Otway, in _Venice Preserved_, handles passage of time admirably. Toward the end of the first act, Pierre makes an appointment with Jaffier to meet him that night on the Rialto at twelve. Exit Pierre. Immediately Belvidera enters to Jaffier. Their talk, only about four pages in length, is so passionately pathetic that a hearer loses all accurate sense of time. There is an _entr'acte_, and then a scene between Pierre and Aquilina. Again it is brief, only three and a half pages, but it is dramatic, and complicates the story. Consequently, when Jaffier does meet Pierre on the Rialto, we are quite ready to believe that considerable time has passed and it is now twelve o'clock. Otway has used three devices to cover a time space: an absorbing emotional scene, an _entr'acte_, and a Cover Scene.[26]
All the methods just described have had to do with representing time on stage. When time necessary for the telling of a story may be treated as passing off stage, other devices may be used. Most of them gather about a dropping of the curtain. Recently there has been much use of the curtain to denote, without change of set, the passing of some relatively brief time. When a group of people leave the stage for dinner, the curtain is dropped, to rise again as the group, returning from dinner, take up the action of the play. Just this occurs in Act I of Pinero's _Iris_.[27] Mr. Belasco, in _The Woman_, dropped the curtain at the beginning of a cross examination, to raise it for the next act as the examination nears its climax. In _The Silver Box_,[28] dropping the curtain twice in Act I makes it possible to see the Barthwicks' dining-room "just after midnight," "at eight-thirty A.M.," and at "the breakfast hour of Mr. and Mrs. Barthwick." Such curtains, though justifiable, have one serious objection. They bring us back with a jolt from absorbed following of the play to the disturbing truth that we are not looking at life, but at life selectively presented under obvious limitations of the stage. Scene 1 of _The Silver Box_, which began "just after midnight," lasts only a few minutes; yet when the curtain "rises again at once," we are to understand that eight hours have elapsed.
The simplest method of handling time off stage is to treat it as having elapsed between acts or on the dropping of a curtain within an act.[29] In how many, many plays--for instance, Sir Arthur Pinero's early _Lady Bountiful_--has the hero, in whatever length of time between the fourth and fifth acts the dramatist has preferred, become the regenerated figure of the last act! All that is needed in _The Man Who Came Back_, as produced, to change the dope-ridden, degenerating youth into a firm character, even into a landed proprietor, is a sea voyage from San Francisco to Honolulu--and an _entr'acte_! What takes place between acts is far too often--medicinally, morally, dare we say dramatically?--more significant than what we see. Yet why deride this refuge of the dramatist? Such use is merely an extension of what we permit any dramatist who, writing two plays on the same subject or person, implies or states that very many years have elapsed between the two parts. No one seriously objects when thousands of years are supposed to elapse between the _Prometheus Bound_ and the _Prometheus Unbound_ of Æschylus.[30] Surely, it is logical to treat spaces between acts like spaces between plays on related subjects. The trouble lies, not in the time supposed to have elapsed, but in the changes of character said to have taken place. As long as our drama was primarily story, and not, as it has come to be increasingly, a revealer of character, we were content, if each act contained a thrilling dramatic incident, to be told that this or that had happened between the acts. The early drama did this by the Dumb Show and the Chorus.