Dramatic Technique Part 16

[21] _Becket_, Act I, Scene 4. Alfred Lord Tennyson. The Macmillan Co., New York.

[22] _Letters of Bulwer-Lytton_, p. 38. Brander Matthews, ed.

[23] _Plays of Thomas Dekker._ Mermaid Series. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York.

[24] A. F. Lange, ed. Mayer & Muller, Berlin.

[25] _Letters of Bulwer-Lytton_, pp. 36-37. Brander Matthews, ed.

[26] Preface, _Au Public_, to _La Princesse Georges_. _Oeuvres_, vol.

V. p. 78. Calmann Levy, Paris.

[27] Preface to _Le Supplice d'une Femme_. _Oeuvres_, vol. V. Calmann Levy, Paris.

[28] Walter H. Baker & Co., Boston; W. Heinemann, London.

[29] The Macmillan Co., New York.

[30] _Seven Short Plays._ Maunsel & Co., Dublin.

[31] J. W. Luce & Co., Boston; Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., London.

[32] J. W. Luce & Co., Boston; Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., London.

[33] Harper & Bros., New York.

[34] Hurst & Blackett, Ltd., London.

[35] Doubleday & McClure Co., New York.

[36] The Macmillan Co., New York.

[37] The Macmillan Co., New York.

[38] _Plays of Thomas Middleton._ Mermaid Series. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York.

[39] _Works of Beaumont and Fletcher_, vol. IV. Whalley & Colman, eds. 1811.

[40] _The Mollusc._ H. H. Davies. Walter H. Baker & Co., Boston; W.

Heinemann, London.

[41] _Lettres sur les Anglais_, Lettre XIX, _Sur la Comedie_, p. 170.

A. Basle, 1734.

[42] _Hamburg Dramaturgy_, p. 265. Bohn ed.

CHAPTER V

FROM SUBJECT TO PLOT: PROPORTIONING THE MATERIAL: NUMBER AND LENGTH OF ACTS

A dramatist, proportioning his rough story for performance in the limited s.p.a.ce 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 sc.r.a.ppy acts of a few minutes each; to crowd all his needed scenes into five acts is to get scenes as sc.r.a.ppy 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."[1] 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 Women_[2] by Euripides, or von Hofmannsthal's _Electra_[3] 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 aesthetical 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."[4]

The difficulty with a play of only two acts is similar. If the piece is to fill an evening, each act must last an hour or more. _The Winter's Tale_ is really a two-act play: Act I is the story of _Hermione_ and _Leontes_, Act II the story of _Florizel_ and _Perdita_, with _Time_ as Chorus separating the acts. Division of this play into five acts and use of modern scenery have given it the effect of breaking to pieces midway, where Time speaks. When each of the two parts is played uninterruptedly, as in Mr. Granville Barker's recent revival, this effect disappears and it becomes clear that the original division is artistically right.

However, so long is each of the two parts that _The Winter's Tale_, when seen in this way, badly strains the attention of a present-day audience.

Contrastingly, to use more than five acts in the s.p.a.ce of two hours and a half is either to carry the performance over into a second day, as with the two-part play of Elizabeth's time--something we cannot now tolerate; or to write such sc.r.a.ppy acts that the frequent s.h.i.+fting of scenery and dropping of the curtain spoil desired illusion. If it be remembered that there is nothing essentially wrong in a play of one, two, six, or even more acts, and that changing tastes or the necessities of particular subjects may in very rare instances make any of these divisions desirable, it can be said that three, four, or five acts are today the normal divisions for plays.

An objection to long plays of one or two acts is that when the piece lasts only an hour and a half, as in the case of _Miss Julia_, the evening must be filled out with something else. In the first place, it is by no means easy to arrange a mixed program in which each play shows to complete advantage. Nor are audiences usually fond of adjusting themselves to new characters and new plots two or three times in an evening. On the professional stage, Barrie's short plays have done something to make the general public more ready to s.h.i.+ft their interest to fresh subjects in the course of an evening, but a mixed program of plays is rarely popular except in theatres of the so-called "experimental" cla.s.s.

The advantage in three acts is that each allows a longer s.p.a.ce than does the division into four or five acts in which characterization may develop before the eyes of the audience, or a larger number of ill.u.s.trative actions bearing on the central purpose of the act may be shown. The offset is that three acts provide only two breaks by which the pa.s.sing of time may be suggested. Neither four nor three acts have any essential superiority over each other, or over five acts. Five acts, in and of themselves, have no superiority over four or three; nor, as some persons have seemed to think, are they the only divisions in which a drama in verse may be written. Avoidance of awkward changes of scene within an act may compel use of four or five acts rather than three. The more episodes in the story to be dramatized, the more aspects of character to be shown by action, the more acts or scenes the dramatist must use. If long s.p.a.ces of time must be allowed for because they are part of the story or marked changes of character demand them, the dramatist will need more _entr'acte_ s.p.a.ce, and, consequently, more acts. It is, then, necessary change of place and pa.s.sage of time which are the chief factors in determining choice among three, four, or five acts.

For centuries theoretical students of the drama have worried themselves about the two unities: place and time. Practising dramatists, however, have usually found that generalizations in regard to them help little and that in each individual play they must work out the place and time problems for themselves. Practice as to s.h.i.+fting scenes has depended most, and always will, upon whether the physical conditions of the stage permit many real or imagined s.h.i.+fts. The Greek stage, with its fixed background and its chorus nearly always present, forced an attempt at unity of place, though the Greeks often broke through it.

Unity of action was the first dramatic law of the ancients; unity of time and place were mere consequences of the former which they would scarcely have observed more strictly than exigency required had not the combination with the chorus arisen. For since their actions required the presence of a large body of people and this concourse always remained the same, who could go no farther from their dwellings nor remain absent longer than it is customary to do from mere curiosity, they were almost obliged to make the scene of the action one and the same spot and confine the time to one and the same day.

They submitted bona fide to this restriction; but with a suppleness of understanding such that in seven cases out of nine they gained more than they lost thereby. For they used this restriction as a reason of simplifying the action and to cut away all that was superfluous, and thus, reduced to essentials, it became only the ideal of an action which was developed most felicitously in this form which required the least addition from circ.u.mstances of time and place.

The French, on the contrary, who found no charms in true unity of action, who had been spoilt by the wild intrigues of the Spanish school, before they had learnt to know Greek simplicity, regarded the unity of time and place not as consequences of unity of action, but as circ.u.mstances absolutely needful to the representation of an action, to which they must therefore adapt their more complicated and richer actions with all the severity required in the use of chorus, which, however, they had totally abolished. When they found, however, how difficult, nay at times impossible this was, they made a truce with the tyrannical rules against which they had not the courage to rebel.

Instead of a single place they introduced an uncertain place, under which we could imagine now this now that spot; enough if the places combined were not too far apart and none required special scenery, so that the scenery could fit the one about as well as the other. Instead of the unity of a day, they subst.i.tuted unity of duration, and a certain period during which no one spoke of sunrise or sunset, or went to bed, or at least did not go to bed more than once, however much might occur in this s.p.a.ce, they allowed to pa.s.s as a day.[5]

The Elizabethan author writing, in his public performances, for an audience accustomed to build imaginatively a setting from hints given by properties, signs on the stage, or descriptions in the text, changed the scene at will. Recall the thirteen changes in Act III of _Antony and Cleopatra_.

On the modern stage such frequent change is undesirable for three reasons: the expense of constructing and painting so many scenes; the time consumed in making the changes, which may reduce decidedly the acting time of the play; and the check in sustained interest on the part of the audience caused by these many changes. The growth of the touring system also has led to reduction in the number of scenes, for transportation of numerous and elaborate sets is too expensive.

Moreover, the interest in extreme realism has carried us more and more into such scenes of simple or sordid living as call for only one to three sets in a play.

At times it is easy, or at least possible with ingenuity, to have for a play, whatever its length, but one setting. Von Hofmannsthal's _Electra_ is an ill.u.s.tration. Another is _The Servant in the House_, a play in five acts by Rann Kennedy.

The scene, which remains unchanged throughout the play, is a room in the vicarage. Jacobean in character, its oak-panelling and beamed-ceiling, together with some fine pieces of antique furniture, lend it an air of historical interest, whilst in all other respects it speaks of solid comfort, refinement, and unostentatious elegance.[6]

Hervieu's _Connais-Toi_, a play of three acts, is another instance of one setting throughout.[7]

Not infrequently it is comparatively simple to confine a play to one set for each act, or even less. _The Great Divide_, by William Vaughn Moody, and _The Weavers_, by Hauptmann, show a new setting for each act. In _The Truth_, by Clyde Fitch, Acts I and II have the same setting: "At _Mrs. Warder's_. An extremely attractive room in the best of taste"; Acts III and IV are in "_Mr. Roland's_ rooms in _Mrs. Crespigny's_ flat in Baltimore." In the four acts of _The Witching Hour_, by Augustus Thomas, there is a change of set only for Act II.[8] Such reducing of possible settings to two or three for a play of four or five acts requires practice, and, in some cases, decided ingenuity. In present-day use the safest principle is this: a set to an act, if really needed, but no change of set within the act unless there be unavoidable reason for it.

What, then, is the would-be dramatist to do when faced by six or more settings to a five-act play, or two or three settings within what he believes should be an act? Often what seems a necessary early scene is but clumsy exposition: skilful handling would incorporate it with the scene immediately following. Scene 1, Act III, of Dryden's _The Spanish Friar_ is in the street. Lorenzo, in friar's habit, meeting the real friar, Dominic, bribes him to introduce him into the chamber of Elvira.

The scene is merely the easiest way of making the audience understand why the two men enter together very early in the next scene.

ACT III. SCENE 1. _The Street_

_Enter Lorenzo, in Friar's habit, meeting Dominic_