The BEFORE – setting the stage, Prologue

The aim of this guide is to provide would-be dramatists with some systematic advice and guidance in a plain and practical way. Many existing books are more aimed at guiding the judgment of the critic in writing review columns, rather than stimulating and developing the creative impulse of the playwright.

Isn’t it better to write plays instead of writing about them? A person may have a great love for an art, and have some insight into its principles and methods, but lack the innate ability required to create an original piece of art. On the other hand, some gifted and excellent playwrights often lack the ability or patience to guide and mentor novices. An accomplished dramatist may often not be the best guide for novice dramatists. He can’t analyze his own performance, and through that discriminate between that in his performance which is of universal validity, and that which may be good for him, but would be bad for any one else.

The word “theme” refers to the subject of a play, or to the story. For example, the theme of “Romeo and Juliet” is youthful love crossed by ancestral hate; the theme of “Othello” is jealousy; the theme of “Le Tartufe” is hypocrisy; the theme of “Caste” is fond hearts and coronets and the theme of “Getting Married” is getting married.

In some plays it is evident that there was no theme that could be expressed in abstract terms, present in the author’s mind, but through a process of abstraction we can formulate a theme for plays like “As You Like It”, “The Way of the World” or for “Hedda Gabler”.

Whatever maybe the seed that started a play – whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or personal experience, a newspaper headline, an emotional adventure or an incident in the street – the play will be of small account as a work of art unless character, at a very early point, enters into its development. Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes: “Sometimes I start with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge from its first idea.” “My experience is,” another dramatist wrote, “that you never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play.” He writes: “It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind, that he must express it, and in dramatic form.”

The critic Ferdinand Brunetière said: “The theatre in general, is nothing but the place for the development of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed to it by destiny, fortune, or circumstances.” And again: “Drama is a representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the malevolence of those who surround him.” (Etudes Critiques, vol. vii, pp. 153 and 207) This definition describes the matter of many dramas, but it does not lay down any characteristic common to all drama, and possessed by no other form of fiction.

In a play by James Bernard Fagan, “The Prayer of the Sword”, there is
a clear example of an inadequate obstacle. A youth named Andrea destined for the priesthood falls in love, and the tragedy ought to lie in the conflict between this earthly passion and his heavenly calling and election. The fact that he has as yet taken no irrevocable vow is not the essence of the matter. There would have been a tragic conflict if Andrea had felt absolutely certain of his calling to the priesthood, and had defied Heaven, and endangered his immortal soul because of his
overwhelming passion. That would have been a tragic situation – but the author had carefully avoided it – unfortunately. From the outset it had been impressed upon the audience that he had no priestly vocation. There was no struggle in his soul between passion and duty. His struggles were all with external forces and influences. Therefore the play, which a real obstacle might have converted into a tragedy, remained a sentimental romance … and was forgotten.

Secondary suspense or surprise is experienced in empathy with the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is to follow. The dramatist should focus his main appeal on secondary suspense, for the longer his play endures, the larger will be the proportion of any given audience knowing it beforehand – in outline, if not in detail. A good example to extract the maximum effect from what might else have been an anti-climax, would be the death of Othello – no easy problem for Shakespeare. Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to torture. How was Othello’s death to be made the culminating moment of the tragedy, and not a foregone conclusion or a mere conventional suicide? Shakespeare’s dramatic genius shines unmistakably from Othello’s address, as he is being led away:

Valuable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the
scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen’s “Efterladte
Skrifter”, some of which now have been translated under the title of “From Ibsen’s Workshop” (Scribner), and well worth studying.
The great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen’s practice is that the play should be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not allowed to become fixed, either in the author’s mind or on paper, before it has
had time to grow and ripen. Many of Ibsen’s greatest individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had
reached a point of development at which many authors would have considered the work of art ripe for birth.

H.A. Jones writes: “When you have a character or several characters you haven’t a play. You may keep these in your mind and nurse them till they combine in a piece of action; but you haven’t got your play till you have theme, characters, and action all fused. The process with me is as purely automatic and spontaneous as dreaming; in fact it is really dreaming while you are awake.” The apparent spontaneity of a character’s proceedings is a pure illusion. It means no more than that the imagination, once set in motion along a given line, moves along that line with an ease and freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural and almost uncanny. Authors who are very gifted for character-creation probably experience this illusion, though they are sane enough and modest enough to realize that an illusion it is. Here flexibility is vital.

Most dramatists draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious work of constructing the play. Ibsen mostly did so, but then shortened the list later. Some saved up the characters rejected from one play, and used them in another. There are essential characters in every play, without whom the theme would be unthinkable, and auxiliary characters that are simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on the action, but not indispensable to the theme. It depends upon how we define the theme whether a character is essential or auxiliary. The auxiliaries might all have been utterly different, or might never have existed at all, and yet the essence of the play would remain intact. The modern dramatist has a wide latitude of choice in the technical matter of working out his plot with the smallest possible number of characters, or he may introduce a crowd of auxiliary personages. The nature of his theme will be the guide to this. In a broad social study or a picturesque romance, many auxiliary figures are in order, but in a subtle comedy, or a psychological tragedy, the essential characters should have the stage as much as possible to themselves.