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Updated: May 11, 2025
Indeed it was more cordially received than the drama, as is indicated by this criticism by Hanslick: "Perhaps in a few years Ibsen's Peer Gynt will live only through Grieg's music, which, to my taste, has more poetry and artistic intelligence in every number than the whole five-act monstrosity of Ibsen."
A letter to Tennyson in 1884 from so competent a student of Shakespeare as Sir Henry Irving declares that ‘Becket’ is a finer play than ‘King John.’ Still, the ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ ‘The Lotos-Eaters,’ ‘The Gardener’s Daughter,’ outweigh the five-act tragedy in the world of literary art. Of acted drama Tennyson knew nothing at all.
Alexandrian precept, handed on by Horace, gave to the five act division a purely arbitrary sanction, which induced playwrights to mask the natural rhythm of their themes beneath this artificial one. But in truth the three-act division ought no more to be elevated into an absolute rule than the five-act division.
"She has aged very much. I really must begin to think of my end." Outside, in the street, Joanna's husband was waiting for her a dark, ragged man, with a five-act expression of face. "Don't talk to me for a while," she begged. "I have been among ghosts." "Ghosts?" "They were much too dull to be real: and yet Oh, Jack, I feel glad for the first time that our child was taken!
It was foredoomed to failure, because it depended upon the iniquity known as "quick returns." De mortuis nil nisi bonum. That a one-act play is fully able to create a veritable sensation, as keen as any that a five-act drama might evoke, was instanced at the Manhattan Theater, when Mrs. Fiske produced a little drama, written by herself, and called "A Light from St. Agnes."
Burns's powers were concentrative, and he could put into a song what a dramatist might elaborate into a five-act tragedy; but that is not to say that the dramatist is the greater poet. After all, the song is the more likely to live, and the more likely, therefore, to keep the mission of the poet an enduring and living influence in the lives of men.
It lay on the table, bearing on its first page the title, Gertrude, a Bourgeois Tragedy. The piece was a five-act one, in prose. A couple of days later, actors and actresses were assembled in Balzac's drawing-room. Madame Dorval pursed her lips at the words, Gertrude, tragedy. "Don't interrupt," cried the author, laughing. However, after the reading of the second act they had to interrupt.
Rondeaux were hawked about from butcher to baker, at ten to the joint, or three to the four-pound loaf, and triolets were going at a hollow-toothful of brandy. A ballade-worth of butter would hardly cover a luncheon biscuit, while a five-act blank-verse tragedy was given away for a pound of tea, and that only when the characters were incestuous and the caesuras irreproachable.
Of course, some of the manuscripts are ridiculous: five-act plays that would not last an hour and a half upon the stage and three-act comedies which would require an evening per act; tragedies in rhymed verse not up to the standard of cracker poetry. It is difficult to understand how such things come to be written.
I have heard that the Roi Candaule was originally an act of La Boule, and the Photographe seems as though it had dropped from La Vie Parisienne by mistake. In M. Meilhac's earlier five-act plays, the Vertu de Celimène and the Petit fils de Mascarille, there is great power of conception, a real grip on character, but the main action is clogged with tardy incidents, and so the momentum is lost.
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