And let them work.
Are the following straight translations from the old French farce, Pierre Patelin,[64] as easy to speak as the revisions?
The first revision certainly gives lines easier to speak. The writer of the second revision hears it and knows the gesture, facial expression, and intonation which must go with “This!” Dialogue which is perfectly clear and characterizing should not be allowed to pass in the final revision if at any point it is unnecessarily difficult to deliver.
From the preceding discussion it must be clear that the three essentials of dialogue are clearness, helping the onward movement of the story, and doing all this in character. Dialogue is, naturally, still better if it possesses charm, grace, wit, irony, or beauty of its own. Dialogue which merely states the facts is, as we have seen, likely to be dull or commonplace. Well characterized dialogue still falls short of all dialogue may be if it has none of the attributes just mentioned. Feeling this strongly, the dramatists throughout the ages have striven to give their dialogue attractiveness because of its style, forgetting that above all for the dramatist it is true that “style is the man,” and that “style is a thinking out into language.” Lyly, Shakespeare, in some of the scenes of his early plays, Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy, John Dryden in his Heroic Drama, Cibber and Lillo in their rhythmic prose which often might be perfectly well printed as blank verse, strove to decorate their dialogue from without—something sure to fail, either with the immediate audience or with posterity. If the charm, the grace, the wit, the irony of the dialogue does not come from the characters speaking, that dialogue fails in what has been shown to be one of its chief essentials, right characterization. Congreve emphasized this in that classic of dramatic criticism, his letter Concerning Humour in Comedy.[65] “A character of a splenetic and peevish humour should have a satirical wit. A jolly and sanguine humour should have a facetious wit. The former should speak positively; the latter, carelessly: for the former observes and shows things as they are; the latter rather overlooks nature, and speaks things as he would have them; and his wit and humour have both of them a less alloy of judgment than the others.” Undoubtedly, however, the dramatist may do much in helping a character to reveal these qualities, particularly beauty of thought or phrasing. It is a conventional use supposed to make for beauty which The Rehearsal ridicules in the following scene, for at nearly all crises the Heroic Drama rested on a simile for its strongest effect.
Prettyman. How strange a captive am I grown of late!
Shall I accuse my love or blame my fate?
My love I cannot; that is too divine:
And against fate what mortal dares repine?
Enter Chloris
But here she comes.
Sure ’tis some blazing comet! is it not? (Lies down.)
Bayes. Blazing comet! Mark that; egad, very fine.
Prettyman. But I am so surpris’d with sleep, I cannot speak the rest. (Sleeps.)