There is little more clear and positive to be said about the first act. Study of the best models will reveal many points inherent in all, but no general rules so clear as those of brevity, action, and suspense. The practical limit of time is from fifteen to thirty minutes, the medium of twenty being common to mono-scenic acts, but on this no positive canon can be ascertained. It depends on the interest, and only this general rule is partially true, that no interest can carry an audience through a first act of forty-five minutes.
We next come to the middle acts of the play, and here again general rules are hard to find. The number of acts varies so much that nothing positive can be said except as regards fixed lengths of drama. Treating all between the first and last acts as a whole, the first certain rule that meets us is this truism:
XI. From the second to the last act the interest must be regularly increased, and each act must end in suspense, leading to the next.
Without an observance of this rule no play can ever be permanently successful as a general thing. There have been some poor plays with little interest, that have been bolstered up for a time by the force of a single character, portrayed by a peculiar actor, but in that case the play becomes a mere "star play," not amenable to the common rules, and useless out of the hands of the peculiar star who owns it. Of such are those multiform dramas, constantly varying, of which Mr. Sothern makes Lord Dundreary and Sam the central figures. The actor found he had made a lucky hit in his character, and he hired out the work of altering the play to any sort of literary hacks, so that he himself is really the creator of the plays, and when he dies they will die. In the "American Cousin," as it was first played, the interest lay entirely in Asa Trenchard, and the drama was very skilfully constructed, with ascending interest, to develop the ideal Yankee. In that part Jefferson made his first public hit. As soon as he found that Dundreary had stolen the play from its hero, Jefferson was wise enough to drop the contest between high comedy and broad farce, in which the latter must conquer when they come together. By taking up the ideal Dutchman (or rather German, as he makes it) in Rip Van Winkle, he created a part of which no one can deprive him, but which will probably die with him. No one else has succeeded with it to the same degree, and "Rip Van Winkle" stands as a model of a successful star play, wherein all the interest hangs on a single character.