When a dramatist faces the need to represent on stage, a passage of time which could not in real life be coincident with the action of the scene, he must (_a_) hypnotize an audience by a long scene of complicated and absorbing emotion into thinking that the required time has passed; or (_b_) must discover some motive sufficiently strong to account for a swift change in feeling; (_c_) or must get his person or persons off stage and write what is known as a "Cover Scene."
An audience led through an intense emotional experience does not mark accurately the passage of time. Make the emotional experience protracted, as well as absorbing, and you may imply or even state that any reasonable length of time has passed. The fearful agony of _Faustus_ so grips an audience that it loses track of the time necessary for the speech, or would, were it not for the unfortunate emphasis on the actual time: "Ah, half the hour is passed; 'twill all be passed anon"; "The clock strikes twelve." In _Hamlet_, the fourth act takes place during the absence of Hamlet in England. By its many intensely moving happenings, it makes an auditor willing to believe that Hamlet has been absent for a long time, when in reality he has been on the stage within a half hour. Such time fillings may, of course, be a portion of a scene, a whole scene, or even a whole act. In most cases, it is quite impossible that the time really requisite and the time of action should coincide. The business of the dramatist is to make the audience feel as if the time had passed--to create an illusion of time.
The second method of meeting the time difficulty, finding motivation of some marked change in character or circumstances which permits it to be as swift as it is on the stage, is best treated in the next chapter.
In _The Russian Honeymoon_,[23] a play once very popular with amateurs, there is bad handling of a time difficulty. The hero, going out in his peasant costume, must return after a few speeches, in full regimentals. A lightning change of costume is, therefore, necessary. More than once this lack of a proper Cover Scene has caused an awkward wait at this point in the play. Mark the absurdly short time Steele, in his _Conscious Lovers_ allows Isabella for bringing Bevil Junior on stage. Apparently, the latter and all his group must have been waiting at the end of the corridor.