...The dramatic action was necessarily laid in the open air—usually before a palace or temple.... In general the dramatists displayed an amazing fertility of invention in this particular, as a few illustrations will suffice to show. In the Alcestis Apollo explains his leaving Ametus’ palace on the ground of the pollution which a corpse would bring upon all within the house (Euripides’ Alcestis, 22 f.) and Alcestis herself, though in a dying condition, fares forth to look for the last time upon the sun in heaven (ibid. 206). Œdipus is so concerned in the afflictions of his subjects that he cannot endure making inquiries through a servant but comes forth to learn the situation in person (Sophocles’ Œdipus Rex, 6 f.). Karion is driven out of doors by the smoke of sacrifice upon the domestic altar (Aristophanes’ Plutus, 821 f.). In Plautus’ Mostellaria (1, ff.) one slave is driven out of doors by another as the result of a quarrel. Agathon cannot compose his odes in the winter time, unless he bask in the sunlight (Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazuæ, 67 f.). The love-lorn Phædra teases for light and air (Euripides’ Hippolytus, 181). And Medea’s nurse apologizes for her soliloquizing before the house with the excuse that the sorrows within have stifled her and caused her to seek relief by proclaiming them to earth and sky (Euripides’ Medea, 56 ff.).[12]
When it is not easy to see how a number of settings may be cut down, a dramatist should carefully consider this: May episodes happening to the same person or persons in the same settings, but apparently demanding separate treatment because they occur at widely different times, be brought together? The dramatizer of a novel faces many opportunities for this telescoping of scenes. Any one adapting A Tale of Two Cities, if he uses Jerry Cruncher, will probably combine the two scenes in his home. To bring together incidents happening to the same person or persons at the same place, but at different times, is the easiest method of cutting down possible scenes.
It is, of course, possible to bring together circumstances which happened at different places at different times, but to the same persons. A notable instance is Irving’s compacting of two scenes in Tennyson’s Becket: he places at Montmirail what is essential in both Scene 2, Act II, Montmirail. “The Meeting of the Kings,” and Scene 3, Act III, “Traitor’s Meadow at Freteval.” It is, indeed, often necessary to transfer a group of people from the exact setting in which an occurrence took place to another which makes possible other important action. In Haraucourt’s adaptation of Les Oberlé, a dinner party at the Brausigs’ is transferred to the home of Jean Oberlé, with his father and mother as hosts. This change permits the adapter to follow the dinner party with episodes which must take place in Jean’s home. This group of changes concerns, obviously, bringing to one place events which happened to the same persons at another place, and even at another time.
Sometimes necessary condensation forces a dramatist to bring together at one place what really happened at the same time, but to other people in another place. For instance, the heroine of the play is concealing in the house her Jacobite brother, supposed by the people who have seen him to be the Pretender himself. The Whig soldiery come to search the house. Sitting at the spinet, the girl makes her brother crouch between her and the wall, folding her ample gown around and over him. Then, as the officer and his men minutely search the room, she plays, apparently idly song after song of the day. Just at this time, but at a distance, her lover, a young Whig officer, is eating his heart out with jealousy, because he fears that she is concealing the Pretender through love of him. Why waste time on a separate scene for the lover? Make him the officer in command of the searching troop: then all that is vital in what was his scene can be brought out when what happened to the same people at the same time, but at different places, is made to happen at the same place.
Similarly, what happened to two people in the same place but at different times may sometimes, with ingenuity, be made to happen to one person, and thus time saved.
Finally, what happened to another person at another time, and at another place may at times be arranged so that it will happen to any desired figure. About midway in the novel Les Oberlé, Jean and his uncle Ulrich hear the women at the autumn grape-picking sing the song of Alsace. In the play, in the first scene, Jean sings it as he passes from the railway station to his house.[13] Shakespeare, in handling the original sources of Macbeth, also illustrates successful combination around one person of incidents or details historically associated with other persons, times, and even places.
Most of the story is taken from Holinshed’s account [in the Historie of Scotland] of the reigns of Duncan and Macbeth (A.D. 1034-1057), but certain details are drawn from other parts of the chronicle. Thus several points in the assassination of Duncan, like the drugging of the grooms by Lady Macbeth, and the portents described in II, iv., are from the murder of Duncan’s ancestor Duffe (A.D. 972); and the voice that called “Sleep no more!” seems to have been suggested by the troubled conscience of Duffe’s brother Kenneth, who had poisoned his own nephew.[14]
Marlowe, in his Edward II,—a dramatization of a part of Holinshed’s History,—proves that he perfectly understood all these devices for compacting his material.
The action covers a period of twenty years, from 1307, when Gaveston was recalled, to the death of Edward in 1327. Marlowe’s treatment of the story shows a selection and transposing of events in order to bring out the one essential fact of the King’s utter incompetence and subjection to unworthy favorites. Gaveston was executed in 1312, and the troubles in Ireland (II, ii.) and in Scotland (II, ii.) occurred after his death, but Marlowe shifts both forward in point of time in order to connect them with Gaveston’s baleful influence. Warwick died in his bed in 1315, seven years before the battle of Boroughbridge, but Marlowe keeps him alive to have him captured and ordered to execution in retaliation for his killing of Gaveston. At the time the play opens the Earl of Kent was six years old, but Marlowe, needing a counsellor and supporter of the King, used Kent for the purpose. In the play young Spencer immediately succeeds Gaveston as the King’s favorite; really the young Hugh le Despenser, who had been an enemy of Gaveston, remained an opponent of Edward’s for some six years after Gaveston’s death. Historically the Mortimers belong with the Spencers, i.e. to the later part of the reign, but in order to motivate the affair between the Queen and young Mortimer Marlowe transfers them to the beginning of the play and makes them leaders in the barons’ councils.[15]