Chapter VII Characterization
In drama, undoubtedly the strongest immediate appeal to the general public is action. Yet if a dramatist is to communicate with his audience as he wishes, command of dialogue is indispensable. The permanent value of a play, however, rests on its characterization. Characterization focuses attention. It is the chief means of creating in an audience sympathy for the subject or the people of the play. “A Lord,” “A Page,” in a pre-Shakespearean play usually was merely a speaker of lines and little, if at all, characterized. When Robert Greene or his contemporaries adapted such sources for their stage, with sure instinct for creating a greater interest in their public, they changed these prefixes to “Eustace,” “Jacques,” “Nano,” etc. Merely changing the name from type to individual called for individualization of character and usually brought it. Indeed, in drama, individualization is always the sign of developing art. In any country, the history of modern drama is a passing, under the influence of the audience, from abstractions and personifications, through type, to individualized character. In the Trope, cited p. 17, one Mary cannot be distinguished from another. In a later form it is not a particular unguent seller who meets the Maries on the way to the tomb, but a type,—Unguent Seller. When a writer of a Miracle Play first departed a little from the exact actions and dialogue of the Bible, it was to add abstractions—Justice, Virtue, etc.—or types: soldiers, shepherds, etc. From these he moved quickly or slowly, as he was more or less endowed dramatically, to figures individualized from types, such as the well-characterized shepherds of the Second Towneley Play. The Morality illustrates this same evolution even more clearly. Beginning with the pure abstractions of Mundus et Infans or Mankind it passes through type characterization in Lusty Juventus or Hyckescorner to as well individualized figures as Delilah and Ishmael in The Nice Wanton.1 Abstractions permit an author to say what he pleases with the least possible thought for characterization. Type presents characteristics so marked that even the unobservant cannot have failed to discern them in their fellow men. Individualization differentiates within the types, running from broad distinctions to presentation of very subtle differences. Because individualization moves from the known to the less known or the unknown, it is harder for an audience to follow than type characterization, and far more difficult to write. However, he who cannot individualize character must keep to the broader kinds of melodrama and farce, and above all to that last asylum of time-honored types—musical comedy.
Fundamentally, type characterization rests on a false premise, namely, that every human being may be adequately represented by some dominant characteristic or small group of closely related characteristics. All the better recent drama emphasizes the comic or tragic conflict in human beings caused by many contradictory impulses and ideas, some mutually exclusive, some negativing others to a considerable extent, some apparently dormant for a time, yet ready to spring into great activity at unforeseen moments. Ben Jonson carried the false idea to an extreme when he wrote of his “humour” comedies:
In every human body,
The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one part and are not continent,
Receive the name of humours. Now thus far
It may, by metaphor, apply itself
Unto the general disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits and his powers,
In his confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour.2
Were Ben Jonson’s physiology sound, we should have, not occasional cranks and neurotics as now, but a race of nothing else. Today modern medical science has proved the bad physiology of his words, and dramatists have followed its lead.
What gave the type drama its great hold, in the Latin comedy of Plautus and Terence, in Ben Jonson and other Elizabethans, what keeps it alive today in the less artistic forms—broad farce, pure melodrama—is fourfold. Type characterization, exhibiting a figure wholly in one aspect, or through a small group of closely related characteristics, is easy to understand. Secondly, it is both easy to create, and, as Ben Jonson’s great following between 1605 and 1750 proves, even easier to imitate. Thirdly, farce and melodrama, indeed all drama depending predominantly on mere situation, may succeed, though lacking individualization of character, with any audience which, like the Roman or the Elizabethan, gladly hears the same stories or sees the same figures handled differently by different writers. Much in the plays of Reade, Tom Taylor, and Bulwer-Lytton3 which passed, in the mid-nineteenth century, for real life, depending as it did on a characterization which barely rose above type, was only thinly disguised melodrama. The recent increasing response of the public to better characterization in both farce and melodrama has tended to lift the former into comedy, the latter into story-play and tragedy. Just here appears a fourth reason for the popularity of characterization by types. Though entertaining plays may be presented successfully with type characterization only, no dramatist with inborn or acquired ability to characterize, can hold consistently to types. Observation, interpretative insight, or a flash of sympathy will advance him now and again, as Jonson was advanced more than once, to real individualization of character. Contrast the thoroughly real Subtle, Face, and Doll of The Alchemist4 with the types, Ananias and Sir Epicure Mammon; contrast the masterly, if very brief, characterization of Ursula in Bartholomew Fair5 with the mere type of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. An uncritical audience responding to the best characterization in a play, overlooks the merely typical quality of the other figures. That is, the long vogue of types upon the stage rests upon ease of comprehension, entire adequacy for some crude dramatic forms, ease of imitation, and a constant tendency in a dramatist of ability to rise to higher levels of characterization. Now that we are more and more dissatisfied with types in plays making any claim to realism, the keen distinction first laid down by Mr. William Archer in his Play-Making becomes essential. If type presents a single characteristic or group of intimately related characteristics, “character drawing is the presentment of human nature in its commonly recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.”6 Mr. Galsworthy in The Silver Box and Justice Mr. Archer regards as a drawer of character; in Strife7 as a psychologist. He holds Sir Arthur Pinero a characterizer of great versatility who becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of feminine types—in Iris, in Letty, in the heroine of Mid-Channel.8 By this distinction, most good drama shows character drawing; only the great work, psychology.
Drama which does not rise above interest in its action rests, as has been said, on the idea that most people are simple, uncomplicated, and easy to understand. Great drama depends on a firm grasp and sure presentation of complicated character, but of course a dramatist has a perfect right to say that, though he knows his hero—Cyrano de Bergerac, for instance—may have had many characteristics, it is enough for the purpose of his play to represent the vanity, the audacity, and the underlying tenderness of the man. It is undeniable, too, that particular characteristics of ours may be so strong that other characteristics will not prevent them from taking us into sufficient dramatic complications to make a good play. In such a case, the dramatist who is not primarily writing for characterization will present the characteristics creating his desired situations, and let all others go. Conversely, he who cares most for characterization will try so to present even minor qualities that the perfect portrait of an individual will be recognized. Often, however, the happenings of a play may seem to an audience incompatible, that is, the character in one place may seem to contradict himself as presented elsewhere. Just here is where the psychologist in the dramatist, stepping to the front, must convince his audience that there is only a seeming contradiction. Otherwise, the play falls promptly to the level of simple melodrama or farce. That is, the character-drawer paints his portrait, knowing that, if it is well done, its life-likeness will at once be recognized. The psychologist, knowing that the life-likeness will not be readily admitted, by illustrative action throws light on his character till his point is won. Our final judgment of characterization must depend on whether the author is obviously trying to present a completely rounded figure or only chosen aspects.
Thus the old statement, “Know thyself,” becomes for the dramatist “Know your characters as intimately as possible.” Too many beginners in play-writing who care more for situation than for character, sketch in a figure with the idea that they may safely leave it to the actor to “fill out the part.” When brought to book they say: “I felt sure the actor in his larger experience, catching my idea—you do think it was clearly stated, don’t you?—would fill it out perfectly, and be glad of the freedom.” Were modesty the real basis for this kind of work, there might be good in it; but what really lies behind it are two great foes of good dramatic writing: haste or incompetence. The interest and the delight of a dramatist in studying people should lie in accurate conveying to others of their contradictions, their deterioration or growth as time passes, the outcropping of characteristics in them for which our observation has not prepared us. Nobody who really cares for characterization wants somebody else to do it for him. Nobody who has really entered into his characters thoroughly will for a moment be satisfied to sketch broad outlines and let the actor fill in details. Rarely, however, does the self-deceived author of such slovenly work deceive his audience. It meets at their hands the condemnation it deserves. Such an author assumes that in all the parts of his play, actors of marked ability and keen intelligence will be cast. Only in the rarest cases does that happen. Many actors may not see the full significance of the outlines. Others, whether they see them or not, will develop a character so as to get as swiftly as possible effects not intended by the author but for which they, as actors, are specially famous. Such a playwright must, then, contend, except in specially fortunate circumstances, against possible dullness, indifference, and distortion. It is the merest common sense so to present characters that a cast of average ability, or a stage manager of no extraordinary imagination may understand and represent them with at least approximate correctness, rather than so to write that only a group of creative artists can do any justice to the play. Clear and definitive characterization never hampers the best actors: for actors not the best it is absolutely necessary unless intended values are to be blurred.
It frequently happens that a writer whose dialogue is good and who has enough dramatic situations finds himself unable to push ahead. He knows broadly what he wants a scene to be, but somehow cannot make his characters move freely and naturally in it. Above all, the minor transitional scenes prove strangely difficult to write. Of course a scene or act may be thus clogged because the writer is mentally fagged. If, when a writer certainly is not tired, or when, after rest, he cannot with two or three sustained attempts develop a scene, the difficulty is not far to seek. In real life do we surely find out about people at our first, second, or even third meeting? Only if the people are of the simplest and most self-revelatory kind. The difficulty in these clogged scenes usually is that the author is treating the situation as if it were not the creation of the people in it, and as if a skilful writer could force any group of people into any situation. As Mr. Galsworthy has pointed out, “character is situation.”9 The latter exists because someone is what he is and so has inner conflict, or clashes with another person, or with his environment. Change his character a little and the situation must change. Involve more people in it, and immediately their very presence, affecting the people originally in the scene, will change the situation. In the left-hand column of what follows, the Queen, though she has one speech, in no way affects the scene: the situation is treated for itself, and barely. In the right-hand column, the Queen becomes an individual whose presence affects the speeches of the King and Hamlet. Because she is what she is, Hamlet addresses to her some of the lines which in the first version he spoke to the King: result, a scene far more effective emotionally.
| King. And now princely Sonne Hamlet, What meanes these sad and melancholy moodes? For your intent going to Wittenberg, Wee hold it most unmeet and unconvenient, Being the Joy and halfe heart of your mother. Therefore let mee intreat you stay in Court, All Denmarkes hope our coosin and dearest Soone | King. But now my Cosin Hamlet, and my sonne. |
| Ham. A little more than kin, and lesse then kind. | |
| King. How is it that the clowdes still hang on you. | |
| Ham. Not so much my Lord, I am too much in the sonne. | |
| Queene. Good Hamlet cast thy nighted colour off And let thine eye looke like a friend on Denmarke, Doe not forever with thy vailed lids Seeke for thy noble Father in the dust, Thou know’st ’tis common all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternitie. | |
| Ham. I Maddam, it is common. | |
| Quee. If it be Why seemes it so perticuler with thee. | |
| Ham. My lord, ’tis not the sable sute I weare: No nor the teares that still stand in my eyes, Nor the distracted haviour in the visage, Nor all together mixt with outward semblance, Is equall to the sorrow of my heart, Him have I lost I must of force forgoe, These but the ornaments and sutes of woe. | Ham. Seemes Maddam, nay it is, I know not seemes, Tis not alone my incky cloake coold mother Nor customary suites of solembe blacke Nor windie suspiration of forst breath No, nor the fruitfull river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage Together with all formes, moodes, chapes of griefe That can denote me truely, these indeede seeme, For they are actions that a man might play But I have that within which passes showe These but the trappings and the suites of woe. |
| King. This shewes a loving care in you, Sonne Hamlet, But you must thinke your father lost a father, That father dead, lost his, and so shalbe untill the Generall ending. Therefore cease laments, It is a fault gainst heaven, fault gainst the dead, A fault gainst nature, and in reasons Common course most certaine, None lives on earth, but hee is borne to die. | King. Tis sweete and commendable in your nature Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father But you must knowe your father lost a father, That father lost, lost his, and the surviver bound In filliall obligation for some tearme To do obsequious sorrowe, but to persever In obstinate condolement, is a course Of impious stubbornes... etc. |
| Que. Let not thy mother loose her praiers Hamlet, Stay here with us, go not to Wittenberg. | Quee. Let not thy mother loose her prayers Hamlet, I pray thee stay with us, goe not to Wittenberg. |
| Ham. I shall in all my best obay you madam. | Ham. I shall in all my best obay you madam.10 |
Inexperienced dramatists too often forget that a character who is simply one of several in a scene may not act as he would alone.
Mr. Macready’s Bentevole is very fine in its kind. It is natural, easy, and forcible. Indeed, we suspect some parts of it were too natural, that is, that Mr. Macready thought too much of what his feelings might dictate in such circumstances, rather than of what the circumstances must have dictated to him to do. We allude particularly to the half significant, half hysterical laugh and distorted jocular leer, with his eyes towards the persons accusing him of the murder, when the evidence of his guilt comes out. Either the author did not intend him to behave in this manner, or he must have made the other parties on the stage interrupt him as a self-convicted criminal.11
Stevenson clearly recognized this truth:
I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same kind about my Braxfield story. Braxfield—only his name is Hermiston—has a son who is condemned to death; plainly there is a fine tempting fitness about this; and I meant he was to hang. But now, on considering my minor characters, I saw there were five people who would—in a sense who must—break prison and attempt his rescue. They are capable, hardy folks, too, who might very well succeed. Why should they not, then? Why should not young Hermiston escape clear out of the country? and be happy if he could with his—But soft! I will betray my secret or my heroine.12
When a scene clogs, don’t hold the pen waiting for the impulse to write: don’t try to write at all. Study the situation, not for itself, but for the people in it. “The Dramatist who depends his characters to his plot,” says Mr. Galsworthy, worthy, “instead of his plot to his characters, ought himself to be depended.”13 If a thorough knowledge of the characters in the particular situation does not bring a solution, study them as the scene relates itself to what must precede in characterization. More than once a dramatist has found that he could not compose some scene satisfactorily till he had written carefully the previous history of the important character or characters. The detailed knowledge thus gained revealed whether or not the characters could enter the desired situation, and if so, how. Pailleron, author of Le Monde où l’on s’ennuie declared that, in his early drafts, he always had three or four times the material in regard to his dramatis personæ ultimately used by him.
Intimate knowledge of his characters is the only safe foundation for the ambitious playwright. It is well-nigh useless to ask managers and actors to pass finally on a mere statement of a situation or group of situations, without characterization. All they can say is: “Bring me this again as an amplified scenario, or a play, which shows me to what extent the people you have in mind give freshness of interest to this story, which has been used again and again in the drama of different nations, and I will tell you what I will do for you.” Reduce any dramatic masterpiece to simple statement of its plot and the story will seem so trite as hardly to be worth dramatization. For instance: a man of jealous nature, passionately in love with his young wife, is made by the lies and trickery of a friend to believe that his wife has been intriguing with another of his friends. The fact is that the calumniator slanders because he thinks his abilities have not been properly recognized by the husband and he has been repulsed by the wife. In a fury of jealousy the husband kills his innocent wife and then himself. That might be recognized as the story of any one of fifty French, German, Italian, English, or American plays of the last hundred years. It is, of course, the story of Othello—a masterpiece because Shakespeare knew Othello, Iago, Desdemona, and Cassio so intimately that by their interplay of character upon character they shape every scene perfectly. In other words, though a striking dramatic situation is undoubtedly dramatic treasure trove, whether it can be developed into anything fresh and contributive depends on a careful study of the people involved. What must they be to give rise to such a situation—not each by himself, but when brought together under the conditions of the scene? Even if a writer knows this, he must work backward into the earlier history of his people before he can either move through the particular scene or go forward into other scenes which should properly result from it.
Far too often plays are planned in this way. A writer thinks of some setting that will permit him a large amount of local color—a barroom, a dance hall, the wharf of an incoming ocean liner. Recognizing or not that most of this local color is unessential to the real action of the play, he does see that one or two incidents which are necessary and striking may be set against this background. Knowing broadly, how he wants to treat the scene, instead of studying the main and minor characters in it till he knows them so intimately that he can select from a larger amount of material than he can possibly use, he moves, not where the characters lead him, but whither, vi et armis, he can drive them. Rarely to him will come the delightful dilemma, so commonly experienced by the dramatist who really cares for character, when he must choose between what he was going to do and the scene as developed by the creatures of his imagination who, as they become real, take the scene away from him and shape it to vastly richer results.14 When the dramatist interested only in situation shapes the acts preceding his most important scene, he searches simply for conditions of character which will permit this important scene to follow. Result: earlier acts, largely of exposition and talk, or of illustrative action slight and unconvincing because characters forced into a crucial situation can hardly reveal how they brought themselves to it. There is no middle way for the dramatist who seeks truth in characterization. Given a situation, either it must grow naturally out of the characters in it, or the people originally in the mind of the author must be remodeled till they fit naturally into the situation. In the latter case, all that precedes and follows the central situation must be re-worked, not as the dramatist may wish, but as the remodeled characters permit. A critic met a well-known dramatist on the Strand. The dramatist looked worried. “What’s the matter,” queried the critic, “anything gone wrong?” “Yes. You remember the play I told you about, and that splendid situation for my heroine?” “Yes. Well?” “Well! She won’t go into it, confound her, do the best I can.” “Why make her?” “Why? Because if I don’t there’s an end to that splendid situation.” “Well?” “Oh, that’s just why I’m bothered. I don’t want to give in, I don’t want to lose that situation; but she’s right, of course she’s right, and the trouble is I know I’ve got to yield.”
At first sight the problem may seem different in an historical play, for here a writer is not creating incident but is often baffled by the amount of material from which he must select,—happenings that seem equally dramatic, speeches that cry out to be transferred to the stage, and delightful bits of illustrative action. Yet, whether his underlying purpose is to convey an idea, depict a character, or tell a story, how can he decide which bits among his material make the best illustrative action before he has minutely studied the important figures? Above all others, the dramatist working with history is subject to the principles of characterization already laid down. Lessing stated the whole case succinctly:
Only if he chooses other and even opposed characters to the historical, he should refrain from using historical names, and rather credit totally unknown personages with well-known facts than invent characters to well-known personages. The one mode enlarges our knowledge or seems to enlarge it and is thus agreeable. The other contradicts the knowledge that we already possess and is thus unpleasant. We regard the facts as something accidental, as something that may be common to many persons; the characters we regard as something individual and intrinsic. The poet may take any liberties he likes with the former so long as he does not put the facts into contradiction with the characters; the characters he may place in full light but he may not change them, the smallest change seems to destroy their individuality and to substitute in their place other persons, false persons, who have usurped strange names and pretend to be what they are not.15
There is, however, a contrasting danger to insufficient characterization. Any one profoundly interested in character may easily fill a scene with delicate touches which nevertheless swell the play to undue length. When careful examination of a play which is too long makes obvious that no act or scene can be spared in whole or in part, and that the dialogue is nowhere wordy or redundant, watch the best characterized scenes to discover whether something has not been conveyed by two strokes rather than one. If so, choose the better. Watch the scenes also lest delicate and sure touches of characterization may have been included which, delightful though they be, are not absolutely necessary to our understanding of the character. If so, select what most swiftly yet clearly gives the needed information. Over-detail in characterization is the reason why certain modern plays have sagged, or hitched their way to a conclusion, instead of producing the effect desired by the author.
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.
Mirza is indeed a Person of a peculiar Taste; for a Cunning Man to own himself a Rogue to the Man he shou’d keep in ignorance, and whom he was to work to his ends, argues little pretence to that Name; but he laughs at Honesty, and professes himself a Knave to one he wou’d have honest to him....
In the second Act, he talks of Memnon’s having recourse to Arms, of which Power we have not the least Word in the first: All that we know is, that he returns from Banishment on a day of Jubilee, when all was Safe and Free....18
For similar reasons, Mr. Eaton criticises unfavorably The Fighting Hope:
One of the best (or the worst) examples of false ethics in such a play is furnished by The Fighting Hope, produced by Mr. Belasco in the Autumn of 1908, and acted by Miss Blanche Bates. In this play a man, Granger, has been jailed, his wife and the world believe for another man’s crime. The other man, Burton Temple, is president of the bank Granger has been convicted of robbing. A district attorney, hot after men higher up, is about to reopen the case. It begins to look bad for Temple. Mrs. Granger, disguised as a stenographer, goes to his house to secure evidence against him. What she secures is a letter proving that not he, but her husband, was after all the criminal.
Of course this letter is a knockout blow for her. She realizes that the “father of her boys” is a thief, that the man she would send to jail (and with whom you know the dramatist is going to make her finally fall in love) is innocent. Still, in her first shock, her instinct to protect the “father of her boys” persists, and she burns the letter.
So far, so good, but Mrs. Granger is represented as a woman of fine instincts and character. That she should persist in cooler blood in her false and immoral supposition that her boys’ name will be protected or their happiness preserved—to say nothing of her own—by the guilt of two parents instead of one, is hard to believe. Yet that is exactly what the play asks you to believe, and it asks you to assume that here is a true dilemma. A babbling old housekeeper, whose chief use in the house seems to be to help the plot along, after the manner of stage servants, tells Mrs. Granger that she must not atone for her act by giving honest testimony in court, that of course she must let an innocent man go to jail, to “save her boys’ name.”
It would be much more sensible should Mrs. Granger here strike the immoral old lady, instead of saving her blows for her cur of a husband, in the last act, who, after all, was the “father of her boys.” But she listens to her. She appears actually in doubt not only as to which course she will pursue, but which she should pursue. She is intended by the dramatist as a pitiable object because on the one hand she feels it right to save an innocent man (whom she has begun to love), and on the other feels it her duty to save her sons’ happiness by building their future on a structure of lies and deceit. And she reaches a solution, not by reasoning the tangle out, not by any real thought for her boys, their general moral welfare, not by any attention to principles, but simply by discovering that her husband has been sexually unfaithful to her. Further, he becomes a cad and charges her with infidelity. Then she springs upon him and beats him with her fists, which is not the most effective way of convincing an audience that she was a woman capable of being torn by moral problems.
Of course as the play is written, there is no moral problem. The morality is all of the theatre. It belongs to that strange world behind the proscenium, wherein we gaze, and gazing sometimes utter chatter about “strong situations,” “stirring climaxes,” and the like, as people hypnotized. There might have been a moral problem if Mrs. Granger, before she discovered her husband’s guilt, had been forced to fight a rising tide of passion for Temple in her own heart. There might have been a moral problem after the discovery and her first hasty, but natural, destruction of the letter, if she had felt that her desire to save Temple was prompted by a passion still illicit, rather than by justice. But no such real problems were presented. The lady babbles eternally of “saving her boys’ good name,” while you are supposed to weep for her plight. Unless you have checked your sense of reality in the cloak room, you scorn her perceptions and despise her standards. How much finer had she continued to love her husband! But he, after all, was only the “father of her boys.”19
It is insufficiently motivated characterization which Mr. Eaton censures in The Nigger:
Obviously, the emotional interest in this play is—or should be, rather—in the tragedy of the proud, ambitious Morrow, who wakes suddenly to find himself a “nigger,” an exile from his home, and hopes, from his sweetheart and his dreams. Yet, as Mr. Sheldon has written it, and as it was played by Mr. Guy Bates Post in the part of Morrow, and by the other actors, the play is most poignant in its moments of sheer theatrical appeal, almost of melodrama, such as the suspense of the cross-examination of the old mammy and her cry of revelation, or the pursuit of the fugitive in act one. Between his interest in the suspense of his story and in the elucidation of the broader aspects of the negro question in the South, Mr. Sheldon neglected too much his chief figure, as a human being. Unless the figures live and suffer for the audience, unless their personal fate is followed, their minds and hearts felt as real, the naturalistic drama of contemporary life can have but little value, after all. That is what makes its technique so difficult and so baffling. From the moment when Morrow learned of his birth, he became a rather nebulous figure, not suffering so much as listening to theories which were only said by the dramatist to have altered his character and point of view.20
Perhaps it would be more strictly accurate to say that the comment on The Nigger points to inadequate treatment of character changing as the play progresses. The favorite place of many so-called dramatists for a change of character is in their vast silences between the acts. There, the authors expect us to believe that marked and necessary changes take place. They show us in clear-cut dramatic action the good character before he became bad and after he has become bad, but for proof that the changes took place, we must look off stage in the entr’acte. Read Lady Bountiful and note that between the last and the next to the last acts large changes have taken place in the main characters. Iris would be a far greater play than it is could we have seen how its central figure passes from the taking of the check book to the state of mind which makes her accept Maldonado’s apartment. Contrast with these plays the thoroughly motivated change in the Sergeant of The Rising of the Moon or of Nora in A Doll’s House.
Where American plays too frequently break down is in what may be called the logic of character. Even when actions have been properly motivated up to the last act or scene, this is handled in such a way as rather to please the audience than to grow inevitably out of what has preceded. Rumor has it that when Secret Service was produced in one of the central cities of New York State, the hero at the end chose his country rather than the girl. The public, with that fine disregard in the theatre for the values it places on action outside, disapproved. Promptly, the ending was so changed that the two lovers could be started on that sure road to happiness ever after which all men know an engagement is—upon the stage. In a play such as Secret Service, planned primarily to entertain, such a shift may be pardonable, but even in such a case it must be done with skill if it is not to jar. The Two Gentlemen of Verona in some fifty lines at its close shows Proteus madly in love with Silvia, and Valentine longing for her also; Valentine threatening the life of Proteus when he discovers the latter’s perfidy, but forgiving him instantly when Proteus merely asks pardon; and Proteus, when he discovers that the page who has been following him is Julia, turning instantly away from Silvia to her. Here is faulty characterization in two respects: each change is not sufficiently motived; each does not accord with the characterization of Proteus and Valentine in the earlier scenes.
Proteus. Nay, if the gentle spirit of moving words
Can no way change you to a milder form,
I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arms’ end,
And love you ’gainst the nature of love,—force ye.
Silvia. O heaven!
Pro. I’ll force thee yield to my desire.
Valentine. Ruffian, let go that rude uncivil touch,
Thou friend of an ill fashion!
Pro. Valentine!
Val. Thou common friend, that’s without faith or love,
For such is a friend now! Treacherous man,
Thou hast beguil’d my hopes! Nought but mine eye
Could have persuaded me. Now I dare not say
I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted now, when one’s right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest. O time most accurst,
’Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!
Pro. My shame and guilt confounds me.
Forgive me, Valentine; if hearty sorrow
Be a sufficient ransom for offence,
I tender’t here; I do as truly suffer
As e’er I did commit.
Val. Then I am paid;
And once again I do receive thee honest.
Who by repentance is not satisfied
Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleas’d.
By penitence the Eternal’s wrath’s appeas’d;
And, that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.
Julia. O me unhappy! (Swoons.)
Pro. Look to the boy.
Val. Why, boy! why, wag! how now! What’s the matter? Look up; speak.
Jul. O good sir, my master charg’d me to deliver a ring to Madame Silvia, which, out of my neglect, was never done.
Pro. Where is that ring, boy?
Jul. Here ’tis; this is it.
Pro. How? let me see!
Why this is the ring I gave to Julia.
Jul. O, cry you mercy, sir, I have mistook;
Pro. But how cam’st thou by this ring? At my depart
I gave this unto Julia.
Jul. And Julia herself did give it me;
And Julia herself hath brought it hither.
Pro. How! Julia!
Jul. Behold her that gave aim to all thy oaths,
And entertain’d ’em deeply in her heart.
How oft hast thou with perjury cleft the root!
O Proteus let this habit make thee blush!
Be thou asham’d that I have took upon me
Such an immodest raiment, if shame live
In a disguise of love.
It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,
Women to change their shapes than men their minds.
Pro. Than men their minds! ’tis true. O heaven! were man
But constant, he were perfect. That one error
Fills him with faults; makes him run through all the sins.
Inconstancy falls off ere it begins.
What is Silvia’s face, but I may spy
More fresh in Julia’s with a constant eye?
Vol. Come, come, a hand from either.
Let me be blest to make this happy close;
’Twere pity two such friends should be long foes.
Pro. Bear witness, Heaven, I have my wish for ever.
Jul. And I mine.
Similar inconsistencies are in many modern plays. A dramatist has a particularly striking scene which he wishes to make the climax of his play. Into it he forces his figures regardless. Lessing made fun of this fault.
... In another still worse tragedy where one of the principal characters died quite casually, a spectator asked his neighbor, “But what did she die of?”—“Of what? Of the fifth act,” was the reply. In very truth the fifth act is an ugly evil disease that carries off many a one to whom the first four acts promised a longer life.21
Or it may be, as in the case of Shakespeare just cited, that a dramatist feels certain changes of character are necessary if the play is to end as promptly as it must. Such changes, therefore, he brings about even if it means throwing character or truth to the winds. English and American plays of the 1880 and 1890 periods show many instances of theatrically effective endings either forced upon the characters or only one of several possible endings—and not the most probable. According to the conventions of the time, any young woman who had parted with her virtue, no matter what the circumstances, must make reparation by death. This usually came from some wasting but not clearly diagnosed disease. There was not always a clear distinction between inanition and inanity. A similar convention usually saved from death the male partners of these “faults,” provided they indulged at the right moment in self-repentant speeches. Sir Arthur Pinero, writing what he regarded as the logical ending of The Profligate, was forced by the sentimentality of his public to keep Dunstan Renshaw alive. Here are the two endings:
THE ENDING AS ACTED
Dunstan. (He is raising the glass to his lips when he recoils with a cry of horror.) Ah! stop, stop! This is the deepest sin of all my life—blacker than that sin for which I suffer! No, I’ll not! I’ll not! (He dashes the glass to the ground.) God, take my wretched life when You will, but till You lay Your hand upon me, I will live on! Help me! Give me strength to live on! Help me! Oh, help me!
(He falls on his knees and buries his face in his hands. Leslie enters softly, carrying a lamp which she places on the sideboard; then she goes to Dunstan.)
Leslie. Dunstan! Dunstan!
Dunstan. You! You!
Leslie. I have remembered. When we stood together at our prayerless marriage, my heart made promises my lips were not allowed to utter. I will not part from you, Dunstan.
Dunstan. Not—part—from me?
Leslie. No.
Dunstan. I don’t understand you. You—will—not—relent? You cannot forget what I am!
Leslie. No. But the burden of the sin you have committed I will bear upon my shoulders, and the little good that is in me shall enter into your heart. We will start life anew, always seeking for the best that we can do, always trying to repair the worst that we have done. (Stretching out her hand to him.) Dunstan! (He approaches her as in a dream.) Don’t fear me! I will be your wife, not your judge. Let us from this moment begin the new life you spoke of.
Dunstan. (He tremblingly touches her hand as she bursts into tears.) Wife! Ah, God bless you! God bless you, and forgive me!
(He kneels at her side, and she bows her head down to his.)
Leslie. Oh, my husband!
THE ENDING AS PRINTED
Dunstan. Fool! Fool! Why couldn’t you have died in Florence? Why did you drag yourself here all these miles—to end it here? I should have known better—I should have known better. (He takes a phial from his pocket and slowly pours some poison into a tumbler.) When I’ve proved that I could not live away from her, perhaps she’ll pity me. I shall never know it, but perhaps she’ll pity me then. (About to drink.) Supposing I am blind! Supposing there is some chance of my regaining her. Regaining her! How dull sleeplessness makes me! How much could I regain of what I’ve lost! Why, she knows me—nothing can ever undo that—she knows me. Every day would be a dreary, hideous masquerade; every night a wakeful, torturing retrospect. If she smiled, I should whisper to myself—“yes, yes, that’s a very pretty pretence, but—she knows you!” The slamming of a door would shout it, the creaking of a stair would murmur it “she knows you!” And when she thought herself alone, or while she lay in her sleep, I should be always stealthily spying for that dreadful look upon her face, and I should find it again and again as I see it now—the look which cries out so plainly “Profligate! you taught one good woman to believe in you, but now she knows you!” No, no—no, no! (He drains the contents of the tumbler.) The end—the end. (Pointing towards the clock.) The hour at which we used to walk together in the garden at Florence—husband and wife—lovers. (He pulls up the window-blind and looks out.) The sky—the last time—the sky. (He rests drowsily against the piano.) Tired—tired. (He walks rather unsteadily to the table.) A line to Murray. (Writing.) A line to Murray—telling him—poison—morphine—message—(The pen falls from his hand and his head drops forward.) The light is going out. I can’t see. Light—I’ll finish this when I wake—I’ll rest. (He staggers to the sofa and falls upon it.) I shall sleep tonight. The voice has gone. Leslie—wife—reconciled—
(Leslie enters softly and kneels by his side.)
Leslie. Dunstan, I am here. (He partly opens his eyes, raises himself, and stares at her; then his head falls back quietly. Leslie’s face averted.) Dunstan, I have returned to you. We are one and we will make atonement for the past together. I will be your Wife, not your Judge—let us from this moment begin the new life you spoke of. Dunstan! (She sees the paper which has fallen from his hand, and reads it.) Dunstan! Dunstan! No, no! Look at me! Ah! (She catches him in her arms.) Husband! Husband! Husband!22
It is of course true, as M. Brieux maintains in regard to the two endings of his early play, Blanchette,23 that sometimes more than one ending may be made plausible. Consequently he changed a tragic close to something more pleasing to his audience. Belief grows, however, that when a play has been begun and developed with a tragic ending in mind, this cannot with entire convincingness be changed to something else unless the play is rewritten from the start. There is inevitableness in the conduct on the stage of the creatures of our brains even as with people of real life. So strongly does Sir Arthur Pinero feel this as the result of his long experience that, though he changed the ending of The Big Drum in 1915 in accordance with public demand, he restored the original version when printing the play. He says in his Preface:
The Big Drum is published exactly as it was written, and as it was originally performed. At its first representation, however, the audience was reported to have been saddened by its “unhappy ending.” Pressure was forthwith put upon me to reconcile Philip and Ottoline at the finish, and at the third performance of the play the curtain fell upon the picture, violently and crudely brought about, of Ottoline in Philip’s arms.
I made the alteration against my principles and against my conscience, and yet not altogether unwillingly. For we live in depressing times; and perhaps in such times it is the first duty of a writer for the stage to make concessions to his audience and, above everything, to try to afford them a complete, if brief, distraction from the gloom which awaits them outside the theatre.
My excuse for having at the start provided an “unhappy” ending is that I was blind enough not to regard the ultimate break between Philip and Ottoline as really unhappy for either party. On the contrary, I looked upon the separation of these two people as a fortunate occurrence for them both; and I conceive it as a piece of ironic comedy which might not prove unentertaining that the falling away of Philip from his high resolves was checked by the woman he had once despised and who had at last grown to know and to despise herself.
But comedy of this order has a knack of cutting rather deeply, of ceasing, in some minds, to be comedy at all; and it may be said that this is what has happened in the present instance. Luckily it is equally true that certain matters are less painful, because less actual, in print than upon the stage. The “wicked publisher” therefore, even when bombs are dropping round him, can afford to be more independent than the theatrical manager; and for this reason I have not hesitated to ask my friend Mr. Heinemann to publish The Big Drum in its original form.24
What Ibsen thought of the ultimate effect of changing an ending to accord with public sentiment, these words about A Doll’s House show:
At the time when A Doll’s House was quite new, I was obliged to give my consent to an alteration of the last scene for Frau Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, who was to play the part of Nora in Berlin. At that time I had no choice. I was entirely unprotected by copyright law in Germany, and could, consequently, prevent nothing. Besides, the play in its original, uncorrupted form was accessible to the German public in a German edition which was already printed and published. With its altered ending it had only a short run. In its unchanged form it is still being played.25
Dumas fils was even more severe in his strictures:
If at the second performance you are ready to modify your central idea, your development or your conclusion to please the public whom the night before you were pretending to teach something fresh, you may be, perhaps, an ingenious worker in the theatre, an adroit impresario, a facile inventor; you will never be a dramatist. You can make mistakes in details of execution; you have no right to make a mistake in the logic of your play, its correlations of emotions and acts, and least of all, in their outcome.26
Characterization, then, should be watched carefully in its fundamentals, all changes, and especially for its logical outcome. Long ago, Diderot summed up the subject thus:
One can form an infinitude of plans on the same subject and developed around the same characters. But the characters being once settled, they can have but one manner of speaking. Your figures will have this or that to say according to the situation in which you may have placed them, but being the same human beings in all the situations, they will not, fundamentally, contradict themselves.27
How may we know whether our motivation is good or not? First of all, it must be clear. If an audience cannot make out why one of our characters does what he is doing, from that moment the play weakens. It is on this ground that William Archer objected to the Becket of Tennyson:
“Some gents,” says the keeper, in Punch, to the unsuccessful sportsman, “goes a-wingin’ and a-worritin’ the poor birds; but you, sir—you misses ’em clane and nate!” With the like delicate tact criticism can only compliment the poet on the “clane and nate” way in which he has missed the historical interest, the psychological problem, of his theme. What was it that converted the Becket of Toulouse into the Becket of Clarendon—the splendid warrior-diplomatist into the austere prelate? The cowl, we are told, does not make the monk; but in Lord Tennyson’s psychology it seems that it does. Of the process of thought, the development of feeling, which leads Becket, on assuming the tonsure, to break with the traditions of his career, with the friend of his heart and with his own worldly interest—of all this we have no hint. The social and political issues involved are left equally in the vague. Of the two contending forces, the Church and the Crown, which makes for good, and which for evil? With which ought we to sympathize? It might be argued that we have no right to ask this question, and that it is precisely a proof of the poet’s art that he holds the balance evenly, and does not write as a partisan. But as a matter of fact this is not so. The poet is not impartial; he is only indefinite. We are evidently intended to sympathize, and we do sympathize, with Becket, simply because we feel that he is staking his life on a principle; but what that principle precisely is, and what its bearings on history and civilization, we are left to find out for ourselves. Thus the intellectual opportunity, if I may call it so, is missed “clane and nate.”28
Contrast the third, fourth, and fifth acts of Michael and His Lost Angel29 with the first and second. So admirable is the characterization of Acts I and II that a reader understands exactly what Audrie and Michael are doing and why. In the other acts, though what they are doing is clear, why the Audrie and Michael of the first two acts behaved thus is by no means clear and plausible. Indeed, plausibility and clearness go hand in hand as tests of motivation. Accounting for the deeds of any particular character is easy if the conduct rests on motives which any audience will immediately recognize as both widespread and likely to produce the situation. It is just here, however, that national taste and literary convention complicate the work of the dramatist. An American, watching a performance of Simone30 by M. Brieux, hardly understood the loud protests which burst from the audience when the heroine, at the end of the play, sternly denounced her father’s conduct. To him, it seemed quite natural that an American girl should assume this right of individual judgment. The French audience felt that a French girl, because of her training, would not, under the circumstances, thus attack her father. M. Brieux admitted himself wrong and changed the ending. It is this fact, that conduct plausible for one nation is not always equally plausible for another, which makes it hard for an American public to understand a goodly number of the masterpieces of recent Continental dramatic literature.
What literary convention may do in twisting conduct from the normal, the pseudo-classic French drama of Corneille and Racine, and its foster child, the Heroic Drama of England, illustrate. Dryden himself points out clearly the extent to which momentary convention among the French deflected the characters in their tragedies from the normal:
The French poets... would not, for example, have suffer’d Cleopatra and Octavia to have met; or, if they had met, there must only have passed betwixt them some cold civilities, but no eagerness of repartee, for fear of offending against the greatness of their characters, and the modesty of their sex. This objection I foresaw, and at the same time contemn’d; for I judg’d it both natural and probable that Octavia, proud of her new-gain’d conquest, would search out Cleopatra to triumph over her; and that Cleopatra, thus attack’d, was not of a spirit to shun the encounter: and ’tis not unlikely that two exasperated rivals should use such satire as I have put into their mouths; for, after all, tho’ the one were a Roman, and the other a queen, they were both women.
Thus, their Hippolytus is so scrupulous in point of decency that he will rather expose himself to death than accuse his stepmother to his father; and my critics I am sure will commend him for it: but we of grosser apprehensions are apt to think that this excess of generosity is not practicable, but with fools and madmen. This was good manners with a vengeance; and the audience is like to be much concern’d at the misfortunes of this admirable hero; but take Hippolytus out of his poetic fit, and I suppose he would think it a wiser part to set the saddle on the right horse, and choose rather to live with the reputation of a plain-spoken, honest man, than to die with the infamy of an incestuous villain. In the meantime we may take notice that where the poet ought to have preserv’d the character as it was deliver’d to us by antiquity, when he should have given us the picture of a rough young man, of the Amazonian strain, a jolly huntsman, and both by his profession and his early rising a mortal enemy to love, he has chosen to give him the turn of gallantry, sent him to travel from Athens to Paris, taught him to make love, and transformed the Hippolytus of Euripides into Monsieur Hippolyte.31
One of the chief elements in the genius of Shakespeare is his power to transcend momentary conventions, fads, and theories, and to discern in his material, whether history or fiction, eternal principles of conduct. Thus he wrote for all men and for all time. In Love’s Labor’s Lost he wrote for a special audience, appealing to its ideas of style and humor. In Twelfth Night he let his characters have full sway. Which is the more alive today?
Nor is it only the literary conventions of an audience which affect the problem of plausibility set an author. The French public of 1841 which came to the five-act play of Eugène Scribe, Une Chaine,32 asked, not a convincing picture of life, but mere entertainment. Therefore they accepted insufficient motivation and artificiality in handling the scenes. Louise, the wife, discovering from words of her husband as she enters the room that her former lover, Emmeric, now prefers Aline to her, sits down and dashes off a signed letter releasing him. Just why is not clear. In order that she may do this writing unobserved of her husband, two characters must, for some time, be so managed as to stand between him and her. In order that the husband may never know she has been in love with Emmeric, the letter must be kept out of his hands, and read only by the guardian of Aline, Clerambeau. All this requires constant artifice. Sidney Grundy made a one-act adaptation of Une Chaine called In Honor Bound.33 In this, Lady Carlyon, waking from sleep on the divan in her husband’s study, hears, unobserved by Philip and Sir George, the young man’s admission that he no longer cares for her. When her cry reveals her, Sir George, her husband, thinking her unwell, goes to bring her niece, Rose, to her aid. Lady Carlyon learns promptly from Philip that the guardian of the girl he is engaged to demands a letter releasing him from any former entanglement. Lady Carlyon, to cover her chagrin, with seeming willingness writes and signs a letter. Thus the writing takes place when the husband is off stage, and the evident chagrin of Lady Carlyon motivates it better. The relation of the husband to the letter is also handled better than in the original. He, unlike St. Geran, strongly suspects that his wife has cared for the younger man. Lady Carlyon is unaware that Sir George is the guardian in question and that the girl is her niece, Rose. Consequently she lets slip that Philip possesses the desired letter. Sir George demands it as his right, noting her disturbance when she learns that her husband is involved in the situation. When Philip refuses to surrender the letter, Sir George courteously permits him to read it aloud. Just before the signature is reached, he stops Philip, asking him if the letter is signed. When Philip admits that it is, Sir George insists on having the letter, then, without looking at it, burns it at the lamp with words of sympathy for the writer. All this turns the husband in this scene from a mere lay figure into a character, and greatly lessens the artificiality of the original. By means of better characterization a motivation fundamentally more plausible is provided. Why? Because an English audience of 1880-90 expected much more probability in a play than did a French or English audience of 1841.
Of course, conduct initially unconvincing may be so treated as to become entirely satisfactory. One of the delights in characterization is so preparing for an exhibition of character likely to seem unreal of itself that when it is presented it is accepted either at once or before the scene closes. Any motive which a dramatist can make acceptable to his audience is ultimately just as good as one accepted unquestioningly. Shylock’s demand for the pound of flesh is in itself unplausible enough—the act of one demented or insane. But Shakespeare’s emphasis on his racial hate lends it possibility. His presentation of the other people in the play as accepting the bond with the minimum of question makes it seem probable. If a would-be dramatist were to rule out as material not to be treated whatever at the outset seems improbable or impossible, think what our drama would lose: such plays as Faust, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Blue Bird, and even Hamlet.
Repeatedly in treating plausibility it has been implied or stated that what is said or done must be “in character.” This suggests another test of good motivation. What happens must be plausible, not only in that it accords with known human experience, but with what has been done by the character in preceding portions of the play. In The Masqueraders, when Sir Brice and David stake Dulcie and her child against the fortune of the latter, and let all turn upon a game of cards, a reader is skeptical, for even if it be admitted that Sir Brice might do this, it does not accord with what we know of David from the earlier scenes of the play.
(Exit Dulcie. The two men are left alone. Another slight pause. Sir Brice walks very deliberately up to David. The two men stand close to each other for a moment or two.)
Sir Brice. You’ve come to settle your little account, I suppose?
David. I owe you nothing.
Sir Brice. But I owe you six thousand pounds. I haven’t a penny in the world. I’ll cut you for it, double or quits.
David. I don’t play cards.
Sir Brice. You’d better begin.
(Rapping on the table with the cards.)
David. (Very firmly.) I don’t play cards with you.
Sir Brice. And I say you shall.
David. (Very stern and contemptuous.) I don’t play cards with you.
(Going towards door; Sir Brice following him up.)
Sir Brice. You refuse?
David. I refuse.
Sir Brice. (Stopping him.) Once for all, will you give me a chance of paying back the six thousand pounds that Lady Skene has borrowed from you? Yes or no?
David. No.
Sir Brice. No?
David. (Very emphatically.) No. (Goes to door, suddenly turns round, comes up to him.) Yes. (Comes to the table.) I do play cards with you. You want my money. Very well. I’ll give you a chance of winning all I have in the world.
Sir Brice. (After a look of astonishment.) Good. I’m your man. Any game you like, and any stakes.
David. (Very calm, cold, intense tone all through.) The stakes on my side are some two hundred thousand pounds. The stakes on your side are—your wife and child.
Sir Brice. (Taken aback.) My wife and child.
David. Your wife and child. Come—begin!
(Points to the cards.)
Sir Brice. (Getting flurried.) My wife and child? (Puts his hand restlessly through his hair, looks intently at David. Pause.) All right. (Pause. Cunningly.) I value my wife and child very highly.
David. I value them at all I have in the world. (Pointing to the cards.) Begin!
Sir Brice. You seem in a hurry.
David. I believe I haven’t six months to live. I want to make the most of those six months. If I have more I want to make the most of all the years. Begin!
Sir Brice. (Wipes his face with his handkerchief.) This is the first time I’ve played this game. We’d better arrange conditions.
David. There’s only one condition. We play till I’m beggared of every farthing I have, or till you’re beggared of them. Sit down!
Sir Brice. (Sits down.) Very well. (Pause.) What game?
David. The shortest.
Sir Brice. Simple cutting?
David. What you please. Begin!
Sir. Brice. There’s no hurry. I mean to have a night’s fun out of this.
David. Look at me. Don’t trifle with me! I want to have done with you. I want them to have done with you. I want to get them away from you. Quick! I want to know now—now—this very moment—whether they are yours or mine. Begin.
Sir Brice. (Shuffles the cards.) All right. What do we cut for?
David. Let one cut settle it.
Sir Brice. No. It’s too much to risk on one throw.
David. One cut. Begin.
Sir Brice. It’s too big. I can’t. (Gets up, walks a pace or two.) I like high play, but that’s too high for me. (David remains at back of table, very calm; does not stir all through the scene; Sir Brice walking about.) No, by Jove! I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Three cuts out of five. Damn it all! I’m game! Two out of three. By Jove, two out of three! Will that do?
David. So be it! Shuffle. Sit down!
(Sir Brice sits down; begins shuffling the cards. All through the scene he is nervous, excited, hysterical, laughing. David as cold as a statue.)34
An almost similar situation in a play set in a remote part of the West, Believe Me, Xantippe, is more convincing. A loutish beast agrees to gamble for a woman he is kidnapping with a young adventurer who sees at the moment no other way to save her from the other man’s clutches. The scene is not at all improbable for either man. In The Princess and the Butterfly, all the preceding acts are but a preparation for what the world will call the unreason, in the last act, of the marriages of Sir George and the Princess Pannonia,—of middle age with youth. Their final conduct would seem unplausible were it not entirely in keeping with their characters as carefully developed in the earlier parts of the play. The Rising of the Moon of Lady Gregory shows a final situation for the Police Sergeant which, at the opening of the play, would seem impossible for him. In a few pages, however, the dramatist so develops the character that we are perfectly ready to accept his sacrifice of the “hundred pounds reward” which he so coveted at the outset.
Motivation should not, however, be allowed to obtrude itself, but should be subordinated to the emotional purpose of the scene. The modern auditor prefers to gather it almost unconsciously as the action of the play proceeds rather than to have it emphasized for him, as does Iago, at the end of several acts of Othello. Another instance of this frank motivation among the Elizabethans may be found in the soliloquy from The Duchess of Malfi:
Cardinal. The reason why I would not suffer these
About my brother is because at midnight
I may with better privacy convay
Julias body, to her owne lodging. O, my conscience!
I would pray now: but the divell takes away my heart
For having any confidence in praier.
About this hour I appointed Bosola
To fetch the body: when he hath serv’d my turne,
He dies.35
Good motivation, then, must be clear; either plausible naturally or made so by the art of the dramatist; should in each particular instance comport with the preceding actions and speech of the character; and should not be so stressed as to draw attention away from the emotional significance of the scene.
It is by well-motived characterization that drama passes from melodrama to story-play and so to tragedy; or, from the broadest farce or extravaganza through low comedy to high. As long as we care little what the people in our play are, and greatly for comic or serious happenings, we may string situations together almost at will. The moment that our figures come alive, as has been pointed out, selection in our possible material has begun. Some of the incidents in our melodrama or broad farce will drop out as wholly impossible for these figures which have come to life. Others must be modified if the figures are to take part in them. Give a melodrama sustaining, convincing characterization and it must at least turn into a story-play, something which after a mingling of the serious and the comic does not end tragically. So characterize in a story with a serious ending that the tragic result develops inevitably from the sequence of preceding scenes, and tragedy is born. Watch the way in which Shakespeare lifts the Hubert and Arthur scene of the old play of King John by the infused characterization. In the old play the author presents us with puppets depending for their effect on the contained horror of the scene. Shakespeare creates a winsome, brave young prince, and a very human Hubert. The scene moves us, not, simply from our dread of physical torture, but because of our growing intense sympathy for the lad who is fighting for his life.
| ACT IV. SCENE 1. Northampton. A Room in the castle | |
| Enter Hubert de Burgh with three men | Enter Hubert and two Attendants |
| Hub. My masters, I have shewed you what warrant I have of this attempt; I perceive by your heavie countenances, you had rather be otherwise imployed, and for my owne part, I would the King had made choyce of some other executioner; onely this is my comfort, that a King commaunds, whose precepts neglected or omitted, threatneth torture for the default. Therefore in briefe, leave me, and be readie to attend the adventure: stay within that entry, and when you hear me crie, God save the King, issue sodainly foorth, lay handes on Arthur, set him in his chayre, wherein (once fast bound) leave him with me to finish the rest. | Hub. Heat me these irons hot, and look thou stand Within the arras: when I strike my foot Upon the bosom of the ground, rush forth, And bind the boy, which you shall find with me, Fast to the chair: be heedful. Hence, and watch. |
| 1. Attend. I hope, your warrant will bear out the deed. | |
| Hub. Uncleanly scruples: fear not you: look to’t.— | |
| (Exeunt Attendants.) | |
| Young lad, come forth; I have to say with you. | |
| Enter Arthur | |
| Arth. Good morning, Hubert. | |
| Hub. Good morrow, little prince. | |
| Attendants. We goe, though loath. (Exeunt.) | Arth. As little prince (having so great a title To be more prince,) as may be.—You are sad. |
| Hub. My Lord, will it please your Honour to take the benefite of the faire evening? | Hub. Indeed I have been merrier. |
| Enter Arthur to Hubert de Burgh | |
| Arth. Gramercie Hubert for thy care of me, In or to whom restraint is newly knowen, The joy of walking is small benefit, Yet will I take thy offer with small thankes, I would not loose the pleasure of the eye. But tell me curteous Keeper if you can, How long the King will have me tarrie here | Arth. Mercy on me! Methinks nobody should be sad but I: Yet, I remember, when I was in France, Young gentlemen would be as sad as night, Only for wantonness. By my christendom, So I were out of prison and kept sheep, I should be as merry as the day is long; And so I would be here, but that I doubt My uncle practises more harm to me: He is afraid of me and I of him. Is it my fault that I was Geffrey’s son? No, indeed, is’t not; and I would to heaven, I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert. |
| Hub. I know not Prince, but as I gesse, not long. God send you freedome, and God save the King. | |
| (They issue forth.) | |
| Arth. Why now sirs, what may this outrage meane? O help me Hubert, gentle Keeper helpe; God send this sodaine mutinous approach Tend not to reave a wretched guiltless life. | |
| Hub. So sirs, depart, and leave the rest for me. | Hub. (Aside.) If I talk to him, with his innocent prate He will awake my mercy, which lies dead: Therefore I will be sudden, and dispatch. |
| Arth. Then Arthur yeeld, death frowneth in thy face, What meaneth this? Good Hubert plead the case. | Arth. Are you sick, Hubert? you look pale today. In sooth, I would you were a little sick; That I might sit all night, and watch with you: I warrant I love you more than you do me. |
| Hub. Patience yong Lord, and listen words of woe, Harmful and harsh, hells horror to be heard: A dismall tale fit for a furies tongue. I faint to tell, deepe sorrow is the sound. | Hub. (Aside.) His words do take possession of my bosom.— Read here, young Arthur, (Showing a paper.) (Aside.) How now, foolish rheum! Turning dispiteous torture out of door? I must be brief; lest resolution drop Out at mine eyes in tender womanish tears.— Can you read it? Is it not fair writ? |
| Arth. What, must I die? | |
| Hub. No newes of death, but tidings of more hate, A wrathfull doome, and most unluckie fate: Deaths dish were daintie at so fell a feast, Be deafe, heare not, its hell to tell the rest. | |
| Arth. Alas, thou wrongst my youth with words of feare, Tis hell, tis horror, not for one to heare: What is it man if needes be don, Act it, and end it, that the paine were gon. | Arth. Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect. Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes? |
| Hub. Young boy, I must. | |
| Hub. I will not chaunt such dolour with my tongue, Yet must I act the outrage with my hand. My heart, my head, and all my powers beside, To aide the office have at once denide. Peruse this Letter, lines of treble woe, Reade ore my charge, and pardon when you know. | Arth. And will you? |
| Hub. And I will. | |
| Hubert, these are to commaund thee, as thou tendrest our quiet in minde, and the estate of our person, that presently upon the receipt of our commaund, thou put out the eies of Arthur Plantaginet. | Arth. Have you the heart? When your head did but ache, I knit my handkerchief about your brows, (The best I had, a princess wrought it me,) And I did never ask it you again: And with my hand at midnight held your head, And, like the watchful minutes to the hour, Still and anon cheer’d up the heavy time, Saying, What lack you? and, Where lies your grief? Or, What good love may I perform for you? Many a poor man’s son would have lain still, And ne’er have spoken a loving word to you; But you at your sick service had a prince. Nay you may think my love was crafty love, And call it cunning: do, an if you will. If heaven be pleas’d that you will use me ill, Why, then you must.—Will you put out mine eyes? These eyes that never did, nor never shall So much as frown on you? |
| Arth. Ah, monstrous damned man! his very breath infects the elements. Contagious venyme dwelleth in his heart; Effecting meanes to poyson all the world. Unreverent may I be to blame the heavens Of great injustice, that the miscreant Lives to oppresse the innocents with wrong. Ah, Hubert! makes he thee his instrument, To sound the tromp that causeth hell triumph? Heaven weepes, the Saints do shed celestiall teares, They feare thy fall, and cyte thee with remorse, To knock thy conscience, moving pitie there, Willing to fence thee from the range of hell, | Hub. I have sworn to do it, And with hot irons must I burn them out. |
| Arth. Ah! none but in this iron age would do it. The iron of itself, though heat red-hot, Approaching near these eyes would drink my tears, And quench this fiery indignation, Even in the matter of mine innocence: Nay, after that, consume away in rust, But for containing fire to harm mine eye. Are you more stubborn hard than hammered iron? An if an angel should have come to me, And told me Hubert should put out mine eyes, I would not have believ’d him; no tongue but Hubert’s. | |
| Hell, Hubert, trust me all the plagues of hell Hangs on performance of this damned deede. This seale, the warrant of the bodies blisse, Ensureth Satan chieftaine of thy soule: Subscribe not Hubert, give not Gods part away, I speake not only for eyes priviledge, The chiefe exterior that I would enjoy: But for they perill, farre beyond my paine, Thy sweetes soules losse, more than my eyes vaine lack: A cause internall, and eternall too, Advise thee Hubert, for the case is hard, To loose salvation for a Kings reward. | Hub. Come forth. (Stamps.) Re-enter Attendants, with Cord, Irons, &c. Do as I bid you do. |
| Arth. Oh! save me, Hubert, save me! my eyes are out, Even with the fierce looks of these bloody men. | |
| Hub. Give me the iron, I say, and bind him here. | |
| Hub. My Lord, a subject dwelling in the land Is tyed to execute the Kings commaund. | Arth. Alas! what need you be so boisterous-rough? I will not struggle; I will stand stone-still. For heaven’s sake, Hubert, let me not be bound. Nay, hear me Hubert: drive these men away, And I will sit as quiet as a lamb; I will not stir nor wince, nor speak a word, Nor look upon the iron angerly. Thrust but these men away, and I’ll forgive you, Whatever torment you do put me to. |
| Arth. Yet God commaunds whose power reacheth further, That no commaund should stand in force to murther. | |
| Hub. But that same Essence hath ordained a law, A death for guilt, to keepe the world in awe. | |
| Arth. I pleade, not guiltie, treasonlesse and free. | |
| Hub. But that appeale, my Lord, concernes not me. | Hub. Go, stand within: let me alone with him. |
| Arth. Why thou art he that maist omit the perill. | 1. Attend. I am best pleas’d to be from such a deed. (Exeunt Attendants.) |
| Hub. I, if my Soveraigne would remit his quarrell. | |
| Arth. His quarrell is unhallowed false and wrong. | Arth. Alas! I then have chid away my friend: He hath a stern look, but a gentle heart.— Let him come back that his compassion may Give life to yours. |
| Hub. Then be the blame to whom it doth belong. | |
| Arth. Why thats to thee if thou as they proceede, Conclude their judgement with so vile a deede. | |
| Hub. Why then no execution can be lawfull, If Judges doomes must be reputed doubtfull. | Hub. Come, boy, prepare yourself. |
| Arth. Is there no remedy? | |
| Hub. None but to lose your eyes. | |
| Arth. Yes where in forme of Lawe in place and time, The offended is convicted of the crime. Hub. My Lord, my Lord, this long expostulation, Heapes up more griefe, than promise of redresse; For this I know, and so resolude I end, That subjects lives on Kings commaunds depend. I must not reason why he is your foe, But doo his charge since he commaunds it so. Arth. Then doo thy charge, and charged be thy soule With wrongfull persecution don this day. You rowling eyes, whose superficies yet I doo behold with eyes that Nature lent: Send foorth the terror of your Moovers frowne, To wreake my wrong upon the murtherers That rob me of your faire reflecting view: Let hell to them (as earth they wish to me) Be darke and direfull guerdon for their guylt, And let the black tormentors of deepe Tartary Upbraide them with this damned enterprise, Inflicting change of tortures on their soules. Delay not Hubert, my orisons are ended, Begin I pray thee, reave me of my sight: But to performe a tragedie indeede, Conclude the period with a mortal stab. Constance farewell, tormenter come away, Make my dispatch the Tyrants feasting day. Hub. I faint, I feare, my conscience bids desist: Faint did I say? fear was it that I named: My King commaunds, that warrant sets me free: But God forbids, and he commandeth Kings, That great Commaunder counterchecks my charge, He stayes my hand, he maketh soft my heart. Goe cursed tooles, your office is exempt, Cheere thee young Lord, thou shalt not loose an eye, Though I should purchase it with losse of life. Ile to the King and say his will is done, And of the langor tell him thou art dead, Goe in with me, for Hubert was not borne To blinde those lampes that nature pollisht so. Arth. Hubert, if ever Arthur be in state, Looke for amends of this received gift, I tooke my eyesight by thy curtesie, Thou lentst them me, I will not be ingrate. But now procrastination may offend The issue that thy kindness undertakes: Depart we Hubert, to prevent the worst. (Exeunt.)36 | Arth. O heaven!—that there were but a mote in yours, A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wandering hair, Any annoyance in that precious sense! Then, feeling what small things are boisterous there, Your vile intent must needs seem horrible. Hub. Is this your promise? go to; hold your tongue. Arth. Hubert, the utterance of a brace of tongues Must needs want pleading for a pair of eyes: Let me not hold my tongue; let me not, Hubert: Or Hubert, if you will, cut out my tongue. So I may keep mine eyes. O! spare mine eyes; Though to no use, but still to look on you. Lo! by my troth, the instrument is cold, And would not harm me. Hub. I can heat it, boy. Arth. No, in good sooth; the fire is dead with grief, Being create for comfort, to be us’d In undeserv’d extremes: see else yourself; There is no malice in this burning coal; The breath of heaven hath blown his spirit out, And strew’d repentant ashes on his head. Hub. But with my breath I can revive it, boy. Arth. And if you do, you will but make it blush, And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert: Nay, it, perchance, will sparkle in your eyes; And like a dog that is compell’d to fight, Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on. All things that you should use to do me wrong, Deny their office: only you do lack That mercy, which fierce fire, and iron, extends, Creatures of note for mercy-lacking uses. Hub. Well, see to live; I will not touch thine eyes For all the treasures that thine uncle owes: Yet I am sworn, and I did purpose, boy, With this same very iron to burn them out. Arth. O! now you look like Hubert; all this while You were disguised. Hubert. Peace! no more. Adieu. Your uncle must not know but you are dead: I’ll fill these dogged spies with false reports; And pretty child, sleep doubtless, and secure, That Hubert for the wealth of all the world Will not offend thee. Arth. O heaven!— I thank you, Hubert. Hub. Silence! no more. Go closely in with me; Much danger do I undergo for thee. (Exeunt.) |
For further illustration of Shakespeare’s clear understanding that the emotions of well-characterized figures are better means of controlling an audience than a merely horrific situation, study his handling of the ghost scene in Richard III or Julius Cæsar in contrast with similar places in Hamlet. What most transmuted the Ur-Hamlet of Thomas Kyd into one of the greatest tragedies of all time was the characterization Shakespeare put into it. Certainly, characterization makes for dramatists the stepping-stones on which they may rise from dead selves to higher things.
How may all this needed characterization best be done? A dramatist should not permit himself to describe his characters, for in his own personality he has no proper place in the text. There the characters must speak and act for themselves. There has been, however, an increasing tendency lately to describe the dramatis personæ of the play in programs, either in the list of characters or in a summary of the plot. Some writers apparently assume that every auditor reads his program carefully before the curtain goes up. Such an assumption is false: more than that it is lazy, incompetent, and thoroughly vicious, putting a play on the level with the motion pictures, which cannot depend wholly on themselves but would often be wholly vague without explanatory words thrown upon the canvas. Nor can the practice of the older dramatists like Wycherley and Shadwell, who often prefixed to their printed plays elaborate summaries describing the dramatis personæ, be cited as a final defense.
Sir William Belfond, a Gentleman of above 3,000 per annum, who in his youth had been a spark of the town, but married and retired into the country, where he turned to the other extreme, rigid and morose, most sordidly covetous, clownish, obstinate, positive, and froward.
Sir Edward Belfond, his Brother, a merchant, who by lucky hits had gotten a great estate, lives single, with ease and pleasure, reasonably and virtuously. A man of great humanity and gentleness and compassion towards mankind; well read in good books possessed with all gentleman-like qualities.
Belfond, Senior, eldest son to Sir William; bred after his father’s rustic, swinish manner, with great rigour and severity; upon whom his father’s estate is entailed; the confidence of which makes him break out into open rebellion to his father, and become lewd, abominably vicious, stubborn, and obstinate.
Belfond, Junior, second Son to Sir William; adopted by Sir Edward, and bred from his childhood by him, with all tenderness, and familiarity, and bounty, and liberty that can be, instructed in all the liberal sciences, and in all gentlemanlike education. Somewhat given to women, and now and then to good fellowship, but an ingenious, well-accomplished gentleman: a man of honour, and of excellent disposition and temper.
Truman, his friend, a man of honour and fortune.
Cheatly, a rascal, who by reason of debts dares not stir out of Whitefriars, but there inveigles young heirs in tail, and helps them to goods and money upon great disadvantages; is bound for them, and shares with them, till he undoes them. A lewd, impudent, debauched fellow, very expert in the cant about town.
Shamwell, cousin to the Belfonds, an heir, who being ruined by Cheatly, is made a decoy-duck for others; not daring to stir out of Alsatia, where he lives. Is bound with Cheatly for heirs, and lives upon them a dissolute, debauched life.
Captain Hackum, a blockheaded bully of Alsatia; a cowardly, impudent, blustering fellow; formerly a sergeant in Flanders, run from his colours, retreated into Whitefriars for a very small debt, where, by the Alsatians, he is dubbed a captain; marries one that lets lodgings, sells cherry brandy, and is a bawd.
Scrapeall, a hypocritical, repeating, praying, psalm-singing, precise fellow, pretending to great piety, a godly knave, who joins with Cheatly, and supplies young heirs with goods and money.
Attorney to Sir William Belfond, who solicits his business and receives all his packets.
Lolpoop, a North-country fellow, servant to Belfond, Senior, much displeased at his master’s proceedings.37
It is more than doubtful if anything so elaborate could be found in the manuscripts of Wycherley and Shadwell. Their purpose was doubtless the same as that of certain modern dramatists who, with a view to making plays less difficult for those unaccustomed to reading them, greatly amplify the stage directions before their plays go to print. Mr. Granville Barker in the manuscripts of his plays is particularly frugal of stage directions, but in the printed form of The Madras House,38 practically the whole history of Julia is given in the opening stage direction:
Julia started life—that is to say, left school—as a genius. The head mistress had had two or three years of such dull girls that really she could not resist this excitement. Watercolour sketches were the medium. So Julia was dressed in brown velveteen, and sent to an art school, where they wouldn’t let her do watercolour drawing at all. And in two years she learnt enough about the trade of an artist not ever to want to do those watercolour drawings again. Julia is now over thirty, and very unhappy. Three of her watercolours (early masterpieces) hang on the drawing-room wall. They shame her, but her mother won’t have them taken down. On a holiday she’ll be off now and then for a solid day’s sketching; and as she tears up the vain attempt to put on paper the things she has learnt to see, she sometimes cries. It was Julia, Emma, and Jane who, some years ago, conspired to present their mother with that intensely conspicuous cosy corner. A cosy corner is apparently a device for making a corner just what the very nature of a corner should forbid it to be. They beggared themselves; but one wishes that Mr. Huxtable were more lavish with his dress allowances, then they might at least have afforded something not quite so hideous.
Such characterizing is an implied censure on the ability of most readers to see the full significance of deft touches in the dialogue. If not, then it is necessary because some part of it is not given in the text as it should be, or it is wholly unnecessary and undesirable, for the text, repeating all this detail, will be wearisome to an intelligent reader. The safest principle is, in preparing a manuscript for acting, to keep stage directions to matters of setting, lighting, essential movements, and the intonations which cannot, by the utmost efforts of the author, be conveyed by dialogue.39 In this last group belong certain every-day phrases susceptible of so many shadings that the actor needs guidance. In the last line of this extract from the opening of Act III of Mrs. Dane’s Defence, the “tenderly” is necessary.
Enter Wilson right, announcing Lady Eastney. Enter Lady Eastney. Exit Wilson.
Lady Eastney. (Shaking hands.) You’re busy?
Sir Daniel. Yes, trying to persuade myself I am forty—solely on your account.
Lady Eastney. That’s not necessary. I like you well enough as you are.
Sir Daniel. (Tenderly.) Give me the best proof of that.
Notice that the statement just formulated as to stage directions reads, “cannot be conveyed,” not “may not.” Cross the line, and differences between the novel and the play are blurred, for the author runs a fair chance of omitting exposition needed in the text and of writing colorless dialogue. A recently published play prefaces not only every speech, but even parts of the speeches with careful statements as to how they should be given, even when the text is perfectly clear. Nothing is left to the imagination, and the text is often emotionally colorless.
Let it be remembered, then, that the stage direction is not a pocket into which a dramatist may stuff whatever explanation, description, or analysis a novelist might allow himself, but is more a last resort to which he turns when he cannot make his text convey all that is necessary.
The passing of the soliloquy and the aside40 makes the dramatist of today much more limited than were his predecessors in letting a character describe itself. Today everything depends on the naturalness of the self-exposition. The vainglorious, the self-centered, the garrulous will always talk of themselves freely. The reserved, the timid, and persons under suspicion will be sparing of words. When the ingenuity of the dramatist cannot make self-exposition plausible, the scene promptly becomes unreal. The point to be remembered is, as George Meredith once said, that “The verdict is with the observer.” Not what seems plausible to the author but what, as he tries it on auditors, proves acceptable, may stand.
Description of one character by another is usually more plausible than the method just treated. Even here, however, the test remains plausibility. It requires persuasive acting to make the following description of Tartuffe perfectly natural. There is danger that it will appear more the detailed picture the dramatist wishes to place in our minds than the description the speaker would naturally give his listeners:
Orgon. Ah! If you’d seen him, as I saw him first,
You would have loved him just as much as I.
He came to church each day, with contrite mien,
Kneeled, on both knees, right opposite my place,
And drew the eyes of all the congregation,
To watch the fervor of his prayers to heaven;
With deep-drawn sighs and great ejaculations.
He humbly kissed the earth at every moment;
And when I left the church, he ran before me
To give me holy water at the door.
I learned his poverty, and who he was,
By questioning his servant, who is like him,
And gave him gifts; but in his modesty
He always wanted to return a part.
“It is too much,” he’d say, “too much by half;
I am not worthy of your pity.” Then,
When I refused to take it back, he’d go,
Before my eyes, and give it to the poor.
At length Heaven bade me take him to my home,
And since that day, all seems to prosper here.
He censures nothing, and for my sake
He even takes great interest in my wife;
He lets me know who ogles her, and seems
Six times as jealous as I am myself.
You’d not believe how far his zeal can go:
He calls himself a sinner just for trifles;
The merest nothing is enough to shock him;
So much so, that the other day I heard him
Accuse himself for having, while at prayer,
In too much anger caught and killed a flea.41
The scene in which Melantius draws from his friend Amintor (The Maid’s Tragedy, Act III, Scene 2) admission of his wrongs, shows admirable use of both kinds of description—of oneself and of another person.
Melantius. You may shape, Amintor,
Causes to cozen the whole world withall,
And you yourselfe too; but tis not like a friend
To hide your soule from me. Tis not your nature
To be thus idle: I have seene you stand
As you were blasted midst of all your mirth;
Call thrice aloud, and then start, faining joy
So coldly!—World, what doe I here? a friend
Is nothing! Heaven, I would ha told that man
My secret sinnes! Ile search an unknowne land,
And there plant friendship; all is withered here.
Come with a complement! I would have fought,
Or told my friend a lie, ere soothed him so.
Out of my bosome!
Amintor. But there is nothing.
Mel. Worse and worse! farewell.
From this time have acquaintance, but no friend.
Amin. Melantius, stay; you shall know what that is.
Mel. See; how you plaid with friendship! be advis’d
How you give cause unto yourselfe to say
You ha lost a friend.
Amin. Forgive what I ha done;
For I am so oregone with injuries
Unheard of, that I lose consideration
Of what I ought to doe.—Oh!—Oh!
Mel. Doe not weepe.
What ist? May I once but know the man
Hath turn’d my friend thus!
Amin. I had spoke at first,
But that—
Mel. But what?
Amin. I held it most unfit
For you to know. Faith, doe not know it yet.
Mel. Thou seest my love, that will keepe company
With thee in teares; hide nothing, then, from me;
For when I know the cause of thy distemper,
With mine old armour Ile adorn myselfe,
My resolution, and cut through my foes,
Unto thy quiet, till I place thy heart
As peaceable as spotless innocence.
What is it?
Amin. Why, tis this—it is too bigge
To get out—let my teares make way awhile.
Mel. Punish me strangely, Heaven, if he escape
Of life or fame, that brought this youth to this.42
The cry with which Electra turns to her peasant husband in the play of Euripides is perhaps as fine an instance as there is of natural description by one person of her relations to another.
Peasant. What wouldst thou now, my sad one, ever fraught
With toil to lighten my toil? And so soft
Thy nurture was! Have I not chid thee oft,
And thou wilt cease not, serving without end?
Electra. (Turning to him with impulsive affection.) O friend, my friend, as God might be my friend,
Thou only hast not trampled on my tears.
Life scarce can be so hard, ’mid many fears
And many shames, when mortal heart can find
Somewhere one healing touch, as my sick mind
Finds thee.... And should I wait thy word, to endure
A little for thine easing, yea, or pour
My strength out in thy toiling fellowship?
Thou hast enough with fields and kine to keep;
’Tis mine to make all bright within the door.
’Tis joy to him that toils, when toil is o’er,
To find home waiting, full of happy things.
Peasant. If so it please thee, go thy way.43
Unquestionably, however, the best method of characterization is by action. In the first draft of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Krogstad uses with his employer Helmar, because he is an old school fellow, the familiar “tu.” This under the circumstance illustrates his tactlessness better than any amount of description. When Helmar is irritated by this familiarity, his petty vanity is perfectly illustrated. Any one who recalls the last scene of Louis XI as played by the late Sir Henry Irving remembers vividly the restless, greedily moving fingers of the praying King. They told far more than words. The way in which Mrs. Lindon, throughout the opening scene of Clyde Fitch’s The Truth,44 touches any small article she finds in her way perfectly indicates her fluttering nervousness.
At Mrs. Warder’s.... A smart, good-looking man-servant, Jenks, shows in Mrs. Lindon and Laura Fraser. The former is a handsome, nervous, overstrung woman of about thirty-four, very fashionably dressed; Miss Fraser, on the contrary, a matter-of-fact, rather commonplace type of good humor—wholesomeness united to a kind of sense of humor....
Mrs. Lindon nervously picks up check-book from the writing-table, looks at it but not in it, and puts it down....
She opens the cigar box on the writing-table behind her and then bangs it shut....
She picks up stamp box and bangs it down.
Rises and goes to mantel, looking at the fly-leaves of two books on a table which she passes.
Does not the action of this extract from Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside help most in depicting the greed and dishonesty of Yellowhammer, as well as the humor and ingenuity of the suitor?
Touchwood junior. (Aside.) ’Twere a good mirth now to set him a-work
To make her wedding-ring; I must about it:
Rather than the gain should fall to a stranger,
’Twas honesty in me t’ enrich my father.
Yellowhammer. (Aside.) The girl is wondrous peevish. I fear nothing
But that she’s taken with some other love,
Then all’s quite dashed: that must be narrowly looked to;
We cannot be too wary in our children.—
What is’t you lack?
Touch. jun. O, nothing now; all that I wish is present:
I’d have a wedding-ring made for a gentlewoman
With all speed that may be.
Yel. Of what weight, sir?
Touch. jun. Of some half ounce, stand fair
And comely with the spark of a diamond;
Sir, ’twere pity to lose the least grace.
Yel. Pray, let’s see it. (Takes stone from Touchwood junior.)
Indeed, sir ’tis a pure one.
Touch. jun. So is the mistress.
Yel. Have you the wideness of her finger, sir?
Touch. jun. Yes, sure, I think I have her measure about me:
Good faith, ’tis down, I cannot show it to you;
I must pull too many things out to be certain.
Let me see—long and slender, and neatly jointed;
Just such another gentlewoman—that’s your daughter, sir?
Yel. And therefore, sir, no gentlewoman.
Touch. jun. I protest.
I ne’er saw two maids handed more alike;
I’ll ne’er seek farther, if you’ll give me leave, sir.
Yel. If you dare venture by her finger, sir.
Touch. jun. Ay, and I’ll bide all loss, sir.
Yel. Say you so, sir?
Let us see.—Hither, girl.
Touch. jun. Shall I make bold
With your finger, gentlewoman?
Moll. Your pleasure, sir.
Touch. jun. That fits her to a hair, sir.
(Trying ring on Moll’s finger.)
Yel. What’s your posy, now, sir?
Touch. jun. Mass, that’s true: posy? i’faith, e’en thus, sir:
“Love that’s wise
Blinds parents’ eyes.”
Yel. How, how? if I may speak without offence, sir, I hold my life—
Touch. jun. What, sir?
Yel. Go to,—you’ll pardon me?
Touch. jun. Pardon you? ay, sir.
Yel. Will you, i’ faith?
Touch. jun. Yes, faith, I will.
Yel. You’ll steal away some man’s daughter: am I near you?
Do you turn aside? you gentlemen are mad wags!
I wonder things can be so warily carried,
And parents blinded so: but they’re served right,
That have two eyes and were so dull a’ sight.
Touch. jun. (Aside.) Thy doom take hold of thee!
Yel. Tomorrow noon
Shall show your ring well done.
Touch. jun. Being so, ’tis soon.—
Thanks, and your leave, sweet gentlewoman.
Moll. Sir, you’re welcome.—
(Exit Touchwood junior.)
O were I made of wishes, I went with thee!45
Could any description or analysis by the author or another character paint as perfectly as does the action of the following lines the wistful grief of the child pining for his mother?
Enter Giovanni, Count Lodovico.
Francisco. How now, my noble cossin! what, in blacke?
Giovanni. Yes, unckle, I was taught to imitate you
In vertue, and you must imitate mee
In coloures of your garments: my sweete mother
Is—
Fran. How? where?
Giov. Is there; no, yonder; indeed, sir, Ile not tell you,
For I shall make you weepe.
Fran. Is dead.
Giov. Do not blame me now,
I did not tell you so.
Lodovico. She’s dead, my lord.
Fran. Dead!
Monticelso. Blessed lady; thou art now above thy woes!
Wilt please your lordships to withdraw a little?
(Exeunt Ambassadors.)
Giov. What do the deade do, uncle? do they eate,
Heare musicke, goe a hunting, and bee merrie,
As wee that live?
Fran. No, cose; they sleepe.
Giov. Lord, Lord, that I were dead!
I have not slept these sixe nights. When doe they wake?
Fran. When God shall please.
Giov. Good God let her sleepe ever!
For I have knowne her wake an hundredth nights,
When all the pillow, where she laid her head,
Was brine-wet with her teares. I am to complaine to you, sir.
Ile tell you how they have used her now shees dead:
They wrapt her in a cruell fould of lead,
And would not let me kisse her.
Fran. Thou didst love her.
Giov. I have often heard her say she gave mee sucke,
And it would seeme by that shee deerely lov’d mee
Since princes seldome doe it.
Fran. O, all of my poore sister that remaines!
Take him away, for Gods sake!
(Exeunt Giovanni, Lodovico, and Marcello.)46
In brief, then, understand your characters thoroughly, but do not, in your own personality, describe them anywhere. Let them describe themselves, or let other people on the stage describe or analyze them, when this is naturally convincing or may be made plausible by your skill. Trust, however, above all, to letting your characters live before your audience the emotions which interest you, thus making them convey their characters by the best means of communication between actor and audience—namely, action.
In the chapter (VI) dealing with clearness in exposition the extreme importance of identifying the characters for the audience has been carefully treated.47 Closely connected with this identifying is the matter of entrances and exits.
The characterizing value of exits and entrances is usually little understood by the inexperienced dramatist. Yet in real life, men and women cannot enter or leave a room without characterization. Watch the people in a railroad car as it nears the terminus. The people who rise and stand in the aisles are clearly of different natures from those who remain quietly seated till the train reaches its destination. The twenty or thirty standing wait differently and leave the car with different degrees of haste, nervousness or anticipation. Those who remain seated differ also. Some are absorbed in conversation, oblivious of the approaching station; others, somewhat ostentatiously, watch the waiters in the aisles with amused contempt. Study, therefore, exits and entrances. Very few will be found negative in the sense that they add nothing to the knowledge of the characters. How did Claude enter in the following extract from a recent play? Claude, it should be said, has been mentioned just in passing, as a suitor of Marna. Other matters, however, have been occupying attention.
Enter Claude
Claude. (Sitting beside her on the settle.) I thought I should not see you tonight.
Marna. I wondered if you would come.
Claude must really have entered in character—quickly, impetuously, or ardently. He may have paused an instant on the threshold; he may have dashed in, leaving the door ajar; he may have closed it cautiously; he may have come in through the window. And how did they get to the settle? The author may know all this, but he certainly does not tell. He should visualize his figures as he writes, seeing them from moment to moment as they move, sit, or stand. Otherwise, he will miss much that is significant and characterizing in their actions.
In a play that was largely a study of a self-indulgent, self-centred youth, to the annoyance of all he is late at the family celebration of his cousin’s birthday. Sauntering in, he meets a disappointing silence. Looking about, he says, “Nobody has missed me.” And then, as all wait for his excuses, he shifts the burden of speech to his mother with the words, “Hasn’t her ladyship anything to say?” Surely this entrance characterizes.
Illusion disappears, also, when people needed on the stage, from taxi-cab drivers to ambassadors, are apparently waiting just outside the door. A play of very interesting subject-matter became almost ridiculous because whenever anybody was needed, he or she was apparently waiting just outside one of the doors. As some of these were persons involved in affairs of state and others supposedly lived at a distance, their prompt appearance partook of wizardry. People should not only come on in character, but after time enough has been allowed or suggested to permit them to come from the places where they are supposed to have been.
How much the entrance of a character should be prepared for must be left to the judgment of the dramatist. Whatever is needed to make the entrance produce the effect desired must be planted in the minds of the audience before the character appears. Phormio, in Terence’s play of that name, does not appear before the second act. His entrance is undoubtedly held back both to whet curiosity to the utmost before he appears, and in order to set forth clearly the tangle of events which his ingenuity must overcome. Magda, in Sudermann’s Heimat, also appears first in the second act. This is not done because some leading lady wished to make as triumphant an entrance as possible, an inartistic but time-honored reason in some plays, but because, till we have lived with Magda’s family in the home from which she was driven by her father’s narrowness and inflexibility, we cannot grasp the full significance of her character in this environment when she returns. Usually, of course, a character of importance does appear in the first act, but naturalness first and theatrical effectiveness second determine the point at which it is proper that a character should appear. The supposed need in the audience for detailed information, slight information, or no information as to a figure about to enter must decide the amount of preliminary statement in regard to him. If possible, a character enters, identifies himself, and places himself with regard to the other persons involved in the action as nearly as possible at one and the same time. The more important the character, the more involved the circumstances which we must understand before he can enter properly, the greater the amount of preliminary preparation for him. In Phormio48 and Heimat (or Magda) this preparation fills an act; in Tartuffe it fills two acts. More often bits here and there prepare the way, or some one passage of dialogue, as in the introduction of Sir Amorous La-Foole in Ben Jonson’s Epicœne.49
Dauphine. We are invited to dinner together, he and I, by one that came thither to him, Sir La-Foole.
Clerimont. I, that’s a precious mannikin!
Daup. Do you know him?
Cler. Ay, and he will know you too, if e’er he saw you but once, though you should meet him at church in the midst of prayers. He is one of the braveries, though he be none of the wits. He will salute a judge upon the bench, and a bishop in the pulpit, a lawyer when he is pleading at the bar, and a lady when she is dancing in a masque, and put her out. He does give plays and suppers, and invite his guests to them, aloud, out of his window, as they ride by in coaches. He has a lodging in the Strand for the purpose: or to watch when ladies are gone to the china-houses, or the Exchange, that he may meet them by chance, and give them presents, some two or three hundred pounds’ worth of toys, to be laughed at. He is never without a spare banquet, or sweetmeats in his chamber for their women to alight at, and come up to for bait.
Daup. Excellent! he was a fine youth last night; but now he is much finer! what is his Christian name? I have forgot.
Re-enter Page
Cler. Sir Amorous La-Foole.
Page. The gentleman is here below that owns that name.
Cler. ’Heart, he’s come to invite me to dinner, I hold my life.
Daup. Like enough: prithee, let’s have him up.
Cler. Boy, marshall him.
In Scene 1, Act I, of Becket, as written by Lord Tennyson, we have:
Enter Rosamund de Clifford, flying from Sir Reginald Fitz Urse, drops her veil
Becket. Rosamund de Clifford!
Rosamund. Save me, father, hide me—they follow me—and I must not be known.
Sir Henry Irving arranged this for the stage as follows:
Enter Rosamund de Clifford. Drops her veil
Rosamund. Save me, father, hide me.
Becket. Rosamund de Clifford!
Rosamund. They follow me—and I must not be known.
There are real values in these seemingly slight changes. With a rush and in confusion, Rosamund enters. As it is her first appearance in the play, it is of the highest importance that she be identified for the audience. If Becket gives her name as she enters, it may be lost in her onward rush. If entering, she speaks the line, “Save me, father, hide me,” she centers attention on him and he may fully emphasize the identification in, “Rosamund de Clifford!” Note as bearing on what has already been said in regard to unnecessary use of stage direction that Irving cut out “flying from Sir Reginald Fitz Urse.” He knew that Rosamund’s speeches and her action would make the fleeing clear enough, and that the scene immediately following with Fitz Urse would show who was pursuing her. Entrances, when well handled, therefore, must be in character, prepared for, and properly motivated.
Exits are just as important as entrances. The exit of Captain Nat in Shore Acres has already been mentioned under pantomime. Mark the significance of the exit of Hamlet in the ghost scene, as he goes with sword held out before him. The final exit of Iris in Pinero’s play is symbolic of her passing into the outer and under world.
Maldonado. You can send for your trinkets and clothes in the morning. After that, let me hear no more of you. (She remains motionless, as if stricken.) I’ve nothing further to say.
(A slight shiver runs through her frame and she resumes her walk. At the door, she feels blindly for the handle; finding it, she opens the door narrowly and passes out.)
The absurdities in which the ill-managed exit or entrance may land us, Lessing shows amusingly:
Maffei often does not motivate the exits and entrances of his personages: Voltaire often motivates them falsely, which is far worse. It is not enough that a person says why he comes on, we ought also to perceive by the connection that he must therefore come. It is not enough that he say why he goes off, we ought to see subsequently that he went on that account. Else, that which the poet places in his mouth is mere excuse and no cause. When, for example, Eurykles goes off in the third scene of the second act, in order, as he says, to assemble the friends of the queen, we ought to hear afterwards about these friends and their assemblage. As, however, we hear nothing of the kind, his assertion is a schoolboy “Peto veniam exeundi,” the first falsehood that occurs to the boy. He does not go off in order to do what he says; but in order to return a few lines on as the bearer of news which the poet did not know how to impart by means of any other person. Voltaire treats the ends of acts yet more clumsily. At the close of the third act, Polyphontes says to Merope that the altar awaits her, that all is ready for the solemnizing of their marriage and he exits with a “Venez, Madame.” But Madame does not come, but goes off into another coulisse with an exclamation, whereupon Polyphontes opens the fourth act, and instead of expressing his annoyance that the queen has not followed him into the temple (for he had been in error, there was still time for the wedding) he talks with his Erox about matters he should not ventilate here, that are more fitting conversation for his own house, his own rooms. Then the fourth act closes—exactly like the third. Polyphontes again summons the queen into the temple, Merope herself exclaims, “Courons nous vers le temple où m’attend mon outrage”; and says to the chief priests who come to conduct her thither, “Vous venez à l’autel entrainer la victime.” Consequently we must expect them inside the temple at the beginning of the fifth act, or are they already back again? Neither; good things will take time. Polyphontes has forgotten something and comes back again and sends the queen back again. Excellent! Between the third and fourth, between the fourth and fifth acts nothing occurs that should, and indeed, nothing occurs at all, and the third and fourth acts only close in order that the fourth and fifth may begin.50
At the end of Act II of The Princess and the Butterfly the exits are as important as any part of the text. Note particularly the last.
Denstroude. (On the steps, pausing and looking back.) You cycle at Battersea tomorrow morning?
Mrs. St. Roche. It’s extremely unlikely.
Denstroude. I shall be there at ten. Don’t be later.
(He kisses his hand to her and departs. She stands quite still, thinking. A Servant enters, crosses to the billiard-room, and proceeds to cover up the billiard-table. She walks slowly to the ottoman and sits, looking into the fire. St. Roche reappears and comes down the steps. She does not turn her head. He goes to the table and mixes some spirits and water.)
St. Roche. (As he mixes the drink.) What d’ye think—what d’ye think that silly, infatuated feller’s goin’ to do?
Mrs. St. Roche. Demailly?
St. Roche. (Glancing toward the billiard-room.) Sssh! (With a nod.) Um!
(He comes to her, bringing her the tumbler in which he has mixed the drink.)
Mrs. St. Roche. (Taking the tumbler, her eyes never meeting his.) Well, what is he going to do?
St. Roche. Marry that low woman.
Mrs. St. Roche. (Callously.) Great heavens! the fool!
St. Roche. Yes. Shockin’, ain’t it?
Mrs. St. Roche. (Putting the glass to her lips, with a languid air.) She has blinded him, I suppose, with some story or other; or he would hardly have committed the outrage, tonight, of presenting her to me.
St. Roche. (Returning to the table and mixing a drink for himself.) That’s it—blinded him. And yet it’s almost incomprehensible how a feller can be as blind as all that. Why, the very man-in-the-street—
(The Servant switches off the lights in the billiard-room, and comes out from the room.)
St. Roche. (To the man.) I’ll switch off the lights here.
(The Servant goes out.)
Mrs. St. Roche. Well, you had better let him know that he mustn’t attempt to come to this house again.
St. Roche. Poor chap!
Mrs. St. Roche. We can’t be associated, however remotely, with such a disgraceful connection.
St. Roche. Of course, of course. (Coming down, glass in hand.) I could tell you things I’ve heard about this Mrs. Ware—
Mrs. St. Roche. (Rising.) Please don’t! I want no details concerning a person of her world.
(She ascends the steps slowly, carrying her cloak and her tumbler—without looking back.)
Goodnight.
St. Roche. (With a wistful glance at her.) Goodnight.
(She departs. He stands for a little while contemplating space; then he switches off the light. The room remains partially illumined by the fire-glow. He turns to examine the fire. Apparently assured on that point, he walks, still carrying his tumbler, to the door which is in the centre wall; where, uttering a little sigh as he opens the door, he disappears.)51
The passages quoted (pp. 268-275) from The Troublesome Reign of King John and Shakespeare’s play show crude and perfect handling of exits and entrances. In the old play the murderers merely enter and go out again as ordered. In Shakespeare they enter at the moment which makes them the climactic touch in the terror of Arthur and the audience. When Hubert orders them to go, it is the first sign that he may relent.
The inexperienced dramatist is almost always wasteful in the number of characters used. An adaptation of a Spanish story called for a cast of about a dozen important figures and some sixty supernumeraries as soldiers and peasants—all this in a one-act play. It meant very little labor to cut the soldiery to a few officers and some privates, and the peasantry to some six or eight people. Ultimately, the total cast did not contain a quarter as many people as the original, yet nothing important had been lost. Rewriting a play often is, and should be, a “slaughter of the innocents.” Don’t use unneeded people. You must provide them with dialogue, and as the play goes on, some justification for existence. The manager must pay them salaries. First of all, get rid of entirely unnecessary people. They usually hold over from the story as originally heard or read. For instance, a recent adaptation used from the original story a blinking dwarf sitting silent, forever watchful, at a table in the restaurant where the story was placed. His smile simply emphasized the cynicism of the story enacted in his sight. He was in no way necessary to the telling of the story,—and so he disappeared in the final form of the play. One is constantly tempted to bring in some figure for purposes of easy exposition only to find that one must either bind him in with the story as it develops, or drop him out of sight the moment his expository work is done. The trouble with such figures is that they are likely to give false clues, stirring a hearer to interest in them or their apparent relation to the story, when nothing is to come of one or the other. Usually a little patience and ingenuity will give this needed exposition to some character or characters essential to the plot. In a recent play of Breton life during the Chouan War, an attractive peasant boy was introduced in order to plant in the minds of the audience certain ideas as to immediate conditions of the war, and the relation of the woman to whom he is talking with the Prince, his leader. Wishing to show the devotion of the Prince’s followers, the author had the boy talk much of his own loyalty to his leader. Just there was the false clue. Every auditor expected his loyalty to lead to something later in the play; but the youth, having told his tale, disappeared for good. It took very little time to discover that all the young man told could perfectly well be made clear in one preceding scene between the woman and her son, and two of the other scenes immediately following, between the woman and the young Prince. It is these unnecessary figures who are largely responsible for the scenes already spoken of in chapter IV which clog the movement of a play.
Sometimes, too, similar figures at different places in a play do exactly or nearly the same work,—servants for instance. When it does not interfere with verisimilitude, give the tasks to one person rather than two, or two rather than three. That is, use only people absolutely needed. Sometimes these carelessly introduced figures stray through a play like an unquiet spirit. In The Road to Happiness one character, Porter, was of so little importance that most of the time, when on the stage, he had nothing to do. When really acting, it was largely in pantomime, or with speech that, not effectively, reiterated what some one else was saying. He existed really for two scenes. In the first act he might just as well have been talked about as shown, and in the second act what he did could well have been done by one of the other important characters. When any character in a play shows a tendency not to get into the action readily; when for long periods he is easily overlooked by the author; it is time to consider whether he should not be given the coup de grâce.
Today we are fortunately departing from an idea somewhat prevalent in the middle of the nineteenth century, that a figure once introduced into a play should be kept there until the final curtain. That is exalting technique, and the so-called “well-made” play, above truth to life. When a character is doing needed work, use him when and as long as he would appear in real life, and no longer. Use each character for a purpose, and when it is fulfilled, drop him. Naturalness and theatrical economy are the two tests: the greater of these is naturalness.
All that has been said comes to this. Know your characters so intimately that you can move, think, and feel with them, supplied by them with far more material than you can use in any one play. See that they are properly introduced to the audience; that they are clearly and convincingly presented. Do not forget the importance of entrances and exits. Cut out all unnecessary figures.
There follow three bits of characterization from very different types of play: Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife, a comedy of manners; G. B. Shaw’s farce-comedy, You Never Can Tell; and Eugène Brieux’s thesis play, The Cradle. The first scene aims merely to present vividly the riotous and drunken squire. The second, while characterizing William, aims to illustrate that contentment lies in doing that to which one is accustomed, under accustomed conditions. The third not only characterizes; it shows that no law of man can wholly give a woman to a second husband when common anxiety with the first husband for the child of their marriage draws them together. Note in all three the use of action as compared with description or analysis; the connotative value of the phrasings; the succint sureness.
THE PROVOKED WIFE