Page:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu/500

 Every action, if conceived of as complete, has its causes, growth, height, consequences and close. There is no binding law to prescribe the relative length or proportion at which these several stages in the action should be treated in a drama; or to regulate the treatment of such subsidiary actions as may be introduced in aid of the main plot, or of such more or less directly connected “episodes” as may at the same time advance and relieve its progress. But experience has necessarily from time to time established certain rules of practice, and from the adoption of particular systems of division for particular species of the drama—such as that into five acts for a regular tragedy or comedy, which Roman example has caused to be so largely followed—has naturally resulted a certain uniformity of relation between the conduct of an action and the outward sections of a play. Essentially, however, there is no difference between the laws regulating the construction of a Sophoclean or Shakespearian tragedy, a comedy of Molière or Congreve, and a well-built modern farce, because all exhibit an action complete in itself.

The “introduction” or “exposition” forms an integral part of the action, and is therefore to be distinguished from the “prologue” in the more ordinary sense of the term, which like the “epilogue” (and the Greek  ) stands outside the action, and is a mere address to the public from author, presenter or actor occasioned by the play. Prologue and epilogue are mere external, though at times effective, adjuncts, and have, properly speaking, as little to do with the construction of a play as the bill which announces it or the musical prelude which disposes the mind for its reception. A special kind of preface or argument is the “dumb-show,” which in some old plays briefly rehearses in pantomime the action that is to follow. The introduction or exposition belongs to the action itself; it is, as the Hindu critics called it, the seed or circumstance from which the business arises. Clearness being its primary requisite, many expedients have been at various times adopted to secure this feature. Thus the Euripidean prologue, though spoken by one of the characters of the play, took a narrative form, more acceptable to the audience than to the critics, and placed itself half without, half within, the action. The same purpose is served by the separate “inductions” in many of the old English plays, and by the preludes or prologues, or whatever name they may assume, in numberless modern dramas of all kinds—from Faust down to the favourites of the Ambigu and the Adelphi. More facile is the orientation supplied in French tragedy by the opening scenes between hero and confidant, and in French comedy and its derivatives by those between observant valet and knowing lady’s-maid. But all such expedients may be rendered unnecessary by the art of the dramatist, who is able outwardly also to present the introduction of his action as an organic part of that action itself; who seems to take the spectators in medias res, while he is really building the foundations of his plot; who touches in the opening of his action the chord which is to vibrate throughout its course—“Down with the Capulets! down with the Montagues!”—“With the Moor, sayest thou?”

The exposition, which may be short or long, but which should always prepare and may even seem to necessitate the action, ends when the movement of the action itself begins. This transition may occasionally be marked with the utmost distinctness (as in the actual meeting between the hero and the Ghost in Hamlet), while in other instances subsidiary action or episode may judiciously intervene (as in King Lear, where the subsidiary action of Gloster and his sons opportunely prevents too abrupt a sequence of cause and effect). From this point the second stage of the action—its “growth”—progresses to that third stage which is called its “height” or “climax.” All that has preceded the attainment of this constitutes that half of the drama—usually its much larger half—which Aristotle terms the, or tying of the knot. The varieties in the treatment of the growth or second stage of the action are infinite; it is here that the greatest freedom is manifestly permissible; that in the Indian drama the personages make long journeys across the stage; and that, with the help of their under-plots, the masters of the modern tragic and the comic drama—notably those unequalled weavers of intrigues, the Spaniards—are able most fully to exercise their inventive faculties. If the growth is too rapid, the climax will fail of its effect; if it is too slow, the interest will be exhausted before the greatest demand upon it has been made—a fault to which comedy is specially liable; if it is involved or inverted, a vague uncertainty will take the place of an eager or agreeable suspense, the action will seem to halt, or a fall will begin prematurely. In the contrivance of the “climax” itself lies one of the chief tests of the dramatist’s art; for while the transactions of real life often fail to reach any climax at all, that of a dramatic action should present itself as self-evident. In the middle of everything, says the Greek poet, lies the strength; and this strongest or highest point it is the task of the dramatist to make manifest. Much here depends upon the niceties of constructive instinct; much (as in all parts of the action) upon a thorough dramatic transformation of the subject. The historical drama at this point presents peculiar difficulties, of which the example of Henry VIII. may be cited as an illustration.

From the climax, or height, the action proceeds through its “fall” to its “close,” which in a drama with an unhappy ending we still call its “catastrophe,” while to terminations in general we apply the term dénouement. This latter name would, however, more properly be applied in the sense in which Aristotle employs its Greek equivalent  —the untying of the knot—to the whole of the second part of the action, from the climax downwards. In the management of the climax, everything depends upon producing the effect; in the fall, everything depends upon not marring it. This may be ensured by a rapid advance to the close; but neither does every action admit of such treatment, nor is it in accordance with the character of those which are of a more subtle or complicated kind. With the latter, therefore, the “fall” is often a revolution or “return,” i.e. in Aristotle’s phrase a change into the reverse of what is expected from the circumstances of the action ( )—as in Coriolanus, where the Roman story lends itself so admirably to dramatic demands. In any case, the art of the dramatist is in this part of his work called upon for the surest exercise of its tact and skill. The effect of the climax was to concentrate the interest; the fall must therefore, above all, avoid dissipating it. The use of episodes is not even now excluded; but, even where serving the purpose of relief, they must now be such as help to keep alive the interest, previously raised to its highest pitch. This may be effected by the raising of obstacles between the height of the action and its expected consequences; in tragedy by the suggestion of a seemingly possible recovery or escape from them (as in the wonderfully powerful construction of the latter part of Macbeth); in comedy, or wherever the interest of the action is less intense, by the gradual removal of incidental difficulties. In all kinds of the drama “discovery” will remain, as it was in the judgment of Aristotle, a most effective expedient; but it should be a discovery prepared by that method of treatment which in its consummate master, Sophocles, has been termed his “irony.” Nowhere should the close or catastrophe be other than a consequence of the action itself. Sudden revulsions from the conditions of the action—such as are supplied with the aid of the deus ex machina, or the revising officer of the emperor of China, or the nabob returned from India, or a virulent malaria—condemn themselves as unsatisfactory makeshifts. However sudden, and even in manner of accomplishment surprising, may be the catastrophe, it should, like every other part of the action, be in organic connexion with the whole preceding action. The sudden suicides which terminate so many tragedies, and the unmerited paternal blessings which close an equal number of comedies, should be something more than a “way out of it,” or a signal for the fall of the curtain. A catastrophe may conveniently, and even (as in