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THE DRAMA 
 
 ITS LAW AND ITS TECHNIQUE ' 
 
 BY 
 
 ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE, Ph.D. 
 
 M 
 
 / 
 
 ALLYN AND BACON 
 
Copyright, 1898, 
 By Lamson, WolfFe and Company. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 FAN 
 
 Nortuood Press 
 
 J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
 
 Norwood f Mass.f U.S.A. 
 
Mu 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 FREYTAG'S Technik des Dramas, written 
 thirty-five years ago, remains up to this time 
 the best work of its kind. Yet its defects of man- 
 ner and of arrangement are apparent even to the 
 casual reader, and they become yet more evident 
 when the book is subjected to the test of the college 
 class-room. Such a test — one for which the book 
 was never intended — obscures its merits, which 
 are many, and emphasizes its defects, which might 
 appear few and superficial, but which are peculiarly 
 irritating to both teacher and student. Yet the 
 need of such a book is indicated by the number 
 of treatises on the drama which have appeared 
 since Freytag wrote. All of these that I have seen, 
 however, are either too exclusively philosophical, 
 and in their theorizing about the art ignore the 
 practical details of the craft, or they are not philo- 
 sophical enough, and in their preoccupation with 
 the craft lose sight of the fundamental principles, 
 the absolute standards, of the art. 
 
 In this, as in all other essentials, Freytag was 
 sound ; his proportionate emphasis is right, and 
 when I first began to realize the defects of the 
 
 V 
 
 4 :> ] 
 
Vi PREFACE 
 
 book, I thought that by making some changes it 
 could be rendered more practically available while 
 no less suggestive. I soon discovered, however, that 
 it was not possible to fit Freytag's discussion into 
 the Procrustean framework of my own plan. His 
 book lacks system, but it does possess the unity 
 that must always characterize the utterances, how- 
 ever careless, of an honest and conscientious 
 thinker. My book, I saw, might rectify some of 
 the faults of the original, but would fall short of its 
 merits. So I laid Freytag quite aside, and wrote 
 the following chapters with as little regard as possi- 
 ble to the discussions in the Technik. " As little 
 as possible," — for to make any claim to entire 
 independence would be preposterous. No one 
 can read the utterances of a thoughtful critic and 
 veteran in stage-craft like Freytag without being 
 influenced by them. Even if one has arrived inde- 
 pendently at the theories and the judgments therein 
 contained, the formulation and illustration of these 
 theories and judgments by another mind must 
 affect him, if not by altering his thought, at least 
 by enriching its subject-matter. I wish, therefore, 
 to make a comprehensive acknowledgment of my 
 indebtedness to the Technik. Comprehensive and 
 general it must be, for just because his book, 
 despite its diffuseness and its desultorines?, is vital 
 and fundamental, it is impossible to lay a finger on 
 the exact places where I am in its debt. 
 
 One of the chief merits of Freytag's work is 
 its mass of illustrative comments on ancient and 
 
PREFACE VU 
 
 modern dramas. More especially was his use of 
 the Greek dramatists valuable and suggestive, and 
 I hesitated before determining to omit from this 
 treatment any such detailed discussion. Without 
 a sympathetic famiharity with ^schylus, Sophocles, 
 and Euripides for tragedy, and with Aristophanes 
 for comedy, no one can claim the right to "judge 
 righteous judgment " in things dramaturgic. When 
 Freytag wrote, such a familiarity was scarcely to be 
 gained without years of toil ; since his time, modem 
 classical scholarship has experienced a wonderful 
 growth, bearing fruit in a number of critical treatises 
 whose profound learning is informed by philo- 
 sophic insight and delicate taste, is directed by a 
 sense for historic proportion, is dominated by just 
 aesthetic standards. With such works at hand as , 
 the treatises of Jebb, of Butcher, of Haigh, any j ^ 
 detailed treatment of the ancient drama would be ' 
 presumptuous, not to say superfluous, and its place 
 is more fittingly taken by the bibliography at the 
 end of the volume, which points out to the student 
 some of the guides to whom he will commit himself 
 when he shall explore this part of the field. 
 
 Of Freytag's illustrations from modern drama, 
 many are based on German plays, and are thus less 
 illuminating to the average American reader — even 
 the college student — than to the German audience 
 for whom they were intended ; hence they greatly 
 increase the bulk of the book without adding pro- 
 portionately to its effectiveness. I have confined 
 my illustrations more strictly to English Uterature, 
 
Vm PREFACE 
 
 using the drama of other nations only where it is 
 needed for comparison. Such a method is theo- 
 retically lawful as well as practically expedient, 
 since English drama was in its formative period — 
 that is, up to Dryden — scarcely at all influenced 
 by any other drama save the Roman and, chiefly 
 indirectly, the Greek. With our own contemporary 
 drama it is different. It is not possible to set up a 
 language -barrier when our Enghsh and American 
 stages are occupied with the plays of Italian, 
 French, German, and Scandinavian writers. 
 
 Of contemporary drama Freytag's book takes 
 almost no account. Indeed, when he wrote, the 
 renaissance, if we may venture to call it so, of 
 drama had only just set in. Ibsen had been writ- 
 ing plays only a few years, and his greatest were 
 yet to come ; Sudermann was six years old; 
 Hauptmann was an infant; Fulda was not yet 
 born, nor was Maeterlinck, nor Rostand, the brill- 
 iant actor-dramatist who is now hailed by some 
 of his countrymen as their young Shakespeare ; in 
 England a few critic s were hopelessly hoping that 
 -'^dhe'^ama was not really so dead as it seemed. 
 Small wonder that Freytag's mention of modern 
 work had rather the character of an exhortation 
 and a warning than of a critical judgment. But in 
 the last thirty years many good plays, many brill- 
 iant ones, some great ones, have been written, and 
 it is well not to ignore them. In the ordinary 
 college courses it is, indeed, scarcely possible to 
 lay much emphasis on these, yet it is unfortunate 
 
FREFACS IX 
 
 to treat the drama as though it came to an end, for 
 England in 1616, and for Germany in 1832. Such 
 an attitude lends color of truth to the assertion that 
 the drama is no longer a living art form. One of 
 the signs of its life is that it is changing ; and we 
 must not be deceived by the frequent presentations 
 of Shakespeare's plays into thinking that our stage 
 is like the EHzabethan, or that our Shakespeare is 
 the Shakespeare of Elizabeth and of James. In 
 the study of drama Shakespeare must be our centre, 
 but just as we cannot arrive at the truest judgment 
 if we leave out the Greeks, so too we cannot if we 
 ignore our own contemporaries. >1 
 
 Finally, there is one great section of the drama 
 which Freytag left untouched, — comedy. Yet it 
 is present as an element in every one of Shake- 
 speare's plays, it is the predominant element in 
 many of them, and a discussion of the drama which 
 ignores this is, not Hamlet with Hamlet left out, 
 but something more preposterous — Henry IV with 
 Falstaff left out. 
 
 For an exhaustive, or even a fairly satisfactory, 
 discussion of dramatic comedy an entire volume is 
 needed ; such a volume ought to be written. In 
 the three chapters here devoted to the subject I 
 have tried merely to make a survey of the field, to 
 suggest points of view whence it may be studied, 
 to point out lines along which it may be explored. 
 So little has it been investigated that I cannot 
 offer the student even the nucleus for a bibliog- 
 raphy. My hope is that others may come to 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 realize the fascination of this branch of dramatic 
 theory, and that more may be done to illuminate 
 this, at present the most complex and the least 
 adequately treated subject in the realm of literary 
 criticism. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I. — LAW 
 
 PAGB 
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 
 I. Poetic Truth i 
 
 IL/^ Dramatic Unity lo 
 
 IJU. Seriousness — SIIQYAH ... 22 
 IM. The Nature and Sources of Tragic 
 
 Effect 36 
 
 't-V^ The Nature and Sources of Comic 
 
 Effect 51 
 
 PART II. — TECHNIQUE 
 
 ^I. The Two Types of Drama ... 68 
 
 ^11. The Logical Divisions of the Action 76 
 
 ^ III. The Mechanical Divisions of the 
 
 Drama 93 
 
 ''IV. Character-treatment . . . .116 
 
 <- V. Plot in Comedy 137 
 
 ^VI. Character-treatment in Comedy . 162 
 
 Bibliographies 175 
 
 Index 179 
 
 xi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 A DRAMA is a pr esentation of an action, or 
 closely interlinked series of actions, ex- '" 
 pressed directly Byiiiearrs~of' speech' and gesture. 
 It is, however, distinguished from other literary 
 species, not only by its form, but by its subject- X 
 matter and its point of view. Its subject-m atter 
 is the action and re action of human will, a nd it is 
 treated withTv iew. not to the sequen ce of events, pt^r-*-^ 
 
 but to their essential relations as causes and effects. jiJtA/f^ 
 Nj^The drama is like the epTt: in that it deals with / 
 events of human life ; it differs from it by empha- 
 sizing more strongly the volitio nal an d subjective 
 rather than the incidental and objective elements 
 in such events: iit is like the lyric in that it is 
 concerned with emotional, or, more broadly, with 
 spiritual states~~it differs from it by emphasizing, 
 not the emotional or spiritual state considered in 
 itself, but this considered as issuing from or de- 
 veloping into volition. Thus, though it has a 
 closer connection with the inner life than has the 
 epic, and a closer connection with the outer life 
 than has the lyric, it trenches upon the realm of 
 both epic and lyric, and every great drama has in 
 
XIV INTRODUCTION 
 
 it each of these elements, though their relative 
 proportions may vary. 
 
 Vary, indeed, they do. The Greek drama, de- 
 veloping out of the choral ode, always kept a 
 strongly lyric cast; the Teutonic drama is as 
 strongly epic in character. The Greek type, as 
 we get it in Seneca, degenerates into the rhetorical 
 monologue, from which the French classical 
 drama never wholly freed itself; the Teutonic 
 type easily lapses into the presentation of a series 
 of events without inner unity, as in some of Shake- 
 speare's historical plays which are little more than 
 chronicles thrown into dramatic form. Within the 
 limits of art, however, there is possibility of wide 
 divergence in the proportionate values of the two 
 elements, and the (Edipus Tyrannus does not ex- 
 clude Macbeth from the number of great dramas. 
 
 In the following discussion it has been assumed 
 that, beneath the differences of form that distin- 
 guish the ancient drama from the modern, there 
 is enough identity in their informing spirit and 
 underlying motive to justify a treatment of them 
 as one. Differences there are, nor are they merely 
 those of form, and Freytag states one side of the 
 truth when he says: "Since Aristotle formulated 
 some of the chief laws of dramatic effect, the cult- 
 ure of the human race has grown older by more 
 than two thousand years. It is not merely the 
 artistic forms — the stage and the manner of pres- 
 entation — which have altered, but, what is more 
 important, the spiritual and moral nature of man, 
 
INTRODUCTION XV 
 
 the relation of the individual to the race and to 
 the highest forces of life, the idea of freedom, 
 and the conception of the divine being, all these 
 have undergone great changes." This is true, 
 yet the more familiar one grows with the Greek 
 drama the more one comes to realize that in the 
 fundamental constitution of human nature there 
 has been~TTttle change, and that in proportion as 
 the drama is great it is the same for all ages. Or, 
 if there are in this respect great essential differ- 
 ences, — as there are certainly great superficial 
 ones, — we English are closer to the Greeks in 
 sympathy than we are to some peoples of more 
 recent times, for example, the French of the 
 seventeenth century, and are more at one with 
 the writer of (Edipus Tyrannus than with the 
 writer of Athalie, 
 
 The two elements that are emphasized in dra- ^ 
 matic treatment of human nature are, broadly 
 speaking, free will and causality. It is a com- 
 monplace of criticism to say that the Greek drama 
 presented the latter, the modern drama the former, 
 and indeed the Greek and the modern use of these 
 two elements is different. But the doctrine of the 
 freedom of the individual is not new, it is as old 
 as the words, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." 
 The doctrine which sees the individual borne re- 
 morselessly forward to his fate by forces which he 
 did not initiate is not confined to Greece, it is as 
 old as the first commandment in the Decalogue, or 
 the words, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, 
 
 /^ 
 
XVI INTRODUCTION 
 
 and the children's teeth are set on edge"; but it 
 is also as modern as Ibsen. The ancient world 
 laid greater stress on the second of these two truths, 
 the modern world on the first, but it is only the 
 proportionate emphasis that has changed : nothing 
 old has been wholly lost, nothing really new has 
 been added. 
 
 In discussing any art it is possible to treat it in 
 two ways, according as one considers the princi- 
 ples or laws that underly it as an art, or the rules 
 of technique that govern it as a craft. In the 
 first aspect it is brought into more or less close 
 relation with all art; in the second aspect it needs 
 a narrower and more detailed treatment of those 
 things which mark it off from the other arts. The 
 following discussion has attempted to open up the 
 subject first in the more general aspect, and then 
 in the more specific. ^ iJ'f Y v/- 
 
 Like all art, the drama, to be' of value at all, 
 mus ^ have truth ; to be coherent and effective, it 
 must have unity; to command^ our veneration, it 
 , niust have that quality which the Greeks called 
 ^oTovS?, and which we call greatness, seriousness, 
 nobility. In one sense, any one of these qualities, 
 deeply interpreted, includes the others, but it is 
 possible also to separate them in thought. It has 
 seemed best to take them thus separately and then 
 to try to follow up the two main lines, the tragic 
 and the comic, along which dramatic art has 
 developed. 
 
The Drama 
 
t 
 
 PART I — LAW 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 POETIC TRUTH 
 
 ALL art, said Aristotle, is imitation. That he 
 did not mean by this the mere copying or 
 mirroring of facts is sufficiently clear from his re- 
 marks about the ideal and philosophic character of 
 poetry: "Tragedy represents men as better than 
 they are,"^ "It should preserve the type and yet 
 ennoble it.'"^ In the light of such passages, the 
 word "imitation" takes on another significance 
 from that we might at first be inclined to give 
 it, but it is still misleading, and it seems better 
 to substitute the broader term, "poetic truth." 
 What does this mean, and what does it imply? - 
 All art, and hence_ all _great^^drania*__i& in_ Jj;s I ( 
 nature both universal and,personal,b^>th_general J 
 and selective. . The painter cannot, for example, (^ 
 paint every leaf of a tree, and if he did so his 
 painting would certainly be more unsatisfactory to 
 us than if he had worked with less minuteness. 
 His art lies in determining which of the impres- 
 
 1 Poetics, II. 2 /^., XV. 
 
 B I 
 
2 LAW 
 
 sions into which the infinitely complex total which 
 we call "tree" may be resolved — which of these 
 is to be preserved as essential, which may be re- 
 jected. No two artists would ever make quite 
 the same choice, yet each might be, artistically, 
 true to the subject. Each would, if he were a great 
 artist, give us something better than the landscape 
 itself, he would interpret it to us — make it mean 
 more than it had before. Millet once said, in 
 effect, " A flock of sheep must be regarded by the 
 painter, not as a collection of animals, but as one 
 single huge animal, moving on many feet, and it 
 must be so painted." And it is because Millet 
 himself painted sheep in this way that his work is 
 really art. \ To take another illustration, there is 
 a certain living artist who has wonderful power in 
 drawing the urchins of London's streets, convey- 
 ing, with a few seemingly careless strokes, the . 
 very life and movement of the boys. It is said 
 that he first makes a rather detailed drawing of his 
 subject, then goes over his work, eliminating line 
 after line, until he has reduced it, as it were, to 
 its lowest terms, and there_£emains no line not ai)-t^ 
 sgl utely necessary^ The finished product, with its 
 appearance of carelessness, is really the result of 
 the most careful selection. It is conceivable that 
 such a process should all have been mental, and 
 nothing have appeared on paper but the final re- 
 sult; conceivable, too, that it might be partly or 
 wholly unconscious on the part of the artist; but 
 the process, or something like it, is characteristic 
 
POETIC TRUTH 3 
 
 of all art, and in proportion as the artis t is great 
 will his selective power be true and unerring, ' 
 never rejecting the significant and retaining the 
 unessential. To this end, however, he needs large 
 and deep knowledge of his subject. Wordsworth 
 said that a simple recital of the facts of a given 
 phenomenon might be at once formally accurate 
 and essentially untrue because it had been made 
 either mechanically or ignorantly, noting the un- 
 essential and the significant without discriminating 
 between them. Such discrimination comes with 
 knowledge, which enables us to check our observa- 
 tion of particular instances by a knowledge of the 
 universal, gained through observation of other 
 particular instances. 
 
 It will now be evident what was meant by saying . 
 that art is in its nature both universal and personal 
 or selective. It becomes the one by means of the 
 other, for the selection will reject the accidental 
 and temporary and retain the essential and perma- 
 nent. In this selective process the personality of 
 the artist is tested; upon his personality depends 
 the value of his work to others. If it is deep 
 enough and big enough to be in unison with the 
 individualitjr(Tf~the~ "expression is legitimate) of 
 humanity, he will see in his subject, be it land- 
 scape or human soul, the things that all humanity 
 must see when it looks deeply enough, though it 
 may need his quickened vision to point them out. 
 Thus the artist must be at once different from his 
 fellow-man, and like him. " Once in a while an 
 
4 LAW 
 
 individual Ideal, when expressed, enlightens the 
 world of art, and then we have the artistic genius; 
 he is the prophet who shows to others an ideal field 
 which they ^t once recognize as effective for them- 
 selves, although but for him it would have been 
 unknown to them. To e xpress his own id eal must 
 be the artist' s work." ^ Of the ideal in this sense 
 Amiel's remark is true; "The ideal, after all, is 
 truer than the real; for the ideal is the eternal ele- 
 ment in perishable things: it is their type, their 
 sum, their raison d^etre^ their formula in the book 
 pf the Creator, and therefore at once the most ex- 
 act and the most condensed expression of them."* 
 The danger in this selective art-process is evi 
 dent, especially if we note some phases of it in 
 painting. The extremists of the so-called "im- 
 pressionist " school are simply carrying this process 
 to its farthest issue. They reproduce of a land- 
 scape only a single aspect. All its possibilities of 
 suggestion, its complexity and shading, are swept 
 away to make room for the artist's single impres- 
 sion. The result is rather remarkable. If one 
 happens to approach such a picture from the right 
 direction, with exactly the right light, and in a 
 peculiarly receptive mood, one may receive from 
 it an impression startlingly vivid. If, on the other 
 hand, these conditions are not fulfilled, the pictu^ 
 may be absolutely meaningless to us. The reason 
 is plain enough. The artist has so narrowed his 
 
 1 H. R. Marshall, /Esthetic Principles, p. 97. 
 * Amiel, Journal, p. 105; 
 
POETIC TRUTH 5 
 
 presentation of impressions that it appeals to but 
 few besides himself — it has become personal past 
 the point of contact with others. 
 
 The same thing occurs in literature, though it 
 is not so easily demonstrable. Schopenhauer is 
 a case of the too narrowly selective, the viciously . 
 personal. He attempts satire, let us say; what 
 results? Often enough, it is not satire, but in- 
 vective, more or less hysterical. He is giving us 
 things as they appear to him, but they appear to 
 him as they do not appear to a sane man, and his 
 work becomes interesting, not as art, but as pa- 
 thology. If one would see the difference between 
 satire and anger, that is, between legitimate and 
 illegitimate personality, compare him with Juvenal 
 or Swift at their best, or compare the fourth part 
 of Gulliver's Travels with the first three parts, 
 fi t is in finding the mean b etween this personal 
 narrowness^ that is too selective, and the photo- 
 graphic impersonality that is not selective aPall, 
 that the individuality of the artist, his training and 
 his ideals, are tested. It is t his that determi nes . 
 how much his work shall possess pf what w e may^ I 
 call poetic, or artis tic, tru th. The difference be- 
 tween such truth and the truth of philosophy is 
 not so much in the final result as in the means 
 employed to reach it. The philosopher seeks to 
 discover the essential and universal," and to state it 
 in terms of the universal. The artist seeks to state 
 it in terms of the particular.^ If he wishes to pre- 
 sent the contrast between the misguided human 
 
"6 LAW 
 
 heart, preoccupied with its gloomy or ghastly 
 criminal purposes, and the sane and kindly stand- 
 ards of the world of freer men, the philosopher 
 will state this in terms of universal application; 
 the poet may symbolize it by the rough and sud- 
 den knocking at a castle gate, and the drowsy 
 murmurs of a sleepy porter. 
 
 L^Such a selective process is forced upon the 
 dramatist, also, by the practical conditions of his 
 problem. A play must, when acted, not exceed 
 three hours, but this is an extreme estimate, and 
 includes the time for scene-shifting and other 
 waits ; the business of the play itself ought not to 
 use more than two-thirds of this time. He has, 
 then, two hours in which to present his action, 
 with its causes and results. Obviously, there are 
 in real life few cases where such an action occu- 
 pies so short a time;t it is more apt to stretch over 
 months or years, and its links are "the HttFe; 
 nameless, . unremem befed acts^ of o«t daily life. 
 The artist cannot possibly reproduce all these, and 
 he must, therefore, be in a sense "untrue" to his 
 model.^3' Yet, if he could reproduce them, he would 
 not. For life, nature, in itself, as distinguished 
 from nature as seen by us, is unemphatic. Its so- 
 called contrasts, its humor, its varying emphasis, 
 its "meaning," have their existence, not in the 
 things themselves, but in the mind of the observer. 
 It is, therefore, the artist's part to supply these, to 
 mould his material, impressing upon it the stamp 
 
 1 Cf. infra, pp. 14-16. 
 
POETIC TRUTH f 
 
 of his mind, and thus giving it emphasis, propor- 
 tion, perspective, — which brings us back again to 
 the selective process. (Out of the infinite series 
 of occurrences he chooses such links as seem to 
 him most important, or such as may be made to 
 symbolize more than themselves!] These critical 
 moments he emphasizes, the rest he lets go, trust- 
 ing that from what we see we will infer what we do 
 not see.^ 
 
 Take Macbeth, The dramatist must present to 
 us the rnor al ruin , — the sp«^itual disintegration of 
 a man, with its inner causes. What does he do? 
 He selects his moments, presents these, and lets 
 them stand for all that goes between. We first 
 hear of our hero as a high-minded and courageous 
 soldier. Then we see him, fresh from victory, re- 
 ceive the first suggestion of greater honors to be 
 won; we see how the idea takes hold of him, and 
 we suspect that one so easily touched must have 
 been less sound at heart than we and others had 
 supposed. What goes on in his mind immediately 
 after this we are not told, but after the scenes with 
 Lady Macbeth, we can look back and imagine. 
 That is, we find ourselves responding to the poet's 
 demand, we are become co-workers with him. 
 After the murder, again, we get no insight into 
 Macbeth' s inner life until after he has been made 
 king. Then comes the banquet-scene, which, brief 
 as it is, throws a blaze of light backward over the 
 
 1 Cf. the discussion of " the unities " in the following chapter, 
 especially pp. 14-19. 
 
LAW 
 
 interval. We recognize with perfect certitude the 
 disintegration that has been going on in a spirit 
 that we now see to have been never really strong, 
 either for good or evil. And now our mind can 
 go forward without teaching, we shall expect from 
 the harassed king no firmness of touch, we know 
 his spirit is fevered, that he is the slave of his past. 
 For Lady Macbeth we are given no clews through 
 the course of the play until, at the end, we are 
 allowed, for one brief glimpse, to see her off her ^ 
 guard, when her will of steel is relaxed in delirious 
 
 E sleep. But those few lurid moments reveal to us - 
 ^ whole life-history, and it is enough. ■ ^ ^ ' 
 
 i If one would realize the tremendous compres- 
 ^ sion of the play, and get the full significance of 
 its method, let him note how another artist has 
 treated a similar theme. Dostoiefsky, in Crime 
 and Punishmenty gives us the history of a few days 
 in a young man's life, during which he commits a 
 crime, and afterwards, hovering on the verge of 
 madness, undergoes spiritual tortures of the most 
 exquisite kind. His mental processes are given 
 almost from minute to minute, not an hour is un- 
 accounted for. The effect of the whole is, it is 
 true, tremendous; but it is not the kind of effect 
 that art ought to produce, it is not the purified 
 "pity and fear" which makes a subject beautiful 
 in art which is merely terrible in nature. The 
 writer certainly possessed such knowledge of the 
 human soul as is given to few; had he possessed 
 also the power to wield this knowledge, his book 
 
POETIC TRUTH 9 
 
 would have been one of the grandest art-produc- 
 tions to which a man ever gave being. But o^ .e 
 feels that he is not master gf his in s piration^ he is 
 mastered by it,_ an(l the book has upon it the taint 
 ' of madness from which the author, if we may trust 
 report, was not wholly free. And thus it happens, 
 that while Shakespeare had probably a less pro- 
 found understanding than Dostoiefsky of the inner 
 life of a sin-darkened soul, we feel that his drama is 
 a great artistic creation, whereas of Dostoiefsky's 
 story we feel that it might have been this, but is 
 not. 
 The discussion has led us to the verge of that 
 Clever-dying controversy concerning the merits of 
 the realistic and the idealistic in arj Z]' To enter 
 "upon it would carry us beyond the limits of our 
 subject. Be it suggested, however, thatJthe antithe- 
 sis between the two terms is not absolute and fixed, 
 for all true art is, as we have^seen^ideal, and 
 all true art is based ^in reality. The difference 
 between"~the two scEooTs is quantitative, it is a 
 difference in the proportionate emphasis they lay 
 upon these two aspects of arF,^ and their divergence 
 should never be so great as to lead them, the one 
 beyond the limits of art into the photographic, 
 the other beyond the limits of art into the over 
 narrowly personal. 
 
 1 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 DRAMATIC UNITY 
 
 FEW sayings have been the occasion of such 
 bitter and long-continued controversy as Aris- 
 totle's remarks on the unity of the drama. For 
 this reason, and because they furnish a convenient 
 point of departure, it may be well to quote his own 
 words : 
 
 '* Tragedy is an imitation of an action, that is complete, 
 and whole, and of a certain magnitude. V\. . A whole is 
 that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is 
 that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, 
 but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An 
 end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows 
 some other thing, either by necessity, or in the regular course 
 of events, but has nothing following it. A middle is that 
 which follows something as some other thing follows it. A 
 well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end 
 at haphazard, but conform to the type here described," ^ 
 
 '* Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in 
 the unity of the hero. ' For infinitely various are the incidents 
 in one mari'Js life, which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, 
 too, there are many actions of one man out of which we can- 
 not make one action. ... As therefore, in the other imita- 
 tive arts, the imitation is one, when the object imitated is 
 one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate 
 
 1 Aristotle, Poetics, VII. 
 lo 
 
DRAMATIC UNITY If 
 
 one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts 
 being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, 
 the whole will be disjointed and disturbed." ^ 
 
 " Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imita-'^/ 
 tion in verse of characters of a higher type. . . . They differ, I 
 again, in length : for Tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, J 
 to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but V 
 slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no-^ 
 limits of time." ^ ' / / ^ 
 
 ■ The first two passages quoted, emphasizing the ^ \^ 
 peed for what is technically known as " unity of 
 agtion^^w ill be seen to have permanent and es- j 
 sentiaTl^alidity. The last passage is evidently d//i 
 passing generalization made from the usage of 
 Aristotle's contemporaries. \ It was^ how e v er, taken 
 up by the French of the early sixteenth century 
 and, under the title " unity of time," exalted to the 
 position of a chief canon in dramatic art. A_third 
 requirement, that of " unity of place," though not 
 even suggested by Aristotle, was taken for granted, 
 partly as a corollary of the uijity of time^ partly in 
 imitation of Greek and Senecan usage. These 
 three canons, supported by the authority of the 
 French Academy, and, after some resistance, ac- 
 cepted and defended by Corneille, determined the 
 form of French drama until the beginning of this 
 century, when Victor Hugo, in Hernani, broke 
 bounds, and the " Romantic " reaction became 
 powerful. In Germany the drama for a time 
 slavishly followed French models, but the break 
 
 1 Aristotle, Poetics, VIII. « lb., V. 
 
12 LAW 
 
 with the unities came somewhat earlier than in 
 France, and may be taken as dating from Lessing's 
 notes on dramatic writing, published between 1767 
 and 1769. In England the period of great drama 
 fell so much earlier than in France or in Germany, 
 that it escaped almost altogether the tyranny of 
 " classic " tradition. To Shakespeare, Aristotle can 
 have been Httle more than a name, and though 
 Seneca's tragedies were translated in his Hfetime, 
 their influence was only one of the factors which 
 determined the form of the national drama.^ 
 
 Yet, relatively small as was their influence in 
 our own literature, the " unities " have been too im- 
 portant elsewhere to be passed over in a discussion 
 of the drama. Moreover, the very absurdities into 
 which they led their adherents are ipstructive as to 
 the true basis of dramatic theory. Nothing, for ex- 
 ample, could be more suggestive than the treatise 
 in which Corneille ^ defends The Three Unities , of 
 Action, of Timey and of Place, A few extracts will 
 indicate his position. 
 
 " The fiiie regarding the unity of time is based ugo n this 
 remark of Aristotle, * that the tragedy ought to confine the 
 duration of its action within one revolution of the sun, or to 
 try to exceed this but slightly.'^^These words have given 
 occasion to this famous controversy, whether they ought to 
 
 ^ For the blending of the Senecan and the national tradition, 
 of. R. Fischer, Zur Kunstentwicklung der Englischen Tragodie. 
 
 2 P. Corneille, Discours III, J^es Trois lMtis. 
 
 » Note Corneille's mistranslation of Aristotle, which really 
 begs the whole question. Compare Butcher's translation, quoted 
 above, p. zx. 
 
DRAMATIC UNITY 1$ 
 
 be understood to mean a natural day of twenty-four hours^ 
 or an artificial day of twelve. . . . For my part, I find that 
 there are subjects which it is so inconvenient to reduce within 
 so brief a time, that not only would I grant them the entire 
 twenty-four hours, but I would even avail myself of the 
 license allowed by the philosopher to exceed this number a 
 little, and would without scruple extend it to thirty." 
 
 Jn support of the rule he argues thus : 
 
 " The dramatic poem is an imitation, or, better, a portrait 
 
 of the actions of men; and there is no doubt that portraits 
 
 are the more excellent in proportion as they the more closely 
 
 ^V/ resemble their original. The representation [of a drama on 
 
 pJ&i^ stage] lasts two hours, and the verisimilitude would be 
 
 Qj/ perfect if the action which it presented did not demand 
 
 Y^ more for its actual occurrence. Let us not, then, fix upon 
 
 either twelve hours or twenty-four, but let us compress the 
 
 action of the poem into as brief a space as we possibly can, 
 
 in order that its representation have the greater verisimilitude 
 
 and be the more perfect." 
 
 I As to unity of place, he admits that the rule is] 
 not found either in Horace or in Aristotle, but he 
 nevertheless holds it binding, and characterizes as 
 " un peu licencieuse "/the interpretation of it which 
 would allow a single drama to represent such places 
 as a man could go to and return from in a day. 
 He goes on : 
 
 ** " I could wish, in order not to offend the spectator in any 
 way, that what we represent before him in two hours could 
 actually take place in two hours, and that what we make him 
 see, on a stage that is immovable, could confine itself to one 
 roiom, or one hall, according to choice ; but often this is so 
 inconvenient, not to say impossible, that it is necessary, for 
 place as for time, to admit some enlargement of the limits." 
 
14 LAW 
 
 He concludes that in cases of absolute necessity 
 it is sufficient that the action be confined within the 
 walls of a single city. At the close of his treatise, 
 however, the common sense of the practical play- 
 wright overcomes for a moment the conventionality 
 — never quite genuine — of the Academician, and 
 asserts itself in the impatient remark : 
 
 " It is easy for the theorists to be rigid; but if they were 
 to give to the public six or a dozen poems of this sort, they 
 would perhaps widen their rules even more than I have done, 
 when they had seen by experience what restraint their pre- 
 cision causes, and how many beautiful things it banishes 
 from our stage." 
 
 Evidently the trouble here arises from a misuse 
 of the word " imitation^" and a misconception of 
 what "truth to nature" really is. (Art does not 
 copy nature, it follows and interprets it, and Cor- 
 neille's first proposition, about which he says " there 
 is no doubt " — namely, that the more closely the 
 stage presentation copies the actual events the 
 more perfect is the drama — this proposition is 
 false and subversive of good art ; /f he had followed 
 it consistently, he would not have been the great 
 artist he was. ^ 
 
 On the other hand, the practice of "following 
 these rules at a distance " has something to be said 
 for it. Shakespeare's dramas would have been 
 better if they had not taken quite so much license. 
 The structure of Lear is marred by the too fre- 
 quent changes of scene, not because these destroy 
 the illusion, but because every such change demands 
 
DRAMATIC UNITY 1 5 
 
 a fresh adjustment of the reader's mind to the new 
 conditions^ and such use of his energies is waste of 
 his energies unless there is some compensating 
 gain. S jh Antony and Cleopatra we have a n ilhig - 
 trati on of the way in which bad artistic form may 
 "al most nullify the effectiveness of the artist's rgal 
 perceptions ; for the noble scenes scattered th rough 
 the play do not wholly atone for the^sprawling, 
 helter-skelter character of the treatment. 
 
 In modem plays the elaborateness of the scenery 
 has taken the place of the "classic " tradition as a 
 check on frequent changes of scene, and, except in 
 plays that are chiefly spectacular, the tendency is 
 to cut down scene-shifting, especially within the 
 act. yhe greate j- p.mphfl< ;i< ^, to n, on the inner 
 rathepj falin^e outer aspects tjf th e dramatic situa- 
 tion^jnayji ave had some thi ng, to do with the sim- 
 plificati on of setting and com pactness of treatment 
 that mark§jthe- work of at least some groups of 
 modern dramatists. It may be noted in the plays 
 of the young German writers, Sudermann, Haupt- 
 mann, Fulda; it is yet more striking in the dramas 
 of Ibsen, some of which preserve the same scene 
 throughout, while two. Ghosts and John Gabriel 
 
 Borkman^ r>^g^fnrA tK^ iir>i»y ^f time i" olmr>g» 
 
 Corneille's strictest mterpretatioiii. The same is 
 true of Sudermann 'sZ>/<f Heirnath^'^ and it is inter- 
 esting to note that these two plays, which have 
 
 1 Cf. for an expansion of this, the comparison between Shake- 
 speare and Browning, pp. 129-133. 
 
 2 Acted by Duse and by Bernhardt under the title Magda. 
 
l6 LAW 
 
 roused more than common interest on the stage 
 as well as among the reading public, show such 
 conformity to the standards of a past age. But it 
 is also significant that all three of these plays 
 resemble the Greek drama in presenting to us thft 
 culminating point of an action that has been going 
 on for years; the plays themselves include little 
 more than would be found in the last act of a 
 Shakespearean drama, and their likeness to the 
 classic form may be taken as a natural result of 
 this essential similarity of theme. 
 
 The gain in ttf^isfe cases, however, is not due, as 
 Corneille would have said, to the greater accuracy 
 with whicF th ej[acts can be co pied, bui t o^iKe 
 I greater economy of attention maSepiossible^b^con- 
 l ^ntration in the treatment and by elimination of 
 I distracting^featureST^ Ibsen's Ghosts, which pre- 
 sents the occurrences of a single day in Mrs. 
 Alving's drawing-room, is not, because of this, a 
 whit more "true" than Shakespeare's Macbeth, 
 whose action covers at least months and ranges 
 between England and Scotland. Except when 
 they are of importance for other reasons than 
 those Corneille gives, the unities of time and of 
 place may be set aside as non-essential. The 
 dramatist cannot copy -his subject, — he ought not 
 to do so, — and the extent to which he copies its 
 outer setting cannot be rigidly pkscribed to him. 
 Since he must often make us feel, by means of a 
 few phrases, a soul's long-drawn agonies, why 
 may he not also make us feel, by means of a two 
 
DRAMATIC UNITY I^ 
 
 hours' play, a soul's life-history? Surely, if he 
 can, he may. 
 
 BiU if these requirements concerning time and 
 place were conventional rules-imposedupQn_d.rama 
 from without, that concerning action, is a vitally 
 grounded law, growing out of the very nature of 
 the art- form; and it is characteristic of the direct- 
 ness and truth ^of ArLStotle's thought that he is not 
 content with a casual mention of this point, as in 
 the matter of the time-limit, but pauses to empha- 
 size and elaborate his idea, — reverts to it now and 
 again to add some further comment from another 
 paint of view. 
 
 J^_^jiat he means by unity of action he makes very 
 clear. It isjorganicjmity, he explains, not formal 
 or verbal, that he wants, and this is not necessarily 
 attained by making the actions aU centre about 
 on e man . He hits the point exactly when he says 
 thai it is the act ion chose n^ which must beawhole^ 
 It must, that is, be such an action as can be ade- 
 quately set forth, with its "beginning, middle, 
 and end," during the two hours allotted to the 
 poet, and by the means at his command. This 
 effectually cuts him off from treating certain themes. 
 National issues, for instance, cannot be handled 
 by hfm, except as they touch upon individual 
 hum an liv es. They may, indeed, have a certain 
 large unity, they are as truly controlled by laws, 
 and as open to philosophic treatment as is the life 
 of a single man, but the drama cannot handle 
 them. Gibbon's Decline and Fahof the Roman 
 c 
 
l8 LAW 
 
 Empire may, by a figure of speech, be called a 
 magnificent drama. It has, on a gigantic scale, 
 complete and organic unity; it has, in the true 
 sense, a beginning, a middle, and an end. It does 
 for the Roman Empire what Shakespeare does for 
 Macbeth — portrays a process of disintegration and 
 ruin, and traces it to its source in contravention of 
 the laws of human life and intercourse. But Gib- 
 bon's subject-matter is outside the dramatist's 
 realm. He may touch upon it, as Shakespeare 
 does in Julius Ccssar, but the centre of interest 
 will be not the state, but the man, as here it is 
 Brutus. Where this is not the case, as in several 
 of Shakespeare's historical plays, Henry VIII ^ or 
 Henry F, or King John^ the play is in so far im- 
 perfect. That even Shakespeare erred thus often is 
 not surprising. Such plays appealed to the patri- 
 otism of his audience and ministered to their 
 inherent Teutonic love of incident and spectacle; 
 they were to those times what the plays based on 
 Napoleon's life have within recent years been to 
 ours. But such productions are not good dramatic 
 art. The play must have, not merely a running 
 story that can be told, but a centre, and a deter- 
 mined line of development. Shelley expressed 
 this when he wrote, in his preface to The Cenci, 
 ** Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader 
 all the feelings of those who once acted it, their 
 hopes and fears, their confidences and misgivings, 
 their various interests, passions, and opinions, 
 acting upon and with each other, yet all conspir- 
 
DRAMATIC UNITY I9 
 
 ing to one tremendous end, would be as light to 
 make apparent some of the most dark and secret 
 Caverns of the human heart." It is this "conspir-i 
 ing to one tremendous end " that is the test of the \ 
 plot and of the characters. 
 
 But it is a test that cannot be applied by rule of 
 thumb. Aristotle, indeed, speaks, in his cool, 
 definite way, of " the structuraljujiion of the parts 
 being such that if any one of them is displaced or 
 removed, the whole will be disjointed and dis- 
 turbed." ^ Such a test can well be applied to the 
 dramas of Sophocles : — try t o "cut" the Antigone 
 or the (Edipu Sf either by reducing the number of 
 characters or by removing incidents ; it is like hew- 
 ing away a limb from a living creature. But, with 
 modern plays, it is another matter. It is true 
 the French of the sixteenth century, following a 
 perverted classic tradition, attempted to attain this 
 same kind of unity : their plays have few under- 
 plots, the number of characters is kept as low as 
 possible. But to the Teutonic mind, these produc- 
 tions lack the power that comes of unified com- 
 plexity, while they have not, on the other hand, 
 the lyric intensity and vitality of the Greek drama. 
 Schopenhauer puts this feeling perhaps over-vigor- 
 ously, as is his way, but effectively, when he says 
 that the French tragedies " in general observe this 
 [unity] so strictly that the course of the drama is 
 like a geometrical line without breadth. There 
 it is always a case of 'Only get on ! Penscz a voire 
 affaire r- iPoetUs,wm. 
 
20 LAW 
 
 In the modern French drama, however, as in 
 all English, we have to face the question of epi- 
 sode and subordinate characters — problems which 
 virtually did not exist for Aristotle, since the 
 severely narrow limits of tragedy did not admit of 
 any episode in our sense of the word, and minor 
 characters scarcely appeared. Shakespeare's 
 dramas, on the contrary, abound in episodes that 
 have little apparent connection with the main plot, 
 many of which could be cut out without "disjoint- 
 ing " or " disturbing " the structure of the play. In 
 actual stage presentation some of these actually are 
 left out, and, unless we sit book in hand, we are 
 not likely to notice the omissions. This is less 
 true of the tragedies, however, and in the greatest 
 of these we shall usually find that many of these 
 seemingly trifling incidents are set there with a 
 purpose,- and make toward the main end. " Almost 
 too copiously and with apparent carelessness, the 
 great artist fastens his golden ornaments in all parts 
 of his piece; but he who goes to unclasp them finds 
 them grown iron-fast into the texture of the whole." * 
 
 That a given scene may be omitted without leav- 
 ing the story of the action incomplete is, of course, 
 no indication that such a scene is superfluous, or 
 runs counter to true unity. Many scenes are 
 needed to give shading to character, to .supply 
 contrast, " or backgrou"nd. , Here, again, nothing 
 can be decided by rule, and even about the great- 
 est of the plays we find that opinion differs. The 
 
 1 Freytag, Technik des Dramas^ p. 45. 
 
DRAMATIC UNITY 21 
 
 underplot in Lear is, according to one critic, a 
 blemish, since it is " connected but loosely with 
 the main action," and "retards the movement and 
 needlessly renders the whole more bitter. " Others^ 
 regard this same underplot as a source of strength, 
 since it furnishes a reflection of the main action 
 and thus heightens the total effect, as the subordi- 
 nate theme in a symphony may be a reflection or 
 variant of the principal theme, or as the subordi- 
 nate lines of a picture may follow the lead of the 
 main color masses. It matters less which judgment 
 we finally adopt than the manner in which we arrive fff^ 
 at the judgment. The only tribunal of appeal is VTUy^ 
 taste, but it sho uld be taste that has been trained by ^"^ J 
 long and thoughtful familiarity with the best art. y^^^ji^iJ* 
 
 1 Vide Ulrici : Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, 1, 437 if.; Brandes ; ^ 
 
 William Shakespeare, II, 135. -<r«"^ 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 SERIOUSNESS SHOYAH 
 
 " npRAGEDY," said Aristotle, " is an imitation 
 X of an action that is serious." The word he 
 uses here, (TTrov^atas, is explained"¥y Butcher as 
 uniting the two notions of grave and great ; it has 
 been paraphrased by Arnold in the expression 
 " high and excellent seriousness," and these 
 phrases come as near as any to indicating a cer- 
 tain quality of greatness which we all recognize as 
 indispensable to the serious drama. 
 \ To begin with, one must carefully guard oneself 
 I against the mistake of confusing greatness of sub- 
 \ ject with greatness of treatment. Only the second 
 ^ can produce greatness in the art-product, yet these 
 two things have been, and still are, constantly con- 
 founded. Donne's poems, we are told, are sublime 
 because their theme is so. Milton's Paradise Lost 
 is greater than Virgil's ^neid by the whole differ- 
 ence in grandeur between the conceptions of the 
 two poems, one dealing with the founding of Rome, 
 the other with the fall of man from his first state. 
 It is easy to see the absurdity of such judgments, 
 taking them individually, and nearly as easy to fall 
 into similar absurdities on one's own account. 
 
 22 
 
SERIOUSNESS— -SnOTAH 2$ 
 
 The reason may be that there is in such notions a 
 root of truth. For, if the subject does not make 
 the poem, at least subject and poem have a com- 
 mon source, the one being chosen, the other 
 created, by the poet; and it is quite probable that 
 if a "sublime" subject genuinely appeals to a 
 poet, he has in him elements of sublimity, al- 
 though these may not be accompanied by the 
 power to create a sublime poem. 
 
 And we must make another distinction, between 
 the subject-matter as it exists apart from the artist 
 in the actual world of experience, and the subject 
 as recognized by the artist, recreated in his mind as 
 his theme. Sometimes one of these is truly great 
 when the other is not. Thus, a jealous man does 
 not usually impress us as having any elements of 
 greatness, yet Othello is great, because greatly 
 conceived; querulous and impotent old age seems 
 unpropitious for drama, as do the half-crazed 
 murmurs of an old clown, yet Lear and his fool 
 are among the greatest dramatic creations. Such 
 greatness is due, not to the original subject-matter, | 
 but to the poet who, whatever his theme, views it 
 so truly and deeply that he reaches its inner sig- 
 nificance as human life — and it is in the depths of 
 human life that greatness will be found, if found 
 anywhere. 
 
 The necessity that tragedy and the serious drama 
 shall possess an element of greatness or largeness 
 — call it nobility, elevation, what you will — has 
 always been recognized. The divergence has come 
 
24 LAW 
 
 when men have begun to say what they mean by 
 this quality, and — which is much the same thing 
 
 — how it is to be attained. Even Aristotle, when 
 he begins to analyze methods, sounds, at first hear- 
 ing, a little superficial. The hero must be, he 
 says, " one who is highly renowned and prosperous, 
 
 — a personage like CEdipus, Thyestes, and other 
 illustrious men of such families."^ Now we are 
 used to seei ng tragic effects produced in the treat- 
 ment of ch aracters who are neither renown ed nor 
 of noble family. Yet, for his own time, Aristotle 
 was right. For dramatic action means struggle, 
 and struggle of the most intense kind; the dra- 
 matic agent must therefore possess, not only latent 
 passion and potential energy, but opportunity which 
 shall make this energy kinetic. Such opportunity 
 came in the past chiefly to such men as by birth or 
 fortune were placed in positions of power, who 
 were forced to take part in affairs having large 
 issues and demanding positive and individual 
 activity. They had, as others did not have, op- 
 portunity for self-expression in action; they had 
 greatness thrust upon them, while the average man 
 of their times was lost in the corporate body. For, 
 even in Greece, society had not yet wholly freed 
 itself from the tradition of tribal solidarity and 
 tribal responsibility, and the individual appears 
 in half-relief, epic rather than dramatic, controlled 
 by events rather than originating action. This 
 the Greek dramatists felt, and it was one of the 
 
 1 Poetics, XIII. 
 
SERIOUSNESS — SHOT AH 25 
 
 reasons why they sought their heroes in the rolls 
 of kings and their actions in the annals of nations^ ^ 
 They were right, and Aristotle merely stated, in 
 his somewhat bare way, a generalization from their 
 practice. What is wrong is the assumption made 
 by later theorists and dramatic artists that, because 
 the Greeks had found their tragic heroes among 
 kings, theref ore royalty was sufficient to constitute ^i^ 
 a tragic hero, and a great national issue was, as 
 such, tit subject tor a tragic action. Thus Racine, 
 in Athalie, has chosen a crisis in Hebrew history. 
 He has not, however, presented to us actions in 
 themselves of great tragic import — or rather, he 
 has not interpreted to us the tragic import of the ^2 ^ 
 actions which he presents. A vicious queen, wha^^ ^^ 
 has won her throne by murder, retains it by force.f^ "^H^ 
 By a successful coup d^eiai of the minority, she is ' f^f' / 
 deposed and put to death. This theme has ^^^'Ar^f^J 
 torical importance; it lacks dramatic importance^inj* _ 
 because the sources of the action are not rooted ^g^*ir/4 
 in the spiritual natur e of the heroine or of any f^y^^ a 
 other of the actors. Yet two points in the action f'^™'/ 
 might have furnished a theme that would have h h^ H 
 been truly dramatic. One is the conflict between 
 the queen's ambitious lust of power and her 
 impulse of love for the boy who proves her rival. 
 Another is the conflict of impulses in the old 
 general, Abner, whose instinctive patriotism bids 
 him free his country from an oppressive and 
 unrighteous rule, but whose military training en- 
 joins him to render unquestioning obedience to his 
 
26 LAW 
 
 sovereign. Each of these themes is suggested in 
 Racine's drama, and as each suggestion occurs the 
 reader awaits its further development, but awaits 
 it in vain. The author evidently had in mind the 
 historical importance of his action rather than its 
 spiritual import. 
 
 Compare the way in which Shakespeare has 
 treated a similar subject. Julius Ccesar, like 
 Athaliey is concerned with a crisis in a nation's 
 history, where a tyrant is overcome by a small but 
 steadfast minority. But the tragic interest does 
 not depend upon our knowledge that the fate of 
 Rome hung upon the result of Brutus' conspiracy. 
 This fact, kept in the background, or used as a 
 motive force in the half-prophetic consciousness of 
 Brutus himself, does indeed enhance the appeal to 
 our interest, but the nearer and stronger appeal is 
 made through the individuality of the men Caesar, 
 Antony, Brutus, Cassius, while the tragic theme is 
 found in the spiritual experiences of Brutus, torn 
 by a double and conflicting allegiance. Thus, in 
 Brutus, Shakespeare has done exactly the thing that 
 Racine missed doing, and Julius Ccesar has in 
 this respect a greatness that Athalie wholly lacks. 
 
 That the spiritual issue might have been made 
 yet clearer may be acknowledged; it will certainly 
 be recognized if we extend our field of comparison, 
 and consider Browning's use of a similar theme in 
 Strafford. As in Athalie^ as in Julius Ccesar^ 
 there is in Strafford the tyrant, the oppressed 
 people crying for relief, the reluctant, sad-hearted 
 
SERIOUSNESS — SnOTAH 2/ 
 
 leaders shrinking from the issue, yet forced to meet 
 it. But here, as yq. Julius Ccesar, the greatness of the 
 interests involved does not constitute the tragedy, 
 though it furnishes the occasion for it and makes 
 for it a background of sombre grandeur. The 
 tragic interest gathers about the three figures Pym, 
 ^ J Charles, Strafford; it centres in the spiritual ex- 
 ^cfi-'^'^periences of the great statesman who is forced by 'J^j^cff^^ft 
 ^^ ' fate to do violence to one-half of himself in being^^^^^y^ ^ 
 true to the mandates of the other half. All the TQy\/^f^c(2* 
 
 pain of a great 
 to itself. To say that Strafford is a greater drama* 
 XhdiTi. Julius CcBsar would be at least venturesome; it 
 would probably be a mistake, for there are many 
 considerations to be taken into account in the final 
 judgment of a drama. The three plays are here 
 presented as a group to illustrate the ^^fc^ which 
 political eminence in the actor and n^^^Kissues 
 involved in the action may be used oH^fed by 
 the dramatist.^ 
 
 It is apparent that a proper use of these ele- 
 ments, as subsidiary aids to dramatic effect, is 
 entirely legitimate. It is equally apparent that 
 
 iThe three, or more particularly the last two, would well repay 
 study from other points of view. The characters and motiving 
 of Caesar as compared with Charles, and of Brutus as compared 
 with Strafford and Pym, the use made of historical background, 
 the treatment of the subordinate characters, all these are subjects 
 that could be so treated as to illuminate the questions of dra- 
 matic effect in general. 
 
28 LAW 
 
 they must be recognized as subsidiary only, that 
 they must not be given first place as factors of 
 this " greatness " which we have been discussing. 
 The essential requirement is that the dramatic hero 
 be freeJxL express himself in action, that he be 
 given scope first to develop and then to express 
 his individuality ; and material power, social and 
 political eminence are valuable only because they 
 furnish these things, and only wTiBn they do so. 
 What is ~fequire.d for great dram a is not great po- 
 ^ litical or religious or social issues as such, but the 
 "^enlar gement of soul and stress of passion that some- 
 times accompanies great issues. What is needed 
 tor the tragic hero is not the crowned head, but 
 the royal nature. " Royal " by a figure only, for 
 such a nature is not now necessarily found among 
 monarchs; and kings, once singularly fit subjects 
 for dramatic treatment, are becoming singularly 
 unfit, ^^^^monarch, bound and shackled by con- 
 stitut^^^B-ovisions, loses his personality, though 
 in his^BP^e capacity he may still keep his free- 
 dom. The very eminence that once gave scope 
 to his individuality now tends to repress it, and, 
 private individuality and official greatness being 
 thus dissevered, the special dramatic meaning of 
 this greatness is gone; there is no longer the iden- 
 tity expressed in the significant title, "CEdipus, 
 King:' 
 
 On the other hand, this freedom and scope for 
 individuality, no longer the concomitant of roy- 
 alty as such, is in modern times often found in 
 
SERIOUSNESS —SnOTAH 
 
 fThe 
 
 the status of the so-called " private " man. 
 "royal" nature that is developed by power and 
 opportunity, and which in turn uses power and 
 opportunity for its self-expression, may be found 
 in a man whose eminence is social or political; it 
 is even conceivable that a great tragic hero may 
 be found in one who has no apparent " eminence " 
 of any kind. Such a one, it may be said, is Bea- 
 trice Cenci, but the case is not clear enough to 
 prove the point. Certainly our modern stage- 
 drama, with its love of "middle-class" subjects, 
 has not yet produced anything really great. On 
 the other hand, it is significant that the greatest 
 classic dramas — those of Shakespeare and of 
 Sophocles, those of Schiller, Euripides, Corneille 
 — all conform to this seemingly superficial rule of 
 Aristotle, as do the greatest English dramas of this 
 century, those of Shelley, of Tennyson, of Brown- 
 ing, and of Swinburne. The German " familien- 
 drama " and the French society drama lack this 
 element of greatness, or where they possess it they 
 too will be found to be in conformity. 
 
 There is another consideration which might 
 have motived Aristotle's remark, though it probably 
 did not do so. Dramatic action is not merely 
 action as seen in the outer event, )but action viewed 
 in relation to its source in passionate emotion and 
 in relation to its reactionary emotional effeqtl. It 
 is therefore necessary that we understand the spir- 
 itual states of the agent, and this is in the main 
 brought about only through his own words. For 
 
30 LAW 
 
 the medium of the drama is self-expression by the 
 ac tors, n ot description by the writer, and self-ex- 
 pression principally i n word s. But such power of 
 self-expression implies in the agent a large degree 
 of culture of a certain kind, as well as a certain 
 bent of character; in general, men must reach 
 rather a high level, intellectually, before they be- 
 come sufficiently conscious of their own spiritual 
 states to express them. 
 
 In the modern drama, owing to the increased 
 complexity and subtlety of the dramatic motiving, 
 it is increasingly important that we understand the 
 thought as well as the acts of the persons involved. 
 Consider what the play of Hamlet would be if its 
 hero were not endowed with the most marvellous 
 power of self-expression, counterbalancing his 
 power of self-repression. Our appreciation of the 
 play depends upon our understanding of the rela- 
 tion between his apparently meaningless acts and 
 his spiritual states, which are deeply significant; 
 and it is because, whether intentionally or not on 
 the author's part, Hamlet does not, after all, ade- 
 quately express these spiritual states ^ • that the 
 drama still remains not perfectly clear in its 
 motiving. 
 
 A very recent attempt to introduce' the unedu- 
 
 1 Possibly the reason why he does not is because these spiritual 
 states were not clearly conceived by the author himself. He 
 seems to have been working away from 'an earlier, traditional 
 Hamlet, toward a new conception of the character, but never to 
 have quite freed himself from the earlier tradition. Cf. Corbin : 
 The Elizabethan Hamlet, 
 
SERIOUSNESS — SnOTAH 3 1 
 
 cated classes into the drama as its central figures 
 seems only to bear out the principle just developed. 
 Hauptmann, in Die Weber, presents a society of 
 working people degraded by crushing labor and 
 hopeless poverty almost to the level of brutes. 
 The result is not satisfying. There are scenes of 
 keen pathos, there are scenes with tragic ligh ts, 
 but the participants have not suffic ient power of 
 self-expression : they need a spokesman. We know 
 they are hungry, sick, dying, and we pity them; 
 but they are in coherent, a nd their incoherence is 
 none the less baffling because we know that in re- 
 producing it the author is giving us a faithful por- 
 trait of actual conditions. The same material 
 might have been used with great effect in another 
 literary form — in the story, for instance, or the 
 no vel, for this form would have given the author a 
 chance to interpret his, cha racters to the reader, to 
 speak for them where they cannot speak for them- 
 selves. But they are not suitable for dramatic treat- 
 ment — at least it yet remains to prove them so. 
 
 'Summing up, then: Aristotle's generalization 
 from Greek usage is seen to have been borne out 
 by later dramatic writers, but the reasons for its 
 validity must be recognized, or there is danger of a 
 superficial-' and conventional interpretation. The 
 use of great national issues is right so long as the 
 dramatist does not rely for his great effects upon 
 our knowledge of the great issues involved. ^ It is 
 well that the hero be out Mrnrdly nr^at as well as 
 inwardly, — the two things will usually go together, 
 
32 LAW 
 
 - — but the dramatist must not be content to substi- 
 tute the outward for the inward greatness. 
 
 But if this quality of "greatness " does not essen- 
 tially consist in these things, in what does it es- 
 sentially consist? 
 
 Shelley, in another connection, says : 
 "The highest moral purpose aimed at in the 
 highest species of the drama is the teaching the 
 human heart, through its sympathies and antipa- 
 thies, the knowledge of itself." ^ And an answer to 
 the question just propounded would be, that a 
 drama, which deals truly and — which is the same 
 thing — vitally with the human heart in its strug- 
 gles with itself and with the outer world, will pos- 
 sess greatness and seriousness. Such an answer may 
 seem utterly hackneyed, but it is, in the end, the 
 only one that can be given. For the artist has 
 to do with phenomena, and in the world of phe- 
 nomena the human spirit — whatever we may 
 think of it absolutely — is relatively the greatest 
 thing we know. There are ideas metaphysical 
 which bring with them a kind of enlargement of 
 mind technically known in -Esthetic as the feel- 
 ing of sublimity : such are the conceptions of God 
 as found in the Hebrew religion and in some of 
 the religions of the far East, the conception of the 
 soul, or of a future life. Such ideas as these are 
 found in the writings of Dante and of Milton, 
 and it is occasionally suggested that their writ- 
 ings are for this reason greater than, for example, 
 
 1 Preface to the Cenci. 
 
SERIOUSNESS — SHOTAH 33 
 
 Shakespeare's. In reply, we may say that it is 
 at least doubtful whether it is the metaphysics 
 of Milton that give him his greatness, while we 
 may be sure it is not this which gives Dante his. 
 But, even if it were so, Shakespeare's defence is 
 clear. With metaphysical notions as such the 
 dramatist h as nothing to do . TTis concern is, first 
 and last, with the human spi rit, and these ideas 
 concern him, not directly, but only in so far as 
 they appeal to and influence the men and women 
 whom he^ is^portraying. It is not his province to 
 
 " Assert eternal providence 
 And justify the ways of God to men," 
 
 but rather to shQwJii£.way;sj)f men toward God, — 
 or whatever stands to them for God, — and toward 
 each other. Dante may say : 
 
 '* Varamente quant' io del regno santo 
 Nella mia mente potei far tesoro, 
 Sara ora materia del mio canto." ^ 
 
 The dramatist approaches such subjects only in- 
 directly, through his created persons. It is thus 
 that Hamlet gazes out into 
 
 " That undiscovered country from whose bourn 
 No traveller returns." 
 
 It is thus that Antigone faces death, firm, but 
 hopeless, in those last words of hers: 
 
 "Ah, fount of Dirce, and thou, holy sons of 
 Thebe whose chariots are many; ye, at least, will 
 
 1 Paradiso. XXXIII. 
 
34 LAW 
 
 bear me witness, in what sort, unwept of friends, 
 and by what laws I pass to the rock-closed prison 
 of my strange tomb, ah me unhappy! who have 
 no home on the earth or in the shades, no home 
 with the living or with the dead. . . . Unwept, 
 unfriended, without marriage-song, I am led forth 
 in my sorrow on this journey that can be delayed 
 no more. No longer, hapless one, may I behold 
 yon day-star's sacred eye; but for my fate no tear 
 is shed, no friend makes moan."^ 
 
 It is thus that Beatrice looks over the brink, 
 shuddering : 
 
 " My God ! can it be possible I have 
 To die so suddenly? So young to go 
 Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground ! 
 To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more 
 Blithe voice of living being; . . , 
 
 " What ! O, where am I? Let me not go mad ! 
 Sweet heaven forgive weak thoughts ! If there should be 
 No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world; 
 The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world ! 
 If all things then should be — my father's spirit, . . . 
 
 ..." Who ever yet returned 
 To teach the laws of death's untrodden realm? 
 Unjust, perhaps, as those which drive us now, 
 O, whither, whither? "2 
 
 This is the sublimity of the dramatist.' But such 
 passages as these show also, better than any expo- 
 
 1 Antigone, trans. Jebb, pp. i6i ft 
 
 2 Shelley : The Cenci, V, 4. 
 8 Cf. infra, pp. 40-42. 
 
SERIOUSNESS — SHOT AH 3 5 
 
 sition can do, the source of the dramatic a-TrovSrj 
 in the poet's interpretative portrayal of human 
 souls. We might say that any human soul, so 
 long as it be stroi^ig a nd positive, — that is, trul y 
 alive, — might, if deeply viewed, be a "great " sub- 
 ject. He might not possess the kind of qualities 
 that become dramatic; his story might not have 
 the kind of unity necessary in a play; but simply 
 in this one quality of greatness and seriousness he 
 would be fit. The quality is not, of course, con- 
 fined to drama; hardly, even, to so-called " serious " 
 writing. It is possessed by Dante and Shake- 
 speare and Sophocles, it is true, but it also under- 
 lies Rabelais and pervades Cervantes. It marks 
 every line of Browning's writing, while — to take 
 examples somewhat at random — Tennyson seldom 
 shows it, Byron almost never. But while other 
 forms of writing may possess this quality, the 
 serious drama must possess it. There are other 
 sources of greatness and seriousness : a poem may 
 have it by virtue of its sweep and velocity of 
 thought, as in Byron's Cain; or of its nobility 
 of thought and its majestic sound and rhythm, as 
 in Milton; or by a certain large simplicity, as in 
 KeaXs^^^rton. The serious drama may have 
 all these; it must have the greatness that springs 
 from a wise and vital treatment of human nature. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE word "tragic," as commonly used, de- 
 notes anything sad, especially somethijig 
 having the qualities of suddenness and finality. 
 It is scarcely distinguished from the pathetic, and, 
 though when the two words are brought together a 
 difference is felt, it is a difference rather of inten- 
 sity than of quality. But for our purposes the 
 word must be interpreted more narrowly, to 
 mean the kind of effect produced by the sight 
 of a losing sjtruggle carried .on. between a strong 
 but imperfect individuality and the oyerpowering 
 forces of life. This will do as a rough beginning, 
 as a trial definition, to be corroborated or modified 
 as it is applied to those tragedies which are by 
 universal consent held to be among the greatest. 
 Choosing almost at random, let us take for this 
 purpose the tragedy Macbeth, the tragedy Othello, 
 and the tragedies whose centre of interest is the 
 figure of Orestes. 
 
 In Macbeth we have a double protagonist, for 
 a treatment of Lady Macbeth as subordinate in- 
 volves one in great difficulties. We have here a 
 man in whom are mingled great strength and great 
 36 
 
SOURCES OF TRAGIC EFFECT 37 
 
 weakness : he is a brave and able soldier, but is 
 incapable of prolonged and consistent effort; his 
 thinking is superficial and his morality/is there- 
 fore not vital and durable; a man of generous and 
 kindly impulses, but open to influence either for 
 good or evil if another stronger and steadier force 
 be brought to bear upon him. Such a force is 
 found in Lady Macbeth. Her mind is cool and 
 steady, and her effectiveness in carrying out any 
 policy she may take up, whether that policy be 
 good or bad, is therefore greater than his could 
 ever be. The occurrence of favorable opportunity, 
 and her ambition for her husband determine her 
 toward evil. Macbeth, morally unsound but 
 wavering in his policy, is upheld by his wife, 
 and together they enter upon the series of acts 
 which end in the ruin of both. The tragic effects 
 are found in their struggles to do that which is 
 impossible — to escape the consequences of their 
 own acts. 
 
 Othello presents, stated briefly, a struggle 
 between two natures: the one impulsive, passion- 
 ate, generous, endowed with tremendou s power to 
 I gve and hate , but not well poised, without con- 
 trolling judgment; the other cold, intellectually 
 agile, self-sufficient and self -controlled, able to use 
 himself and others as tools with a skill founded in 
 an accurate though limited understanding of hu- 
 man ihotives. In this struggle, Othello's weakness 
 brings about his fall, but lago's success is not 
 complete because his understanding is thus limited 
 
 rt 
 
38 LAW 
 
 — because the world is not, after all, wholly moved 
 by the motives which he understands and counts 
 upon. Each falls a victim to the laws of society 
 which are based in human nature. 
 
 In Orestes we have the spectacle of a man who, 
 through no fault of his own, is placed in a posi- 
 tion where he must choose between two evils, and, 
 whichever he chooses, he will be contravening 
 some of the most sacred laws of religion and of 
 nature. He chooses, and bears the retribution 
 which his act, though necessary, necessarily 
 involved. 
 
 In these instances we find certain constant ele- 
 ments which had been already implied in our trial 
 definition. There is always a struggle, there is 
 the fighter, and there is the opposing force. Let 
 us examine these elements. 
 
 And first, the fighter. Our definition said, a 
 strong but imperfect individuality. It has already 
 (chap. Ill) been suggested that the dramati c per- 
 son must be vital and positive. Not that he must 
 nece¥sarily act'^posTHvely; the colorlessness of 
 much of Hamlet's outer activity is quite different 
 from that of his two friends, Rosenkranz and Guil- 
 denstern. It is not the result of forcelessness, but 
 the resultant of conflicting forces within him. 
 The hero must be imperfect, because, for one 
 reason,~a^erfectiy poised character is usually too 
 nearly invulnerable for the opposing force to get 
 a firm hold. Aristotle clearly saw this when he 
 said that the hero must not be a perfectly good 
 
SOURCES OF TRAGIC EFFECT 39 
 
 man, but, as we shall see, this provision has to 
 be accepted with some reservations.^ The deepest 
 reason for it is found in the nature of the oppos- 
 ing force. 
 
 For the best form of tragedy is found, according 
 to Hegel, when the op posing force is closely united 
 with the soul of the fighter himself — when it has 
 effected a lodgment in the enemy's trenches and 
 fights from with in as well as from witho ut. Such 
 is the case in Macbeth, such is Orestes' case, 
 such is the case in Othello, such is preeminently 
 the case in Hamlet and in Wallenstein, Th e hero 
 is, as it were, his own worst enemy. So that one 
 is almost inclined to state categorically that the 
 hero must be thus imperfect, because the tragic 
 struggle must be within him in order to be truly 
 tragic. 
 
 But tempting as it is to generalize from these 
 supreme examples, we must be careful not to con- 
 struct such a theory of the tragic as will exclude 
 such plays as Antigone, and Romeo and Juliet. 
 Here we have another class of effects which we 
 cannot ignore, and in which the tragic element is 
 certainly of a different kind from that found in the 
 other group. We have, in each of these cases, a 
 tragic hero or heroes whose struggle is with outer 
 circumstances, and-wiiose^ll-TSTrecessitated, not 
 by inner weakness, but by the brute strength^ of 
 external fact. " Thus, Antigone is, so far as her 
 trag'/* end is concerned, a perfect character. But 
 
 1 Cf. infra, pp. 117 ft 
 
40 LAW 
 
 a combination of circumstances suddenly arises, 
 because of which she is forced to choose between 
 conformity to a social or political law and obedi- 
 ence to a spiritual or religious law. Her brother's 
 corpse lies unburied outside her native city. Her 
 king and uncle — having over her since her father's 
 death also a father's authority — imperatively com- 
 mands that the body shall not be buried. This 
 command Antigone feels bound, by all the sacred- 
 ness of family ties and religious custom, to contra- 
 vene. She chooses to break the law of the state, 
 and by the state she dies. The story of Orestes 
 might, of course, be similarly interpreted, and 
 thus brought within this group of tragedies. 
 
 It may indeed be said that such a death in such 
 a cause is not defeat but triumph, and so it is, 
 from one standpoint. But such a standpoint is 
 not one from which we can judge drama with any 
 practical helpfulness. It would involve us in end- 
 less subtleties, probably ending in the assertion 
 \j that the only thing truly tragic is the moral ruin of 
 
 soul, — which would cut out nearly everything in 
 .'drama except Macbeth and Browning's A Soul's 
 Tragedy f or at least would swing around the whole 
 emphasis in the tragedies we know, transferring 
 the interest from the so-called "heroes" to the 
 so-called "villains," who, having power only to 
 "kill the body" of their victims, kill, in so doing, 
 their own souls. 
 
 Evidently this will not do, and we must return 
 to a simpler and perhaps a somewhat more external 
 
 
SOURCES OF TRAGIC EFFECT 4I 
 
 way of judging. Antigone may be spiritually a 
 conqueror, — her death is surely amply avenged, — 
 but considered simply as a woman, as a human 
 being with but one earthly life to live, she is con- 
 quered. This, indeed, she herself recognizes 
 when she answers the chorus, who have been try- 
 ing to show her the heroic aspect of her fate : 
 
 " Chorus. But 'tis great renown for a woman who hath 
 perished that she should have shared the doom of the godlike, 
 in her life, and afterward in death. 
 
 Antigone. Ah, I am mocked ! In the name of our 
 fathers' gods, can ye not wait till I am gone, — must ye taunt 
 me to my face, O my city, and ye, her wealthy sons? Ah, 
 fount of Dirce, and thou holy ground of Thebe whose chariots 
 are many; ye, at least, will bear me witness, in what sort, 
 unwept of friends, and by what laws I pass to the rock- 
 closed prison of my strange tomb, ah me unhappy! who 
 have no home on the earth or in the shades, no home with 
 
 the living or with the dead From what manner of parents 
 
 did I take my miserable being ! And to them I go thus, 
 accursed, unwed, to share their home. Alas, my brother, 
 ill-starred in thy marriage, in thy death thou hast undone my 
 life ! " 1 
 
 To change the instance : — the end of the prison- 
 scene in Faust means that the girl has won for 
 herself the great spiritual victory ; 
 
 *' Marguerite. Gericht Gottes! Dir hab' ich mich fiber* 
 geben ! 
 Dein bin ich, Vater ! Rette mich ! 
 . Ihr Engel ! Ihr heiligen Schaaren, 
 Lagert euch umher, mich zu bewahren ! 
 
 1 Antigone, trans. Jebb, pp. 155 ft 
 
42 LAW 
 
 Heinrich ! Mir graut's vor dir. 
 Mephistopheles. Sie ist gerichtet! 
 Stimme. [von oben] Ist gerettet ! " 
 
 But her drama is none the less a tragedy, and 
 while the "voice from above" proclaims her 
 "saved," Mephistopheles is, humanly speaking, 
 entirely right in deeming her "lost." The two 
 judgments here thus opposed may be taken as 
 representative of the two standards — the standard 
 which judges a human life by itself, and sees in 
 death an ultimate fact; and the standard which 
 looks beyond and above to a different set of spir- 
 itual values, in which death is a comparatively un- 
 important element, or important only as it acts 
 upon the hero's nature as a motive. The second 
 standard may or may not be the true one; the 
 first seems the only practicable one to apply to art. 
 For, as we have already said, the artist works with 
 phenomena only; life has for him only what it 
 seems to have for those who live it, and death for 
 him is ultimate because it ends our known activity.^ 
 Remembering, then, that there is another way 
 of judging, we may once more return to our defi- 
 nition of tragedy : as a losing struggle wherein the 
 (opposing and victorious forces may lie either 
 chiefly within the hero's own nature, in which case 
 we have a conflict which is chiefly spiritual — 
 1 Hamlet, Orestes; or they may lie chiefly outside, 
 in which case we have a struggle more or less ex- 
 ternal, the hero remaining unmoved — Antigone, 
 
 1 Ct supra, pp. 32-34, and infra^ pp. 88-90. 
 
SOURCES OF TRAGIC EFFECT 43 
 
 Romeo, and Juliet; or it may be both internal and 
 external — Othello, possibly Wallenstein. Of 
 course in one sense it must always be both, for 
 the spiritual forces of the inner struggle will always 
 have some outward and material embodiment, the 
 outer conflict will always have an answering inner 
 phase.^ Here, as always, it is a question of pro- 
 portion, of relative emphasis, and there is no pos- 
 sibility of strict demarcations of classes. 
 
 One other element there is which these all have 
 in common, besides the necessity of there being a 
 struggle and a losing one : the element, namely, of 
 causality. Aristotle saw this clelirly and laiH great 
 emphasis upon it : 
 
 " Tragedy is an imitation ... of events terrible and pitiful. 
 Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us 
 by surprise ; and the effect is heightened when, at the same 
 time, they follow from one another. The tragic wonder will 
 then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by 
 accident; for even accidents are most striking when they 
 have an air of design." 2 
 
 " These last [reversal of fortune and recognition] should 
 arise from the internal structure of the plot, so that what 
 follows should be the necessary or probable result of the 
 preceding action. It makes all the difference whether one 
 event is the consequence of another, or merely subsequent 
 to it." « 
 
 " It is therefore evident that the unravelling of the plot, no 
 less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, 
 it must not be brought about by the Deus ex Machina, 
 Within the action there must be nothing irrational. " * 
 
 1 Cf. iw/J-a, pp. 129 ff. ^FoeHcs.lX. »/J.,X. */<>., XV, 
 
> 
 
 44 LAW 
 
 That is to say, the opposing force must derive its 
 power, n ot only really but evidently, from what 
 has gone before. Aristotle even goes so far as to 
 say that if the event be not really probable, it 
 should at least, by a kind of sleight of hand, be 
 made to seem so.^ But, if such jugglery is neces- 
 sary, it means weakness. The drama should be the 
 place where we may see, more easily recognizable 
 than in actual life, the universal operation and 
 validity of irresistible law. Othello is not a great 
 tragedy because a husband mistakenly kills his 
 wife, but because he is seen to be, in so doing, 
 the victim and the agent of absolute and remorse- 
 less law. Wallenstein is not a great tragedy 
 because the general is assassinated, or even because 
 he is a traitor, but because these things are seen 
 to be the inevitable conclusion of the given series 
 of events. The thing which we must be made to 
 feel is, in Amiel's phrase, "The fatality of the 
 consequences which follow upon every human act, 
 — the leading idea of dramatic art and the most 
 I tragic element of life." ^ 
 
 To take an opposite instance, the following is a 
 true story of our Civil War : A young Confederate 
 soldier had, after months of service, obtained leave 
 to go home for a few weeks. His companions 
 crowded around him, giving him messages to 
 friends, and letters to be sent when he rt ched a 
 safe district. As he was ready to start he turned 
 back, with the words, "Guess I'll have one more 
 
 1 Poetics, XXIV. 2 Journal, 6th April, 185 1. 
 
SOURCES OF TRAGIC EFFECT ' 45 
 
 look at the Yanks," and went out again to the in- 
 trenchments. He leaned forward on the ridge, 
 raised his head above it, and a bullet from the 
 Union ranks struck him. He fell forward, dead. 
 
 Such an event appeals to us with more than 
 common force, by virtue of its grim irony. It is 
 one of those accidents which Aristotle would have 
 said have an air of design, but it i s not available 
 for tragedy — at least, not for the chief event of 
 tragedy — because it is, after all y accident. At 
 may, indeed, be said that nothing is accidental, 
 everything is the result of unvarying law, and this 
 is certainly true.) But not all events bear upon 
 them the recognizable stamp of this causality, and 
 there are therefore in our experience a vast num- 
 ber of occurrences which go by the name of acci- 
 dents. The dramatist may be able by his insight 
 and power of presentation to take some of these 
 occurrences out of this category. If he can, they 
 are his to use. If he cannot, they are not fit mate- 
 rial for tragedy; their appearance in drama is a 
 sign of_deca)r, it is one of the d^stmguTshing char- 
 acteristics of the "melodramatic." If examples 
 of this kind of abuse are wanted, they may be 
 found in almost any of the plays of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher. 
 
 Sucl].^n incident as that just given, if not strictly 
 speaki.:^ tragic, is certainly pathetic, and we are 
 now ready to return to the distinction, suggested at 
 the beginning of the chapter, between these two 
 classes of effects. That is pathetic which involves 
 
46 LAW 
 
 suffering, unmerited, or out of proportion to guilt, 
 or at least considered without reference to the guilt 
 of the sufferer. It implies a certain passivity on 
 his part, or a resistance so manifestly inadequate 
 as to amount to the same thing. Thus, the suffer- 
 ings of animals under abuse are pathetic, the suffer- 
 ings of sick people are so, so is much spiritual 
 suffering which is recognized as inevitable and en- 
 dured as such. Thus, Ophelia and Desdemona 
 may be called pathetic, while Hamlet and Othello 
 are tragic, and we might multiply examples indefi- 
 nitely. This is perhaps the reason why children 
 have never been used as tragic heroes. To them- 
 selves, their world is great and their emotions in- 
 tense, and, suffering being a wholly subjective 
 matter, their actual sufferings are doubtless often as 
 great as those of adults. But the dramatist is con- 
 cerned wi th act as well as feeling, with struggle as 
 well as pain, and the child has not the command 
 of himselFand of the world to meet these require- 
 ments. Occasionally the treatment of children in 
 literature, by some singular combination of good 
 fortune and skill and sympathy, does approximate 
 the tragic j it does this in Kipling's remarkable 
 story. The Drums of the Fore and A/L But the 
 means by which the author has attained this result, 
 so far as they are discoverable, only go to prove 
 the truth of the general rule. An interesting in- 
 stance of its validity may be found in the three 
 Theban plays of Sophocles. In the (Edipus Rex 
 Antigone and Ismene are simply pathetic figures, 
 
SOURCES OF TRAGIC EFFECT 47 
 
 used to enhance the effect of their father*s fall. In 
 the CEdipus Coloneus Antigone is rising out of this 
 passivity, but she is still in the main pathetic in 
 this sense. In the Antigone she has become truly 
 tragic, though retaining a certain pathetic tone, by 
 virtue of the quietness of her resistance.^ 
 
 It is, then, n ot enough that an incident be pa- 
 thet ic — that the recit al of it saddens us. It must 
 
 not be merely 
 
 " a tale of things 
 Done long ago, and ill done,*' 
 
 but must i nvolve action and reaction, blow and 
 counterblow, the conflict of forces . 
 
 It has become a commonplace of dramatic criti- 
 cism to say that the Greek tragic differs from ours 
 in that their tragic force was a resistless fate, while 
 with us it springs from recognized antecedents, 
 usually to be found in the voluntary acts of the 
 hero himself. Thus Freytag says : 
 
 "The dramatic ideas and the dramatic actions of the 
 Greeks dispensed with a rational world-order, dispensed, 
 that is, with an interlinking of events that is completely 
 accounted for by the conditions and the onesidedness of 
 the characters represented. We are become freer men, we 
 recognize on the stage no other fate than such as arises 
 out of the essential nature of the hero himself." * 
 
 1 It is not meant to imply that the three plays were written in 
 sequence or regarded as a trilogy. They were written at long 
 intervals, and probably not in the order of the story, and were 
 not performed together. Cf. Jebb's introduction to his translation 
 oi Antigone, §§ 22, 23. 
 
 2 Die Technik des Dramas^ p. 81. And cf. pp. Iig-ao. 
 
I 
 
 48 LAW 
 
 Such phrases are, however, apt to be misleading. 
 Whatever be the difference in the form of state- 
 ment, the underlying tragic motive in CEdipuSy 
 and in Lear or Hamlet or Othello^ is really the 
 same, namely, "the fatality of the consequences 
 which follow upon every human act." 
 
 It has been assumed that much of Ibsen's work 
 is in this respect Greek rather than modern. But 
 even in Ghosts^ where the idea of an overpower- 
 ing fate is most prominent, this idea affords the 
 tragic material only, and neither in Ibsen nor in 
 Sophocles is the victim of this "fate" regarded, 
 per set as the tragic hero. In Ghosts the victim, 
 Oswald, is not the hero at all — he is a passive 
 sufferer under what the dramatist, mistakenly or 
 not, represents as unalterable law. The real pro- 
 tagonist is Oswald's mother, and the tragic effect 
 is found in the spectacle of her heroic struggle 
 against a power that she finally discovers to be 
 unconquerable. 
 
 There is, as has been suggested, a type of tragedy 
 which does not entirely conform to the principles 
 we have been deducing. We have examples of it in 
 Shakespeare's Richard III, in Jonson's Catiline and 
 Sejanus, in Massinger's The Roman Actor. In these 
 cases the hero is an absolutely vicious character 
 who holds his place as hero at all only by reason of 
 
 high intellectual_p,pwers, The tra^fe^y presents to 
 
 us the spectacle of his downfall, it presents the ven- 
 geance taken by society upon one \vho has done 
 violence to all its laws. It does i^bt portray an 
 
SOURCES OF TRAGIC EFFECT 49 
 
 inner struggle, it does not present a spiritual prob- 
 lem ; it shows the means by which a moral monster 
 is prevented from permanent enjoyment of the 
 fruits of his vices and his crimes. 
 
 Such a theme can, it is evident, never be treated 
 so as to attain the highest tragic effect. It may 
 contain much pathos in the subordinate characters 
 — it usually does contain this. When it is great 
 at all its gre atness is intellectual so lely. It might 
 be better to call this g roup s atiric tragedies, with 
 emphasis on the " satiric," for it possesses the grim 
 irony of satire and its judicial attitude, and thus 
 affiliates with one group of satiric comedy. The 
 differences between Richard IIIzxA Sejanus on the 
 one hand, which are called tragedy, and Volpone on 
 the other, which is called comedy, aire superficial ; 
 their kinship is essential. 
 
 Thus far we have been considering the elements 
 of the tragic in themselves, and, so far as is pos- 
 sible, apart from their effect on the spectator. 
 Aristotle chose the other point of view and defined 
 the tragic solely in terms of its effect.^ The two 
 elements of this effect he made pity and fear, with 
 a third element which may'be here disregarded 
 because, despite the efforts of philosophers and 
 commentators, it is still not quite clear what he 
 meant, nor are we sure that his statement, if we do 
 understand it, is true for us moderns. But pity 
 and fear will be found to be readily convertible 
 into the terms we have used. " Pi ty" corresponds 
 
 1 Poetics, VI. 
 
50 LAW 
 
 to the suffering and the struggle, "fear" corre- 
 sponds to the causality. For Aristotle elsewhere 
 distinguishes pity from fear by saying that pity 
 1^ is caused by the perception of suffering which we 
 1 do not think of as affecting ourselves; ^ear is 
 caused by the perception of suffering which we 
 realize may be ours. Now this last element is 
 exactly what is involved in causality, it is the 
 element of universal law, whose universality in- 
 volves us in its sweep, and the perception of which 
 produces, according to our mood, either an en- 
 largement of spirit or a sense of oppression which 
 is probably another name for Aristotle's fear. 
 ^^^- Thus we may sum up the elements of tragic 
 V \ effect in three words : suffering, struggle, causality, 
 j Suffering alone is pathetic merely7~struggle alone 
 ■may be heroic merely (note the Heracles of Euripi- 
 des* Alkestis) ; causality alone gives us the rational 
 i merely : the union of the three produces the tragic. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NATURE AND SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT 
 
 PERHAPS nothing in the province of literary 
 forms is so baffling as comedy. Considered 
 objectively, as an art-product, it trenches on the 
 realm of the grotesque, confessedly one of the most 
 difficult problems of aesthetics, while in its subjec- 
 tive aspect it requires an analysis of our intellectual 
 processes which has not yet been satisfactorily 
 given us by psychologists. Moreover, in consid- 
 ering concrete literary examples of comedy we 
 are constantly checked by the conviction that the 
 perception of what is comic is something very un- 
 stable, subject t o change with process of time , and 
 showing wide divergence among different classes 
 of society living at the same time. This is, of 
 course, partly true also of our perception of the 
 tragic, but by no means to the same extent. For 
 tragedy, as we have seen, deals with phases of 
 human nature which are relatively eternal and un- 
 changing. We cannot, of course, affirm that our 
 perception of the tragic in the (Edipus is exactly 
 the same as was that of Sophocles' contemporaries; 
 but certainly time has made far less difference here 
 than it has in the understanding and appreciation 
 
52 LAW 
 
 of Aristophanes, and this quite aside from the in- 
 evitable obscurity of the comic poet's political al- 
 lusions. Apparently, the feelings to which tragedy 
 appeals attained a high degree of development at 
 an earlier time than did those to which comedy 
 appeals, and they have therefore undergone less 
 change. 
 
 Especially in the last few centuries has the comic 
 sense been undergoing a modification intimately 
 connected with the development of that group of 
 feelings which may be roughly classed as the phil- 
 anthropic. At the end of the sixteenth century, 
 the sweetest-natured gentleman of his age could, 
 without argument, class physical deformity among 
 the legitimate sources of laughter.^ To-day such 
 ia sentiment would at once stamp the holder of it 
 as lacking in fine feeling and sympathetic instincts. 
 It has only recently occurred to Shakespeare stu- 
 dents that many of his scenes which to us are tragic 
 or pathetic were perhaps comic or partly comic to 
 his audience, and, right or wrong in the given 
 instances, the suggestion is extremely interesting 
 as a recognition of the instability, of the comic 
 seiiscj, and as a step toward the study of its evo- 
 lution.^ 
 
 Such a study is here inadmissible; all we can 
 do is to recognize that the problem exists, and 
 admit that what is to be said in this chapter must 
 
 1 Sidney, Defense of Poesy, ed. Cook, p. 51. 
 
 2 Cf. John Corbin, The Elizabethan Hamlet, and Barrett 
 Wendell, William Shakespeare. 
 
SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT 
 
 53 
 
 necessarily be subject to modification when 
 subject^shalljiaye been wo rked outJ urtIi£r^ 
 
 It is generally agr.ee dTHat the sense of the comi c 
 ^» arisesfrom a perception of incongruity. The in- 
 congruity may be physical or spiritual, or both; 
 it may be perceptual or conceptual, or both; it 
 may exist in space or in time, or in both; and, 
 according as it is one or another of these, there 
 results one or another variety of comic effect. It 
 may be helpful to make a rough scheme of these 
 classes of comic effects, always remembering that 
 any such scheme can only approximate complete- 
 ness and only suggest truth. 
 
 A. The incongruity is purely conceptual, as in 
 the various forms of wit. Here we may class puns, 
 double meanings, irony, hyperbole, etc. An ex- 
 ample is the well-known question, addressed to a 
 servant carrying a roasted hare, " Is that your own 
 hare or a wig?" 
 
 B. The incongruity is perceptual as well as 
 conceptual. 
 
 I. It is based on a perception of successive 
 evejils*__Ih£ source of the comic effect may be 
 stated in general terms as the contrast between 
 expjectation_ and fulfilment. A simple example of 
 this is the case of a man who goes to sit down in 
 a chair, the chair is drawn away, he ^ on tlje 
 floor. Such an occurrence is almost certain to 
 raise a laugh, and the comic in our modern variety 
 show is largely of this character. 
 
 In comedy of a higher Jvpe, the cases are lesg 
 
 f 
 
54 LAW 
 
 simple , but the p r inciple is the same^ The oc- 
 currences are partly or wholly in the realm of the 
 intellectual or social, rather than the physical life. 
 Examples of this are the relations between Rosa- 
 lind and Orlando in As You Like It^ and the devel- 
 opment of the main plots of any of Plautus' or 
 Terence's comedies.^ These last, however, con- 
 tain much of the simpler comic, of the variety- 
 show type; so also does Shakespeare's Comedy of 
 Errors, The case in As You Like It^ on the other 
 hand, affiliates with the next group. Indeed, 
 nearly all ' comedy of intrigue, though .its main 
 plot may be reduced to this type, involves some 
 character-treatment, and must therefore be referred 
 in part to the following group. 
 
 II. The incongr uity is based on a perception 
 of appearances, simultaneous rather than succes- 
 sive7~"An example is the effect produced by the 
 juxtaposition of a very tall and a very short man, 
 or a very fat and a very thin man. The case is a 
 good one to take, because it is so easily analyz- 
 / able. The two members of the comparison are 
 here supplied to perception, while a third element 
 — the conception of the normal man — exists in 
 the mind of the percipient as the standard from 
 which both deviate. That this conceptual norm 
 must exist, and must be a norm common to both 
 members of the comparison presented, is shown 
 by the fact that the contrast between a tall man 
 and a child is usually not funny to us, because we 
 
 1 Cf. infra, pp. 139 flf. 
 
SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT $5 
 
 apply different standards to the two; whereas, if 
 the child attempts to take on a man's ways, he 
 brings upon himself the application of the man's 
 standard, and gets laughed at. Similarly, we laugh 
 when a man adopts a child's manner. Again, the 
 sight of a big tree and a small one side by side is 
 not usually funny, because we have no definitely 
 established standard of size for trees in general. 
 The examples might be multiplied indefinitely, 
 showing th e necessity for a common standard, and 
 a definite one. 
 
 btarting from these simple cases, we find comic 
 effects ranging all the way up to those of very 
 great complexity. The cases of actual physical 
 deformity, of drunkenness, of the milder forms of 
 insanity, all of which have ceased to be funny to 
 many people, still are highly comic to many, and 
 must be classed here; also instances like the use 
 made of Falstaff's huge size, in King Henry /F, 
 or of Ursula's in Bartholomew Fair. Our modern 
 comic stage has much of this sort of thing. More 
 complex, but essentially akin, are the cases where 
 the emphasis is laid upon eccentricities of char- 
 acter. The standard applied may be a moral one, 
 as often in Jonson, or an intellectual one, as per- ' 
 haps in the case of Osric or Polonius in Hamlet, 
 or a social one, as in many of Molifere's plays. 
 Here we must class all the so-called " Comedy of 
 Humors." Here belong all the effects to which 
 Meredith has exclusively applied the term " Com- 
 edy," his standard of reference being the standard 
 
56 LAW 
 
 of common sense of the well-trained social man 
 considered primarily as in society.^ 
 
 C. There appears to be yet another source of 
 comic e ffect, w hich is, howeverT^oftunately grow- 
 ing less and less important. That, namely, which 
 ar ises from the mere sight of pain, esp ecially pain 
 involving violent movement. To take, as usual, 
 a simple instance, the sight of a man getting a 
 l] ^ating is apt to appear funny to somepeople,' even 
 to-day, and any one who reads Aristophanes and 
 Plautus and Terence, or even the Elizabethan and 
 pre-Elizabethan drama, is almost forced to con- 
 clude that beatings were esteemed iMnny per se. Of 
 course the comic effect in these cases may often 
 be interpreted as lying not in the beating qua 
 beating, but in the beating qua surprise, as, for 
 instance, in the Comedy of Errors , IV, 4, where 
 Dromio enters, with the rope's end his master had 
 sent him for, and, instead of thanks, gets a taste of 
 it himself. But, placing the most charitable con- 
 struction on such instances, we are still forced to 
 suspect that, in the comic incident as in case of 
 roast pig, the beating may have helped to "im- 
 part a gusto." And this suspicion is strengthened 
 if we note that in all comic surprise the surprise 
 is almost always somewhat disagreeable for the 
 person at whom we laugh, which only means that 
 such comic denouements are, so to speak, beatings 
 in disguise. Perhaps, then, Hobbes was right, at 
 least in his estimate of the natural man, when he 
 
 1 Cf. George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy. 
 
 / 
 
SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT 5/ 
 
 calls the comic sense "a sudden glory arising from 
 some sudden conception of some eminency in our- 
 selves by comparison with the inferiority of others, 
 or with our own formerly." 
 
 Leaving out of account this last group, which is 
 partly provided for in group B^ we have two main 
 classes of comic effects, of which the second falls 
 into two parts, according as the contrasts occur 
 simultaneously or successively, and so have to do 
 respectively with plot and with character. But 
 of course, though these groups are separable in 
 thought, they are not so in experience, and the] 
 scheme just given makes, we must repeat, no claii 
 to subtlety of discrimination. For in dealing with 
 anything so shifting and elusive as the comic sense, 
 any schematic statement imposing, as it does, hard 
 and fast limits where no such really exist, must of 
 necessity be inadequate and partly false. But it 
 is nevertheless useful if it be taken as merely indi- 
 cating the main lines of comic effect. It will be 
 found that most literary comedy can be easily put 
 in one or another or in several of the above 
 categories. 
 
 The first division. Ay may be disregarded in 
 this discussion, since it is only incidental in the 
 drama. Group By I and II are essential, as they 
 concern the treatment of life in its two aspects : 
 character (physical or spiritual) and plot. For it 
 is with these that the drama essentially deals. 
 
 I^s evident that all the cases suggested in the 
 sclwme just given have certain things in common ; 
 
58 LAW 
 
 t^ey imply a certain attitude on the part of the per- 
 cipient quite different from the serious or tragic 
 ittitudcv Every case makes an a ppeal to the 
 [Qte llect primar ily, and to the emotions only sec- 
 mdaril y^ if at all. The very word " incongruity " 
 [implies a process of co mparison, w hich implies 
 the reference to some standard or norm. A fat 
 man is funny, not in virtue of his fatness per se^ but 
 because most men- are not fat. One may ask, " But 
 why is that funny?" which is merely to ask why 
 any incongruity is comic. There is as yet no 
 answer, any more than there is to the question why 
 laughter rather than any other bodily contortion 
 should be the physical expression of amusement. 
 We must take these as ultimate facts, and leave 
 their further explanation to the physiological 
 psychologists. 
 ; i To return, the whole matter is seen to be de- 
 
 jpendent on perception of relations and the as- 
 
 'sumption of a standard of reference. 
 
 But further, the incongruity^will_be_p£rceiyed 
 as comic only if the attention be held closely to 
 the particular contrast to be made. If it is allowed 
 to wander, to take into consideration other aspects 
 of the subject presented, the sense of the comic 
 may give place to some other feeling. The ap- 
 peal has thus far been to the intellect rtierely, and 
 to the intellect working along a narrow and defi- 
 nitely prescribed line. But if the emotions are 
 called in, or if the mind breaks over the prescribed 
 limits of the treatment, the comic incongruity may 
 
SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT 59 
 
 be forgotten in more serious thoughts. If, for in- 
 stance, after smiling at the sight of our very tall 
 man walking beside our very short one, we ap- 
 proach them, and suddenly perceive that the short 
 man is a cripple and deformed, the smile vanishes. 
 Why ? Because a whole set of feelings are called 
 into activity of such a nature and strength as quite 
 to overwhelm the intellectual perception of con-' 
 trast. We perceive the contrast, indeed, all the 
 more vividly, but our thought dwells not on the 
 contrast per se, intellectually considered, but on 
 what it involves to the cripple himself. Our emo- 
 tions are aroused, our sympathy is evoked. i 
 Thus it may be said that the perception of the^ 
 comic has in it something arbitrary and limited.^' 
 It requires"a point of view which shall cut off fronj 
 the mental visipn the real issues of life and its 
 vital substance, — the emotions and susceptibilities 
 that make it subject to pleasure or pain. If the 
 view be changed, so as to include these, the comic 
 usually vanishes.^ The distinction is one of treat- \ 
 ment, of attitude, not of original material, and this ; 
 is why the same material may be either comic or 
 tragic according to its treatment"^ wEy "even the 
 same treatment may appear to us comic or tragic 
 according as we fix our attention upon one or 
 another aspect of it; for this reason two people 
 may watch the same occurrence, and one may smile 
 and the other be saddened by it. 
 
 1 But cf. injra, p. 65-66. 
 
60 LAW 
 
 Take as further illustration an instance from life 
 and one from literature : 
 
 A boy stands convulsed with laughter as he 
 watches the wild contortions of two cats whose tails 
 have been wired together; another boy, too small 
 to interfere, may be suffering actual pain at the 
 same sight. What is the difference? In a sense, 
 both boys are right, for, though they are looking at 
 the same occurrence, what they see is not the same : 
 the thing the big boy sees is funny; the thing the 
 little boy sees is painful. The little boy feels 
 the pain of the tightly wound wire as it cuts into 
 the animals' flesh, he feels the frenzy of the help- 
 less creatures, he resents the brute strength that 
 can willingly cause such tortures. The big boy, 
 on the other hand, simply does not see or feel 
 anything of all this : he sees merely the contortions 
 of the animals, their total failure to comprehend 
 the real cause of their difficulty, and the inade- 
 quacy of the means they take to meet it. At the 
 present time society, on the whole, stands with 
 the small boy and condemns the big one; three 
 centuries ago it would have done precisely the 
 reverse; and each position is intellectually ex- 
 plicable though to us only one seems morally 
 justifiable. 
 
 Take now an instance from literature : 
 
 In Lear the subject-matter is the treatment of 
 an old, helpless father by his daughters, and it ii 
 so handled as to be one of the most terrible trage- 
 dies ever written. But is this the only possible 
 
1 
 SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT 6l 
 
 treatment? Turn to Aristophanes, and find in Tlie 
 Clouds precisely the same theme made the basis 
 of a comedy — of comedy, indeed, to appreciate 
 which we must divest ourselves of some modern 
 preconceptions, but genuine comedy nevertheless, 
 and not cruel, simply because it is out of the 
 realm of the emotions entirely. ^i 
 
 There is, then, this f undamental ^ difference 
 between tragedy and come dy: a difference in 
 point of view — a difference not in the thing as 
 pefceiveS^'ByTKe eye, but in the thing as conceived 
 by the mind. We may say that tragedy interprets 
 life by emphasizing its vital realities; comedy re- 
 constructs it by emphasizing certain aspects of it^ 
 selected so as to make good cor^trasts, striking in- 
 congruities. Each is eminently selective, but the 
 prmciple of selection is different. — ATrd~the^ comic 
 standpoint may be assumed toward almost any sub- 
 ject: it may be momentary, and we have its light 
 playing over the situation for an instant and then 
 going out, as when Hamlet rouses himself from his 
 bitter melancholy to i^ake sport of Polonius or 
 Osric; or it may be pervasive, affecting the entire 
 conception of life as represented by the artist,' as 
 in Shakespeare's early comedies {^Love's Labour's 
 Lost, Comedy of Errors^ and Jonson's typical ones; 
 or it may^^single out certain characters for comic 
 treatment in the midst of an otherwise serious 
 presentation of a subject, as in Shakespeare's later 
 comedies. And according as it is more or less 
 pervasive do we get all the gradations between un- 
 
r7 
 
 \ 
 
 62 LAW 
 
 mixed comedy or pure farce at the one extreme 
 and the tragedy with comic lights at the other. 
 
 To return now to our classification of comic 
 effects. It has thus far be en based on differences 
 in subject-matter, and we have distinguished the 
 come3y whose main point lies in the incongruities 
 ^ men's character, from the comedy which em- 
 phasizes mainly the incongruities in the things 
 that happen to men. And if The Comedy of 
 Errors is a purer example of the second class than 
 King Henry IV is of the first, this is because, 
 dramatically, character can scarcely be presented 
 save through action, and Aristotle's assertion — 
 difficult to explain as it stands^ — is unquestionably 
 true if we change its application and read : " With- 
 out action there cannot be a comedy; there may 
 be without character."^ 
 
 ^ But in the group of character comedies there is 
 another basis of distinction. For incongruity of 
 character implies — it springs from — imperfection 
 of character. If a man's character were in per- 
 fect poise, if it were absolutely symmetrical, it 
 would not be comic. Co medy, then, is really 
 based on imperfections in character, but consid- 
 ered from the comic, not the tragic standpoint. 
 
 Now it is evident that one may view these im- 
 perfections in one of several ways: one may 
 simply enjoy them as such, without forming a 
 judgment of the moral or intellectual level of the 
 
 1 Cf. Poetics, VI, " Without action there cannot be a tragedy; 
 there may be without character." 
 
SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT 6$ 
 
 person in whom they are manifested. Or one 
 may, without losing sight of the comic, regard the 
 person with sympathy, or even love. Or one may, 
 consciously or unconsciously, make a judgment, 
 and there is added to our perception of the comic, 
 and modifying this perception, a feeling of su- 
 periority, moral or intellectual or both, while we 
 may express this judgment in terms varying from 
 the gentlest irony to the severest condemnation, 
 according to our mood and the nature of the sub- 
 ject. This was the sort of comedy of which Sid- 
 ney was speaking when he said, " The comedy is 
 an imitation of the common errors of our life, 
 which he representeth in the most ridiculous and 
 scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible 
 that any beholder can be content to be such a 
 one." ^ The significant thing here is the use of the 
 two words " scornful " and " ridiculous. " " Ridic- 
 ulous " carries with it a notion of superiority on 
 the part of the percipient which is not so palpably 
 implied in other words for the comic; "scornful" 
 still further emphasizes this, leaving out the 
 notion of the comic altogether ; and the conclud- 
 ing phrase of the passage makes the writer's 
 standpoint yet clearer. 
 
 Such a passage, especially coming from Sidney, 
 is highly significant. What he would have said if 
 he had lived to see the Shakespearean comedy we 
 can only surmise. Pe-haps he might then have 
 seen the possibility of an ♦^her kind of comic per- 
 
 1 Tk£ Defense of Poesy, p. 28. 
 
 \ 
 
 \ 
 
 % 
 
 \ 
 
64 LAW 
 
 ception, wherein we laugh at the folly and love the 
 fool. But, as it stands, the passage fairly repre- 
 sents the type of comedy we have termed judicial. 
 Jonson's is a stronger statement of the same 
 view: 
 
 " But, with an armed, and resolved hand, 
 
 I'll strip the ragged follies of the time 
 
 Naked as at their birth. . . . 
 
 ... and with a whip of steel, 
 
 Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs. 
 
 "... Well, I will scourge those apes. 
 And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirror, 
 As large as is the stage whereon we act; 
 Where they shall see the time's deformity 
 Anatomized in every nerve and sinew. 
 
 ... my strict hand 
 Was made to seize on vice. . . . ^ 
 
 And Meredith's description of Moli^re's comedy 
 gives us only another aspect of this kind of 
 comedy : 
 
 " Never did man wield so shrieking a scourge 
 upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not 
 shaken while administering it. Tartuffe and Har- 
 pagon, in fact, are each made to whip himself and 
 his class, the false pietists, and the insanely covet- 
 ous. Moliere has only set them in motion. He 
 strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of 
 the creature, and is content to offer her better 
 clothing. . . . The source of his wit is clear 
 reason: it is a fountain of that soil; and it springs 
 1 Every Man out of His Humour, Induction. 
 
SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT 6$ 
 
 to vindicate reason, common sense, Tightness and 
 justice."^ 
 
 These two attitudes, the non- judicial and the 
 judicial, though of course neither one is ever 
 adopted witli perfect consistency by any given 
 writer, make a convenient basis for distinguishing - 
 the t wo main tendencies of comedy. If we seek 
 for literary types, we shall find the one predomi- 
 nating in Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot; the 
 other predominating in Jonson, Moli^re, Thack- 
 eray, Meredith; while Addison and Goldsmith are 
 on the border line between. 
 
 We have called the second sorj^atjriccomedj;, 
 because its tendency is toward satire. This will 
 be apparent if we make a mental survey of the two 
 fields of comedy and satire, and see how difficult 
 it is at some points to distinguish them. Making 
 Shakespeare one end of the scale, and Juvenal the 
 other, we find next Shakespeare, but with satiric 
 qualities, Addison and Thackeray; close to Juve- 
 nal, but with comic qualities, Swift, with Pope and 
 Dryden as subordinate types; between these would 
 come Jonson and Moliere, while Aristophanes 
 verges rather on satire, and Rabelais rather 
 on comedy, though a rigid classification of either 
 of these last is beyond possibility. 
 
 On the other hand, the pure comedy shades off 
 into other forms. It is, we have said, non-judicial, 
 but one of the reasons why it is non-judicial is 
 because it is sympathetic. Now we have seen 
 
 1 Meredith : An Essay on Comedy, pp. 27, 28, 
 F 
 
v^ 
 
 66 LAW 
 
 that keen^ sjnmpathy is usually incompatible with 
 comic^ perception. That it was inevitably and 
 invariably incompatible we expressly did not 
 affirm. For here, as in the case of satiric comedy, 
 there is no hard and fast line drawn, but the two 
 things may shade off the one into the other. We 
 may have the purely comic, where the sympathies, 
 in this sense, are not invoked, as in the Launce 
 episodes of The Two Gentlemen of Verona; or 
 as in Sir John Falstaff, — the pure comic prepon- 
 derating, but enough sympathy so that transition 
 to the pathetic is possible, as hinted in the scene 
 of Falstaff' s rebuff at the hands of the young king, 
 and the account of his death. ^ Accentuate the 
 sympathy farther, retaining the comic, and you 
 get Cervantes' comedy; accentuate it still farther 
 ind you get the Fool in Lear. 
 
 Thus we find that the comic sense tends to vary in 
 one of these two directions, — toward the pathetic 
 or even the tragic on the one hand, and toward 
 the satiric on the other. And it is evident that 
 in the case of comedians like Jonson and Moliere, 
 who stand part way on the road toward satire, any 
 discussion which does not take into account the 
 satiric as well as the comic aspect must necessarily 
 be inadequate. 
 
 One more quality of comedy must be mentioned 
 here, though its purport will be more fully shown 
 
 '^King Henry IV, Part II. Act V, Scene 5, King Henry V, 
 Act II, Scenes 2 and 3, Probably the first of these Scenes was 
 intended by Shakespeare to be comic. 
 
SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT 6/ 
 
 in the chapter on comic plot-structure. It is this : 
 
 tion of its view, leaves out much of life; raore- 
 over, tfieltHmgs it leaves out are those things that 
 we are accustomed to call the serious realities of 
 life, — the realities of pain and death, and the in- 
 exorable sway of law. He nce, comedy is not 
 bouujd, as is tragedy, to base itself on law; it may 
 make a much freer use of what we call chance; the 
 events and people with which it deals may, if we 
 may use a figure, all be largely external. As an 
 actual fact, comedy does do this, and compared 
 with tragedy, the emphasis on causality, on law, is 
 slight. 
 
 Summing up: we have seen that comic effects 
 have a rommon basis in incongruity^ contrast; 
 that the incongruity may lie principally in the 
 realm of events, and we have comic intrigue, or in 
 the realm of appearances, and we have comic char- 
 acter j^ while usually both these are found in con- 
 junction, but with preponderating emphasis on 
 one or the other, which gives us farce or intrigue 
 co medy on the one hand and character comedy on 
 the other. We have seen, too, that comedy differs 
 from tragedy not so much in subject-matter as iiT 
 point of view and treatment. Finally, we have 
 noted that comedy itself varies"' according to the 
 attitude of the author or the percipient, tending, 
 where it becomes judicial, toward satire; where it 
 becomes sympathetic, toward pathos and tragedy. 
 
PART II — TECHNIQUE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE TWO TYPES OF DRAMA 
 
 THUS far we have been considering the drama 
 with reference to the general principles 
 which govern it. We have distinguished drama 
 from other literary forms; have considered those 
 qualities which have always been deemed indis- 
 pensable for good dramatic effect, namel y, truth, 
 unity, proportion, seriojisnessj^andjha ye ^ eter- 
 mined, at least in part, what are the essential ele- 
 ments of tragedy and comedy. 
 
 Turning now from these fundamental principles, 
 which apply with more or less exactness to other 
 forms of art than the drama, we come to consider 
 in detail the way in which the dramatic form 
 works itself out, — the rules of its technique. 
 
 But here, too, before proceeding to those more 
 mechanical regulations which are a part of the 
 craft and are somewhat variable, we ought first to 
 emphasize such laws as are a part of the art and 
 are basic, and therefore permanent. 
 
 The serious drama, as we have seen, presents a 
 68 
 
THE TWO TYPES OF DRAMA 69 
 
 Struggle between two forces. Like any struggle, 
 it proceeds from the first repose to the first grap- 
 pling, then follows the tug and strain of the 
 wrestle, until a moment comes when the advantage 
 begins to go with one side or the other. From 
 that moment on, the struggle moves inevitably, 
 though perhaps not in a direct line, on to the final 
 overthrow of one of the contestants. Such ist 
 the course of every drama. The character of the ! 
 contest may be of various kinds; it may be single 
 combat, — man against fellow-man ; or man 
 against society and social law ; or man against ' 
 himself; while the sphere of the contest may be 
 in the physical or the spiritual world, or in.both. 
 In any case, the play Jalls_J.ogicallX ijUo two 
 
 parts, called the r ising and the falling ac tion. 
 
 whose point of junction and division is this de- 
 cisive moment just spoken of, called in dramatic 
 terms the clim|fx or turning-point. In these two 
 parts are set forth respectively the actioasof the 
 two contestants, the rising action being devoted 
 predominantly to the one that is the aggressor, the 
 falling action to the other. There are evidently 
 two possibilities: (i) the hero takes the initia - 
 tive^ is the ag gressor, or (2) he is in the beg in- 
 n ings relatively passive and acts only when he is 
 d rawn or driven into action bv the attack of the 
 opposing force. In the first case, the hero is most 
 prominent in the rising action, in the second, he 
 does not come to his fullest expression until the 
 falling action. Of the first sort, we may take as 
 
70 TECHNIQUE 
 
 examples Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Richard 
 III, Antigone. Of the second, Othello, more 
 doubtfully, Lear. 
 
 Thus in Macbeth: in Act I, Scene 3 suggests his 
 aggressive attitude toward his king, and hence 
 toward the political and social law; Scene 4 further 
 emphasizes this; Scenes 5 and 7 clinch his definite 
 determination to kill the king, a determination in 
 which Lady Macbeth is even more prominent than 
 Macbeth himself. In Act II we have the murder 
 of Duncan; in Act III the murder of Banquo. 
 But in Scene 4 of this act, i.e. almost the exact 
 mechanical middle of the play, occurs the banquet- 
 scene, which presents the beginning of the reaction 
 in Macbeth' s own spirit; in Scene 5 Hecate dooms 
 him with the authority of her magic power; in 
 Scene 6 we have the beginning of the political re- 
 action. (Note the beautiful completeness of this 
 scene-group, wherein the triple reaction — the 
 spiritual, the supernatural, the political — is fore- 
 shadowed.)^ After the banquet- scene Macbeth 
 ceases to have prominence. In Act IV his 
 activity does overlap a little in the murder 
 of Macduff's children, but it is significant that 
 Macbeth himself t. ^s not appear here, and the 
 bulk of the act is taken up with the opposition, — 
 hence the elaboration of the scene in Macduff's 
 castle and in the English court between Malcolm 
 and Macduff. In Act V we have a simple work- 
 ing out of the double catastrophe, for Macbeth 
 
 1 Cf. infra, p. 83. 
 
THE TWO TYPES OF DRAMA 7 1 
 
 and Lady Macbeth, and except for the sleep- 
 walking scene, the act oscillates between Macbeth 
 and the insurgent army.^ 
 
 Thus, resuming, we have the first two acts and 
 half of the third devoted to exposition of the 
 double hero's activity; the last half of the third 
 act and all of the fourth and fifth to exposition of 
 the reaction of this activity. The play illustrates, 
 with diagrammatic clearness, the essential charac- 
 ter of this type of drama. 
 
 Compare with this Othello, In the first scene 
 we have the arch enemy, lago, with his fellow- 
 conspirator and tool, Roderigo. Their opposition 
 is stated, and its activity begun. In Scene 2 lago 
 is still the central figure, in Scene 3 comes Othello's 
 great speech before the council, but the scene ends 
 again with lago and Roderigo, concerting their 
 villany : 
 
 " I have't, it is engender'd. Hell and night, 
 Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light" 
 
 In Act II, Scene i, Desdemona and Othello ap- 
 pear, but are quiet, almost colorless. The illu- 
 mination is still focussed brilliantly upon lago, 
 and the scene closes with his elaboration of his 
 plan of revenge. Scene 3 wi' ^f^sses his first deci- 
 sive move, in working out that part of his scheme 
 that concerns Cassio. In the first half of Act III 
 lago strikes directly at Othello, and the end of this 
 scene leaves him now in his turn thoroughly 
 
 1 Cf. infra, p. 73. 
 
72 TECHNIQUE 
 
 roused, with all his untamable passions inflamed. 
 From this point on Othello receives greater and 
 greater emphasis, though lago is not allowed to 
 fall into the background. In Scene 4 occurs the 
 first encounter between Othello and Desdemona, 
 which involves the question of the handkerchief. 
 In Act IV, Scene i, lago still works up his evi- 
 dence; Scene 2 has the second interview of Othello 
 with Desdemona, and ends with the plan of lago 
 and Roderigo for Cassio's death; Scene 3 gives 
 Desdemona her needed prominence. Act V, 
 Scene i, has the murder of Cassio by Roderigo, 
 which means the perfecting of lago's plans, but 
 which also ultimately involves his own ruin. 
 Scene 2 has the catastrophe. 
 
 Thus it will be seen that, in contrast to Mac- 
 betfiy this play begins by presenting its hero at 
 poise, in a state of repose from which he is not 
 roused until the third act, while from the third 
 act on his passionate activity moves forward in a 
 continuous and tremendous crescendo. Any one 
 who remembers the part as acted by the elder Sal- 
 vini will remember the overwhelming effect of this 
 crescendo as brought out by the almost brutally 
 titanic power of the actor. 
 
 The two types of drama possess each its peculiar 
 advantages and drawbacks, and each makes its 
 different and characteristic impression. In the 
 first, the interest of the audience is more imme- 
 diately enlisted for the hero, who appears as ag- 
 gressive and defiant. But the last half of the play 
 
THE TWO TYPES OF DRAMA 73 
 
 is harder to make effective, because the opposing 
 force is apt to be less concentrated and less able 
 to focus the attention. It is, in_general^less inter- 
 esting to see the hero^acted_upQnj^ than to s^e h im 
 ac ting. In Macbeth we must all feel the weakness 
 of the second half compared with the first, the 
 immediate falling off in effectiveness after the ban- 
 quet-scene. Yet it was necessary, as we have seen, to 
 set forth the activity of the opposition, and Shake- 
 speare was forced to do this in a series of scenes 
 which tend to scatter the attention and dissipate 
 the interest of the audience. In Othello^ on the 
 other hand, the interest constantly rises throughout 
 the play, beginning on a low and unemphatic note, 
 and rising through scene after scene to the final 
 clashing chords of the catastrophe. The play can 
 scarcely even be said to have its climax in the 
 third act.^ It is rather a steady ascent through a 
 series of scenes, each more intense and decisive 
 than the preceding. Possibly, however, it may be 
 said that the contrast with Macbeth is not quite 
 fair, because in Othello the opposing force is also 
 concentrated in one person, — is embodied in the 
 genius of lago, — so that it is as if the play had two 
 heroes, one for each half of the action. On this basis 
 the drama might after all be classed with Macbeth, 
 because lago is in one sense the hero, and his 
 activity begins at once. This may be so, but per- 
 haps it only shows that a drama of the highest 
 power will have the strength of each type and 
 
 1 CC infra, pp. 77-78, and p. 84. 
 
74 TECHNIQUE 
 
 avoid the weakness of each. But, on the whole, 
 the Macbeth type has been the one o ftenest 
 adopted by the great dramatists. Shakespeare's 
 plays almost" atr conform to it, and this is one of 
 the reasons why his plays are so often weak in 
 their working out, why the second half often fails 
 to fulfil the promise of the first. It is significant 
 that two of his plays of which this is not true, 
 Othello and Lear^ are of the other type. 
 
 In the Greek drama we find both types. To 
 begin with, however, we must remember that the 
 Greek tragedy often leaves out what would be our 
 rising action, and begins somewhere about our 
 turning-point, or even beyond that, in the falling 
 action, at the fourth or fifth act. Thus, when 
 Freytag places the CEdipus Tyrannus in the second 
 class with Lear and Othello^ he is using an inap- 
 plicable standard. For, to the Greek mind, what 
 went before the written play was also a part of it. 
 Thus, the real plot of the CEdipus may be stated, 
 for our purposes, as follows : A young man slays 
 his father and marries his mother, and by this 
 double crime, committed in ignorance, gains pos- 
 session of a throne. As a result, misfortune de- 
 scends upon his people, ruin upon him. That is 
 to say, he first acts, boldly and decisively; then 
 he suffers the results of his acts. The parallel 
 with Macbeth is apparent, though disguised by the 
 circumstance that whereas the Englishman took 
 his hero at the beginning of his crime and followed 
 him through to the end, the Greek began near the 
 
THE TWO TYPES OF DRAMA 75 
 
 end, presupposing the earlier acts. The CEdipus 
 Tyrannus may be considered as beginning at a 
 point corresponding to the banquet-scene in Mac- 
 beth ; that proviso made, the correspondences 
 become clear, and the play is seen to be one of 
 the first type. To class it with Othello is to miss 
 its significance. 
 
 The Philoctetes and the Ajax may, however, 
 properly be so classed ; probably, also, the Electra, 
 In each of these the hero appears as reacting 
 against forces that have been in long-continued 
 opposition to him. On the other hand, Antigone 
 is plainly of the first type, like Macbeth and (Edi- 
 pusy only here there is no difficulty, because the 
 play includes within itself, formally, and not by 
 implication merely, both the deed and the result. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 LOGICAL DIVISIONS OF THE ACTION 
 
 WHATEVER be the disposition of the con- 
 testing forces, certain things in the work- 
 ing out are unvarying. There is always a rising 
 action, there is ahvays a falling action, no matter 
 to which of these the chief activity of the hero is 
 relegated; there is always a turning-point and a 
 catastrophe; there are certain other minor but 
 essential elements. It is well to consider these 
 before we take up the more mechanical divisions of 
 acts and scenes, and they will be discussed under 
 the heads : Introduction, Rising Action, Climax, 
 Falling Action, Catastrophe. 
 
 And, first, it will be well to look for a moment 
 at the diagram which has, since Freytag presented 
 it, become stock property in dramatic exposition. 
 The play is represented as a pyramid, rising to its 
 turning-point or climax and falling to its catas- 
 trophe. The metaphor will be found to be a 
 helpful one. When the climax occurs at about the 
 mechanical middle of the play, the diagram may 
 be made thus (in the diagrams, A = introduction, 
 
 76 
 
LOGICAL DIVISIONS OF THE ACTION 7/ 
 
 B = rising action, C = turning-point, D = falling 
 action, E = catastrophe) : 
 
 while, according as it falls before or after this 
 point, we may modify the figure thus: 
 
 or thus 
 
 indicating in the one case a rapid rising action 
 and a slow descent, and in the other the reverse. 
 Othello is, in one interpretation, an example of the 
 last, if we make the steps of the rising action the 
 successive scenes in which lago arouses and fixes 
 the jealous suspicion of Othello. According to 
 this. Scene 3 of Act III is only one member of the 
 
yS TECHNIQUE 
 
 ascent, which rises further in Scene 4 of the same 
 act, and culminates in Act IV, Scene i . The fall- 
 ing action may be said to begin in the same scene, 
 where Othello, deeming his fears confirmed, first 
 strikes Desdemona. This places the turning-point 
 appreciably beyond the middle of the play, and 
 gives a relatively short and abrupt descent.^ 
 
 [i] Intro due tio7i. The introduction, whose pur- 
 pose is to prepare the listener for the play, used 
 often to be set apart from the play itself as a pro- 
 logue, or given by one of the actors in a set 
 speech. It is by Shakespeare incorporated into 
 the tissue of the play, and forms the first scene, 
 or occasionally a scene-groupj There are cer- 
 tain things .which it must do, and others which it 
 may do. ut must, quickly and deftly, put the 
 hearer in possession of enough facts to make him 
 intelligent in following the playj It must tell him 
 who the speakers are and prepare him for those 
 
 who are soon to enter; ^ must at least hint to him 
 the place and time of the action, although this 
 duty is much lightened by the extensive use of 
 scenery on our modern stage. Besides this, it 
 may set the tone of the piece, indicate its " stim- 
 mung," thus throwing the sensitive listener into 
 the right mood, much in the same way that the 
 "vorspiel " to some operas does (instance that to 
 Lohengrin and to Parsifal). But not all dramatic 
 introductions are thus successful. As instances 
 where they are so, may be mentioned the witch 
 
 1 Cf. supra, p. 73, and infra, p. 84. 
 
LOGICAL DIVISIONS OF THE ACTION 79 
 
 scene in Macbethy the scene of the mob Xn Julius 
 Ccdsar^ of the night watch on the battlements in 
 Hamlety of the street brawl in Romeo and Juliet, 
 
 It is evident that the management of the intro- 
 duction is a severe test of the author's skill. He 
 must tell his audience a great deal without seeming 
 to tell them anything. To this end various de- 
 vices have been employed. We are familiar, on 
 our modern stage, with the chambermaid who vi- 
 vaciously chronicles the family history as she dusts 
 the family apartment; another resource, often used 
 by the Elizabethans, who had not discovered the 
 chambermaid, is that of the friend just returned 
 from abroad, who must be told all the news. 
 Some such expedient the author is almost forced 
 to employ, even at the risk of seeming "stagey," 
 and few indeed are the plays whose beginnings 
 have not some trace of effort and artificiality; 
 for there is one thing more fatal to a play than 
 artificiality, an d that is obscurit y. The audience ^ 
 must at any price be made to understand what they 
 are witnessing, and be made to do it with the least 
 possible effort on their part, so that even the boy 
 in the gallery is quite clear in his mind. Under 
 the most favorable conditions, it will always be a 
 rather trying interval, this process of comprehen- 
 sion, and the habitual reader of plays is often con- 
 scious of a sinking of the heart as he is confronted 
 with a new set of "dramatis personae." Many of 
 Shakespeare's beginnings are not wholly successful : 
 instance the first scene of Hamlety whose perfec- 
 
80 TECHNIQUE 
 
 tion is destroyed by Horatio's tedious account to 
 Marcellus of the political relations of Denmark. 
 Good beginnings are those of Macbeth, I, 2; 
 Othello y I, I ; the first part of the opening scene 
 in Coriolanus} the whole of the first scene of Romeo 
 and Juliety and of Julius Casar, It is an inter- 
 esting study to go over some of these scenes and 
 see just how much information we have been given, 
 which is absolutely, needed to understand the play, 
 and how deftly and without effort this has been 
 accomplished. 
 
 It is almost a rule of the stag e that the introduc- 
 tion shall prepare the audience to receive t he hero, 
 but that the Jifirp Mmsj^^ldLaQt.appear. Where 
 the scene is a lQng_Qne^ this is not so necessarily 
 the case, and the hero often enters toward its 
 close (see the opening scene or scenes of Julius 
 CaTdr\' Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and 
 Juliet, Coriolanus). On the other hand. King 
 Lear plunges at once into the action — for the 
 few preliminary speeches of Gloucester can 
 scarcely be counted — since, by good fortune of 
 the plot and the author's skill in taking advan- 
 tage of it, there was no need of a preliminary 
 exposition. 
 
 In a few cases, moreover, the hero appears at 
 once, and the reason for this is easily apparent. 
 Thus, in Richard III, the first monologue of the 
 king is typical of the way in which his personality 
 dominates the whole drama. lago's part in the 
 first scene of Othello may be similarly interpreted. 
 
LOGICAL DIVISIONS OF THE ACTION 8 1 
 
 if we take the play as having a double hero, and 
 the difference in their respective activities will 
 account for the introduction of lago and not Othello 
 into the first scene. Compare, too, the different 
 effect of Marlowe's Jew of Malta j where the Jew 
 himself is at once introduced to us, and Shake- 
 speare's Merchant of Venice, where he does not 
 enter until the second scene. There is a corre- 
 sponding difference, which it is hard to think acci- 
 dental, between the parts played by the two men 
 in the respective plays, and the attitude of the two 
 authors toward them. 
 
 [ 2] Rising Action. After the introduction comes 
 the action proper of the play. It begins with what 
 is called the "exciting force," that is, the force 
 which is to change things from their condit ion o f 
 bal ance or repose , and precipitate the dramatic 
 conflict^^ From the moment of the exciting force 
 to the moment of the turning-point, the activity thus 
 begun, be it that of the hero or of the opposition, 
 must show a continual, though not necessarily an 
 evert'-paced, gain in power and reachj We have 
 noted how this continual rise is illustrated by Mac- 
 beth: the first two scenes form the introduc- 
 tion, and the third scene, Macbeth' s meeting with 
 the witches, furnishes the exciting force. Here 
 first is suggested to him the thought that afterwards 
 develops into act, in the murders of Duncan and 
 Banquo, while the fulfilment of the first two of the 
 witches' prophecies, at the end of the same scene, 
 serves to emphasize their authority. From this 
 
 G . 
 
82 TECHNIQUE 
 
 point through to the turning-point we have 
 a series of scenes, each of which advances the 
 action somewhat, each carries Macbeth and his 
 wife more and more irretrievably forward along 
 the path they have chosen. The only exception 
 is Act II, Scene 4, which is, also, the only one 
 which does not bring forward one or both the pro- 
 tagonists. The scene is perhaps introduced to 
 suggest the beginning of the return action, and, 
 rather curiously, it is balanced by Act IV, Scene 
 I, where Macbeth* s baleful activity overlaps into 
 the return action. This is only another instance 
 of the singularly symmetrical structure of the 
 play.' 
 \ CBut the r ijing action ought also to introduce t he 
 
 oppos ing forces and make the audience familiar 
 with . ^he characters in which they are em bodied, 
 although it is left for the second part of the play 
 to gi ve them greater prominence^ i Thus, the flight 
 of Malcolm to safety in England hints at a future 
 opponent to Macbeth; Macduff's refusal to go to 
 the coronation of Macbeth at Scone is significant; 
 the failure to kill Fleance suggests the possibility 
 of further checks; the refusal of Macduff to come 
 to court emphasizes his hostility already shadowed. 
 By this means we are prepared for the return actioii 
 even before it has actually set in ; we are constantly 
 reminded that this seeming success is perhaps 
 only strengthening the hand of avenging fate, that 
 "God is not mocked"; and we are thus, in the 
 
 1 Cf. supra, p. 70. 
 
LOGICAL DIVISIONS OF THE ACTION I3 
 
 first part, kept from forgetting what in the second 
 part is to be borne in upon us with tremendous 
 force, namely, the universality and inviolability of 
 law. 
 
 [ 3] Turning-point or Climax, At a certain 
 point in the rising action a moment comes when 
 the activity of the aggressive force is com - 
 pleted ; a moment after which the reversal be- 
 gins, and there looms into view the force that 
 is to dominate the last half of the action. This 
 point is tfie'ciimax, or, beUer, tHe turning-point 
 of the play.^ It is, of course, possible intellect- 
 ually to separate this climactic point of the 
 rise from the initial point of the fall, but actu- 
 ally the two moments are often found organi- 
 cally united in the same scene or scene-group. 
 If the play is of the first type, the turning-point 
 will be the moment when the hero completes the 
 accomplishment of his purposes and feels the 
 check of opposition. Thus in Macbeth the ban- 
 quet-scene begins with the news of Banquo*s 
 death, which assures the usurper that his most 
 dreaded rival is removed. But with the news 
 comes the first check, "Fleance is scaped," and 
 this is followed up by the appearance of Banquo's 
 ghost, foreboding the retribution to come. The 
 two following scenes may be considered as com- 
 plementary to this, but they are, very properly, 
 less elaborated, and are transitional to the return 
 action.^ 
 
 1 Cf. supra, p. 70. 
 
84 TECHNIQUE 
 
 In the second type of play, the turning-point 
 shows the converse of this, and represents the hero 
 as passing from a state of relative quiescence to a 
 state of activity. Thus in Othello the great scene, 
 III, 3, between lago and Othello makes the be- 
 ginning of the turn, though here again we ought 
 perhaps to make a two-membered climax, consist- 
 ing of this scene plus the first scene of Act IV to 
 the word "Devil!" spoken by Othello to Desde- 
 mona, and the blow that goes with it. In a play 
 where the struggle is subjective, and both the con- 
 tending forces are lodged within the hero himself, 
 the turning-point should be the moment when that 
 force which is ultimately to conquer first gains its 
 decided supremacy. Of this type is Shakespeare's 
 Antony and Cleopatra, a play which, however, 
 illustrates dramatic principles as much by their 
 breach as by their observance. Its theme is the 
 struggle between passion and honor, but in the 
 actual working out this theme is obscured by 
 the crowd of unessential details. Its turning-point 
 should come at the point where passion conquers. 
 There are two places where this point might be 
 said to be: first, in Athens, when, after the de- 
 parture of Octavia as mediator to Caesar, Antony 
 returns to Egypt and Cleopatra; second, at Actium, 
 when Antony flies, following the galleys of Cleo- 
 patra. In Shakespeare's play the first of these two 
 points has been wholly ignored, the second has 
 been very inadequately treated* The battle itself 
 is given to a messenger to describe, and the fol- 
 
LOGICAL DIVISIONS OF THE ACTION 8$ 
 
 lowing scene, III, 2, supremely impressive as its 
 first part is, is not enough. It would have been 
 right if set in a larger scene-group, like some of 
 the scene-groups in Hamlet or in Julius Ccesar; 
 but, taken as a single one out of the thirteen scenes 
 of which this act is composed, it is artistically in- 
 adequate, out of proportion. It is, of course, not 
 necessary that the climax be a scdn^ToFgrear out- 
 ward magnificence, though, in fact, it often is so 
 (cf. Macbeth f Julius Ccesar) y yet a c ertain outwar c 
 impressivene ss is, after all, requ isite, simply be- 
 cause, as we have seen earlier, the drama deals 
 solely with the phenomenal. It cannot, as do 
 Ibsen and Maeterlinck in some of their later and 
 more extreme works, deal apparently in common- 
 places and expect us to read into these the most 
 supreme spiritual verities. It cannot, as does 
 Shakespeare in this play, scatter half a dozen 
 superb scenes through a play that has a total of 
 forty-two, and leave the hearer to choose these 
 half dozen to remember. The dramatist should 
 expect much of his audience, but not so much as 
 this. He should do his own selecting, his own 
 emphasizing, for herein lies the difference be- 
 tween the raw material and the art-product. 
 
 On the other hand,|the ' turning-point or climax^/v^ 
 must be spiritually emphatic asj^en^as_oii£^axdly 
 imposin'g^^fKe^HTmax Ui Macbeth is not the 
 climax in virtue of presenting a royal banquet 
 with rich, massive effects; that in Julius Ccesar 
 is not so in virtue of its impressive massing of 
 
S6 TECHNIQUE 
 
 senators assembled in the capitol of the world. 
 There must be inner significance as well, as in 
 these cases there is. So, too, the cli max need 
 not be the mechanical middle of the play; it 
 must be its spiritual centre, the point toward 
 which it makes from the beginning, and from 
 which it passes downward to the end. 
 
 [^]L7^<2///«i;' Action. What the exciting force 
 is to the rising action, that the tragic force is to 
 the falling action. It is, as we have seen, often 
 closely united to the climax; sometimes they are, 
 in a sense, one and the same, as in the (Edipus 
 Tyrannusy where the very announcement that 
 seems to make him perfectly secure really precipi- 
 tates the discoveries that end in the catastrophe. 
 However this may be, the tragi c force is the ini- 
 tiation of the counter activity that is to govern 
 the second half of the play and bring about the 
 catastrophe. In Macbeth^ as we have seen, it is 
 tripartite;^ in Romeo and Juliet it is dual, being 
 embodied in the authority of the state and of 
 Juliet's parents; note that here one of these two 
 — that of the state — is emphasized before the cli- 
 max, the other follows immediately upon the cli- 
 max, being incorporated in the same scene with 
 it. These two forces are the occasion of the 
 lovers* ruin — the occasion rather than the cause, 
 for the causal connection is, after all, indirect, 
 and if the falling action in the play has a weak- 
 ness, it is in this fact, — the fact, namely, that the 
 
 iCf.p.70.*' 
 
LOGICAL DIVISIONS OF THE ACTION 8; 
 
 forces of the falling action are not the forces that 
 bring about the catastrophe.^ 
 
 If, as is commonly the case, the play is of the 
 first type, and the hero has been prominent in the 
 first half of the play, the falling action will bring 
 forward the characters of the opposition, and the 
 hero will either be in the background, as in Mac- 
 bethy or, if this is not the case, his treatment will 
 be different, as in Romeo and Juliet, 
 I The management of the falling action offers 
 \U peculiar difficulties. Up to the climax there has 
 ^ \r^ been growing suspense. After the tragic force 
 V, appears, and the development of the opposition 
 has begun, the listener begins to foresee what is to 
 come, his mind naturally plunges forward, and 
 he is impatient if the dramatist's exposition be 
 slower than his own thought-processes. It is like 
 being forced to await the completion of a slowly 
 spoken sentence, whose point we have already 
 anticipated. Perhaps this is the reason why the 
 turning-point and tragic force are often put late 
 in t he ^pl aV. making the actual duration of the 
 return action less than that of the rise. But there 
 is another device for breaking through this over- 
 confident expectancy of the listener. It is the 
 insertion, in the midst of the falling action, of 
 an event which for a moment breaks its advance, 
 seems even to turn it back; there is shown a way of 
 escape for the victim, or at least a jutting crag by 
 which he may delan^i^fall. This is called the 
 
 el^^j^f 
 
 145. 
 
88 TECHNIQUE 
 
 *^ final suspense." Ins tances of it are: the vic- 
 tory of Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, IV, 7; 
 the successful carrying out by Romeo and Juliet 
 of all the first part of their scheme; the remorse 
 of Edmund in Lear, V, 3, which moves him to 
 revoke his order to kilf Lear and Cordelia; the 
 news brought to King Richard in Richard ///, 
 IV, 4, that the army and navy of his opponents 
 are both scattered; in Julius Ccesar, taking the 
 first part as a whole in itself, Caesar's determina- ■ 
 tion not to go to the senate house that particular 
 day. 
 
 Thus the dramatist, having throughout labored 
 to impress upon us the inevitableness of fate, now '^ 
 for a moment reverses his methods and tries to 
 undo all this. But only for a moment; the check' 
 has done its duty by keying up the slackened at- 
 tention, and this done, the action swings back 
 to its true movement and plunges forward to the 
 catastrophe. 
 
 [5]^ Catastrophe. We h ave traced the dramatic 
 struggle through its rise, turning-point, and fall. 
 We now come to its termination. In our ordi- 
 nary thought, the catastrophe is taken as almost 
 synonymous with death, and this is based on a 
 true conception. For the drama deals with hunian 
 life, and death is, for the dramatist, the end. It 
 is the fitting conclusion for the tragedy because \t 
 really concludes — it is final, precluding possi- 
 bility of amendment or 
 
 Evidently, however, ^^^^^haracter depends, 
 
 W 
 
LOGICAL DIVISIONS OF THE ACTION 89 
 
 not on itself, but upon the nature of the action 
 which it concludes. Death is in itself always 
 solemn, it often moves to pity, sometimes to 
 horror; but it is tragic only when it comes asjhe / 
 natural, the inevitable conclusion of a tragic 
 struggled And in such cases the death itself will 
 ofibn actually seem a relief, just because it does 
 terminate the struggle, just because it has been 
 felt to be inevitable and so its occurrence relaxes 
 the strain of expectation. This is the case in 
 Macbeth. After the horror of the hero's life, its 
 baleful activity without, its moral disintegration 
 within, the physical conflict at the end comes as 
 a return to health. Macbeth himself feels it. 
 After the first sinking of heart that comes with the 
 loss of his last support, there follows the rebound, 
 the natural, if desperate joy in a fair fight, and 
 there is a ring of freedom in his last defiance : 
 
 " Lay on, Macduff, 
 And damn'd be he that first cries, Hold, enough ! " 
 
 Similarly, Brutus certainly feels death to be a 
 release as he says : 
 
 " Caesar, now be still : 
 I killed not thee with half so good a will." 
 
 In King Lear the consummation of the tragedy 
 is, it is true, in a death; not, however, Lear's 
 death, but Cordelia's, and this is tragic, not as 
 it concerns Cordelia, but as it touches Lear 
 himself. The climax of " pity and fear " is in the 
 sight of the mad old man, with the strength of 
 
go TECHNIQUE 
 
 despair, carrying in his dead daughter to show to 
 all men, — the sight of him as he holds the feather 
 to her lips to reveal her breathing, and, dim-eyed 
 in the flesh, sees, with the vision of fevered desire, 
 faint tokens of life. The tension breaks, and he 
 dies, but his death is not tragic. It completes 
 the tragedy of his life, and is fit, right, necessary; 
 but for him it is a release. Kent's feeling is 
 ours: 
 
 " Vex not his ghost : O, let him pass ! he hates him much 
 That would upon the rack of this tough world 
 Stretch him out longer." 
 
 But death is often, too, the consummation of 
 the tragedy in another way. In Antigone^ the 
 young girl's death is the tragedy, because it marks 
 the completeness of her subjugation to crushing 
 human law; whereas the deaths of Haemon and of 
 Eurydice, in so far as they are tragic at all, are sp 
 not in themselves, but in their effect on Creon. 
 In Romeo and Juliet the deaths of the two lovers 
 constitute the tragedy because only thus is forever 
 shut off the possibility of recovered happiness. 
 
 What the catastrophe must bring about is not 
 prima rily death, but finality.— ^CTTequ ilibrium of 
 forces which shall convince us of its permanence. 
 It may be compared to the crash of the landslide 
 by which the too precipitous cliff regains a natural 
 slope. In Julius Ccesar there may be said to be 
 two points of catastrophe : the first for Csesar, the 
 second for the conspirators. In the first half oi 
 
LOGICAL DIVISIONS OF THE ACTION 9 1 
 
 the play, Caesar falls because he had risen too 
 high ; Brutus and Cassius, representing the norm, 
 pull him down. But then they in their turn rise 
 too high, and the second half of the play shows 
 how they are therefore in their turn overthrown. 
 — In the management of the catastrophe, more 
 than anywhere else, ther e should be con centration^ 
 both of thought and expression. During the earlier 
 part of the play, much elaboration is possible, 
 much inc ident, much working-up ot character and 
 episode; but as we near the close the lines should 
 narrow. Earlier, many outcomes were possible; 
 now nothing is possible except the single end to 
 which everything has been tending. Upon this 
 the rays must all converge, everything subsidiary 
 must be eliminated. And if the drama has been 
 well motived and well constructed, there will be 
 no need for elaboration, or even for much empha- 
 sis. The end is inevitable, all it requires is bare 
 statement. To give more than this, to attempt 
 explanation and commentary, implies carelessness 
 on the part of the author, or a lack of faith in his 
 work. Of carelessness, we have an illustration in 
 the last lines of Julius Ccesary the conversation 
 between Messala, Strato, and Octavius, concern- 
 ing the promotion to favor of Brutus' servant. It 
 is a petty detail, that spoils the simple greatness 
 of the close. In another way, the concluding 
 lines, given to Octavius, will, to some of us, seem 
 another dissonance. The play naturally ends with 
 Antony's words, "This was a man," and we would 
 
92 TECHNIQUE 
 
 fain rest here. Octavius' cold words point for- 
 ward into a new realm of life, and at the moment 
 . when we ought to feel that all is finished, we are 
 
 V Krj l)»H [reminded of the political rearrangements to come, 
 uJ^\ >A>*^ ■ the division of spoil — things which are histori- 
 w* />y>€4, xvs Ically true enough, but which are here not fitting. 
 ^ ^v« -K-r- jPerhaps it was Shakespeare's optimism that moved 
 ^*^A f N"^ ^^ make this sort of mistake as often as he 
 ^""^ .jdid, but if so it was optimism ill-timed. 
 
 Summing up: we find that the action of the 
 drama falls naturally into two parts, a rise and a 
 fall; tha t the rising action has lour"p"arts : the 
 introduc tory exposition, the exciting force , the 
 wor king out, and the climax or t urning-point. 
 The falling action has three parts : the tragic 
 force, the working out, and the catastrophe, while 
 often the final suspense makes a fourth part. 
 
 Often, however, dramatic critics make a three- 
 fold division instead of a twofold, namely, into 
 the rising action, the climax, and the falling 
 action. But i| the climax is organically devel- 
 oped out of the rising action, as it ought to be, 
 it is organically a part of it and should not be 
 separated from it, even in thought. 
 
 These, then, we have called the essential ele- 
 ments of the drama, in distinction from those 
 mechanical divisions, called acts and scenes, of 
 which the dramatic structure is made up. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA 
 
 (i) The Acts 
 
 WE have called the division of the^ play into 
 acts and scenes a mechanical one, in dis- 
 tinction from the logical division which has just 
 been discussed. The single fact that the five acts 
 of a play are commonly of about equal length 
 would make it antecedently improbable that they 
 should correspond to the organic articulation of 
 the action's parts. That they actually do not so 
 correspond will be evident from the most super- 
 ficial inspection of any play. For the first act 
 does not cover the introduction alone; the second 
 act does not suffice to contain the rising action, 
 which begins in the first act and overlaps into the 
 third; the third act almost always contains the 
 climax, but it also includes the penultimate stages 
 of the rising action and the initial stages of the 
 falling action; the main part of the falling action 
 is contained in the fourth act, but its last part 
 runs over into the fifth act, which is therefore not 
 exclusively devoted to the catastrophe. 
 
 The relation between the mechanical and the 
 93 
 
\ 
 
 ^ TECHNIQUE 
 
 logical divisions of the play may be thus dia- 
 grammed ; 
 
 Act III 
 
 Rising 
 JLct ^^y^y^ Action 
 ^'"introduction 
 
 It might seem, then, that the acts have no organ- 
 ism in themselves — that they are merely marked 
 off with a tape at equal distances in the course of 
 the play. This is not altogether the case. The 
 division into acts is indeed somewhat a matter of 
 stage convenience : it gives the aud ience time to 
 relax, and the actors time^fqr_rest or for change of 
 costume, it furnishes opportunity for extensive 
 scene-shifting. Moreover, from the author's point 
 of view it is useful because it gives him a few points 
 in the action wherein, the continuity being com- 
 pletely broken, he may assume greater changes and 
 longer lapses of time than is advisable between 
 scenes. 
 
 But each_a(^_ought..tQ ..be, to -some extent, a 
 w hole in it self; it ought to have a "beginning, 
 middle, and elid," a rise and fall somewhat like 
 the rise and fall of the drama as a whole. In the 
 Greek tragedy the sections of the action falling 
 between the choruses formed such wholes, while 
 in the Senecan tragedies, whence modern drama 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA 9$ 
 
 took its formal five-act structure, each act is dis- 
 tinctly complete in itself. In the Medea^ for ex- 
 ample, the five acts present each a distinct stage 
 of the action. Disregarding the choruses, they 
 may be thus epitomized : 
 
 Act I. Presents Medea's turbulent mood as 
 she realizes that she is about to be deserted by 
 her husband. 
 
 Act II. Stirred by the bridal chorus, she medi- 
 tates revenge, but does not yet determine on whom 
 it shall fall. In order to perfect and carry out her 
 yet immature plans, she obtains leave to remain 
 in the palace one day longer. 
 
 Act III. Her anger increases and hardens into 
 cold resolve. In an interview with Jason she 
 assures herself that he really loves the two children 
 he has had by her. She therefore decides to kill 
 them, as well as Creusa, his new bride. 
 
 Act IV. She invokes the aid of magic to endow 
 with destructive powers the rich gifts she purposes 
 to send to Creusa. Her incantations finished, she 
 sends the gifts by her sons. 
 
 Act V. A messenger announces that Creusa and 
 her father have died in agony, and that the city is 
 in flames. Medea, rejoicing in this first fruit of 
 her vengeance, proceeds to complete it. One of 
 her sons she kills before his father arrives, the 
 other she kills in Jason's presence. She herself 
 departs in her magic chariot. 
 
9^ TECHNIQUE 
 
 It will be seen that each act makes one step in 
 the course of the action, each is dominated by a 
 distinct mood in Medea herself : in the first act, 
 it is half -dazed surprise and anger; in the second, 
 wild rage and fierce longing for vengeance; in the 
 third, hard and deliberate resolve; in the fourth, 
 the elation of conscious power; in the fifth, exul- 
 tation in completed vengeance, alternating with 
 horror at her own deeds. 
 
 Each act, moreover, besides completing its sec- 
 tion ot the action, points forward, at its close, to 
 the action that is to follow. Thus at the end of 
 Act I comes her dark prophecy that, as through 
 crime she entered the house of Theseus, through 
 crime she will leave it. At the end of Act II this 
 is made more definite when she gains the day's 
 reprieve in which to work out her vengeance. At 
 the end of Act III she suggests the details of the 
 plot she is to carry forward in the next act. At 
 the end of Act IV she sends the fatal gifts, and 
 we wait for Act V to learn the result. 
 
 Turning now to the modern drama, we find that 
 the structure of the classic French plays is closely 
 ^ similar to their Senecan models. But with Shake- 
 speare the case is different. Of no one of his plays 
 can such an epitome as the one just given possibly 
 be made. The acts have no such unity; instead 
 of presenting a single step in the action, a single 
 mood in the protagonist, they are a network of 
 activities, a complex of moods. 
 
 Yet in some cases a kind of unity is discover- 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA 97 
 
 able. This is especially true of Macbeth. Here, 
 the first act shows Macbeth yielding to the evil 
 promptings of ambition, while Duncan's visit gives 
 him the opportunity to follow out his desires. The 
 second act centres about the murder of Duncan. 
 The third act presents the consummation of Mac- 
 beth 's plots and the beginning of the reaction. 
 The fourth and fifth acts, which are, as is usual 
 with Shakespeare, not so well constructed, present 
 the preliminary and the final stages of the reaction. 
 Take now, in greater detail, the third act : 
 
 Scene i. As a kind of introduction, Banquo 
 sums up Macbeth' s course hitherto: 
 
 " Thou hast it now : King, Cawdor, Glamis, all 
 As the weird women promised; and, I fear, 
 Thou play'dst most foully for 't— " 
 
 Part i. Then his mind reverts to the part of 
 the witches* oracle which has concerned himself. 
 This second thought strikes the keynote of the act, 
 since it is the memory of that prophecy which 
 leads Macbeth to plan Banquo' s murder. 
 
 Part 2. The court enters, and Macbeth en- 
 joins Banquo to be back for the night's feast. 
 His emphasis on Banquo's return — "fail not our 
 feast," "Adieu, till you return at night" — points 
 forward with double irony, first, to the measures 
 Macbeth is about to take that Banquo may not 
 "return at night," and, second, to the terrible 
 manner in which the murdered man is, after all, 
 to fulfil the king's injunction. 
 
98 TECHNIQUE 
 
 Part 3. Then follows the interview between 
 the king and the murderers, really a scene in 
 itself, with its own introduction (lines 73-85), rise 
 (86-115), climax (i 16-126), and conclusion. 
 
 Thus the scene falls into three parts, an intro- 
 duction, a transitional part, and a last part form- 
 ing the first link in the rising action of the act. 
 
 Scene 2. This scene is chiefly of value as char- 
 acter-exposition. It does not advance the story. 
 The opening words again insist, like the repetition 
 of a theme in music, upon the Banquo motive : 
 
 ** Lady Macbeth. Is Banquo gone from court? 
 Servant. Ay, Madam, but returns again to-night." 
 
 Then follows the interview between Lord and Lady 
 Macbeth, giving the necessary insight into their 
 desperate moods. The phrases, "these terrible 
 dreams that shake us nightly," "the torture of the 
 mind," "life's fitful fever," "O, full of scorpions 
 is my mind," are needed to give the spiritual at- 
 mosphere of the act. The scene ends by revert- 
 ing to the theme with which it began. 
 
 Scene 3. The murder of Banquo. The escape 
 of Fleance is the first check to Macbeth' s plans. 
 
 Scene 4. The banquet-scene. It is in three 
 parts : 
 
 The brilliant introduction emphasizes the king's 
 royal state. The few words with the murderer 
 serve to set Macbeth' s mind at rest as to the 
 success of his plot against Banquo. 
 
 With the entrance of the ghost the change 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA 99 
 
 comes, and there follows the half-crazed agony of 
 the king, and the hurried breaking up of the 
 banqueters. 
 
 The last few lines of the scene sketch the after- 
 mood of the king, varying between remorse and a 
 feverish and desperate resolution. 
 
 This scene is, of course, the climax of the act, 
 as of the play. It presents the consummation of 
 the king's plans and the beginning of the reaction. 
 If we seek a turning-point in a few lines, we might 
 find it in these, where he seems dimly conscious 
 of the nemesis to come : 
 
 " the time has been. 
 That, when the brains were out, the man would die, 
 And there an end : but now they rise again, 
 "With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, 
 And push us from our stools." 
 
 Scene 5. The witches and Hecate plan to draw 
 on Macbeth "to his confusion." 
 
 Scene 6. The two lords hint their suspicions 
 with regard to Macbeth, and speak of the party 
 Macduff is raising for resistance. 
 
 Thus the act has a regular rise and fall. It 
 rises to the murder of Banquo, the escape of 
 Fleance suggests the turn, while the banquet-scene 
 and the two following scenes develop the three- 
 fold character of the reactionary forces, the forces, 
 namely, of the moral order, of the supernatural 
 realm, and of the political world. 
 
 In Lear^ Act III, there is, considering the 
 complicated nature of the double plot, a fairly 
 
ICX) 
 
 TECHNIQUE 
 
 Sc. I. 
 Introductory. 
 Heath. Storm. 
 
 Sc. 2. 
 Rise. 
 
 Lear Enters, 
 mad. 
 
 Sc. 4. 
 Climax. 
 Hovel-Scene. 
 
 Sc. 3. 
 Introductory. 
 Gloucester and 
 
 Edmund. 
 
 Sc.5. 
 Rise. 
 Edmund betrays 
 
 Gloucester to 
 
 Cornwall. 
 
 Sc. 6. 
 Secondary Climax and 
 
 Fall. 
 Trial-Scene: Lear 
 
 Carried out for 
 
 Dover. 
 
 Sc. 7. 
 Climax. 
 
 Blinding of Gloucester. 
 Wounding of Cornwall 
 
 hints a return-action. 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA lOt 
 
 compact structure. For the Lear-plot the act 
 may be considered as extending from Scene i to 
 Scene 6; for the Gloucester-plot, from Scene 3 to 
 Scene 7. Making a double order, we may sketch 
 it as in the accompanying diagram. 
 
 It is to be noted that the treatment of the two 
 plots is in this act different in kind : that of Lear 
 is expository, that of Gloucester is narrative. The 
 first has its expository climax in the hovel-scene, 
 it falls away in the gentler tone of the farm- 
 house scene, ending in the old king's exhausted 
 sleep; the second has a steady rise through the 
 three scenes, culminating in the blinding of 
 Gloucester, and having an abrupt fall in the 
 wounding of CornwalL. 
 
 But such ceases of good act-structure are not to 
 be taken as typical of Shakespeare. In Z^ar, for 
 example, the other four acts are, in this respect, 
 hopelessly inorganic. Macbeth is more evenly 
 good, though the first three acts are the best. It 
 is noteworthy, too, that where, as in Lear^ one 
 act surpasses the others in structural- compactness, 
 it is the third. Now the third act has for its nu- 
 cleus the climax of the play as a whole, and it can 
 thus hardly help having a well-marked rise and 
 fall. However, an act may be well constructed 
 and not have both rise and fall — everything 
 depends on what is its position in the play. 
 Take the first two acts of Macbeth; Act I may 
 be thus summarized: 
 
r02 • TECHNIQUE 
 
 Scene i . Witches. Introductory — suggests 
 the " tone " of the play. 
 
 Scene 2. Camp. Introductory exposition. 
 
 Scene 3. Witches, Macbeth, and Banquo. 
 Exciting force. 
 
 Scene 4. Duncan, his generals, etc. Exciting 
 force strengthened by partial fulfilment of the 
 witches' prophecies, which increases Macbeth's 
 confidence in them. 
 
 Scene 5. Lady Macbeth resolves on the murder 
 of Duncan. This initiates the rising action. 
 
 Scene 6. Duncan received by Lady Macbeth. 
 
 Scene 7. Lady Macbeth strengthens Macbeth's 
 resolution. 
 
 Here the first scene is merely preliminary — 
 like the striking of chords in music; the second 
 is introductory; the third and fourth present the 
 exciting force; the fifth, sixth, and seventh pre- 
 sent the first stages of the rise. The act is per- 
 fectly compact and ends at exactly the righ^ 
 moment. 
 
 Compare now Apt 11,^ ^ 
 
 Scene i. Expositional of Macbeth's highly 
 wrought state. 
 
 Scene 2. Contrasting sketch of Lady Macbeth's 
 mood. Macbeth enters, having done the murder. 
 The knocking on the gate. ^ 
 
 Scene 3. The discovery of the murder. Flight 
 of Malcolm and Donalbain. 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA IO3 
 
 Scene 4. Ross and Macduff discuss the murder. 
 Macduff will not attend Macbeth 's coronation. 
 
 The act, in contrast with the preceding, has a rise 
 and fall : it works up to the murder and presents the 
 beginning of the reaction from the deed as shown 
 on Macbeth and on those about him. Taken in 
 greater detail, it has two points of supreme ten- 
 sion: the first in Scene 2, the second in Scene 3. 
 The first part of Scene i, the talk between Banquo 
 and Macbeth, is skilfully managed so as to be 
 pregnant with suggestion. Banquo' s frank re- 
 mark, "I dreamt last night of the three weird 
 sisters," recalls the theme of the rising action, 
 while Macbeth's quick, guilty answer, "I think 
 not of them," is in marked contrast. There 
 follows Macbeth's soliloquy — really a separate 
 scene, and paralleled by the soliloquy of Lady 
 Macbeth at the beginning of Scene 2. After 
 Macbeth enters, having killed Duncan, the first 
 point of tension is reached; when the knocking 
 commences there is a sudden relaxing. The 
 porter's entry makes a break, then the second rise 
 begins, culminating in the discovery of the murder. 
 From this point the tension relaxes again. 
 
 Thus the movement of this act is seen to be 
 quite different from that of the preceding one, and 
 yet different from Act III. If they were to be 
 symbolized in diagrams, they would be about as 
 follows (the Roman numerals indicate acts; the 
 Arabic, scenes): 
 
104 
 
 TECHNIQUE 
 
 One more point is to be noted. It was seen in 
 the Medea of Seneca that each act had toward i-ts 
 close some suggestion of the action that was to 
 follow in the next. The sarafe thing maybe-ob- 
 served at the end of alm,ost any of the acts in 
 Shakespeare's plays. Of the .three acts just ana-, 
 lyzed, the first closes with the criminal resolve oi 
 Macbeth and his Lady; the second has the scene 
 with Macduff, which is subtly suggestive of Jiis 
 antagonism to Macbeth; the third blocks out the 
 three main forces of the return action. 
 
 One might multiply instances of such secondary, 
 anticipatory rise. A notable exception is found 
 in Romeo and Juliet^ in the position of the street 
 brawl scene, wherein Tybalt is killed. We should 
 expect it at the end of Act II instead of at the 
 beginning of Act III. It would have given ex- 
 actly the note of warning needed to intensify the 
 scenes of the climax, yet would not have trenched 
 so closely upon these scenes. The third act woul.d 
 then have begun with the orchard scene, and 
 would have gained the jewel-like unity that is the 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA IO5 
 
 concomitant of singleness of impression in com- 
 plexity of material. 
 
 In studying act-structure, however, Jt^ must oi 
 course be remembered that the absence of a cur- 
 tain made the divisions between the acts much less 
 marked then than now. Yet the case of Macbeth 
 shows that structural act-unity could be, though it 
 seldom was attained by Shakespeare. 
 
 The fact is, we must not expect from Shake- 
 speare perfection of structure. In seeing and seiz- 
 ing upon the essential dramatic moments in his 
 theme he was almost unerring, but in the working 
 out he was usually careless — possibly he was 
 really indifferent, conscious that he possessed the 
 "one thing needful." Certainly the attempt to 
 deduce laws from his act-structure gives, in the 
 main, only negative results, whereas a study of the 
 dramatic moments — what we have called the logi- 
 cal divisions — of his dramas is exhaustlessly 
 fruitful. 
 
 Our modern drama has a character intermediate 
 between the French seventeenth century and the 
 English Elizabethan and Stuart drama. Each act 
 has greater complexity than had the French, greater 
 compactness than the English. Ibsen, in so 
 many respects affiliated with the Greek drama, 
 usually preserves the unity of place and sometimes 
 that of time, as in Ghosts^ and each act is in- 
 dividual in its presentation of some phase of 
 the theme. Sudermann's dramas are models in 
 cleanness of construction, and they have the effec- 
 
I06 TECHNIQUE 
 
 tiveness that comes of masterly technique. In 
 Wildenbruch's Heinrich und Heinrich's Ge- 
 schlechtf his latest and perhaps his strongest 
 drama, the act-structure is remarkably compact. 
 The play is built up about the humiliation of the 
 emperor at Canossa and is in two "evenings," 
 each forming a play by itself, of which the first 
 is the more powerful. An analysis of its acts 
 makes an interesting contrast with the Shake- 
 spearean form. It has a prologue and four acts. 
 
 Prologue. This shows Heinrich when a boy 
 of ten. It serves to give an insight into his 
 original, unperverted nature, and thus to invoke 
 the sympathies of the audience. 
 
 Act I. The State House in Worms. King 
 Heinrich returns from a victorious campaign 
 against the rebellious Saxons. Messengers from 
 the Pope arrive, refusing to grant his request for 
 the emperorship, and censuring him for his evil 
 courses. He sends back a message of defiance 
 couched in studiedly insulting terms. The act 
 is chiefly expositional, presenting the two great 
 factors in the struggle that is to ensue, namely, 
 the king's intense love for his people and the 
 radical antagonism between his nature and ideals 
 and those of the Pope. 
 
 Act II. There are two scenes, the first in 
 Rome, the second in Worms. 
 
 Scene i. Pope Gregory is giving judgment on 
 the penitents brought before him. Heinrich's 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA lOj 
 
 defiance reaches him. He wavers between the 
 dictates of wordly ambition and those of the spir- 
 itual vision. 
 
 Scene 2. Heinrich is under the Pope's ban, 
 but bitter and unyielding. The children of 
 Worms come out with Christmas gifts for the little 
 prince, his son. Softened by this evidence of 
 their love, Heinrich resolves for their sakes to 
 humble himself before Pope Gregory, and secure 
 tranquillity for his people. 
 
 Act III. Canossa. 
 
 Scene i. An audience room in the castle. 
 Gregory is beset by the Saxon faction, enemies of 
 Heinrich, who offer to depose him and let the 
 Pope create an emperor who shall be a tool of the 
 church. As Gregory wavers before the temptation 
 to grasp at temporal power, it is announced that 
 King Heinrich has come to do penance. 
 
 Scene 2. Another audience room. After three 
 days of struggle with conflicting motives, Gregory 
 admits the royal penitent and recalls his curse. 
 Heinrich, at the height of spiritual exaltation, 
 learns of the Pope's dealings with the Saxons, 
 and the perception of this double dealing shatters 
 his faith. His mood changes to one of hard 
 cynicism, and he leaves the presence determined 
 to gain the emperorship by force of arms. 
 
 Act IV. Rome. A fortified tower where the 
 Pope has taken refuge. Heinrich enters the city 
 with his army. In disguise, he visits Gregory 
 and asks him to crown him emperor. Gregory 
 
108 TECHNIQUE 
 
 refuses, and Heinrich goes, to set up a new pope 
 who shall do his will. Gregory dies, while from 
 below are heard the cries of the populace, " Em- 
 peror Heinrich and Pope Vibert! " 
 
 From this epitome it will be seen how each act 
 presents one phase of the subject treated. The 
 first suggests the factors in the problem ; the sec- 
 ond presents the two great protagonists, Heinrich 
 and Gregory, showing how each is torn by con- 
 flicting impulses; the third brings the problem to 
 its issue; the fourth presents the provisional solur 
 tion, which the second part of the play is to bring 
 in question, but which affords temporary stability. 
 
 Among modern French work, an example of 
 beautiful act-structure is Edmond Rostand's Cy- 
 rano de BergeraCj which, though called a " heroiq 
 comedy," has a partly tragic theme and the 
 structure of serious drama. It has five acts, 
 each located in a single place: the first, at the. 
 Hotel de Bourgogne; the second, at Rageneau's 
 bakery, a rendezvous for Bohemian Paris; the 
 third, a street before a house; the fourth, a camp 
 at the siege of Arras; the fifth, a convent garden. 
 Each act is a wonder of construction, being highly 
 complex in material, yet close-knit, with no ten- 
 dency to straggle or fall apart. The first two acts 
 have each a central climax, with a secondary rise 
 toward the close, anticipatory of the following act. 
 The third act has the central climax, but the 
 secondary one is less marked. The fourth act is 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA IO9 
 
 constructed like a fifth act, with a central climax 
 and a sudden fall to a catastrophe; but the curious 
 double nature of the hero's activity makes this 
 conclusion only partial, and the brief fifth act is 
 needed for the final resolution. 
 
 Summarizing; the division into acts has been 
 called mechanical, in distinction from those logical 
 divisions that are grounded in the development 
 of thejheme itself. In the Senecanjlranaa, how- 
 ever, and in the classic French drama modelled 
 thereon, each act has a lyric unity not found in 
 the freer, more epic English drama. The best 
 of the modern work combines the complexity and 
 variety of the English manner with the more care- 
 ful form of the French. 
 
 (2) The Scenes 
 
 The word "scene" has several meanings. It 
 may denote merely the place in which the action 
 occurs; it may refer to the entrances and exits of 
 the persons; or it may mean such a section of the 
 play as, in virtue of its significance, constitutes 
 a unit in the treatment. According to French 
 usage, any change in the number of persons on the 
 stage, either by addition or diminution, makes a 
 new scene. In common English usage, a new scene 
 is indicated when the stage has been cleared and 
 a new entrance occurs. The place of the action 
 may or may not be changed. Thus, in Macbeth^ 
 Act II, the first three scenes occur in the same 
 place, a court of the castle. The first scene would, 
 
1 10 TECHNIQUE 
 
 according to French usage, be three scenes : one 
 with Banquo and Fleance; one with Banquo, 
 Fleance, and Macbeth; one with Macbeth alone. 
 It is in our editions indicated as a single scene, 
 because the entrances and exits overlap; but 
 between Macbeth' s exit and the entrance of Lady 
 Macbeth the stage is clear, hence a new scene is 
 made. Either method of division has drawbacks. 
 The French method often gives importance to an 
 exit or an entrance — that of a servant, for 
 instance — which does not make a real break in 
 the action, and almost always there will be several, 
 sometimes a dozen, of these little, mechanical 
 scenes, going to make up what we may call the 
 logical scene — that is, the scene which develops 
 one phase of the subject. On the other hand, the 
 English method sometimes leaves unemphasized 
 an entrance or an exit that is of great importance, 
 and we have really two logical scenes in one 
 mechanical one. Thus in Macbeth^ Act III, 
 Scene i, there are three distinct parts: (i) Ban- 
 quo alone, (2) Banquo, Macbeth, and the court, 
 (3) Macbeth and the murderers. 
 
 When, therefore, we say that the scene should 
 have in little what the act and the play has in 
 large, — a compact, organic structure with a 
 "beginning, middle, and end," — it is of the 
 logical, not the mechanical scene that we are 
 speaking. 
 
 If Shakespeare is weak in act-management, he 
 is strong in scene-management. Perhaps this is 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA 1 1 1 
 
 because the scene is small enough to be kept in 
 view as a whole, even by the careless and rapid 
 worker that Shakespeare often was; but, whatever 
 be the reason, one may choose almost at random 
 and find a scene exhibiting fine technique. 
 
 As in the case of the act, so in the scene the 
 rise and fall has not always the same form. Act 
 II, Scene 3, of Macbeth has a central rise, but 
 Scene i rises toward the close. Scene 2 falls toward 
 the close, and the three scenes, following Frey- 
 tag's method, might be thus diagrammed ; 
 
 Scd 
 
 Sc.2 
 
 sc:'s > 
 
 and Scenes i and 2 ought, logically, to be taken 
 either as four scenes or as one great scene in four 
 parts, for Macbeth and his wife count here as one 
 person, and their two soliloquies are comple- 
 
112 TECHNIQUE 
 
 mentary parts of the continuous rise to the 
 murder itself. 
 
 In some ways, the words "rise " and "fall " are 
 not helpful, however, and it almost seems unfort- 
 unate that Freytag imposed them on dramatic 
 criticism. They are purely figurative, and figura- 
 tive expressions are misleading when allowed to 
 harden into formulas. As just used, they referred 
 to the tension of the actors in the scenes, and 
 hence of the audience as it follows the action. 
 Thus Scene i begins quietly, with Banquo's words 
 to Fleance, the conversation with Macbeth has 
 more tension, and the soliloquy reaches a spiritual 
 tumultuousness that goes over, on the same pitch, 
 though with difference of tone, into the next scene, 
 and increases on Macbeth' s reentry after the 
 murder. The knocking on the gate acts like a 
 dash of cold water: it breaks the continuity of 
 mood and produces a sudden relaxation of tension. 
 
 For another instance of good scene-structure, 
 take Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene i : 
 
 Introduction. Benvolio and Mercutio by their 
 casual talk prepare us for what is to follow : 
 
 " The day is hot, the Capulets abroad, 
 
 And, if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl." 
 
 Exciting Force. Tybalt and other Capulets 
 enter ; a dispute arises between Tybalt and Mer- 
 cutio. 
 
 Rise. Romeo enters, bears Tybalt's insults, 
 and tries to calm him. 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA II3 
 
 First Climax. Fight between Tybalt and 
 Mercutio, Mercutio mortally wounded. The 
 news of Mercutio's death overcomes Romeo's 
 self-control. 
 
 Second Climax. Reentry of Tybalt. Romeo 
 defies him, they fight, Tybalt is killed. 
 
 Return and Resolution. Entry of the popu- 
 lace, with Montagues, Capulets, and the prince. 
 The guilt of Romeo's action is argued, the prince 
 decides against him and banishes him. 
 
 The scene, with its two climaxes, might be thus 
 diagrammed : 
 
 Act ni 
 
 Scene! 
 
 
 
 In the above scene, the words " rise " and " fall " 
 have regard not only to the inner excitement of 
 the participants, but to the outer events that 
 advance the story. 
 
 In other cases the entire scene is broad expo* 
 I 
 
114 TECHNIQUE 
 
 sition of spiritual states. Thus, in Lear^ Act III, 
 Scene 4, we have an elaborate study of the old 
 man's madness. The beginning is quiet, but 
 by the end of his first long speech the king has 
 worked himself up to an excitement whose char- 
 acter he himself recognizes : 
 
 "O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; 
 No more of that." 
 
 He becomes outwardly calm again, but the entry 
 of Edgar feigning madness brings before his eyes 
 the very madness he fears for himself, and perhaps 
 draws him on toward it. At all events, his excite- 
 ment grows again until it reaches the frenzy in 
 which he cries, "Off, off, you lendings! come, 
 unbutton here," and tears away his clothes. This 
 is the point of greatest spiritual tension in the 
 scene. Gloucester's entrance makes a break, and 
 brings to the front Edgar, whose feigned ravings 
 drop to the whimpered refrain, "Poor Tom's 
 a-cold," "Tom's a-cold," while Lear's fury sub- 
 sides to a dazed quietude. Here the words "rise " 
 and " fall ' ' refer wholly to the spiritual intensity 
 of the scene. 
 
 Summing up: the play, as a whole, is like an 
 organism : it is articulated into^cts, which are in 
 turn artjculated into scenes. Each act and each 
 scene has its own individual completeness — a 
 completeness which is, however, subordinated to 
 that of the whole of which it forms a part. The 
 scenes fall naturally into larger or smaller groups, 
 
MECHANICAL DIVISIONS OF THE DRAMA II5 
 
 and cannot be considered out of their position 
 without in some fashion having violence done 
 them. Each scene, regarded as a unit in a greater 
 whole, resembles not one brick in a straight wall, 
 but one stone in an elaborate arch: the form of 
 the stone will be determined by the point in the 
 arch at which it is placed and the purpose — 
 whether this be ornament or support — which it 
 serves. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 ./■ 
 
 I /' CHARACTER-TREATMENT 
 
 IN the serious drama, it is impossible- to con- 
 sider plot wholly apart from character or 
 character apart from plot. At least, this ought to 
 be so, for the plot being grounded in causality, 
 not accident, its action is the inevitable outgrowth 
 of the characters concerned in it. • Hence, in 
 dealing with dramatic principle and with plot- 
 structure, much has been already stated or assumed 
 with regard to the tragic hero. In fact, all the 
 essentials have been thus stated or assumed. He 
 must, we have seen, have the freedom that both 
 develops the positive, the "royal" character, and 
 offers it opportunity for initiative; he must, we 
 have assumed, possess strength of some sort, other- 
 wise he will not hold his own for a moment in the 
 tragic struggle — rather, no tragic struggle would 
 be possible; but his nature will be one in which 
 conflicting tendencies and impulses are present, 
 for in these conflicting tendencies lies his weak- 
 ness and the opportunity and occasion for the 
 tragic conflict itself. Finally, all these require- 
 ments usually imply that he will be a man of emi- 
 nence, either by birth or fortune or training, and 
 ^ y^' 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT II7 
 
 that he will have the power of self-expression, ena- 
 bling us to understand the inner life that i^ not 
 adequately represented in action. Thus much is 
 evident with regard to the hero of the tragedy or 
 the serious drama, and it is true of the other 
 characters in proportion as their activity in the 
 play resembles his. 
 
 Aristotle laid it down as a general rule, that the 
 hero should be neither wholly bad nor wholly good, 
 because in the one case the spectacle of thg hero's 
 suffering would not move our pity, in the other it 
 woufd simply shock us.^ Yet the philosopher had 
 before him the example, in Antigone^ of a fault- 
 less heroine, in whose judgment of herself we con- 
 cur : " I shall rest, a loved one with him whom I 
 have loved, sinless in my crime." ^ Possibly Aris- 
 totle did not admit this play as on a level with 
 the CEdipus in tragic power; certainly it has no 
 parallel. For Shelley's Beatrice, it is true, feels 
 that her crime is the only right thing, but though 
 her heart is the heart of Antigone, her choice is 
 an Orestean one, from either of whose alternatives 
 there is an instinctive recoil. 
 
 Setting aside, for a moment, this single case, 
 consider these requirements as to goodness and 
 badness in the hero. There are reasons for them 
 deeper than those given by Aristotle. 
 
 We saw that the drama meant struggle, either 
 with outer forces or, as in almost all the greatest 
 
 1 Poetics, XIII. 
 
 2 Antigone, trans. Jebb, p. 23. 
 
Il8 TECHNIQUE 
 
 dramas, with inner forces. If the struggle is 
 an inner one, it means a divided soul with a 
 divided allegiance, conflicting impulses. Such 
 is the case with Orestes, with Hamlet, with Lear, 
 with Beatrice, with Brutus, with Wallenstein, with 
 Faust, with Strafford. None of these has either, 
 on the one hand, the steadfast poise and invulner- 
 ability that we associate with perfect goodness, 
 like that of Christ or th e mythical Socrate.& ; or, on 0t^ | 
 the other hand, the assured firmness and security (j 
 of another sort that we associate with absolute anwj^^jjp 
 deliberate badness, like that of Richard III 
 conceived by Shakespeare. But neither Christ 
 nor Socrates would lend themselves to treatment » . , 
 as a tragic hero, and Sudermann's latest drama, ^^i^*^ 
 Johannes, which attempts a tragic treatment of 
 John the Baptist, does not encourage efforts to use 
 this type of character. Shakespeare's use of the 
 opposite type, in Richard III, results in a play of 
 tremendous power, but, as we have seen, the play 
 is not tragedy at all in the sense in which we have 
 been using the term. Similarly, in Jonson's Se- 
 janus, the two central characters, Claudius and 
 his great favorite, are both monsters of vice and 
 wickedness, but here again the result is not true 
 tragedy, for such characters leave no room for 
 tragic struggle and tragic suffering, and this drama 
 must be placed, with Richard III, in a class apart. 
 With these belongs Massinger's The Roman Actor, 
 though in this case the central character, Nero, 
 has, for the purpose of tragic effect, been consider- 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT 1 1 9 
 
 ably softened by the dramatist : his passionate de- 
 votion to his crime-won wife — a devotion which, 
 so far as the limits of this drama are concerned, is 
 single and absolute — carries him out of himself, 
 and renders him vulnerable in a sense that is not 
 true of Richard or of Sejanus. 
 
 .Returning now to Antigone j it must, first of all, 
 be said that this drama has in it a larger element 
 of the pathetic than, for example, Hamlet^ or the 
 tragedies dealing with Orestes, and that this is due 
 to the fact that she is preeminently the victim of 
 outer misfortune. Moreover, we feel the tragic 
 element in her story in proportion as we realize 
 that she also has been the battlefield of contending 
 forces; that, calm though she appears, she has had 
 a conflict, whose bitterness is hinted in her last 
 outburst of longing for the life and joy she ha§ 
 given up. But her case is different from that of 
 Macbeth or of Hamlet, since the necessity of the 
 conflict has been imposed upon her from without, 
 instead of arising from within, — such was, until. 
 Euripides, the phase of tragic conflict chiefly em- 
 phasized in Greek drama. 
 
 Evidently, the exceptional case of Antigone only 
 helps to establish the rule that tragedy is to be 
 found, not in suffering merely, BurTri'"HJffeilng 
 accompanied by struggle. In so far as Antigone 
 shows the suffering without the struggle it is not 
 tragic but pathetic, as will appear yet more clearly 
 if the play be compared with The Cenci and with 
 the dramas whose subject is the story of Orestes. 
 
120 TECHNIQUE 
 
 We find, then, the plays Antigone and Richard 
 III at the two ends of the scale, but each on the 
 boundary line of typical tragedy, though not for 
 the reason that Aristotle gives. For the question 
 is not one of goodness or badness as such, and it 
 is darkening counsel to bring these elements into 
 the discussion. The dra ma deals with men, not 
 devils or angels, and this not because devils are 
 bad and angels good, but because both are fixed 
 and out of the range of passion, outside of the 
 life that is the dramatist's sphere. The drama 
 shows men stj rred to the foundations of their 
 being, open to influence^ capable of change, torn 
 by desires, able to be aroused to the most intense 
 activity, emotional, intellectual, volitional ; and 
 such men have the souls neither of devils nor 
 angels, but are a compound of elements from 
 both. 
 
 So much for the character of the tragic hero 
 considered in itself. Consider it now with regard 
 to the dramatist's presentation and the spectator's 
 appreciation of it. 
 
 Given a vital, positive character, given freedom 
 to show his individuality in action, the thing that 
 is above all necessary in the treatment is the arous- 
 ing of the spectator's sympathy. He"lnust"Be 
 made, noF me^fely"to see tHe acts, but to sympa- 
 thize with their motiving. If the fact is a murder, 
 we must ourselves feel the feelings that lead up to 
 the deed, otherwise the presentation lacks spir- 
 itual significance. Wordsworth, in his Letter 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT 121 
 
 to a Friend of Robert BurnSy speaking of the 
 biography of the poet, says : 
 
 "So much for facts and actions; and to what 
 purpose relate them, even were they true, if the 
 narrative cannot be heard without extreme pain; 
 unless they are placed in such a light, and brought 
 forward in such order, that they shall explain their 
 own laws, and leave the reader in as little uncer- 
 tainty as the mysteries of our nature will allow, 
 respecting the spirit from which they derived their 
 existence, and which governed the agent." 
 
 And he quotes from Burns himself the lines : 
 
 " One point must still be greatly dark, 
 The moving why they do it." 
 
 It is in the illuminating of this " greatly dark " 
 point which should be the object of the dramatist's 
 endeavor in his treatment of character. For, 
 without attempting psychological subtleties, we 
 may say that a man's life has two phases : its outer 
 manifestation in deeds, and its inner in thoughts 
 and feelings. The two phases are vitally con- 
 nected, and the outer is not explicable save through 
 the inner. ^ Now, the bridge, the middle ground, 
 between inner and outer, is found in words and 
 in gestures. Gesture is not available to the 
 dramatist except through the meagre medium of 
 stage directions, and he must here trust to his 
 actor, or, if the drama be read, to the imagination 
 of his reader. Words, then, are his to use, and 
 in words and acts he finds his material. 
 
122 TECHNIQUE 
 
 4 Self-expression through acts is the dramatist's 
 special provi nceTTt is The Tone and sinew of his 
 work, which is thereby distinguished from the 
 epic. But no one is fully represented by his 
 deeds alone; even in the man who is freest there 
 will be a reserve of tendencies that are never 
 realized, impulses that, so far as outer activity is 
 concerned, nullify each other. These the drama- 
 tist must consider, or his work will deteriorate 
 into chronicle : — 
 
 " Not on the vulgar mass 
 Called * work/ must sentence pass, 
 Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 
 O'er which, from level stand, 
 The low world laid its hand. 
 Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice; 
 
 " But all, the world's coarse thumb 
 And finger failed to plumb, 
 So passed in making up the main accovint; 
 All instincts immature. 
 All purposes unsure. 
 
 That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
 amount. 
 
 " Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 Into a narrow act, 
 
 Fancies that broke through language and escaped; 
 All I could never be, 
 All, men ignored in me. 
 
 This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
 shaped." y, 
 
 We have seen what this fundamental principle 
 usually involves as to the hero's position and cult- 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT 123 
 
 ure. In the technique of the drama it also has > 
 certain corollaries. Two dramatic expedients ] 
 have here their s ource, namely, the soliloquy and p*^ 
 the c onfidant. .. Each is employed to meet a real 
 need, and each is to some extent legitimate. The 
 soliloquy, with its subspecie s, the stage "aside, " 
 is, it is true, usually unnatural, but it is not there- 
 fore to be wholly condemned. It is the conven- 
 tional way of letting us know the inner state of 
 the actor, which we cannot otherwise be made to 
 understand. This is the purpose of the first 
 soliloquy of Richard III, of the soliloquies of 
 Macbeth and of Hamlet, of the exquisite orchard 
 scene in Romeo and Juliet, of the lyric out- • 
 burst of Antigone before she is carried off by the 
 guards. 
 
 The soliloquy has, indeed, been abused. Even 
 Shakespeare does not always escape the Senecan 
 faults of declamation and rhetoric for their own 
 sake; but to counterbalance this we have the Ham- 
 let reveries, and those two wonderfully effective 
 variations of the species, the porter scene and the 
 sleep-walking scene in Macbeth, 
 
 The other expedient, that of the confidenUal 
 friend, to whom the actor may lay bare his inmost 
 soul, is as old as the Greek drama. It Hmelirto 
 modern drama, like so many other dramatic fur- 
 nishings, through Seneca, the nurse or companion 
 in his tragedies being transferred bodily to the 
 French and the English stage, there to undergo 
 many superficial, but no essential modifications. 
 
124 TECHNIQUE 
 
 Both these stage expedients, however, have 
 been the butt of much derision, some of it just 
 enough, and modern playwrights usually try to 
 avoid recourse to them. Where this can be done 
 without sacrificing clearness, it is a distinct gain. 
 Ibsen scarcely uses them at all, and though his 
 plays are sometimes obscure, it is not for this 
 reason. In the second part of Wildenbruch's 
 Heinrich und Hehirich's Geschlecht^ however, the 
 character of Prince Heinrich suffers, being in the 
 highest degree subtle, complex, apparently contra- 
 dictory, while we are given no key to its solution. 
 On the other hand, it is instructive to note how, 
 in Straffordy Browning has succeeded in portray- 
 ing with masterly completeness the hero's inner 
 nature, with very little use of soliloquy in the ordi- 
 nary sense of the term, and with no confidant — 
 for Lady Carlisle cannot be rightly so called. He 
 has done this by carefully arranging the succession 
 of the scenes so that, as Strafford confronts in turn 
 the king, the court, Lady Carlisle, Pym, and the 
 rest, the shiftings in his attitude make clear to us 
 without further commentary that complex inner 
 life which each of his fellows knows only in part 
 and estimates untruly. The play Strafford is here 
 and there marred by the obscurity that is Brown- 
 ' ing's greatest fault, and that is due to a careless 
 and incomplete expression of his thought, yet even 
 as it stands it is worth close study as one of the 
 most magnificent dramatic creations in our litera- 
 ture. Its motto might have been the lines from 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT 12$ 
 
 Ben Ezra quoted above, for the author has taken 
 an historic person, the record of whose acts has 
 seemed enigmatical if not despicable, and has 
 restored or created the soul behind the acts — a 
 soul whose sad grandeur is the more moving be- 
 cause its fate has been to walk before men in the 
 garb of meanness and treachery. 
 
 Ther^-are other way s of arousing s ympathy 
 besides' the direct "expression by the actor of his 
 motives and feelings. Often the simple portrayal 
 of other phases of his nature than those brought 
 out in t he chief action will be the best possible 
 means to this end, and many side-scenes in the 
 great dramas are of this nature. Yn Julius Ccesar 
 a comparison with the Plutarch version shows that 
 the chief additions made by the dramatist were of 
 this sort. Such are the elaboration of the quarrel 
 scene, barely mentioned in Plutarch, the transfer- 
 ence to this scene of the announcement of Cal- 
 purnia's death, the exquisitely tender passage 
 where Brutus is with his guards and with the boy 
 Lucius. Addressing Lucius, he says : 
 
 "What, thou speak'st drowsily? 
 Poor knave, I blame thee not; thou art o'erwatch'd;" 
 
 then, to Varro and Claudius : 
 
 " I pray you, sirs, lie in my tent and sleep; , 
 
 *♦♦♦♦*♦ 
 
 Var. So please you, we will stand and watch your 
 pleasure. 
 
126 TECHNIQUE 
 
 Bru. I will not have it so : lie down, good sirs; 
 
 Look, Lucius, here's the book I sought for so; 
 I put it in the pocket of my gown. 
 
 Luc. I was sure your lordship did not give it me. 
 Bru. Bear with me, good boy, I am much forgetful." 
 
 These lines give us a glimpse of another phase 
 of his character, which we should never have seen 
 in the patriot who killed his friend because he 
 deemed him a tyrant. And they make an appeal 
 to our love, while the patriot might have moved 
 only our admiration and respect. Such appeals 
 seem to occur naturally in the great dramas, thus 
 we find one in Lear, IV, 7, the scene between 
 Lear and Cordelia, which is not needed for the 
 action. Turning to the Greek drama, we may 
 instance the little scene between (Edipus and his 
 daughters, which, coming after the earlier scenes, 
 brings out a side of his nature that was needed to 
 counterbalance its harsher aspects. 
 
 "Nay, let my fate go whither it will: but as touching 
 my children, — I pray thee, Creon, take no care on thee for 
 my sons; they are men. . . . But my two girls, poor hap- 
 less ones, — who never knew my table spread apart, or lacked 
 their father's presence, but ever in all things shared my 
 daily bread, — I pray thee, care for them; and — if thou 
 canst — suffer me to touch them with my hands, and to in- 
 dulge my grief. Grant it, prince, grapt it, thou noble heart ! 
 Ah, could I but once touch them with my hands, I should 
 think that they were with me, even as when I had sight. . . . 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT 12/ 
 
 [Creon's Attendants lead in the children Antigone and 
 
 ISMENE.] 
 
 Ha? O ye gods, can it be my loved ones that I hear sob- 
 bing, — can Creon have taken pity on me and sent me my 
 children — my darlings? Am I right?" etc.i 
 
 In Antigong, too, the character of the heroine 
 has throughout been sustained at a degree of 
 tensity that is almost sternness, the other side 
 must be brought out if our sympathies are to be 
 touched; and the author's sure instinct meets the 
 need in her last words, where she almost breaks 
 down as her love of life and joy assert themselves. 
 With this may be compared the closely similar 
 scene in TTie Cenci, though here there is not quite 
 the same need for it, since the little scenes 
 between Beatrice and her mother, her little 
 brother, and her lover have kept us conscious, 
 throughout the play, of the tenderer, more lovable 
 side of the girl's nature. 
 
 In Hamlet ^t would be tempted to call the scene 
 with Ophelia (III, i) another such; it certainly 
 was given this value by Booth's rendering, but 
 Shakespeare's own intention is not so certain. 
 His purpose here, as elsewhere in the character, 
 may have been a little blurred by the older tradi- 
 tion, and it is not safe to build too much on his 
 treatment.^ 
 
 In Coriolanus such touches are almost wholly 
 lacking, and we miss them, for it is especially in 
 
 1 CEdipus jyrannus, trans. Jebb, pp. 263 ff. 
 * Ct supra, p. 30 and note. 
 
128 TECHNIQUE 
 
 those characters whose tendency is toward stern- 
 ness that the dramatist must be careful to evoke 
 sympathy. 
 
 To turn to a modern drama, this was one of the 
 problems that Wildenbruch had to face in treating 
 the subject of Emperor Heinrich. He had to 
 arouse us to keen sympathy with a man whose iron 
 will and harsh exterior seemed singularly unpro- 
 pitious. His solution is unique and masterly. 
 He treats his main action in four acts, and in place 
 of the other act inserts a prologue wherein he 
 brings before us his hero as a boy of ten years, 
 emotional, sensitive, generous, headstrong, in the 
 first sense of the word, magnanimous. In the 
 swiftly moving, highly condensed and suggestive 
 scenes of this prologue we are made to feel the 
 limitless possibilities for good and evil in the 
 child's nature; we see, too, the kind of influences 
 with which he is surrounded — violence and evil 
 passion on the one hand, the coldness of a narrow 
 and conventional, if not a merely superficial, piety 
 on the other. 
 
 When the play proper opens, and we see the 
 little prince become a king, harsh, haughty, ruth- 
 less, insolent toward God and man, we are not 
 repelled, for we remember the royal nature of the 
 boy, and we feel what must have been the grinding 
 pain of the years that have turned his good to evil. 
 Every bitter word of the king is so calculated as 
 to remind us of the boy, and where the group 
 around him see only a harsh tyrant, brutally mock- 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT 1 29 
 
 ing his conquered enemies and bitter even to his 
 friends, we see in the very brutality and bitterness 
 the perverted expression of a lovable nature. 
 
 No drama, then, can represent merely the acts of 
 the persons concerned; it must represent these acis 
 in the light of the actors' motives, their moods, 
 their ideals. But the proportionate emphasis on 
 what we have roughly called the inner and the outer 
 varies greatly in the work of different dramatic 
 writers, or even in the different dramas of the 
 same writer. If we compare, with this in mind, 
 the dramas of Shakespeare and of Browning, wc 
 see that in general Browning emphasizes the inner 
 life, Shakespeare the outer. Shakespeare sees 
 his characters primarily as acting men among men;' 
 but because he sees them truly, not superficially, 
 he sees also the man behind the activity, and, 
 though valuing the outer, does not ignore the 
 inner life. Browning proceeds conversely. Fol- 
 lowing Ben Ezra's creed, he sees his characters as 
 souls whose outer activity only partly represents 
 them, and he fixes our attention, primarily, upon 
 their inner activity. Shakespeare's emphasis is 
 on the act first, and then on the spiritual state 
 causing it or resulting from it; Browning's is on 
 the spiritual state first, and only secondarily on 
 the act into which it passes, or from which it 
 arises. Shakespeare's treatment is, apparently, 
 though not really, external: he prefers to set 
 before us, in the vividest manner possible, the 
 outer activity of the person, and let us from that 
 
 K 
 
I30 TECHNIQUE 
 
 infer the inner state. Thus Macbeth merely refers 
 in passing to " these dreams that shake us nightly," 
 and of Lady Macbeth' s spiritual experience we 
 get scarcely a glimpse until the fifth act. Again, 
 what Coriolanus undergoes we only guess at through 
 stray hints and by inference from his deeds and the 
 situations in which he is placed. We know that a 
 soldier and a patriot does not go over to the enemy 
 without war of spirit; we know that when a man 
 whose pride has been unyielding gives way to his 
 mother's prayers and reverses his action, it means 
 an inner upheaval; we know that when he finds 
 the enemy he has befriended turning again and 
 rending him, the experience is bitter; but in each 
 of these cases our knowledge is chiefly inferential. 
 Compare with this Browning's treatment of what 
 might have been a similar theme. We say " might 
 have been," because in Luria as actually treated, 
 the similarity of its original story to that of Corio- 
 lanus is scarcely recognizable. The story in its 
 bare outlines is this : A young Moor, with a genius 
 for warfare, comes to Florence and devotes his 
 talents to her service. He is given the command 
 in the war against Pisa, and conducts affairs to the 
 point where victory is certain and there is needed 
 only the mechanical carrying out of his plans. 
 The Florentine leaders, however, mistrust Luria' s 
 single-mindedness, and fear that after the victory 
 he will use his army to make himself master of 
 the city. To prevent this, they enter against him 
 accusations of treachery, and arrange for his secret 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT I3I 
 
 trial and execution. The Pisan general, Tiburzio, 
 chancing upon evidence of their double dealing, 
 discloses it to Luria, and invites him to come over 
 to the Pisans. Luria refuses, completes the orders 
 for the final battle, then takes poison. As he is 
 dying, the Florentine representatives seek him, 
 having by Tiburzio's testimony been convinced 
 of the injustice of their suspicions. But Luria 
 dies. 
 
 The likeness and the contrast in the two stories 
 of Luria and Coriolanus need not be pointed out. 
 For the present purpose what is interesting is the 
 difference in method of treatment. First, the 
 crowds and the large groups of men found in 
 Coriolanus disappear, and instead we have a lit- 
 tle group of seven persons, whose central figure, 
 Luria, is brought and kept under the full blaze 
 of light. Every thought, every feeling, every 
 impulse is revealed from its birth to its fruition. 
 And not this one figure alone, but the others as 
 they come near him, as their activity affects him, 
 are illumined; their motives, too, are searched, 
 till one comes to feel that, after all, the act is 
 nothing compared to the spiritual life behind the 
 act. 
 
 But it is not the dramatist's part to feel this; 
 what he should feel is that the act is everything, 
 when understood in the light of the spiritual life 
 behind the act, and Browning's strength becomes 
 his weakness, his seer's vision of the spiritual man 
 makes him lose grip on those outer activities of 
 
132 TECHNIQUE 
 
 life which are indispensable parts of the drama- 
 tist's material. Such phrases as 
 
 " Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 Into a narrow act," 
 or, 
 
 " the vulgar mass called * work ' " 
 
 are significant of the tendency which sometimes 
 mars his poetic work and lends a color of justice 
 to the remark lately made, "Browning's plays are 
 great poems — and they really ought to be drama- 
 tized." 
 
 In Strafford and A Blot in the ^Scutcheon, how- 
 ever, the balance of emphasis is kept within the 
 bounds of great dramatic art; in Luria^ Colombe's 
 Birthday f A Soul's Tragedy^ it is, in varying de- 
 gree, less perfect; while in Sordello and Paracel- 
 susy where the inner quite overbalances the outer, 
 the poet has judiciously abandoned the strictly 
 dramatic form. 
 
 The extreme of this tendency to portray the 
 inner life at the expense of the outer is seen in 
 the so-called dramas of Maeterlinck. The author 
 boldly declares that his business is not with acts 
 at all, but with the spiritual life which even words 
 are almost powerless to reveal. His theory, like 
 his work, shows a curious lack of the sense of 
 proportion, and his dramas, where they are great, 
 confute his theory. 
 
 Shakespeare, however, though his treatment 
 reverses Browning's emphasis, is not always the 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT 1 33 
 
 same. Between the balance of inner and outer 
 activity in Coriolanus and that in Macbeth there is 
 almost as much difference as between Shakespeare's 
 general method and Browning's. There is cer- 
 tainly more difference than there is between Mac- 
 beth and A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. Coriolanus is 
 the most external of the great tragedies, Macbeth 
 the most consistently spiritual, though Hamletf in 
 parts, goes further than anything else of Shake- 
 speare's. 
 
 This brings us to another question — the ques- 
 tion of s o-called character-dev Qlopm^Tif, Tt has 
 been maintained that much character-development 
 is to be found in Shakespeare, and ten Brink, for 
 example, finds in Romeo and Juliet a great change 
 in Juliet between the Capulet's ball and the Capu- 
 let's tomb. A change, certainly; but the question 
 is, what is the nature of the change? is it true 
 development of character or merely different mani- 
 festations of the same character? 
 
 r Evidently there is need for defining of terms. 
 
 \ A person may be regarded as a complex of many 
 I qualities, whose absolute intensities and relative 
 proportions determine the person's "character." 
 By the use and disuse of these qualities in daily 
 life, these absolute intensities may be increased or 
 diminished, and their relative proportions thereby 
 permanently altered. This constitutes character- 
 development as we ordinarily use the term in 
 real life. In this sense, Tito, in George Eliot's 
 Romolay exemplifies character-development, and 
 
 L 
 
134 TECHNIQUE 
 
 Romola herself does so to a less extent. In 
 Middlemarchy Lydgate, Rosamond, Dorothea, all 
 show it; in The Mill on the Floss y Maggie TuUiver 
 shows it; in Daniel Deronday Gwendolen Harleth 
 shows it. 
 
 In this same sense, we certainly get character- 
 development in Macbeth, He himself recognizes 
 this, when he says : 
 
 " I have almost forgot the taste of fears : 
 The time has been, my senses would have cool'd 
 To hear a night-shriek ; and my fell of hair 
 Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir 
 As life were in't : I have supped full with horrors; 
 Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, 
 Cannot once start me." ^ 
 
 But it is a mistake to take this single play as 
 typical of Shakespeare's work. In this respect, 
 as in others, it is exceptional, and the change in 
 character shown in its hero is different in kind 
 from that shown in Othello or in Coriolanus or in 
 Julius CcBsar, In Othello^ indeed, the difference 
 between the well-poised, confident general who 
 faces the Venetian council, and the frenzied, half- ' 
 savage man of the final scene, — the difference here 
 is apparently greater than between the Macbeth of 
 Act I and of Act V, but the source of the differ- 
 ence is not the same, and its significance is not the 
 same. In Othello we see the gradual arousing of 
 a passionate nature until it reaches a white heat 
 that destroys itself and those nearest it; but this 
 
 1 Macbeth, V, S. 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT 1 35 
 
 IS not character-development, it is the temporary 
 calling into play of one particular .set-fil^jassioiis 
 already mature in the character, though at first in- 
 active because not aroused. It is, of course, by 
 the arousing of passions, by the giving of them 
 free play, that they grow, and in this sense the 
 action of Othello must be regarded as forming one 
 link in the development of all the persons con- 
 cerned. If Othello had lived, he could not after- 
 ward have been quite the same man he was before, 
 but this is not the aspect of the action that is em- 
 phasized in the play. 
 
 With the exception of Macbeth, Lear, and pos- 
 sibly Hamlet, Shakespeare's plays do not show 
 development in this sense. What they do show is 
 the blazing up of powers and passions out of qui- 
 escence mtcT activity, and if we call this develop- 
 ment it is merely because every act that a person 
 performs and every outbreak of passion may be 
 said to be one link in the causal chain determin- 
 ing as well as indicating character. 
 
 If we turn to Browning, we find the case slightly 
 different. A Soul's Tragedy certainly shows char- 
 acter-development; not only shows it, but bases 
 thereon the significance of the " tragedy." Ibsen's 
 A DolVs House shows it; for, though the changes 
 begin and culminate very rapidly, they are real 
 and permanent, not merely the evincing of hitherto 
 latent characteristics. Here, as in A SouPs 
 Tragedy, the focus of attention is upon these 
 permanent changes, only that, whereas in Brown- 
 
136 TECHNIQUE 
 
 ing the soul is lost, in Ibsen (from his standpoint 
 at least) the soul finds itself and sets out to save 
 itself. The same is true of Colombe's Birthday, 
 Note, however, that in the case of Nora and of 
 Colombe the limits of the dramatic form make 
 possible only a suggestion of the development, 
 and each play ends with an outlook into a future 
 that we know will bring further changes along 
 the lines of those already begun. 
 X It is perhaps true that the drama can scarcely 
 
 do more than thus suggesf development, and 
 Shakespeare may have been right in not attempt- 
 ing more. The life-history of Tito Melema or of 
 Maggie TuUiver could not, in the five acts of a 
 drama, have been treated effectively, and such 
 themes may better be left to be handled in the 
 less restricted literary form of the novel. What 
 the drama primarily presents, is the critical moment 
 of conflict, with the spiritual changes therein in- 
 volved. It is this inner crisis, as worked out in 
 the outer clash, the outer crisis as resulting from 
 and reacting on the inner life, that it is the dram- 
 atist's function to portray. 
 
-qHAgrlK-y 
 
 PLOT IN COMEDY 
 / 
 
 IN many respects the laws of structure deter- 
 mined for the serious drama are equally valid 
 for comedy, but there are also important differ- 
 ences between the two kinds of dramatic creation. 
 First, it may be generally stated that in comedies 
 the action of the plot is mtfch more independent 
 of th,i5 characters than it is in the serious drama: 
 it is, as we have already implied, even possible to 
 create a comic plot which shall be really comic, 
 while its persons are nothing more than puppets, 
 the development of the plot being wholly extrane- 
 ous to the characters. This is the case in The 
 Comedy of Errors^ in much so-called farce, in 
 much of the Spanish comedy. Again, the comic 
 action is far less bound to emphasize^Iaw^inTits 
 treatment of events; it can make free use of what 
 we call accident and chance. 
 
 Passing now to a more detailed consideration of 
 its structure, we find that comedies fall into two 
 main groups, according as their comie interest 
 does or does not determine the main plot. Com- 
 pare, for example. King Henry IV with Every 
 Man in His Humour, In the former there is a 
 
 -\ 
 
V 
 
 138 TECHNIQUE 
 
 serious main plot, based on events in English his- 
 tory wherein the fiercest passions were aroused 
 and the largest interests involved, and wherein the 
 actors were of heroic type. The comic interest is 
 found in a number of interspersed scenes whose 
 action is loosely connected with the serious main 
 plot; cut out these scenes, and with few changes 
 the play becomes a serious historical drama. In 
 Jonson's play, on the other hand, the exact con- 
 verse is the case. The serious interest — and 
 there is very little — is subordinate. The comic 
 interest is not merely developed in the main plot, 
 it actually constitutes it; cut out this and you 
 destroy the play. 
 
 These two plays may be accepted as typical of 
 two great classes of comedies. To those of the 
 first type the name "romantic comedy "has been 
 given, for reasons not wholly connected with its 
 structure ; those of the second type have been vari- 
 ously styled, according to considerations foreign 
 to this discussion. To it belong all of Aris- 
 tophanes, most of Plautus and Terence, most of 
 Jonson and Moliere, the comedies of Massinger 
 and Middleton and Congreve. With Henry IV 
 are to be classed all of Shakespeare's comedies 
 except Love's Labour's Lost^ The Comedy ofErrors^ 
 The Merry Wives of Windsor ^ The Taming of the 
 Shrew, 
 
 Since the romantic comedy has as its basis a 
 serioiis^main plot, and its comic interests are epi- 
 sodic, it may be temporarily disregarded. It is 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY 1 39 
 
 in the second class of comedies that we shall find 
 the typical comic structure. 
 
 Reverting to our illustration of the primitive 
 form of comic plot, — our case of the man who sits 
 down on the floor, — let us start again from this. 
 In actual life we know that this may occur for 
 various reasons: (i) he may have miscalculated 
 the position of the chair, and the fault is therefore 
 his own; or (2) the chair may break, and the fault 
 is no one's; or (3) some one with malice prepense 
 may have pulled the chair from under him, or may 
 have placed a weak chair where he was likely to sit. 
 
 So in come dies. The action maxbe one where 
 the mistakes, the^ cqmic^ dj^a^pmntments, _ arise . 
 out of the weakn ess of the victim, and he. aloneJis_ 
 to blame, or they may spring from circumstance, 
 and no one is responsible, or they may be delib- 
 erately planned by one of the play's persons, an 
 arch-intriguer, assisted, perhaps, by lucky acci- 
 dent, which he knows how to turn to account. 
 
 An example of the first sort is seen, though not 
 with perfect clearness, in Love's Labour's Lost^ 
 through the fourth act. The four gentlemen have 
 simply miscalculated their own powers and at- 
 tempted something beyond them. Hence, all fail 
 signally, and the great scene for which the play is 
 planned, IV, 3, merely presents this failure. Each 
 does in turn expose his fellow, in true "house- 
 that-Jack-built fashion, ' ' but no one of them has 
 planned the downfall of another. 
 
 The second kind is exemplified with typical 
 
140 TECHNIQUE 
 
 clearness in The Comedy of Errors, Here the 
 whole complication is the result of chance, no one 
 guides its progress, and its conclusion is as much 
 accident as any part of its course. 
 
 The third sort is seen, as has just been said, in 
 the last act of Love's Labour's Losiy but it is better 
 to select an instance where the entire play is con- 
 structed on this principle. Among the multitude 
 of such, we may mention, as being, for one reason 
 or another, unusually good instances, Jonson's 
 Every Man in His Humour (Brainworm and Ed. 
 Knowell are the intriguers); The Silent Woman 
 (arch- intriguers, Dauphine, Clerimont, and Love- 
 wit); Chapman's All Fools (intriguers, Rinaldo, 
 for the main plot, Cornelio, for a subordinate 
 counter-plot); Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old 
 Debts (intriguers. Wellborn, for the main plot, 
 Allworth and Lovell for the underplot); Moliere's 
 V E cole des Maris (intriguers, Isabelle and Val^re). 
 Among them, the simplest in structure is Moliere's, 
 and next comes Massinger's, which we will take 
 as a type because it is English. The argument 
 is, briefly, as follows : 
 
 Act I. Wellborn, a prodigal, has ruined him- 
 self by his excesses, and his estate has passed into 
 the hands of his uncle. Overreach, an unscrupulous 
 old man who has amassed large wealth by sharp 
 practice. In despair. Wellborn turns for help to 
 Lady Allworth, a rich widow whose late husband 
 he had once befriended in time of need. Out of 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY I4I 
 
 gratitude for this, Lady AUworth consents to feign 
 a betrothal to Wellborn. 
 
 Acts II, III, and IV. On the strength of his 
 expectations, Wellborn is instantly restored to 
 credit. His uncle is anxious to facilitate the 
 match, hoping ultimately to get hold of Lady All- 
 worth's wealth as he already has got Wellborn' s. 
 He therefore pays his nephew's debts and enter- 
 tains him royally. 
 
 Overreach has a daughter, Margaret, whom he 
 longs to see married to a title, and he offers her 
 in marriage to Lord Lovell. In the lord's service 
 is young AUworth, stepson to Lady Allworth, who 
 loves Margaret and is loved by her. Lord Lovell 
 befriends his cause, and while feigning consent to 
 the marriage for himself, helps young Allworth 
 convey Margaret away and marry her. 
 
 Meanwhile Marrall, an attorney and an unscru- 
 pulous attach^ of Overreach, decides that it will 
 be more profitable to serve Wellborn. 
 
 Act V. Through Marrall 's agency it is dis- 
 covered that the deed transferring Wellborn' s 
 estates to his uncle is worthless, and the owner- 
 ship, therefore, reverts to Wellborn. Next, Over- 
 reach learns of the marriage of his daughter with 
 young Allworth. At the double catastrophe he 
 goes mad. 
 
 Now, it will be seen that the entire structure of 
 the plot depends on the deliberately planned 
 schemes of Wellborn and Allworth to outwit Over- 
 
142 TECHNIQUE 
 
 reach. Does this differ from the plan of the 
 serious drama? 
 
 In a sense, we might adopt the phraseology of 
 the tragedy, and call the action " a losing struggle, 
 by an imperfect character, against the overpower- 
 ing forces of life." We might say that there is 
 found here, the three things essential to tragedy : 
 suffering, struggle, causality: . 
 
 In a sense, yes; but in a sense so different from 
 the tragic that, though the words may be un- 
 changed, the ideas can no longer be treated as the 
 same. 
 
 First: the character is indeed imperfect, but 
 the imperfections are here regarded as material. 
 for comic co ntrast, and subjects for ju dicial repre- 
 hension, not fo^pity_and sympathy. This has 
 already been discussed. 
 
 Next, as to the struggle. The result of it in 
 both cases is the overthrow of some one, but the 
 process is different in^ principle and significance 
 — as different as is our case where the malicious 
 person pulls away the chair from the case where 
 two men grapple- in a fair fight. In the serious 
 drama, the hero is c ontending, i t may be against 
 one man, it may be against a host, it may be 
 against himself, it may be against the remorseless 
 "course of things." We may even know from 
 the beginning that the struggle must end in failure, 
 as we do know in the (EdipuSy or in The Cenci; but 
 our hero really fights, he has his chance, all his 
 energies go into the struggle'liid are staked on 
 
<R 
 
 PLOT IN COMEDY I43 
 
 the issue. In this ki nd of com edyi on the other 
 hand, he d oes not really fi^ht : he is a victim, his 
 overthrow is not really ine vitable, it is artfully 
 prearranged . 
 
 Finally, the causality in the two kinds of drama 
 is totally different. Tragedy must be based on 
 law, and, as we saw, it is better for the tragedian \/^ 
 not to use such events as have about them an air 
 of chance. For comedy this requirement is not 
 imperative. The main thing isthe presentation 
 of striking incongruities, and we do not care 
 whether these are evidently grounded in the law 
 of the universe or not; in fact, the range of comic 
 view being limited, it is often better that it should 
 not call too vividly to mind the iron rule of law. 
 Accordingly, we find in comedy the widest license 
 allowed. When Shakespeare, borrowing for his 
 use the old story of the twin brothers, complicates 
 its situations by postulating a second pair of twins 
 as servants to these brothers, we do not cavil at 
 the improbability. If he chose to postulate two 
 pairs of twin sisters, too, we should not object, 
 provided he was master of his material. These 
 considerations have, as will appear, an important 
 bearing on the nature of the comic catastrophe,..-^"" 
 So much for general questions. Contrast now 
 ore particularly the plans of the two types of 
 drama : 
 r* The serious drama usually begins in an apparent 
 equilibrium, from which the conflict develops. In 
 the first part of the play, one of the two contending 
 
144 TECHNIQUE 
 
 forces is paramount; in the second, the other, 
 and the outcome is a final equilibrium wholly 
 different from the apparent equilibrium at the 
 beginning. 
 
 In the comedy just summarized the case is quite 
 different. Instead o f an aggressor meeting an 
 aggressor, there is an aggressor and ayictimTT lt 
 is the naturaTresult of the difference in principle 
 between comedy and tragedy. Instead of a con- 
 flict of forces, the comic plots of this type present 
 a process rather like the picking of the lock of a 
 safe; it may be interesting, it may involve great 
 ingenuity and address, but it is on a wholly differ- 
 ent basis. 
 
 To pursue, for a moment, the figure of the lock : 
 — the beginning of the play presents the problem; 
 we see the strong safe, with its lock, apparently 
 secure; we see the would-be lock-breaker, his eyes 
 fixed on the safe, his fingers twitching to get at its 
 secrets. Next, it is hinted that despite this seem- 
 ing security there are weak points — possibly the 
 lock can be forced. Then comes the process of 
 forcing it, until finally the successful lock-breaker 
 carries out his scheme and enjoys the fruits of his 
 ingenuity. 
 
 What the corollaries are, which may be deduced 
 from the fundamental difference between the two 
 problems, will be evident if we consider, one by 
 one, the logical divisions of this type of drama. 
 
 [i] Exposition, This has no peculiar features. 
 In the Massinger play, the first act is mainly ex- 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY I45 
 
 positional, the rising action being only suggested 
 at the end of the third scene. 
 
 [2] Exciting Force and Rising Action. The ex- 
 citing force is always found in the resolution of 
 the arch-intriguer to outwit his victim. In the 
 play before us, it is Wellborn' s desperate resolve 
 to have one more try at fortune. Sometimes, as 
 often in the plays of Plautus and Terence, a pre- 
 liminary action is presented, which is the imme- 
 diate occasion of this resolution, e.g. a young man 
 falls in love, and plans how to circumvent his 
 father, who opposes him. It is evident that, if in 
 such a case the love-plot is given serious enough 
 emphasis, and our attention is drawn to the issues 
 therein involved, and away from the circumvent- ^^^^ 
 ing of the authorities considered in itself, the play ^^'^ 
 may become serious instead of comic. I The em- ^4^11/ ' 
 phasis is laid, not on the intelk£t»aI.J2iobl£m, but Ztc^f'^ ^ 
 on the emotional crisis. Vlhis comes near ^^^^g^^l^M^^ 
 the case in As You Like It; it is the case in Romeo^ /^y^ A^' 
 andjuliety and perhaps the impression of weakness 
 left upon us by the last act of this play is partly 
 due to this resemblance between its plan and that 
 of the ordinary comedy; for its tragic catastrophe 
 is brought about, not by the essential constitution 
 of things and the nature of the spiritual problem 
 in itself, but by the accidental failure of an inge- 
 niously arranged scheme which might just as well 
 have been successful. JiL ^^ 
 
 [3] CUniaXy and [4] Falling Action. There is, U 1 
 
 strictly spea king, no climax and no falling act ion. ^ ^/* -^ 
 
146 TECHNIQUE 
 
 For, from the very na ture of the case, the victim 
 cannot^ re taHate j^ it would spoil the play if he did. 
 The movement of the rising action goes steadily 
 forward through the play, though not necessarily 
 at uniform rate. From the standpoint of the in- 
 ^-'-i triguer, it might be represented by a line trending 
 ' upward ; from the standpoint of the victim, by one 
 trending downward. In the Massinger play, there 
 is no climax, in the sense in which we have hitherto 
 been using the term. The only possibility of 
 making one would be to take it as formed by Act 
 III, Scene 2, because this scene is the most elabo- 
 rate one in the play, and the only one in which 
 both main plot and subplot are interwoven. But 
 such an external test is not the sort one uses for 
 tragedy. ' 
 
 [5] Catastrophe. It presents the completed re- 
 sults of the intriguer's plans, and the total over- 
 throw of the victim. In contrast to the tragic 
 , catastrophe it need not be causal ly determine d by 
 what has preceded. Here, as elsewhere through- 
 out the action, causality is not emphasized, and 
 here as elsewhere chance may determine. the issue. 
 Thus, in the play mentioned, one-half of the mis- 
 fortune of Overreach is due, not to Wellborn' s 
 machinations at all, save very indirectly, but to 
 the " Deus ex machina " in the person of Marrall. 
 Nor need the catastrophe have any quality of 
 finality; it is sufficient that it furnish some sort of 
 finish, which may not preclude further activity, 
 renewed machinations, more victimizing, or even 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY I47 
 
 a later "turning of the worm" in a retaliatory 
 stroke. Whereas tragedy must be final, comedy 
 need not be more than provisional; it offers a 
 solution only of the specific problem presented. 
 Not that its conclusion is bound to be provisional; 
 this will depend partly upon what has been the 
 underlying purpose of the intrigue." Compare, as 
 illustrating this, the character of the conclusion 
 in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, which is ap- 
 proximately final, with that of The Alchemisty 
 which impresses one as not more than provisional. 
 In many cases, it is true, an air of conclusiveness 
 is given by a sweeping moral regeneration of all 
 knaves, taking place in the last act, but this is 
 usually specious and unsatisfying; it is always 
 quite different from the fundamental and absolute 
 readjustment in the true tragic solution. 
 
 These are the chief differences to- be noted 
 between the comic and the tragic plot. Subordi- 
 nate differences will, of course, follow as corol- 
 laries, but to take them up here would involve 
 detailed analysis of comedy after comedy. The 
 essential thing is to have marked the principal 
 lines of divergence in the two types. 
 
 There are, indeed, cases where the lines seem 
 to cross, and perhaps really do so. In Othello, 
 for example, we have an action which conforms, 
 in some respects, rather to the comic than the 
 tragic type. Othello himself is less a fighter than 
 a victim, while lago's attitude from the beginning 
 is that of the arch-intriguer in the comedies we 
 
 / 
 
148 TECHNIQUE 
 
 have been discussing. He considers himself in- 
 jured, as does Wellborn; he plans a deliberate 
 attack, as does Wellborn, and enlists the help of 
 others; he chooses the point where his victim is 
 weakest and makes his assault there, appealing to 
 Othello's impulsive and unreasoning love, as Well- 
 born appeals to his uncle's consuming greed of 
 gain. There is, moreover, in lago's attitude a 
 kind of grim, colossal humor, while in his schem- 
 ing there is a cool, if somewhat crude, power that 
 makes us respect him and wins our intellectual 
 sympathy, as does the arch- intriguer in a comedy. 
 The divergence from comedy is found in the fact 
 that (i) the character of the victim is so noble, 
 and is so treated as to evoke our emotional sym- 
 pathy; and (2) that he is strong enough, when 
 finally aroused, to retaliate with terrible energy and 
 with such terrible effectiveness that our thought is 
 drawn away from the intellectual phases of the 
 case to its emotional issues.^ But, great as these 
 differences are, the similarity in plan of the first 
 four acts can scarcely be ignored, and it may be 
 one reason why the play does not appeal to all of 
 us as being tragic in the highest sense. 
 
 To take an instance of the converse: Moliere's 
 Le Misanthrope seems, to some readers at least, 
 not at all the typical comedy, and if we examine 
 
 1 Compare the case of Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, 
 where the feeling toward the victim may range, according to the 
 character of the audience and of the actor, all the way from 
 pity to scornful derision. 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY / I49 
 
 the plan of the plot we shall find that it has traits 
 distinctive rather of tragedy than of comedy; it 
 presents, namely, a real conflict of forces, and one 
 that is grounded in the spiritual nature of the per- 
 sons concerned. With very slight changes it 
 might have been made a tragedy, and as it is, 
 when read in some moods, it is apt to seem more 
 tragic than comic. y^ 
 
 \ To resume ; the plan of the comic action differs ^} 
 Mlecidedly from that ot the serious drama in the ^*^>^ 
 ch aracter of it s conflict, in its freedom from the 
 necessity of emphasizing law and its consequent 
 license in use of chance or accident, in the ab- 
 sence of a true climax and a true falling action, 
 and in the nature of its catastrophe. If the seri- 
 ous drama is represented by the projected pyra- 
 mid, the comedy, such as Massinger's, may be 
 represented by two lines, an ascending one for the 
 intriguer, a descending one for the victim. 
 
 Applying these results to other comedies, it will 
 be seen that they conform fairly well. In the 
 comedies of Plautus the victim is usually a rich 
 old man, the intriguer usually his son or nephew, 
 always assisted by a slave, and often by some other 
 young man. The differences between play and 
 play are found in the differences in the method 
 of attack and in the motives for it. In Jonson's 
 comedies the plan is the same in principle, but 
 the schemes are exceedingly complicated; there 
 are usually several intriguers with plans somewhat 
 opposed, and there results a number of separate 
 
150 TECHNIQUE 
 
 little puzzles, with separate solutions, but all finally 
 brought together in the general solution of the 
 denouement. Moli6re's plots, again, are more 
 simple.^ 
 
 Turning now from this large group of comedies, 
 let us see how far its principles apply to the group 
 loosely classed as "romantic." At the beginning 
 of the chapter we turned away from these because 
 the other, by virtue of its simplicity. and its clear- 
 ness of definition, lent itself more readily to 
 analysis. The results thus gained may help us 
 in dealing with the more difficult and elusive 
 "romantic" comedy, or, at least, may afford a 
 firm base from which we may proceed to its in- 
 vestigation. 
 
 In the Jntrig ue comedy it was noted that^ in 
 supplying the intriguer with a motive .Joi^Jiis. 
 scheming, the love-interest was usually employed, 
 and it was suggested that if the love-interest was 
 sufficiently emphasized it might overbalance the 
 comic interest, and the play might become more 
 or less serious. In turning from the plays of 
 Plautus to those of Terence one notices, in some 
 cases, a tendency toward this very thing. Ter- 
 ence's more delicate talent seems to have inclined 
 him to lay a slightly greater emphasis on the seri- 
 ous element of the plot, and there results a change 
 in the proportionate values of the serious and the 
 comic elements. It varies in different plays, but 
 
 1 For a fuller discussion of this type of comedy, cf. Wood- 
 bridge, Studies in Jonson's Comedy. 
 
 \S^ 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY I5I 
 
 on the whole it seems fair to say that Terence treats 
 the motive- interest, if we may so distinguish it 
 from the intrigue-interest, with a tenderness of 
 touch and gentle delicacy of sympathy that in a 
 later age would have developed into the so-called . 
 
 "romantic" plot. In the Heaut o ntimorutnen oSt *ft,K dl ^ 
 the remorseful old father doing self-imposed pen- 6K^ 
 ance for his harshness toward his son, the devotion 
 of that son to his mistress, Antiphila, the little 
 touches that sketch the character of the girl An- 
 tiphila herself; in the Andria, the overwhelming 
 love of iTomphiTu s and Glyceriui^, which seems 
 to have in it something more than the passion we 
 find depicted in Plautus; — these give us glimpses, 
 though no more than glimpses, of a possible devel- 
 opment into another sort of comedy. 
 
 Such a development is found in full maturity in 
 the work of Shakespeare; and though we may not 
 take the plays of Terence as a link in an actual 
 evolutionary chain, — for the evolution took place 
 on other lines, — we may use them in our own 
 thought as furnishing a transition phase between 
 the two kinds of comedy.^ 
 
 In dealing with Shakespeare we have, it must 
 be remembered, only approximate dates, and 
 cannot base too much on chronology, yet enough 
 seems established to give us some rough notions of 
 grouping and development. The comedies, fol- 
 
 1 In Italian comedy, however, there seems actually to have 
 been some such evolution. Cf. Violet Paget's Studies 0/ the 
 Eighteenth Century in Italy. 
 
152 TECHNIQUE 
 
 lowing the approximate chronology now agreed 
 upon, may be arranged as follows : 
 
 Love's Labour's Lost. 
 
 The Comedy of Errors. 
 
 The Two Gentlemen of Verona. 
 
 A Midsummer Night's Dream. 
 
 The Merchant of Venice. 
 The Taming of the Shrew. 
 King Henry IV, two parts. 
 The Merry Wives of Windsor. 
 Much Ado about Nothing. 
 As You Like It. 
 Twelfth Night. 
 
 All's Well that Ends Well. 
 Measure for Measure. 
 
 Cymbeline. 
 
 The Winter's Tale. 
 
 The Tempest. 
 
 Of the earliest group two, Love's Labour's Lost 
 and The Comedy of Errors^ have been already 
 accounted for. In both the comic interest deter- 
 mines the main plot, which is in the one case 
 developed out of the characters, in the other out 
 of pure incident apart from character. Yet in the 
 latter case it is significant that Shakespeare, using 
 Plautus' plot, added to it here and there touches 
 of seriousness not in his original, and the propor- 
 tions of the two elements in the play are more 
 nearly as in some of Terence's comedies. 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY 1 53 
 
 In The Two Gentlemen of Verona we have the 
 roma ntic comedy proper : there is the comic epi- 
 sode, which could be cut out without maiming the 
 play's structure^ and the je^ double 
 
 (as often in Terence) and following in its logical 
 divisions the lines of the serious drama. Because 
 it is so"~simple and typical, it is worth while to 
 examine it somewhat in detail. 
 
 Act I. Exposition : love of Proteus and Julia, 
 friendship of Proteus and Valentine. 
 
 Rising Action : Valentine leaves for Milan, Pro- 
 teus also is to be sent thither. 
 
 Act II. Exposition f continued : love of Valen- 
 tine and Silvia. 
 
 Rising Action^ continued: in development of 
 Proteus' treachery toward Julia and toward Valen- 
 tine. A possible opposition is hinted in Julia's 
 resolution to go to seek Proteus. 
 
 Act III. Climax : apparent success of Proteus* 
 plans, and banishment of Valentine. 
 
 Act IV. Return Action : turn of fortune for 
 Valentine suggested in his being made king of the 
 outlaws; for Proteus it is suggested by the ap- 
 pearance of Julia in Milan; for both it is precipi- 
 tated by Silvia's plan to run away. 
 
 Act V. End of Return Action^ and Resolution : 
 Silvia's flight accomplished, the pursuit of her 
 brings about the solution. 
 
 Here it will be seen that there is a true conflict 
 of forces, a true rise, turning-point, and descent. 
 
154 TECHNIQUE 
 
 And if Proteus has some of the characteristics of 
 the arch-intriguer, it is the serious, not the comic 
 aspect of his activity that is emphasized, and its 
 criminal nature. 
 
 The broad comedy in the play is embodied in 
 the episodes where Speed and Launce appear. 
 They could be cut out, yet they are really related 
 to the main-plot scenes. For, as the Greeks used 
 to follow up their tragedies by a comic parody, so 
 Shakespeare seems here to have intended a parody 
 of his own serious situations. In II, 2, is pre- 
 sented the parting of the two lovers; in the next 
 scene Launce appears and sets forth, with the help 
 of his slippers and his cane, his own farewell to 
 his family : the tears of his parents, the wails of 
 his cat, and the unnatural indifference of his 
 "stony-hearted dog." Again, in III, i, immedi- 
 ately following upon Valentine's desperate grief 
 at the separation from Silvia, comes Speed with 
 the announcement that he, too, is in love, and he 
 proceeds to discuss the situation. The parallelism 
 may be accidental, but it can scarcely be deemed 
 so. A similar case occurs in Love's Labour's Lost, 
 in the Armado-Costard-Jaquenetta episodes, while 
 in As You Like It the parody is elaborated, in 
 Touchstone and Awdry, past the point of mere 
 parody, almost into an independent sub-interest. 
 
 But, besides this burlesque treatment of the seri- 
 ous issue, there is, in the presentation of the issue 
 itself, the beginning of a kind of comedy peculiar 
 to Shakespeare, namely, a touching of the serious 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY 1 55 
 
 with a slightly fnmir light^ — of the most tenderly 
 delicate sort, it is true, but unmistakable comedy 
 nevertheless. This is the case in the scenes in 
 which Julia appears (note especially Act I, Scene 
 2). It is the first trace of the author's power to 
 look at things in two ways at once, a first gleam of 
 the genius that was later to look at the old Lear 
 through the eyes of the "bitter fool," and utter 
 his tragedy in a jest, "And yet I would not be 
 thee, nuncle; thou hast pared thy wit o* both sides, 
 and left nothing i' the middle " : (Goneril enters) 
 "here comes one o' the parings." 
 
 In A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, again, there 
 are the two distinct lines : one the love- interest, — 
 double again, and as usual with the lines inter- 
 crossing until straightened out by Oberon, — and 
 the other the comic interest in the tradesmen of 
 Athens and their interlude. The third group, the 
 fairies and Puck, brings in a semi-lyric element 
 foreign to our present discussion. So far all is 
 clear: the comic in the tradesmen's scenes is easily 
 placed, and it does not affect the main plot. But 
 once more, in this main plot, we find the note of 
 comedy even stronger than in The Two Gentlemen 
 of Verona, while in the entire treatment there is 
 a tone of whimsicality that is perhaps a result of 
 the midsummer night's witchery. The serious 
 and the comic standpoints are represented for us 
 in Oberon and Puck, as they look on at the confu- 
 sion of the two pairs of lovers. Oberon, taking 
 it earnestly, thinks of the consequences : 
 
156 TECHNIQUE 
 
 "What hast thou done? Thou hast mistaken quite 
 And laid the love-juice on some true-love's sight : 
 Of thy misprision must perforce ensue 
 Some true love turned and not a false turned true." 
 
 Puck, the mocker, enjoys the situation: 
 
 " Captain of our fairy band, 
 Helena is here at hand; 
 And the youth, mistook by me, 
 Pleading for a lover's fee. 
 Shall we their fond pageant see? 
 Lord, what fools these mortals be? 
 Oberon. Stand aside : the noise they make 
 Will cause Demetrius to awake. 
 Puck. Then will two at once woo one; 
 That must needs be sport alone; 
 And those things do best please me 
 That befall preposterously." 
 
 And again, when Oberon reprimands the imp: 
 
 " This is thy negligence : still thou mistakest. 
 Or else committ'st thy knaveries wilfully." 
 
 Puck answers, unabashed : 
 
 " Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook, 
 * * * * * * * 
 And so far am I glad it did so sort 
 As this their jangling I esteem a sport." ^ 
 
 And evidently the poet himself was able to see at 
 once with the eyes of Oberon and of Puck. 
 
 In The Merchant of Venice a sterner note is 
 struck. As always, there is the episodic comedy 
 
 1 A Midsummer NigMs Dream, III, 2. 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY 15/ 
 
 and the love-plots, but there is also the Shylock- 
 Bassanio interest. And here the query intrudes 
 itself : did Shakespeare mean the Shylock plot to 
 be comic or not? It has, indeed, even now a grim 
 kind of comic effect, but we must suspect that the 
 Elizabethan audience laughed where we do not. 
 Possibly Shakespeare meant him to be comic, and 
 without purposing to do so lapsed occasionally into 
 a sympathetic treatment simply because he could 
 not help doing this with any character that he 
 handled long. This would account on the one 
 hand for the hardness of tone in the Jessica plot, 
 and on the other hand for the sympathetic insight 
 in such passages as Shylock' s magnificent outburst 
 in answer to Salarino ; 
 
 " Salar. \Vhy, I am sure, if he forfeit, thou wilt not take 
 his flesh: what's that good for? 
 
 Shy. To bait fish withal : if it will feed nothing else, it 
 will feed my revenge. ... I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew 
 eyes? hath not a Jew hands. ... If you prick us, do we 
 not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison 
 us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not re- 
 venge ? " etc.i 
 
 According to this interpretation, we see in Shy- 
 lock, despite such passages, our familiar comic 
 victim, grown indeed more formidable, and re- 
 quiring, not the justice but the injustice of the 
 law courts to overcome him, but the comic victim 
 nevertheless, whose downfall, as in typical comedy 
 of intrigue, brings with it the happiness of the 
 
 1 The Merchant of Venice, III, i. 
 
158 TECHNIQUE 
 
 lovers. Shakespeare's mistake, then, was in 
 making us sympathize too keenly with Shylock, 
 though, as we have said, this may not have been 
 the case for his own day. 
 
 This brings us to Henry IVy whose structure 
 we have already settled. For, though the charac- 
 ter of Falstaff really overshadows the entire play, it 
 does not affect its structure, and the comic scenes 
 are episodic. 
 
 In The Merry Wives of Windsor we have a unique 
 case : the episodic comedy of the two preceding 
 plays is, by a tour deforce^ made the main plot of 
 this one, while a serious subplot is added. The 
 victimizing is an end in itself, instead of being, 
 as in the usual comic main plot, a means to some 
 other end ; and Falstaff, from a unique comic hero, 
 has deteriorated into a commonplace comid'butt. 
 He has lost his peculiar wit, and — most impos- 
 sible of all — he takes himself seriously, so that 
 instead of laughing with him we are laug hing at, 
 him. The character of the play bears out the 
 tradition concerning its writing; it is evidently 
 a piece of hack work, and though the hack work 
 of genius cannot be ignored, the play may, in the 
 present discussion, be set one side. 
 
 The next three comedies form a closely related 
 group, which need here scarcely be considered 
 apart. All have serious love-plots and all have 
 comic by-play, that in Twelfth iV/^>^/being curiously 
 affiliated with the type found in Molibre and Jon- 
 son, while in Rosalind we might, if we chose, see 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY 1 59 
 
 an arch- intriguer turned somewhat ethereal and 
 exceeding moral, managing the others for their 
 best good and her own innocent amusement. In 
 all three the serious plot is occasionally given a 
 comic tone, the comedy being also partly perceived 
 even by the participants themselves. In these 
 three plays we get the perfection of the Shake- 
 spearean comedy, and we need not go on to the last 
 two groups, for, though the bitter jests of AlVs Well 
 that Ends Well and Measure for Measure and the 
 idyllic temperateness of The Tempest show a tre- 
 mendous range in tone and many interesting 
 points of detail, there is nothing new in underly- 
 ing structure. 
 
 Pausing here, then, and looking over the range ^//^^ A 
 of Shakespearean comedy, we find certain qualities y^y- <?l^ 
 characterizing it : a main plot embodying the love-^"^ 
 interest, and episodic scenes embodying the comic 
 interest, the love-interest_tinged with comedy yet 
 not so as to destroy its seriousness. It is thus 
 allied with both kinds of drama : with the serious, 
 in that its main ends are serious and its use of the 
 emotions is so; with the comic by reason of this 
 touch of comedy in the treatment, and also by its 
 emancipation from law. For these serious plots 
 have in this respect almost as much license as has 
 pure comedy, and, whereas tragedy is grounded in ^ 
 the spiritual laws of human life, these present to 
 us situations constructed by the fancy and imagina- 
 tion from materials furnished by human life. In 
 the reconstruction, certain things are left out, and 
 
l60 TECHNIQUE 
 
 that which is above all emphasized in tragedy is 
 here steadily i gnored, the binding force of the law, 
 — " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
 reap." The im agination is free to work , and in 
 the result there is an element of the fancif ul, even 
 of the whimsical. 
 
 Thus, of the three forms, tragedy, comedy, and 
 this Shakespearean type of comedy, each selects 
 out of life certain parts — no one is complete. 
 Comedy is, in one way, the most limited in its 
 view and the most superficial, it emphasizes cer- 
 tain intellectual phases of things but leaves out 
 others, and it avoicis an appeal to the e motions; 
 tragedy is the deepest, laying stress on the emo- 
 tional phases of life, but treating them not simply 
 in themselves, as does the lyric, but in their rela- 
 ytions to will and to outer fact. The romantic 
 comedyts somewhere between these two extremes: 
 its treatment hovers between the surface view, 
 which is characteristic oif the comic, and the deeper 
 insight that is essential to the tragic; it makes 
 use of the emotions, but ignores their causal 
 relations. 
 
 It will be evident that this intermediate position 
 gives the fullest possible scope to the poetic 
 imagination, and we see how in The Tempest and 
 A Midsummer Nighfs Dream it almost passes out 
 of drama proper and verges on what we might call 
 free dramatic fantasia. It is because of these 
 qualities, too, that it is to the lover of the drama 
 peculiarly satisfying. It has neither the thinness 
 
PLOT IN COMEDY l6l 
 
 that often characterizes pure comedy by reason ol 
 its preponderating intellectuality, nor the almost • ^-— 
 oppressive emotional intensity of tragedy; yet it-^ 
 is free to employ the resources of both tragedy and 
 comedy, while it may range in tone from the tem- 
 perateness of the epic to the emotional depth of 
 the lyric. It has at once richness and delicacy; 
 it is at once philosophical and fanciful; it is the 
 most "poetic" of forms. Even Jonson, the high 
 priest of the intellectual in drama, when, for the 
 only time in his dramatic career, he gave freer play 
 to the other side of his nature, adopted a form 
 akin to this; and Shakespeare, though his mighti- 
 est achievements are in tragedy, attained in this 
 form his most nearly perfect artistic excellence. 
 
 M 
 
kI 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 CHARACTER-TREATMENT IN COMEDY 
 
 WE have already seen that, sijgLQfe.t.hfij;?.QJIlic 
 in chara cter is based on imperfect ion, it 
 is possible to regard this imperfection either with 
 simple appreciation of its coimc flavor, or judi- 
 cially^ or sympathetically. 
 
 As an example of the purely appreciative treat- 
 ment, take the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Here 
 there is no tendency either toward the sympathy 
 that verges on pity, or toward the judicial attitude 
 that verges on satire. The character is presented 
 without comment, and left for us to enjoy or over- 
 look. There is no attempt to make her see her 
 own weaknesses or suffer for them; there is not 
 even any sign that the other persons in the play 
 consider her comic. She is, as it were, taken for 
 granted, as one of the comic things in a serious, 
 if not a tragic, world. Be it noted that this abso- 
 lutely non-committal presentation of a comic char- 
 acter is rather rare, even in Shakespeare, — still 
 rarer outside his works. It is found in Moli^re 
 and momentarily in Congreve, but each of these 
 writers quickly relapses into the judicial attitude. 
 
 One remove away from this non-committal 
 162 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT IN COMEDY 1 63 
 
 manner of presentation toward the judicial type 
 is the character-treatment in Love's Labour's Lost 
 The comic theme is found in the contrast between 
 vows and performance, befween pretence and 
 reality. It is treated in three ways. First, in 
 Costard, we have the natural "hian, not aspiring, 
 indeed, but honest; his relations with Jaquenetta 
 are entirely naive. In contrast with him, Armadd.* 
 is presented, who enforces with great parade of 
 superiority the sentence pronounced upon Costard, 
 and the next moment proceeds to outdo Costard 
 in transgression. Note, however, that the author 
 lets him go without exposure, content with the 
 simple exhibition of his character. Finally, there 
 are the four forsworn gentlemen. The contrast 
 between their vow and their performance is first 
 developed, as in Armado's case; but when each 
 attempts to play the part of righteous censor of 
 his fellow, he is caught, and his hypocrisy is ex- 
 posed. This is the first moral check. The second 
 comes in the last act, where the ladies' practical 
 joke accentuates the lesson, and there results in 
 the case of Biron a veritable " reformed character," 
 making his recantation : 
 
 " Oh, never will I trust to speeches penn'd, 
 Nor to the motion of a schoolboy's tongue, 
 Nor never come in vizard to my friend, 
 Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper's song ! 
 Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, 
 Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation. 
 
1 64 TECHNIQUE 
 
 I do forswear them ; and I here protest, 
 
 ******* 
 Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd 
 In russet yeas and honest kersey noes." i 
 
 From the g entle irony of this play th e transition 
 is clear, though the step is a long one, to Jonson's 
 satiric treatment of human infirmity. Jonson, in 
 theory at least, was before all else the moralist, 
 conscious of his calling. Comedy was to him a 
 means, not an end, and he never wearied of re- 
 peating his creed: 
 
 "The ends of all, who for the stage do write. 
 Are, or should be, to profit and delight." ^ 
 
 The "profit" is to be gained from the exposure of 
 folly and villany, the "delight," presumably, from 
 our perception of the masterly way in which the 
 playwright accomplishes his task, if not also from 
 the somewhat questionable pleasure of laughing at 
 the weaknesses of others. Evidently with such 
 a theory it depends chiefly on the natural temper 
 of the writer and on the character of the society in 
 which he is thrown, whether his work will be pure 
 satire or satiric comedy. Jonson's temper had in 
 it a touch of bitterness from which Moliere's is 
 free, and there is a corresponding difference in the 
 work of the two writers. Both deal with folly; 
 both have the consciousness of superiority to folly, 
 which is by no means inconsistent with true no- 
 bility of soul; but the Frenchman had always a 
 
 1 Love's Labour's Lost, V, 2. 
 
 2 The Silent Woman, Prologue. 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT IN COMEDY 1 65 
 
 philosophic sweetness of spirit that the English- 
 man seldom showed. 
 
 Yet in Jonson's work there are degrees. His 
 first typical comedy, Every Man in His Humour, 
 does, as its prologue promises, 
 
 " Sport with human follies, not with crimes," 
 
 and though it distinctly bears the judicial stamp, 
 the judgments are, for Jonson, gentle, and do not 
 overbalance the flavor of comedy. In his next 
 play, Every Man Out of His Humourj there is a 
 marked increase in bitterness, while, to enforce 
 his moral lessons, the writer creates a character 
 (Asper in the induction, Macilente in the play) 
 whose qualities are nearly Jonson's own, and 
 through whose mouth the author makes his satiric 
 comments on the persons of the play. In the 
 two following comedies, Cynthia^s Revels and The 
 Poetaster^ the office of author's spokesman is filled 
 respectively by Critesvfor-^i^ first and by Horace 
 for the second. In these two plays, moreover, 
 the tone is yet more bitter — at times venomous 
 — and the satire even degenerates, as satire is 
 always in danger of doing, into personal attack by 
 the author on his personal enemies. Cynthia's 
 Revels is chiefly interesting because it shows almost 
 all the faults that ever bese't this type of comedy. 
 Its treatment is labored and elaborate. It sets 
 before us, on the one hand, a number of persons 
 showing various kinds and degrees of folly and 
 vice; on the other, a number of persons embody- 
 
l66 TECHNIQUE 
 
 ing contrasting virtues; while, that the intent may 
 be perfectly clear, Crites is turned loose upon the 
 company to expose folly and convict the sinners 
 of their sin. At the end comes their recantation, 
 curiously suggesting that of Biron quoted above : 
 
 "Amorpkus. From Spanish shrugs, French faces, smirks, 
 irpes, and all affected humors, 
 
 Chorus. Good Mercury defend us. 
 
 Phantaste. From secret friends, sweet servants, loves, 
 doves, and such fantastic humors, 
 
 Chorus. Good Mercury defend us," etc., etc.^ 
 
 The taint of personal bitterness does not, how- 
 ever, mar all of Jonson's work. In Volpone the 
 dramatic artist is plainly dominant, and the play 
 is an example of dramatic satire, perfect of its 
 kind, and possessed of a tone which is earnest 
 without being bitter, moral without being self- 
 righteous, and whose comic element takes the form 
 of grim irony that has in it something Titanic. 
 The play is to be classed less with comedy than 
 with what we may call satiric tragedy — such as 
 Jonson's Sejanus and Catiline y and Massinger's 
 The Roman Actor, 
 
 But thejudicial attitude need not nece ssarily 
 be a moral one. It may be mai nly in telkctual. _ 
 and one of Jonson's most brilliant productions, 
 Thf Alchemist^ teaches nothing save, possibly, " Be 
 a knave if you like, but don't be a fool." Almost 
 every person in the play is an arrant rogue, and the 
 
 1 Cynthia's Revels, Palinode. 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT IN COMEDY 1 67 
 
 one honest man is outwitted and put to shame. 
 It is a case of wit against wit, cunning against 
 cunning, and the devil take the hindmost. 
 
 It has seemed advisable to treat Jonson thus at 
 length, because he is generally acknowledged as 
 the seconji^EjQgU§lx.iij:aiaatist^.JKhile he is certainly 
 the greatest English representative of the type of 
 comedy we have been discussing. His work is, 
 moreover, peculiarly interesting because it shows 
 so many phases of the type and because, by illus- 
 trating the extreme as well as the more temperate 
 forms, it shows what is the ultimate tendency of 
 this kind of writing. 
 
 In Moliere and Congreve the judicial type of 
 comedy found a slightly different development. 
 Both have- lhe.,jsatiric note; but both are, though 
 for different reasons, free fro m the bitterness of 
 Jonson. Moliere 's exposure of the follies of the 
 social man was done with a less heavy hand, and 
 he smiled at life often where Jonson would have 
 frowned, or where at least his smile would have 
 been less sweet — more scornful. Moliere dealt 
 with somewhat the same types of men, but types 
 reflecting the difference between the French court 
 of Louis and the English society of the Stuarts, and 
 bearing the stamp of a highly organized social 
 order. His judgments are those, not of abstract 
 morality, but of a morality modified by social tra- 
 ditions. Thus, the condemnation ^f Alceste in 
 Le Misanthrope is not primarily moral, — he is 
 acknowledged to be in a way nearer right than 
 
l68 TECHNIQUE 
 
 C^limene who condemns him, — but in the society 
 where he moves he is an anomaly, and he is there- 
 fore cast out. Such a judgment is wholly foreign 
 to Jonson's modes of thinking; he would not have 
 understood it, possibly he, too, had not yet " spir- 
 itually comprehended the signification of living in 
 society."^ 
 
 Moli^re is, moreover, more sympathetic and less 
 personal. Jonson scarcely ever emancipates him- 
 self from himself, and we feel constantly in his 
 judgments the note of personality. Moliere is a 
 spirit apart, personally unaffected by the follies 
 with which he deals, and so able to look upon 
 them with the pure intellect. It is of him that 
 Meredith is thinking in his exquisite description 
 of the comic spirit: "Men's future upon earth 
 does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness 
 in the present does; and whenever they wax out 
 of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, 
 bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically 
 delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or 
 hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drift- 
 ing into vanities, congregating in absurdities, 
 planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; 
 whenever they are at variance with their profes- 
 sions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible 
 laws binding them in consideration one to another; 
 whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; 
 are false in humility or mined with conceit, indi- 
 vidually, or in the bulk — the Spirit overhead will 
 
 1 Meredith : An Essay oh Comedy, p. 69. 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT IN COMEDY 1 69 
 
 look humanely malign and cast an oblique light 
 on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. 
 That is the Comic Spirit. ... To feel its pres- 
 ence and to see it is your assurance that many sane 
 and solid minds are with you in what you are ex- 
 periencing : and this of itself spares you the pain 
 of satirical heat, and the bitter craving to strike 
 heavy blows. You share the sublime of wrath, 
 that would not have hurt the foolish, but merely 
 demonstrate their foolishness." ^ 
 
 The "pain of satirical heat," and the "bitter 
 craving to strike heavy blows," was Jonson's, not 
 Moliere's. 
 
 Congreve's comedy is yet different. He exposes 
 folly with flashing wit, but he has neither the 
 strenuous morality of Jonson, nor the philosophic 
 aloofness of Moliere. His tolerance is that of the 
 experienced man of the world, and his judgments 
 are those of the man of the world. 
 
 There is another aspect under which the treat- 
 ment of character must be considered. To go back 
 once more to the imperfection in character, it has 
 been seen that, if this is to appear comic, the\ 
 imperfection considered as incongruity~'must be/a 
 emphasized. This may be done whire"iB'e charac- 
 ter, as a whole, may still be kept in view — this is 
 Shakespeare's way; or the rest of the character 
 may be relatively disregarded or altogether ignored, 
 and the imperfections on which the comic effect is 
 
 1 />., pp. 83-85. 
 
170 TECHNIQUE 
 
 based will thus be made to stand out by themselves. 
 If this goes far enough, the result will be personi- 
 fication of the imperfection, which is now con- 
 sidered as a positive quality — jealousy, vanity, 
 boastfulness, choler, greed. When less pro- 
 nounced, the result is at least an emphasis on the 
 character considered as a type rather than as an 
 individual. Jonson furnishes in all his plays, ex- 
 cept perhaps The Alchemist and Bartholomew 
 Fairy abundant illustration of this tendency to 
 present the type, while in The Magnetic Lady 
 and The Staple of News he actually passes over 
 into personification, and the drama lapses, in 
 parts, into allegory. Thus here, again, the author's 
 weaker and less-balanced work shows what is its 
 ultimate tendency. 
 \ To the comedy which treats character in this 
 
 way has been given the name "comedy of humors," 
 from the use of the word "humor" by its repre- 
 sentative, Jonson. He has himself well defined 
 his use of the term : 
 
 " As when some one peculiar quality 
 Doth so possess a inaii that it doth draw 
 All his effects, his spirits, and his powers, 
 In their confluctions, all to run one way. 
 This may be truly said to be a humor," ^ 
 
 and these lines are a fair description of the extent 
 to which he s elects and isolates characteristics, and 
 exaggerates them somewhat for the purposes of his 
 
 \ 
 
 1 Every Man Out of His Humour, Induction. 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT IN COMEDY I7I 
 
 treatments Coleridge's description of Jonson's 
 method is worth placing beside Jonson's own, if 
 we do not allow ourselves to be misled by it : 
 
 "Jonson's [characters] are either a man with a 
 huge wen, having a circulation of its own, and 
 which we might conceive amputated, and the 
 patient thereby losing all his character; or they are 
 mere wens themselves instead of men — wens per- 
 sonified, or with eyes, nose, and mouth cut out, 
 mandrake fashion." ^ 
 
 Taken as censure, the above is true only of Jon- 
 son's inferior work; taken as merely descriptive of 
 a characteristic tendency, it is true of all his work 
 except parts of Bartholomew Fair and The Alche- 
 mist, But it is equally true of Moliere, and of 
 Menander, so far as we know him through Terence. 
 
 It is rather curious that the extreme tendencies 
 of this kind of comedy should be things so diverse 
 as personal invective and allegory. Their sources, 
 however, are different, the one having its origin 
 in temperamental conditions, the other in intel- 
 lectual; for the morally judicial temper easily 
 passes over into the personally scornful, while the 
 perception of the faults that produce asymmetry 
 and disproportion in character readily drifts into 
 an excogitation of abstract qualities. 
 
 Neither of these tendencies appears to be found 
 in the non-judicial comedy. It is less analytic, 
 and while emphasizing single aspects of individu- 
 ality it keeps in view the individual. Instead of 
 
 1 Coleridge : Literary Remains, Vol. II, p. 379. 
 
1/2 TECHNIQUE 
 
 the diagrammatic definition of the type, it presents 
 the definiteness of the concrete instance. The 
 contrast between the two methods suggests the 
 difference between the philosophic and the artistic 
 habit, though the parallel cannot be pressed too 
 far. 
 
 This is the method of Shakespeare as contrasted 
 with that of Jonson. M olfere is somewhere be- 
 tween the two. That he, lik e Jonson^ tends to 
 portra y the type is su ggested even by the titles of 
 his plays, The Hypocrite^ The Miser, The Misan- 
 thrope; but his work does not show the extremes 
 that are found in Jonson, " He seized his charac- 
 ters firmly for the central purpose of the play, 
 stamped them in the idea, and by slightly raising 
 and softening the object of study . . . general- 
 ized upon it so as to make it permanently human." ^ 
 
 It is to be noted that the tendency toward the _ 
 judicial and the tendency toward the typical are 
 found toget ner predomin ating in those dramatists 
 in whose plays the comic interests constitute the 
 main plot. This is, it would seem, not a mere 
 coincidence. For there is probably a connection 
 between the judicial attitude and the analytic, 
 type-constructing habit of mind, and there is a 
 connection between these and the kind of mind 
 that constructs such plots. For the kind of mind 
 that sees things in the form of schemes and dia- 
 grams, that tends to transform character into char- 
 
 1 Meredith : An Essay on Comedy, p. 14. 
 
CHARACTER-TREATMENT IN COMEDY 1/3 
 
 acteristic, will find it natural to construct the sort 
 of plot that suits such treatment. This may be 
 one reason why Jonson invented most of his plots; 
 it may also be a reason why comic authors of his 
 type (Moli^re, Chapman) often borrowed their 
 comic plots from Plautus and Terence. For these 
 plots, or their Greek model, were originally con- 
 structed to fit this sort of comic effect, which may 
 account for the character of the plots, an ingenious 
 complexity, a certain premeditated air and lack 
 of spontaneity, for this is to be referred back to 
 the temper of mind of the author. 
 
 On the other hand , the comedy of sympathy is 
 found b est in those writers who are also tragic, and 
 often it occurs in the mids t of tragedy it$ g]ff as in 
 Lear, And this, too, is intelligible, if we remem- 
 ber how easily the sympathetic comedy passes into 
 the pathetic and the tragic. Perhaps this is why 
 the sudden transitions from tragedy or pathos to 
 this kind of comedy does not shock us, but, accord- 
 ing to its use, either relieves or heightens the 
 tragic effect. Perhaps, too, it was from some such 
 point of view that Plato suggested ^ that the genius 
 of comedy was the same as that of tragedy. Both 
 deal with contrasts, and given the presence of sym- 
 pathy it is sometimes hard to say where comedy 
 ceases and tragedy begins. It is, moreover, easy 
 to understand why such comedy, being concrete 
 and individual, does not demand a plot made 
 
 1 Plato : The Symposium, 324. 
 
174 TECHNIQUE 
 
 especially for it, but more naturally occurs as inci- 
 dental to any and every plot-action. 
 
 In general, an author does not produce both 
 kinds of comedy. There are, however, instances 
 where he wavers between the two; Shakespeare's 
 early comedies seem to show such a wavering, 
 while in Ben Jonson's case it is probable that his 
 romantic comedy. The Case is Altered^ was in hand 
 at about the same time as Every Man in His 
 Humour, Conversely, Shakespeare's Malvolio 
 "sick of self-love" is an instance of reversion to 
 a method of treatment which his mature work had 
 apparently long before abandoned, and the episode 
 of Sir Andrew's duel, also in Twelfth Nighty was 
 enough in Jonson's style to serve as model for an 
 incident in The Silent Woman. Such instances 
 — and they might be multiplied — only go to show 
 that men's minds do not come in fixed moulds or 
 move in fixed grooves. But, in general, it is ap- 
 parent that the two ways of character-treatment, 
 like the two kinds of plots, and the two attitudes 
 toward character, are the outcome of two different 
 types of mind. 
 
 
 
 
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BIBLIOGRAPHIES 
 
 I. LIST OF BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THIS 
 VOLUME 
 
 Amiel, H. F. : Journal. London, 1889. 
 
 Aristotle : Poetics. Ed. S. H. Butcher. London, 1895. 
 
 Brandes, G. : William Shakespeare, A Critical Study. New 
 
 York, 1898. 
 Coleridge, S. T. : Literary Remains. Ed. H. N. Coleridge. 
 
 London, 1836. 
 Congreve, William : Comedies. Ed. W. E. Henley. Chicago 
 
 and London, 1895. 
 Corbin, John : The Elizabethan Hamlet. London and New 
 
 York, 1895. 
 Corneille, Pierre: CEuvres. Ed. Mary-Laveaux. Paris, 
 
 1862. 
 Fischer, Rudolf: Zur Kunstentwicklung der Englischen 
 
 Tragodie von ihren ersten Anfangen bis zu Shakespeare. 
 
 Strasburg, 1893. 
 Freytag, Gustav: Die Technik des Dramas. Leipzig, 1894. 
 Marshall, H. R. : Pain, Pleasure, and Esthetics. New York, 
 
 1894. 
 '^Meredith, George : An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of 
 
 the Comic Spirit. New York, 1897. 
 Paget, Violet (Vernon Lee) : Studies of the Eighteenth 
 
 Century in Italy. London, 1887. 
 Plato: The Dialogues. Trans. B. Jowett. New York and 
 
 London, 1892. 
 
 *75 
 
iy6 BIBLIOGRAPHIES 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip : Defense of Poesy. Ed. Albert S. Cook, 
 
 Boston, 1890. 
 Shelley, P. B. : The Cenci. 
 Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, with critical notes, 
 
 commentary, and translation in English prose. R. C. 
 
 Jebb. Cambridge, 1894. 
 Ulrici, H. : Shakespeare's Dramatic Art. Trans. L. D. 
 
 Schmitz. London, 1876. 
 Wendell, Barrett : William Shakespeare. 
 Woodbridge, E. : Studies in Jonson's Comedy. Boston, 
 
 1898. 
 
 II. LIST OF TREATISES DEALING WITH 
 DRAMATIC THEORY AND CRITICISM 1 
 
 Archer, William : About the Theatre. Essays and Studies. 
 
 London, 1886. 
 
 , English Dramatists of To-day. London, 1882. 
 
 Everett, C. C: Poetry, Comedy, and Duty. New York, 
 
 1890. 
 Fitzgerald, Percy: Principles of Comedy and Dramatic 
 
 Effect. London, 1870. 
 NJFreytag, Gustav : The Technique of, the Drama. Trans. 
 
 E. J. MacEwan. Chicago, 1895. 
 Hazlitt, William : English Comic Writers. Lecture VIII. 
 Hennequin, Alfred: The Art of Play writing. Boston, 1891. 
 Hugo, Victor : Prefaces to Cromwell and Hernani (written 
 
 1827, 1830). j 
 
 Hunt, Leigh: Dramatic Essays. Ed. William Archer and 
 
 R. W. Lowe. London, 1896. 
 Irving, Henry: The Drama. New York, 1892. 
 Jones, Henry Arthur: The Renascence of the English 
 
 Drama. London, 1895. 
 
 1 For references on English drama, cf. the excellent bibliog- 
 raphy by K. L. Bates and L. B. Godfrey, Wellesley College, 1896. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHIES I// 
 
 Lamb, Charles : Dramatic Essays. Ed. Brander Matthews. 
 
 New York, 1891. 
 Morris, Mowbray : Essays in Theatrical Criticism. London, 
 
 1882. 
 Meredith, George : An Essay on Comedy, and the Uses of 
 
 the Comic Spirit. New York, 1897. 
 Moulton, R. G. : Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist. Oxford, 
 
 1889. 
 Polti, Georges: Les Trente-six Situations Dramatiques. 
 
 Paris, 1895. 
 Prolss, R. : Katechismus der Dramaturgic. Leipzig, 1877. 
 Shaw, G. B. : Articles on the drama in the Saturday Review 
 
 up to 1898. 
 Souriau, Maurice : De la Convention dans la Tragedie Clas- 
 
 sique et dans le Drame Romantique. Paris, 1885. 
 Thoma, A. : Das Drama. Gotha, 1891. 
 Wagner, Wilhelm Richard: Oper und Drama. Leipzig, 
 
 1852. 
 Walkley, A. B. : Playhouse Impressions. London, 1892. 
 
 III. LIST OF WORKS THAT WILL BE OF VALUE 
 IN THE STUDY OF CLASSICAL DRAMA 1 
 
 Butcher, S. H. : Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 
 
 with a critical text and a translation of the Poetics. 
 
 London and New York, 1895; ^d ed., 1898. 
 
 , Some Aspects of the Greek Genius. 
 
 Campbell, Lewis: A Guide to Greek Tragedy for English 
 
 Readers. New York and London, 1891. 
 Collins, J. Churton: Menander. In Essays and Studies. 
 
 London, 1895. 
 
 1 With two exceptions, this list does not include translations 
 of the classical authors. Jebb's edition of Sophocles is men- 
 tioned because of its invaluable introductions and notes, and the 
 surpassing excellence of its translation ; the translations of Seneca 
 — the first in English since those by Lodge — are noted because 
 they are new and as yet little known. 
 N 
 
178 BIBLIOGRAPHIES 
 
 Fischer, Rudolf: Zur Kunstentwicklung der Englischen Tra- 
 godie von ihren ersten Anfangen bis zu Shakespeare. 
 Strasburg, 1893. 
 
 Freytag, Gustav: Technique of the Drama. Trans. E. J, 
 MacEwan. Chicago, 1895. 
 
 Haigh, A. E. : The Attic Theatre. Oxford, 1889. 
 
 , The Tragic Drama of the Greeks. Oxford, 1896. 
 
 Jebb, R. C. : The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek 
 Poetry. Boston and New York, 1893. 
 
 , Introductions, etc., accompanying translation of Soph- 
 ocles. 
 ^ Moulton, R. G. : The Ancient Classical Drama : A Study in 
 Literary Evolution. Oxford, 1890. 
 
 Seneca: Medea, and The Daughters of Troy. Metrical 
 translation, Ella I. Harris. Boston, 1898. 
 
 Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments. Prose translation, 
 R. C. Jebb. Cambridge, 1883-96. 
 
 Verrall, A. W. : The Student's Manual of Greek Tragedy. 
 London and New York, i8qi. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Addison, 65. 
 
 ^schylus, vii. 
 
 Amiel, 4, 44. 
 
 Aristophanes, vii, 52, 56, 65, 
 
 138 ; The Clouds, 61. 
 Aristotle, xiv, i, 10, 11, 12, 13, 
 
 XT, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 29, 31, 
 
 38,43,44,45,49, so, 62, H7, 
 
 120. 
 Arnold, 22. 
 
 Beaumont, 45. 
 
 Browning, 29, 35, 129 ; Blot in 
 the Scutcheon, 132, 133 ; Co- 
 lombe's Birthday, 132, 136; 
 Luria, 130-132; Paracelsus, 
 132; Sordello, 132; SouVs 
 Tragedy, 40, 132, 135 ; Straf- 
 ford, oh-^rj, n8, 124-125, 132. 
 
 Butcher, vii, 22. 
 
 Byron, 35. 
 
 Cervantes, 35, 66. 
 
 Chapman, 173 ; All Fools, 140. 
 
 Christ, 118. 
 
 Coleridge, 171. 
 
 Congreve, 138, 162, 167, 169. 
 
 Corneille, 11, 12-14, 16, 29. 
 
 Dante, 32, 33, 35. 
 Dickens, 65. 
 Donne, 22. 
 
 Dostoiefsky, 8-9. 
 Dryden, viii, 65. 
 
 Eliot, 65 ; Daniel Deronda, 134 ; 
 
 Middleinarch, 134; Mill on 
 
 the Floss, 134, 136; Romola, 
 
 133. 136. 
 Euripides, vii, 29, 119 ; Alkestis, 
 
 50. 
 
 Fletcher, 45. 
 
 Freytag, v-ix, xiv, 47, 76, ita, ^ 
 
 Fulda, viii, 15. 
 
 Gibbon, 17, 18. 
 
 Goethe, Faust, 41-42, 118. 
 
 Goldsmith, 65. 
 
 viii, 15; Die 
 
 Haigh, vii. 
 Hauptmann, 
 Weber, 31. 
 Hegel, 39. 
 Hobbes, 56. 
 Horace, 13. 
 Hugo, II. 
 
 Ibsen, viii, xvi, 15, 48, 85, J05, 
 124 ; Doll 's House, 135-136 ; 
 Ghosts, iq, 16, 48, 105 ; John 
 Gabriel Borkman, 15. 
 
 Jebb, vii. 
 
 179 
 
i8o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 John the Baptist, cf. Suder- 
 
 mann. 
 Jonson, 6i, 64. 65, 66, 138, 149, 
 
 158, 161, 164, 167-169, 170, 
 
 171, 172; Alche7nist, 147, 166, 
 170, 171 ; Bartholomew Fair, 
 55, 170, 171; Case is Altered, 
 174; Catiline, 48, 166; Cyn- 
 thia's Revels, 165-166 ; Every 
 Man in His Humour, 137- 
 138, 140, 165, 174; Every 
 Man out of His Hutnour, 165 ; 
 Magnetic Lady, 170; Poet- 
 aster, 165 ; Sejanus, 48, 49, 
 118-119, 166; Silent Woman, 
 140, 174; Staple of News, 
 170 ; Volpone, 49, 166. 
 
 Juvenal, 5, 65. 
 
 Keats, 35. 
 
 Kipling, Drums of the Fore and 
 Ap, 46. 
 
 Lessing, 12. 
 
 Maeterlinck, viii, 85, 132. 
 
 Marlowe, yew of Malta, 81. 
 
 Massinger, 138 ; New Way to 
 Pay Old Debts, 140-142, 144, 
 146, 147, 148, 149; Ro7nan 
 Actor, 48, 118, 166. 
 
 Menander, 171. 
 
 Meredith, 55, 64, 65, 168. 
 
 Middleton, 138. 
 
 Millet, 2. 
 
 Milton, Paradise Lost, 22, 32, 
 
 33. 35- 
 Moli^re, 55, 64, 65, 66, 138, 150, 
 158, 162, 164, 167-169, 171, 
 
 172, 173 ; L'Ecole des Maris, 
 140; Le Misanthrope, 148- 
 149, 167. 
 
 Napoleon, 18. 
 
 Orestes, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 117, 
 118, 119. 
 
 Plato, Sy7nposium, 173. 
 Plautus, 54, 56, 138, 14s, 149, 
 
 150, 152, 173. 
 Plutarch, 125. 
 Pope, 65. 
 
 Rabelais, 35,65. 
 Racine, Athalie, xv, 25-26. 
 Rostand, viii ; Cyrano de Ber- 
 gerac, 108-109. 
 
 Schiller, 29; Wallenstem, 39. 
 
 43. 44, 118. 
 Schopenhauer, 5, 19. 
 Seneca, xiv, ii, 12, 109, 123; 
 
 Medea, 95-96, 104. 
 Shakespeare, ix, xiv, 9, 12, 14, 
 
 18, 20, 29, 33, 35, 52, 61, 65, 
 
 78,96, 105, 106, no, 123, 129, 
 
 132, 135. 136. 151. 154. 159- 
 161, 169, 172, 174 ; All's Well 
 that Ends Well, 159 ; Antony 
 and Cleopatra, 15, 84-85, 88 ; 
 As You Like It, 54, 145, 154; 
 Comedy of Errors, 54, 56, 61, 
 62, 137, 138, 140, 143, 152; 
 Coriolanus, 80, 127-128, ^30, 
 131, 133, 134; Hamlet, ix, 30, 
 33> 38. 39. 42. 46, 48, 55. 6"i, . 
 79, 80, 85, 118, 119, 123, 127, 
 
 133. 13s; Henry IV, ix, 55, 
 62, 66, 137-138, 158 ; Henry V, 
 18,66; Henry VHI, 18 ; John, 
 18; Julius CcBsar, 18, 26-27, 
 79, 80, 85, 88, 90-92, 118, 
 125-126, 134 ; Lear, 14, 21, 
 23, 48, 60, 66, 74, 80, 88, 89- 
 90, 99-101, 114, 118, 126, 13s, 
 154. 173 ; Love's Labour's 
 Lost, 61, 138, 139, 140, 152, 
 154, 163-164 ; Macbeth, xiv, 7, 
 
INDEX 
 
 i8i 
 
 8, i6, i8, 36-37, 39, 40, 70, 
 72, 73. 74. 75. 79. 80, 81-83, 
 85, 86, 87, 89, 97-99, 101-104, 
 105, 109, 110, 111-112, 119, 
 123, 133, 134, 135 ; Measure 
 for Measure, 159; Merchant 
 of Venice, 81, 148 (note), 
 156-158; Merry Wives of 
 Windsor, 138, 158; Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream, 155- 
 156, 160: Othello, 23, 36, 
 37-38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48, 71- 
 72, 1Z> 74. 75. n, 80, 84, 134- 
 135, 147-148; Richard III, 
 48, 49, 80, 88, 118-119. 120, 
 123; Romeo and Juliet, 39, 
 43. 79. 80, 86, 87, 88, 90, 104, 
 I12-113, 123, 133, 145, 162; 
 Taming of the Shrew, 138; 
 Tempest, 159, 160; Twelfth 
 Night, 158, 174 ; Two Gentle- 
 men of Verona, 66, 153-155. 
 
 Shelley, 18, 29, 32; Cenci, 18, 
 34, 117, 118, 119, 127, 142. 
 
 Sidney, 52, 63. 
 
 Socrates, 118. 
 
 Sophocles, vii, 19. 29, 35, 48; 
 j4jax, 75 ; Antigone, 19, 33, 
 39-41, 42, 47, 75, 90, 117. 119, 
 120, 123, 127; Electra, 75; 
 CEdipus Coloneus, 47; CEdi- 
 pus Tyrannus, xiv, xv, 19, 28, 
 46, 48, 51, 74-75, 86, 117, 126- 
 127, 142 ; Philoctetes, 75. 
 
 Sudermann, viii, 15, 105 ; Die 
 Heimath, 15 ; Johannes, 118. 
 
 Swift, 5, 65. 
 
 Swinburne, 29. 
 
 Tennyson, 29, 35, 
 
 Terence, 54, 56, 138, 145, 150- 
 151, 152, 153, 171, 173; An- 
 dria, 151 ; HeautontimorU' 
 menos, 151. 
 
 Thackeray, 65. 
 
 Virgil, /Eneid, 22. 
 
 Wildenbruch, Heinrich und 
 Heinrich's Geschlechi, 106- 
 108, 124, 128-129, 
 
 Wordsworth, 3, 120-121. 
 
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