five acts may be regarded as the maximum, simply by reason of the

time-limit imposed by social custom on a performance. But one frequently

sees a melodrama divided into "five acts and eight tableaux," or even

more; which practically means that the play is in eight, or nine, or ten

acts, but that there will be only the four conventional interacts in the

course of the evening. The playwright should not let himself be

constrained by custom to force his theme into the arbitrary mould of a

stated number of acts. Three acts is a good number, four acts is a good

number,[3] there is no positive objection to five acts. Should he find

himself hankering after more acts, he will do well to consider whether

he be not, at one point or another, failing in the art of condensation

and trespassing on the domain of the novelist.

There is undoubted convenience in the rule of the modern stage: "One

act, one scene." A change of scene in the middle of an act is not only

materially difficult, but tends to impair the particular order of

illusion at which the modern drama aims.[4] Roughly, indeed, an act may

be defined as any part of a given crisis which works itself out at one

time and in one place; but more fundamentally it is a segment of the

action during which the author desires to hold the attention of his

audience unbroken and unrelaxed. It is no mere convention, however,

which decrees that the flight of time is best indicated by an interact.

When the curtain is down, the action on the stage remains, as it were,

in suspense. The audience lets its attention revert to the affairs of

real life; and it is quite willing, when the mimic world is once more

revealed, to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed while

its thoughts were occupied with other matters. It is much more difficult

for it to accept a wholly imaginary lapse of time while its attention is

centred on the mimic world. Some playwrights have of late years adopted

the device of dropping their curtain once, or even twice, in the middle

of an act, to indicate an interval of a few minutes, or even of an

hour--for instance, of the time between "going in to dinner" and the

return of the ladies to the drawing-room. Sir Arthur Pinero employs this

device with good effect in _Iris_; so does Mr. Granville Barker in

_Waste_, and Mr. Galsworthy in _The Silver Box_. It is certainly far

preferable to that "ideal" treatment of time which was common in the

French drama of the nineteenth century, and survives to this day in

plays adapted or imitated from the French.

I remember seeing in London, not very long ago, a one-act play on the

subject of Rouget de l'Isle. In the space of about half-an-hour, he

handed the manuscript of the "Marseillaise" to an opera-singer whom he

adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular

ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the

passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the

moment when it first left his hands. (The whole piece, I repeat,

occupied about half-an-hour; but as a good deal of that time was devoted

to preliminaries, not more than fifteen minutes can have elapsed between

the time when the cantatrice left Rouget's garret and the time when all

Paris was singing the "Marseillaise.") This is perhaps an extreme

instance of the ideal treatment of time; but one could find numberless

cases in the works of Scribe, Labiche, and others, in which the

transactions of many hours are represented as occurring within the

limits of a single act. Our modern practice eschews such licenses. It

will often compress into an act of half-an-hour more events than would

probably happen in real life in a similar space of time, but not such a

train of occurrences as to transcend the limits of possibility. It must

be remembered, however, that the standard of verisimilitude naturally

and properly varies with the seriousness of the theme under treatment.

Improbabilities are admissible in light comedy, and still more in farce,

which would wreck the fortunes of a drama purporting to present a sober

and faithful picture of real life.

Acts, then, mark the time-stages in the development of a given crisis;

and each act ought to embody a minor crisis of its own, with a

culmination and a temporary solution. It would be no gain, but a loss,

if a whole two hours' or three hours' action could be carried through in

one continuous movement, with no relaxation of the strain upon the

attention of the audience, and without a single point at which the

spectator might review what was past and anticipate what was to come.

The act-division positively enhances the amount of pleasurable emotion

through which the audience passes. Each act ought to stimulate and

temporarily satisfy an interest of its own, while definitely advancing

the main action. The psychological principle is evident enough; namely,

that there is more sensation to be got out of three or four

comparatively brief experiences, suited to our powers of perception,

than out of one protracted experience, forced on us without relief,

without contrast, in such a way as to fatigue and deaden our faculties.

Who would not rather drink three, four, or five glasses of wine than put

the bottle to his lips and let its contents pour down his throat in one

long draught? Who would not rather see a stained-glass window broken

into three, four, or five cunningly-proportioned "lights," than a great

flat sheet of coloured glass, be its design never so effective?

It used to be the fashion in mid Victorian melodramas to give each act a

more or less alluring title of its own. I am far from recommending the

revival of this practice; but it might be no bad plan for a beginner, in

sketching out a play, to have in his mind, or in his private notes, a

descriptive head-line for each act, thereby assuring himself that each

had a character of its own, and at the same time contributed its due

share to the advancement of the whole design. Let us apply this

principle to a Shakespearean play--for example, to _Macbeth_. The act

headings might run somewhat as follows--

ACT I.--TEMPTATION.

ACT II.--MURDER AND USURPATION.

ACT III.--THE FRENZY OF CRIME AND THE HAUNTING OF REMORSE.

ACT IV.--GATHERING RETRIBUTION.

ACT V.--RETRIBUTION CONSUMMATED.

Can it be doubted that Shakespeare had in his mind the rhythm marked by

this act-division? I do not mean, of course, that these phrases, or

anything like them, were present to his consciousness, but merely that

he "thought in acts," and mentally assigned to each act its definite

share in the development of the crisis.

Turning now to Ibsen, let us draw up an act-scheme for the simplest and

most straightforward of his plays, _An Enemy of the People_. It might

run as follows:

ACT I.--THE INCURABLE OPTIMIST.--Dr. Stockmann announces his

discovery of the insanitary condition of the Baths.