4.4 The full close
There are themes in which tension can be maintained and heightened to the end. Tragedy has always been regarded as higher form than comedy. It may be due to the tradition to round off human destiny in death if, after all the crises that life could throw at him, the hero can look destiny in the face and “go home” honorably. Sophocles regarded it as “ Call no man happy till his life be ended.” As a form of art, maybe tragedy lets us appreciate “being alive” to a deeper extent, after having lived through this experience. Life may now seem more significant than ever before. The tragic ending is also prone to be misused. Great plays often end in the hero’s death, but to kill your hero doesn’t make the play great. Tension can be maintained with the presence of a threatening sword, gun or poison. Tragic endings were not always popular with audiences during some times in history – but it seemed to be the only way to avoid an anticlimax.
Before attempting to write a tragedy, the playwright should make sure that the theme lends itself to real tragedy, with all the dynamic angles you can place your hero in relation to life and death. The study of character must be profound before the author can justify any death sentences on his personages. We all need to die some day, but the hero must be large enough in life and studied in depth before death could be considered a proportionate close. Aristotle thought that a tragic hero must be too good, or too bad, and death on the stage brings an inherent distinction that demands a sufficient cause. Today we look at the bigger picture of drama objectively and don’t calculate to what degree a man has “deserved” an honorable death. To be able to believe in the character, we need to know him intimately and share his feelings – feel “with” him, and believe that he “dies because he can not live”.
Ibsen never used death as a mere way to escape from problems. In five of thirteen plays, no one dies at all. Playwrights should guard against the temptation to use suicide as a way of untangling or cutting the knotted rope of life. Death by fatal accident is frowned upon in serious drama, and murder is more popular in melodrama. Suicide gets to be used, over used and sometimes abused. It ought to be the
playwright’s, as it is the man’s, last resort. In most countries, suicide is greatly on the increase, and the motives driving people to it would be of a dramatic nature. But it remains a crude and insensitive departure from the entanglement of life and not to be used lightly by the dramatist. The characters need to be large enough, true enough, living enough and the play should probe deep enough into human experience to make the intervention of death seem less incongruous.
Sometimes the end is imposed upon the dramatist by the whole drift and direction of his action. Chance plays a large part in the way events enfold, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not have encountered the sudden temptation to jump, to which she yields in Sir Arthur Pinero’s play. Zoe experiences her life to be miserable and a hopeless muddle. She has a good heart, but no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has messed up other peoples’ lives and intervened disastrously in their destinies. She is ill, her nerves are all on edge and she is desperate enough to use this rapid, but not easy exit.
Another “justified” use of suicide may be found in Galsworthy’s “Justice”. The play is about all the forces of society hounding a luckless youth to his end, having gotten on the wrong side of the law.
Sometimes playwrights come across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide. If a theme does not force upon him a specific kind of last act, but enables him to sustain and increase the tension up to the very close without having to resort to death to help carry the tension, a playwright can feel happy. Such themes are not too common, but they do occur, like Dumas found in “Denise” and “Francillon”, Shaw’s “Candida” and “The Devil’s Disciple” and Galsworthy’s “Strife”. In plays which do not end in death, it will generally be found that the culminating scene occurs in the penultimate act, and that, if anticlimax is avoided, it is by its skilful renewal and reinforcement in the last act and not by the maintenance of an unbroken tension. Of the most successful plays have been those in which the last act came as a pleasant surprise. An anticlimax had seemed inevitable, but the playwright had found a way out of it, like in “An Enemy of the People”. In some modern plays a full close is achieved by altogether omitting the last act, or last scene, and leaving the end of the play to the imagination.