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They are for ever running at the back of public opinion, and shouting 'come on! or 'go back! to those who are in front of them. If half of them had their way, our young actors and actresses would play in Pinero's pieces as Mrs. Siddons or Charles Kean played in the pieces of Shakespeare long ago.
Plays of the Prisoner of Zenda type would come under this head: so would Sir Arthur Pinero's farces, The Magistrate, The Schoolmistress, Dandy Dick; so would Mr. Carton's light comedies, Lord and Lady Algy, Wheels within Wheels, Lady Huntworth's Experiment; so would most of Mr. Barrie's comedies; so would Mr. Arnold Bennett's play, The Honeymoon.
But the contemporary English-speaking stage furnishes examples just as striking of the influence of the actor on the dramatist. Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's greatest heroine, Paula Tanqueray, wore from her inception the physical aspect of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Many of the most effective dramas of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones have been built around the personality of Sir Charles Wyndham.
But we have abundant evidence that the act division was sometimes marked on the Elizabethan stage, and have no reason to doubt that it was always more or less recognized, and was present to Shakespeare's mind no less than to Ibsen's or Pinero's. Influenced in part, perhaps, by the Elizabethan theorists, but mainly by the freakishness of his own genius, Mr.
Sir Arthur Pinero's play, The Profligate, was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed "The Sword of Damocles." A rather flagrant example of suspended attention is afforded by Hamlet's advice to the Players.
To say that such-and-such a factor is necessary, or highly desirable, in a dramatic scene, is by no means to imply that every scene which contains this factor is good drama. Let us take the case of another heroine Nina in Sir Arthur Pinero's His House in Order.
Within recent years, "Masques," an organization of University women, has given unusually artistic performances of Pinero's The Amazons, , and Barrie's Quality Street, . The Department of Oratory has also interested itself in the drama and is responsible for several well-considered presentations of such plays as Galsworthy's Silver Box; Kennedy's The Servant in the House, ; Ibsen's Pillars of Society, ; and Masefield's Tragedy of Nan, .
Great progress toward naturalness in contemporary acting has been occasioned by the disappearance of the soliloquy and the aside. The relinquishment of these two time-honored expedients has been accomplished only in most recent times. Sir Arthur Pinero's early farces abounded with asides and even lengthy soliloquies; but his later plays are made entirely without them.
Both She Stoops to Conquer and The Rivals are good examples of the rapid working-out of an intrigue, engendered, developed, and resolved all within the frame of the picture. Single-adventure plays of a more modern type are the elder Dumas's Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, the younger Dumas's Francillon, Sardou's Divorçons, Sir Arthur Pinero's Gay Lord Quex, Mr.
Barberry was, and Captain Salter Symmes, who took leading male parts in Mr. Pinero's plays when they were produced in Simla, and was invariably considered up there to have done them better than any professional they have at home, though he was even more successful as a contortionist when the entertainment happened to be a burlesque.
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