2.3 The first act
There have been trends through the years to work against the division of a play into acts. Shakespeare used acts to give a rhythm to the action of his plays, although some students of the Elizabethan stage speculate that he did not “think in acts,” but conceived his plays as continuous series of events, without any pause or intermission in their flow. In the Elizabethan theatre there was no need of long interacts for the change of scenes, but there is abundant evidence that the act division was sometimes marked on the Elizabethan stage, and that it was always more or less recognized, and was present to Shakespeare’s mind.
Bernard Shaw did write some plays in one continuous gush of dialogue, in unity of time and place, a continuous mass or mash, e.g. “Getting Married” where he relies upon his virtuosity of dialogue to enable him to dispense with form. He claimed that he is thereby reviving the practice of the Greeks, a claim that can be shown to be unfounded. A typical example of Greek tragedy, “Oedipus”, shows the unity of carefully calculated proportion, order, interrelation of parts … the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or of a living organism.
Note the difference between the formless continuity of “Getting
Married”, and the precise ordering and balancing of clearly differentiated parts in the structure of a Greek tragedy. The division into acts remains a valuable means of marking the rhythm of the story. When there is no story to tell, the division into acts is probably superfluous.
A play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is of a higher artistic order than a play with no act-structure. The dramatist analyze the crises with which he deals, and present them to the audience in their rhythm of growth, culmination and solution. The division into acts helps to mark that rhythm. Aristotle had the necessity for marking this rhythm in mind when he said that a dramatic action must have a beginning, a middle and an end.
Taken in its simplicity, this principle would indicate the three-act division as the ideal scheme for a play. Many of the best modern plays in all languages fall into three acts. The three-act division shouldn’t be more made into an absolute rule than the five-act division. Many modern serious plays are in four acts. A play ought to consist of a great crisis, worked out through a series of minor crises. An act ought to consist either of a minor crisis carried to its temporary solution, or of a random number of such crises grouped together in the development of a given theme. Five acts may be regarded as the maximum because of the time-limit imposed by social custom on a performance.