[31] J. W. Luce & Co., Boston; Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., London.
[32] J. W. Luce & Co., Boston; Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., London.
[38] _Plays of Thomas Middleton._ Mermaid Series. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York.
[39] _Works of Beaumont and Fletcher_, vol. IV. Whalley & Colman, eds. 1811.
[40] _The Mollusc._ H. H. Davies. Walter H. Baker & Co., Boston; W. Heinemann, London.
[41] _Lettres sur les Anglais_, Lettre XIX, _Sur la Comédie_, p. 170. A. Basle, 1734.
[42] _Hamburg Dramaturgy_, p. 265. Bohn ed.
FROM SUBJECT TO PLOT: PROPORTIONING THE MATERIAL: NUMBER AND LENGTH OF ACTS
A dramatist, proportioning his rough story for performance in the limited space of time the stage permits, faces at once the question: "How many acts?" If inexperienced, noting the number of changes of set his story seems to demand he finds himself in a dilemma: to give an act to each change of scene is to break the play into many scrappy acts of a few minutes each; to crowd all his needed scenes into five acts is to get scenes as scrappy as the eight which make the fifth act of Shakespeare's _Macbeth_ or the ten in Act IV of _Henry VI_, Part II. In either case, if he gives his numerous scenes adequate treatment, he is likely to find their combined length forces him beyond the time limit the theatre allows--about two hours and a half.
Let him rid himself immediately of any feeling that custom or dramatic dignity calls for any preference among three, four, or five acts. The Elizabethan drama put such a spell upon the imagination of English-speaking peoples that until recently the idea was accepted: "Five is dignity, with a trailing robe, whereas one, two, or three acts would be short skirts, and degrading."[1] Today a dramatist may plan for a play of three, four, or five acts, as seems to him best.
Why, if no change of scene be required, is not a play of one long act desirable? At first sight, there would seem to be a gain in the unbroken movement. The power of sustained attention in audiences is, however, distinctly limited. Any one who has seen a performance of _The Trojan Women_[2] by Euripides, or von Hofmannsthal's _Electra_[3] needs no further proof that though each makes a short evening's entertainment it is exhausting because of uninterrupted movement from start to finish. To plays of one long act most audiences become unresponsive from sheer physical fatigue. Consequently, use has confined one-act plays to subjects that may be treated in fifteen minutes to an hour, with an average length of from twenty to forty-five minutes. Strindberg has stated well the problem which the play in one long act involves: "I have tried," he wrote in his Introduction to _Miss Julia_, "to abolish the division into acts. And I have done so because I have come to fear that our decreasing capacity for illusion might be unfavorably affected by intermissions during which the spectator would have time to reflect and to get away from the suggestive influence of the author-hypnotist. My play will probably last an hour and a half, and as it is possible to listen that length of time, or longer, to a lecture, a sermon, or a debate, I have imagined that a theatrical performance could not become fatiguing in the same time. As early as 1872, in one of my first dramatic experiments, _The Outlaw_, I tried the same concentrated form, but with scant success. The play was written in five acts, and wholly completed, when I became aware of the restless, scattered effect it produced. Then I burned it, and out of the ashes rose a single, well-built act, covering fifty printed pages, and taking an hour for its performance. Thus the form of the present play is not new, but it seems to be my own, and changing aesthetical conventions may possibly make it timely.