For ultimate convincingness no play can rise above the level of its characterization. The playwright who works for only momentary success may doubtless depend upon the onward rush of events, in a play of strong emotion, to blind his audience to lack of motivation in his characters. John Fletcher is the great leader of these opportunists of the theatre. Evadne, in _The Maid's Tragedy_,[16] killing the King, is a very different woman from the Evadne who gladly became his mistress. Nor are the reproaches and exhortations of her brother Melantius powerful enough to change a woman of her character so swiftly and completely. An audience, absorbed in the emotion of the moment, may overlook such faults of characterization in the theatre. As it reviews the play in calmer mood, however, it ranks it, no matter how poetic as a whole or how well characterized in particular scenes, not as a drama which interprets life, but as mere entertainment. Even perfect characterization of some figures, when the chief are mere puppets, cannot make us accept the play as more than pure fiction. In Thomas Heywood's _A Woman Killed with Kindness_ and _English Traveler_,[17] if the erring wives and their lovers were only as well characterized as the fine-spirited husbands, the servants, and youths like Young Geraldine, the plays might hold the stage today. Doubtless the actor's art in the days of Elizabeth and James gave to villains like Wendoll and women like Mrs. Frankford enough verisimilitude to make the plays far more convincing than they are in the reading. But try as we may, we cannot understand from the text either of these characters. Their motivation is totally inadequate; that is, their conduct seems not to grow out of their characters. Rather, they are the creatures of any situation into which the dramatist wishes to thrust them.
This need of motivation may be fundamental, that is, the characters may seem to an audience unconvincing from the start; or may be evident in some insufficiently explained change, transition in character; or may appear only in the last scene of the play, where characters hitherto consistent are made to act in a way which seems to the audience improbable. When Nathaniel Rowe produced his _Ambitious Stepmother_ in 1700, Charles Gildon bitterly attacked it as unconvincing in its very fundamentals.