1 rected the only fault of Molière's piece, lack of plot." 1 In the same Letter on Comedy, Voltaire brings out clearly what any student of English drama knows, that all through its greatest period it depended far more on complicated story than did the drama of the Continent. Lessing in his Hamburg Dramaturgy, speaking of Colman's The English Merchant, says it has not action enough for the English critics. "Curiosity is not sufficiently fostered, the whole complication is visible in the first act. We Germans are well content that the action is not richer and more complex. The English taste on this point distracts and fatigues us, we love a simple plot that can be grasped at once. The English are forced to insert episodes into French plays if they are to please on their stage. In like manner we have to weed episodes out of the English plays if we want to introduce them to our stage. The best comedies of Congreve and Wycherley would seem intolerable to us without this excision. We manage better with their tragedies. In part these are not so complex and many of them have succeeded well amongst us without the least alteration, which is more than I could say for any of their comedies."2 About all the generalization one may permit one's self here is: For the public of the United States one can at present feel sure that story increases its interest in characterization, however fine. As we shall see in dealing with character, the latter should never be sacrificed to story, but story often ferries a play from the shore of unsuccess to the shore of success. Even today it is not the great poetry, the subtle characterization nor the fine thinking of Hamlet which give it large audiences: it is the varied story, full of surprises and suspense. In another way, Hamlet is a case in point. It shows the im Lettres sur les Anglais, Lettre XIX, Sur la Comédie, p. 170. A. Basle, 1794. possibility of laying down any golden rule as to the amount of story a play should have. Only speaking broadly is it true that different kinds of plays seem to call for different amounts of story. Melodrama obviously does depend on story-happenings often unmotivated and forced on the characters by the will of the dramatist. Romance is almost synonymous with action and we associate with it a large amount of story. The word Intrigue in the title "Comedy of Intrigue" at once suggests story. Tragedy and High Comedy, on the other hand, depend for their values on subtle characterization. In these last two forms it would seem that the increasing characterization must, because of the time limit, mean decrease in the amount of story; then Hamlet, with its complicated story, occurs to us as by no means a single instance of a play of subtle characterization in complicated story. Farce may be either of character or of situation, but there are also farces in which both situation and character ave the exaggerations which distinguish this form from comedy. Comedy of Manners must obviously use much characterization, but it does not preclude a complicated story. Melodrama, then, does call above all else for story. With all the other forms it is in the last analysis the common sense of the dramatist which must tell him how much story to use. He will employ the amount the time limits permit him if he is at the same time to do justice to his characters and to the idea, if any, he may wish to convey. That is, story as we have been watching it develop from the point of departure is, for the dramatist, story in the rough. It is only when it has been proportioned and emphasized so that upon the stage it will produce in an audience the exact emotional effects desired by the dramatist that it becomes plot. Just as the point of departure for a play comes to a writer as a kind of unconscious selection from among all possible subjects, so we have seen that story takes shape by a similar process of conscious or unconscious selection till it is something with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and clear. Nor does selection stop here. The very necessary proportioning and emphasizing mean, as we shall see, that the dramatist selects, and again selects. CHAPTER V FROM SUBJECT TO PLOT: PROPORTIONING THE A DRAMATIST, proportioning his rough story for performance in the limited space of time the stage permits, faces at once the question: "How many acts?" If inexperienced, noting the number of changes of set his story seems to demand he finds himself in a dilemma: to give an act to each change of scene is to break the play into many scrappy acts of a few minutes each; to crowd all his needed scenes into five acts is to get scenes as scrappy as the eight which make the fifth act of Shakespeare's Macbeth or the ten in Act IV of Henry VI, Part II. In either case, if he gives his numerous scenes adequate treatment, he is likely to find their combined length forces him beyond the time limit the theatre allows - about two hours and a half. Let him rid himself immediately of any feeling that custom or dramatic dignity calls for any preference among three, four, or five acts. The Elizabethan drama put such a spell upon the imagination of English-speaking peoples that until recently the idea was accepted: "Five is dignity, with a trailing robe, whereas one, two, or three acts would be short skirts, and degrading." Today a dramatist may plan for a play of three, four, or five acts, as seems to him best. Why, if no change of scene be required, is not a play of one long act desirable? At first sight, there would seem to be a gain in the unbroken movement. The power of sustained attention in audiences is, however, distinctly limited. Any one who has seen a performance of The Trojan Women2 by 1 Essay on Comedy, p. 8. George Meredith. Copyright, 1897, by Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York. The Trojan Women. Translated by Gilbert Murray. G. Allen & Sons, London. Euripides, or von Hofmannsthal's Electra1 needs no further proof that though each makes a short evening's entertainment it is exhausting because of uninterrupted movement from start to finish. To plays of one long act most audiences become unresponsive from sheer physical fatigue. Consequently, use has confined one-act plays to subjects that may be treated in fifteen minutes to an hour, with an average length of from twenty to forty-five minutes. Strindberg has stated well the problem which the play in one long act involves: "I have tried," he wrote in his Introduction to Miss Julia, "to abolish the division into acts. And I have done so because I have come to fear that our decreasing capacity for illusion might be unfavorably affected by intermissions during which the spectator would have time to reflect and to get away from the suggestive influence of the author-hypnotist. My play will probably last an hour and a half, and as it is possible to listen that length of time, or longer, to a lecture, a sermon, or a debate, I have imagined that a theatrical performance could not become fatiguing in the same time. As early as 1872, in one of my first dramatic experiments, The Outlaw, I tried the same concentrated form, but with scant success. The play was written in five acts, and wholly completed, when I became aware of the restless, scattered effect it produced. Then I burned it, and out of the ashes rose a single, well-built act, covering fifty printed pages, and taking an hour for its performance. Thus the form of the present play is not new, but it seems to be my own, and changing æsthetical conventions may possibly make it timely. "My hope is still for a public educated to a point where it can sit through a whole-evening performance in a single act. But that point cannot be reached without a great deal of experimentation." 2 1 Electra. Von Hofmannsthal. Translated by A. Symons. Brentano, New York. Introduction to Miss Julia. Translated by E. Bjorkman. Copyright, 1912, by Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York. |