(Exit.)[20]
This French division of scenes is, of course, made for the convenience of the dramatist as he composes and for the reader, not for the actor or the audience. Though somewhat copied in the past by English authors, it is now rejected by most stages. Even French dramatists are breaking away from it. Memory of this French usage, however, still affects popular speech: when we speak of any part of an act in which two or more people are on stage, we are very likely to call it their “scene” no matter whether they have come on in a changed setting or not. Obviously if scene is to correspond with setting, we need another word for what in our practice is the same as the older French scene.
Not only do necessary changes in setting make proportioning material into acts and within acts difficult, but the time question also raises many problems. It may be troublesome within the act, between the acts, and at the opening of the play. In the final soliloquy of Faustus (p. 35), an hour is supposed to elapse in some thirty lines. Though the Elizabethan, in a case like this, was ready to assist the dramatist, today we are so conscious of time spaces that practically all stage clocks are temporarily out of order, lest they mark too distinctly the discrepancy between pretended and real time.[21] The novelist, in a few lines, tells us of many happenings in a considerable space of time, or writes: “Thus, in idle talk, a full hour passed,” and we do not query the supposed passage of time. On the stage, however, when one gossip says to another: “I must be off. I meant to stop a minute, and I have gossiped an hour,” auditors who recognize perfectly that the two people have not talked ten minutes are likely to laugh derisively. As has been pointed out,[22] this time difficulty has made it practically impossible to dramatize satisfactorily Stevenson’s The Sire de Maletroit’s Door. The swiftly-moving simple story demands the one-act form, but certain marked changes in feeling, convincing enough when they are said to come after ten or twelve hours of strong emotion, become, when they are seen to occur after twenty minutes to an hour, unconvincing. The central situation may be used, but for success on the stage the story must be so re-told that the marked changes in feeling are convincing even when seen. A dilemma results: lapses of time are handled more easily in three or four acts than in one act; the moment The Sire de Maletroit’s Door is re-cast into three or four acts, it needs so much padding as to lose nearly all its original values.
When a dramatist faces the need to represent on stage, a passage of time which could not in real life be coincident with the action of the scene, he must (a) hypnotize an audience by a long scene of complicated and absorbing emotion into thinking that the required time has passed; or (b) must discover some motive sufficiently strong to account for a swift change in feeling; (c) or must get his person or persons off stage and write what is known as a “Cover Scene.”
An audience led through an intense emotional experience does not mark accurately the passage of time. Make the emotional experience protracted, as well as absorbing, and you may imply or even state that any reasonable length of time has passed. The fearful agony of Faustus so grips an audience that it loses track of the time necessary for the speech, or would, were it not for the unfortunate emphasis on the actual time: “Ah, half the hour is passed; ’twill all be passed anon”; “The clock strikes twelve.” In Hamlet, the fourth act takes place during the absence of Hamlet in England. By its many intensely moving happenings, it makes an auditor willing to believe that Hamlet has been absent for a long time, when in reality he has been on the stage within a half hour. Such time fillings may, of course, be a portion of a scene, a whole scene, or even a whole act. In most cases, it is quite impossible that the time really requisite and the time of action should coincide. The business of the dramatist is to make the audience feel as if the time had passed—to create an illusion of time.
The second method of meeting the time difficulty, finding motivation of some marked change in character or circumstances which permits it to be as swift as it is on the stage, is best treated in the next chapter.
In The Russian Honeymoon,[23] a play once very popular with amateurs, there is bad handling of a time difficulty. The hero, going out in his peasant costume, must return after a few speeches, in full regimentals. A lightning change of costume is, therefore, necessary. More than once this lack of a proper Cover Scene has caused an awkward wait at this point in the play. Mark the absurdly short time Steele, in his Conscious Lovers allows Isabella for bringing Bevil Junior on stage. Apparently, the latter and all his group must have been waiting at the end of the corridor.
Isabella. But here’s a claim more tender yet—your Indiana, sir, your long lost daughter.
Mr. Sealand. O my child! my child!