A Book About the Theater

by Brander Matthews

In what is accepted as the earliest edition of Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy,' the most widely popular of all the pre-Shaksperian plays, the text is actually divided into four acts. But this division is not structural; it is almost accidental, as tho it was an afterthought, inserted at the last moment into the copy intended for the printer, and never in the mind of the playwright himself when he was preparing the prompt-book for the actors; and Shakspere, who followed Kyd in more ways than one, apparently followed him in this also. In the folio edition of his plays, published after his death, a division into five acts has been made; but the task has not been accomplished any too skilfully—for example, the second act of 'King John' has but eighty lines, and here the division is into four acts only. The suggestion has been proffered that it was, perhaps, left to the printers to do, the influence of Ben Jonson having been powerful enough to establish the theory that a self-respecting dramatist would never fail to cast his tragedies in the five-act form. It is to be noted also that no division into acts is to be found in the quarto editions published in Shakspere's lifetime; and this is very significant since these quartos seem to have been piratical copies from shorthand notes taken surreptitiously in the theater, thus recording the actual conditions of performance.

It may be doubted whether Shakspere conceived his plays in accordance with any such subdivisions. Some of them, the 'Comedy of Errors' for one, which can be acted in the space of an hour and a quarter, are far too slight for so huge a framework. On the other hand, the several appearances of Chorus punctuate 'Henry V' into five divisions, apparently an intentional conformity to the Horatian rule. Of course, there were generally several intermissions in the Elizabethan performance of a play, altho the resulting divisions were not necessarily five; and it is noteworthy that Shakspere makes Jaques declare that man's life had seven acts.

IV

The fact is that Shakspere was a professional playwright, and that he had no merely academic theories. In composing his plays he followed unhesitatingly the principles that had guided his immediate predecessors. He was seeking ever to give the playgoing public what it had been accustomed to enjoy in the theater, better in degree, no doubt, but the same in kind. Like these predecessors, he kept to the traditions inherited from the medieval mysteries; and he thought in terms, not of acts and of scenes, as a modern playwright is forced to do, but of a continuous narrative shown in action. In doing so he resembles Herodotus, whose history has also been cut up by later editors, dividing it into nine books, altho, as Professor Bury has reminded us, "such divisions had not yet come into fashion" in the historian's own day. There is no reason to suppose that Shakspere would have approved of the attempt of the editors of the folio to subdivide his plays, each into five acts. There is every reason to suppose that he would have been greatly annoyed if he could have foreseen the way in which later editors have chosen further to chop up the acts into an infinity of scenes.

Nowadays, we have been so accustomed to read Shakspere in one or another of the trim and tidy modern editions, with a wanton division into acts and into scenes, each of which indicates a change of place, and each of which seems to suggest a change of scenery, that it is only by a resolute effort of the will that we are able to shake off the prepossessions derived from this unfortunate and confusing presentation of his text. Probably even to-day a majority of those who enjoy reading Shakspere would be surprised to be told that there is no warrant whatever for these alleged changes of scene, and for these superabundant subdivisions of his story. Many of these readers would be taken aback by the unexpected discovery that all this cutting up of Shakspere's text was the work of his commentators, with Rowe at the head of the procession. Some of these readers would feel as tho they were deprived of a precious possession, if they had only an edition in which all this useless machinery was swept away.

And yet this is just the edition which is demanded by the present state of Shaksperian scholarship, and which is now made possible by our new understanding of the Elizabethan theater, with its rude platform thrust out into the yard, so different from our modern theaters, in which the stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame. The Tudor platform-stage is wholly unlike the picture-frame stage of to-day; but it is very like the "pageant," or the scaffold on which the mysteries and miracle-plays were presented. It was to the simple conditions of his semi-medieval theater that Shakspere adjusted himself, rude as those conditions may now appear to us who are accustomed to the sumptuous picturesqueness of our own luxuriant playhouses.

In accepting the theater as he found it, and in availing himself of all its possibilities, such as they were, Shakspere showed his usual common sense. Only by striving to reconstruct for ourselves in our mind's eye, as it were, the playhouse where he plied his trade and earned his living, can we come to any adequate appreciation of his art, of his craftsmanship as a playwright, of his dramaturgic skill. And in any honest effort to understand how his mighty dramas were originally produced by himself and by his fellow actors in the round O of the wooden Globe Theater, unroofed and unlighted except by the dingy daylight of northern Europe, we need always to keep fast in our mind the fact that all preconceptions are false that may be derived from our memory of latter-day performances in theaters of a type which the Elizabethan dramatists could not foresee, and of which the conditions are often the exact opposite of those they accepted without hesitation. That is to say, the most profitable way to reconstruct mentally the Tudor playhouse is to banish from our minds every impression made by our modern theater, with its elaborate complexity, and to study out for ourselves the simple circumstances of performance in the Middle Ages. And as a first step toward the proper standpoint, we must cast out our traditional belief that Shakspere always accepted the classicist formula of five acts, proclaimed by Horace, and employed by Seneca. That he did use it in one or two plays seems indisputable, and he may very well have employed it in a few others, but there is no reason to suppose that he would have submitted himself any more willingly to the rule of five acts than he did to the rule of the three unities.

It may be doubted also whether not a few dramatists, writing later than Shakspere, would not have done well to claim the liberty he and Lope de Vega chose to exercise at will. Racine, for one, had sadly to stretch his 'Athalie' to fill out the five-act framework which he had blindly accepted, altho he had earlier limited 'Esther' to three acts. Schiller, for another, would have gained a swifter compactness for his play if he had left out the needless fifth act of his 'William Tell' and rolled his fourth act into his third. Victor Hugo had to manufacture a fourth act for his 'Ruy Blas,' so slightly related to his main story that it was cut out of the English adaptation acted by Fechter and Booth. Ibsen, it may be added, composed his first tragedy, 'Catiline,' in three acts, altho it was in blank verse, thus early revealing his characteristic independence of tradition.

(1907.)

P. S.—Since this paper was written I have found two opinions as to the number of acts a play ought to have which were unknown to me when I undertook the discussion. The first is in the 'Dasarupa,' the Hindu treatise on the craft of play-making: "There are five stages of the action which is set on foot by those that strive after a result: Beginning, Effort, Prospect of Success, Certainty of Success, Attainment of the Result."