What can we glean about the limitations of the dramatic subject from these successful plays? There is a limitation somewhere, and the first and most obvious is--time. A novelist can make the minute description of a life interesting. The most celebrated novels, such as "Robinson Crusoe," "Vicar of Wakefield," "David Copperfield," "Pendennis," "The Three Guardsmen," and others, have been just such books, imitations of real biographies. But a play is limited in length to five acts, or six at most, and its time of acting has a practical limit of three hours, with the inter-acts. Each act is further practically limited to five scenes, and it is but seldom that it stretches over three, while the latter average is never exceeded and seldom reached in a five-act play. No scene can properly contain more than a chapter of a novel, so we find ourselves practically limited to a story which can be told inside of fifteen chapters, the further inside the better. The French, who are much more artificial than the English in their dramatic canons, almost invariably limit their acts to a single scene, reducing their story thereby to only five chapters. A careful comparison of successful acting plays will generally end in bringing us to one obvious canon:
I. The subject of a drama must be capable of being fully treated in fifteen chapters at most.
The next limitation that we meet is in the nature of the story. A novelist can describe his hero and heroine and the scenes in which they move. He can depict them in motion, and describe a long journey in strange countries, trusting to picturesque scenery and incident to help him out. He can give us a sketch of their former life, and tell how they fared after they were happily married. The dramatist cannot do this. He must put his people down in a given place and leave them there till his scene is over, opening another scene or another act after a silent interval. He can, indeed, put a narrative of supposed events into the mouth of any of his characters, but such narratives are always dull and prosy, and to be avoided. Shakespeare uses them sometimes, but only when he cannot help himself, and always makes them short. The nearest instances that occur to us are, the description by Tressel to Henry VI. of the murder of Prince Edward, usually put now in the first act of "Richard III.," and the story of Oliver in "As You Like It." Sometimes a short story cannot be helped, but if told, it is always found to be of a collateral circumstance not directly leading to the catastrophe. It generally is brought in only to explain the presence of a character on the stage in the successful drama. Sometimes it happens otherwise. For instance, Coleman makes Mortimer, in the "Iron Chest," tell the whole mystery of his life in the form of a story instead of acting it. The result is a poor play, seldom acted, and generally to small audiences, being only valuable for some special features of which we shall speak later. It is not too much to ask for acceptance of this second canon regarding the subject: