Difficulties

of a curtain

The fact that there was no curtain made it difficult to bring acts to a stirring climax. The modern dramatist rings down the curtain at the critical moment; caused by lack the Elizabethan dramatist had to make his actors walk off the stage. But in his later plays Shakespeare made his scenes end effectively in spite of this difficulty. His most common methods were to leave the issue in suspense at the end of a scene, or to work up to a certain emotional pitch and end on just the right note to emphasize this pitch. Thus the first scene of Act II in Macbeth ends with suspense. A bell sounds softly, the signal for Macbeth to murder the sleeping king. His shuddering whisper closes the scene:

"I go,

and it is done; the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell."

The balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, on the other hand, alive with the rapture and wonder of young love, sustains its mood perfectly through the last word. Had Shakespeare had all the resources of the modern stage, he could have contrived no more natural or beautiful ending:

Jul. I have forgot why I did call thee back.
Rom. Let me stand here till thou remember it.
Jul. I shall forget, to have thee still stand there,
Rememb'ring how I love thy company.

Rom. And I'll stay, to have thee still forget,
Forgetting any other home but this.

Jul. 'Tis almost morning, I would have thee gone;-
And yet no farther than a wanton's bird;

That lets it hop a little from her hand,

Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves,

And with a silken thread plucks it back again,

So loving-jealous of his liberty.

Rom. I would I were thy bird.

Jul.

Sweet, so would I;

Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.
Good-night, good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.
Rom. Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast!
Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!

[Exit, above.]

If, however, there were dead men on the stage (as there frequently were in Elizabethan drama) the absence of a curtain made it necessary to call in some one to help remove the corpses. Thus at the end of Hamlet, Fortinbras and his army appear to bear off in solemn procession the somewhat numerous dead with whom the stage is strewn.

of much scenic equipment

But the lack of a curtain was not the only difficulty. The Elizabethan stage, though not so bare of scenery as has been generally supposed, was not equipped with the Difficulties elaborate devices that we have to-day, for caused by lack the emphasis of the setting. Moreover, the performances took place in the afternoon, practically in the open air. Since the setting was not a matter of drop curtains and electrical effects, descriptive poetry had to create an imaginative picture of the needed setting. The atmosphere of the scene had to be created by the words of the author. This made it necessary for Shakespeare to develop his gift of poetic imagination.

Some of the most beautiful poetry in our language we owe to this artificial limitation of the stage. Examples are numerous: the garden scenes, the farewell scene and the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet, the moonlit garden in The Merchant of Venice, the pictures of gloom and horror created by Macbeth's tortured imagination, the description of Cleopatra's barge in Antony and Cleopatra, the constantly repeated accounts of the storm in Julius Caesar, the description of Dover Cliffs in King Lear. In less detailed touches Shakespeare's practical stage-craft takes care to

remind his audience of time and place. The plays are filled with such reminders:

"Yon grey lines that fret the clouds are messengers of day ";

"The deep of night is crept upon our talk";

"How ill this taper burns!";

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!";

"Night's candles are burnt out and jocund Day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops";

"tis bitter cold

And I am sick at heart";

"But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,

Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill"; "The air bites shrewdly";

"The pelting of this pitiless storm";

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!";

"Light thickens and the crow

Makes wing to the rooky wood";

"Now spurs the lated traveller apace

To gain the timely inn";

"in the shade of these melancholy boughs."

The dramatist, then, has to consider in writing his plays the requirements and the limitations of his stage. He must Summary also consider the tastes and abilities of actors and managers and the tastes of his audience. These are the general difficulties to be faced by the playwright.

A FEW GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION

The drama classified

Different Kinds of Drama

The two most fundamental divisions of the drama are comedy and tragedy. If the leading character eventually overcomes the obstacles with which he is striving, the play is called a comedy; if on the other hand, he is overcome by the obstacles, the play is called a tragedy. Thus As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night's

Comedy and tragedy

Dream are comedies; Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Cæsar are tragedies.

A play may, however, have both comic and tragic elements. The hero may lose his struggle but may have gained something in losing it; or the happiness of the leading Tragi-comedy characters may be overshadowed by the unhappiness of some other character or characters who have aroused the sympathy of the audience. Thus in The Merchant of Venice the happiness of the leading characters is overshadowed by the unhappiness of Shylock. In Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac the hero gains by losing. A play which thus combines tragic and comic elements may be called a tragi-comedy. If a comedy is so excessively comic that the leading characters are struggling against absurd and undignified odds, it is called a farce. Difficulties arising from Farce-comedy mistaken identity like those in A Comedy of Errors are usually farcical. When characters are animated by ridiculous motives or blocked by inconsequential trifles, the play is likely to be a farce. The Taming of the Shrew with its absurd exaggeration of Katherine's bad temper and the extreme measures taken by Petruchio to overcome it, is really a farce-comedy. In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest the chief obstacles in the course of true love are a young lady's unwillingness to marry any one whose name is not Ernest and the inability of her suitor to produce any ancestors or antecedents other than the handbag in which he was orginally found at a railway station. Such absurd complications make the play a farce.

A melodrama is a play, usually with a happy ending, in which the interest centers in the exciting and unusual things that happen fast and mysteriously. Melodrama The characters are likely to be "stock figures "—that is, types rather than strongly marked individualities-moved by elementary motives. The good people in such a play

are very good and very brave, qualities which they need if they are to survive the dangers into which they are plunged for no plausible reason except to provide another thrill for the audience. The bad people are very bad, with no redeeming feature unless tenacity of purpose may be so called. A melodrama is not to be judged too seriously. If it supplies harmless entertainment like The Cat and the Canary, for instance, its purpose is achieved. The plot of Hamlet as it originally existed is melodramatic, but Shakespeare transformed the leading character from a figurehead of blood and thunder melodrama into a genuinely tragic human being.

Moving pictures have carried melodrama to absurd but extremely exciting lengths. The early moving pictures used crude melodrama where lovely ladies were rescued weekly from harassing perils and harrowing exploits. Later, with The Birth of a Nation, Hearts of the World, and Orphans of the Storm, the melodrama of the screen acquired certain beauty, humor, and truth. Still more recently both stage and screen have given travesties of highly colored melodrama in such plays as The Bad Man, Merton of the Movies and The Tavern and in such pictures as The Fighting American. These parodies show amusingly the obvious qualities of melodrama. When, in our reading, we find walls which slide without visible human agency; sweet young girls who are grasped in "the fell clutch of circumstance"; deep-eyed, heavy-moustached villains who wreck on-rushing subway trains to the accompaniment of Satanic laughter; handsome young men in fur coats who, with the agility of mountain goats, leap across floating ice and rescue damsels from seething torrents; infantry, cavalry, aëroplanes, and motor corps travelling rapidly, bearing aloft the stars and stripes, all to save a woman's honor or spare her feelings; we may be sure that we are in the land of melodrama and not of life.