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No tyranny could extort this service. No wealth could pay for this golden secret. Sometimes a character appears but once in the course of a great drama. The man or woman, comes on the stage to deliver one message, and then disappears. But that one brief word has its place in the playwright's scheme, and its effect on the action of the piece.
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, when the novel was despotic in its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary expression, and when arrogant writers of fiction like Edmond de Goncourt did not hesitate to declare that the drama was outworn at last, that it was unfitted to convey the ideas interesting to the modern world, and that it had fallen to be no more than a toy to amuse the idle after dinner, Ibsen brought forth a succession of social dramas as tho to prove that the playhouse of our own time could supply a platform whereon a man might free his soul and boldly deliver his message, if only he had first mastered the special conditions of the playwright's art.
Now that these moulds are broken, and both marriage and death may be said to have lost their prestige as the be-all and end-all of drama, the playwright's range of choice is unlimited, and the difficulty of choosing has become infinitely greater.
Her personality fails to detach itself from the romance of her biography by any salient qualities. But Webster, with true playwright's instinct, casts aside historical doubts, and delineates in his heroine a woman of a very marked and terrible nature. Hard as adamant, uncompromising, ruthless, Vittoria follows ambition as the loadstar of her life.
From one point of view Helen could not but admire this power of concentration, but when she perceived that her playwright's work had filled his mind to the exclusion of herself she began to suffer. Her pride resented his indifference, and she was saved from anger and disgust only by the beauty of the writing he brought to her. "The fury of the poet is on him.
Here we touch on one of the subtlest of the playwright's problems the art of arousing anticipation in just the right measure. But that is not the matter at present in hand. In the opening scene of Othello it is true that some talk passes between Iago and Roderigo before they raise the alarm and awaken Brabantio; but it is carefully non-expository talk; it expounds nothing but Iago's character.
The moral peripety the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air is a no less characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the playwright's uses. Certainly there are few things more impressive in drama than to see a man or woman or a man and woman come upon the stage, radiant, confident, assured that
He must have been hiding in the gallery. He leads you into this crazy venture and then deserts you. A man who does that is a puppy." A spark of amusement lit Helen's eyes. "You might call him that when you meet him next." Hugh, with a sudden remembrance of the playwright's powerful frame, replied, a little less truculently: "I'll call him something more fit than that when I see him.
"I begin to see the effect of the bill-board's printing the star's name in letters two feet high and the playwright's in one-inch type." "The newspapers don't print yours at all, do they? Unless you shoot some one," she added maliciously. "True enough. But I don't think I'd shine as a playwright." "What will you do, then, if you fire yourself?" "Fiction, perhaps.
We return now to the point at which the foregoing disquisition it is not a digression became necessary. We had arrived at the general principle that the playwright's chief aim in his first act ought to be to arouse and carry forward the interest of the audience. This may seem a tolerably obvious statement; but it is worth while to examine a little more closely into its implications.
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