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When a new character of importance appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal. Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first, such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader's mental vision.
If he offers nothing but the bare dialogue, he is writing a kind of play; just as a dramatist, amplifying his play with "stage-directions" and putting it forth to be read in a book, has really written a kind of novel.
She will dismiss a man or a house or a view or a dinner with an adjective such as "handsome." There is more description of persons and places in Mr. Shaw's stage-directions than in all Miss Austen's novels. She cuts the 'osses and comes to the cackle as no other English novelist of the same eminence has ever done.
The neglect to provide a ballet in the usual place led to a tremendous disturbance in which the Jockey Club took the lead. Wagner's purpose in the extended portion of the overture now called the "Bacchanale" may be read in his stage-directions for the scene. A large cave seems to extend to an invisible distance at a turn to the right.
Shakspeare gives us enumerations of armies, and returns of killed and wounded, which are not, we suspect, much less accurate than those of Herodotus. There are passages in Herodotus nearly as long as acts of Shakspeare, in which everything is told dramatically, and in which the narrative serves only the purpose of stage-directions.
But the chants, while few in number, are the most individual part of his production; and up to the year 1918 the most impressive. For in The Congo we have real minstrelsy. The shoulder-notes, giving detailed directions for singing, reciting, intoning, are as charming in their way as the stage-directions of J. M. Barrie.
Tristan's start suggests how complete his abstraction, and what the effect of that name unexpectedly pronounced. As Brangaene comes before him, the stage-directions say, he rapidly composes himself. Deferently he inquires of his lady's wishes. Bragaene tells him, barely, that her lady wishes to see him. Then begins the series of his evasions, courteous as possible, but determined as courteous.
It is a curiosity, not the text, which is incorrect, full of arbitrary changes, and punctuated in a way almost unintelligible to an English eye: colons being scattered about with truly French profusion. The stage-directions are the interest of the book.
Shaw and his imitators than we do of the curt, and often non-existent, stage-directions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. To this the reply is twofold. First, the very fact that these disquisitions are written proves that the play is designed to be printed and read, and that we are, therefore, justified in applying to it the standard of what may be called literary illusion.
So again in "Much Ado about Nothing," Act II., Sc. 3, there is a MS. stage-direction to the effect that Benedick, when he hides "in the arbour," "Retires behind the trees." Now as this use of scenery did not obtain until after the Restoration, these stage-directions manifestly could not have been written until after that period.
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