The simplest method of handling time off stage is to treat it as having elapsed between acts or on the dropping of a curtain within an act.[29] In how many, many plays—for instance, Sir Arthur Pinero’s early Lady Bountiful—has the hero, in whatever length of time between the fourth and fifth acts the dramatist has preferred, become the regenerated figure of the last act! All that is needed in The Man Who Came Back, as produced, to change the dope-ridden, degenerating youth into a firm character, even into a landed proprietor, is a sea voyage from San Francisco to Honolulu—and an entr’acte! What takes place between acts is far too often—medicinally, morally, dare we say dramatically?—more significant than what we see. Yet why deride this refuge of the dramatist? Such use is merely an extension of what we permit any dramatist who, writing two plays on the same subject or person, implies or states that very many years have elapsed between the two parts. No one seriously objects when thousands of years are supposed to elapse between the Prometheus Bound and the Prometheus Unbound of Æschylus.[30] Surely, it is logical to treat spaces between acts like spaces between plays on related subjects. The trouble lies, not in the time supposed to have elapsed, but in the changes of character said to have taken place. As long as our drama was primarily story, and not, as it has come to be increasingly, a revealer of character, we were content, if each act contained a thrilling dramatic incident, to be told that this or that had happened between the acts. The early drama did this by the Dumb Show and the Chorus.

ACT II

PROLOGUE

Flourish. Enter Chorus

Chorus. Now all the youth of England are on fire, And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies. Now thrive the armourers, and honour’s thought Reigns solely in the breast of every man. They sell the pasture now to buy the horse, Following the mirror of all Christian kings, With winged heels, as English Mercuries. For now sits Expectation in the air, And hides a sword from hilts unto the point With crowns imperial, crowns, and coronets, Promis’d to Harry and his followers. The French, advis’d by good intelligence Of this most dreadful preparation, Shake in their fear, and with pale policy Seek to divert the English purposes. O England! model to thy inward greatness, Like little body with a mighty heart, What mightst thou do, that honour would thee do, Were all thy children kind and natural! But see thy fault! France hath in thee found out A nest of hollow bosoms, which he fills With treacherous crowns; and three corrupted men, One, Richard Earl of Cambridge, and the second, Henry Lord Scroop of Masham, and the third, Sir Thomas Grey, knight, of Northumberland, Have, for the gilt of France,—O guilt indeed!— Confirm’d conspiracy with fearful France; And by their hands this grace of kings must die, If hell and treason hold their promises, Ere he take ship for France, and in Southampton. Linger your patience on, and we’ll digest The abuse of distance, force a play. The sum is paid; the traitors are agreed; The King is set from London; and the scene Is now transported, gentles, to Southampton. There is the playhouse now, there must you sit; And thence to France shall we convey you safe, And bring you back, charming the narrow seas To give you gentle pass; for, if we may, We’ll not offend one stomach with our play. But, till the King come forth, and not till then, Unto Southampton do we shift our scene. (Exit.) Henry V.

As audiences, becoming more interested in characterization and less in mere story, grew to expect that each act would show the central figure growing out of the preceding act and into the next, they balked more and more at hearing of changes instead of seeing them. They insisted that the effective forces must work before their eyes. Hence the disappearance of Dumb Show and Chorus. With Lady Bountiful[31] the public did not object strongly to what was supposed to happen between the fourth and fifth acts, because it took the whole play as a mere story. But in Iris, when the author asked it to accept all the important stages in the moral breakdown of Iris as taking place between the fourth and fifth acts, there was considerable dissent. Contrast the greater satisfactoriness when an auditor can watch important changes, as he may with Sophy Fullgarney in the third act of the Gay Lord Quex,[32] or with Mrs. Dane in the fourth act of Mrs. Dane’s Defence. To assume that a lapse of time stated to have passed in a just preceding entr’acte, and a change of environment there, have produced marked difference in character is not today enough. A dramatist may assume that only as much time has passed between acts as he makes entirely plausible by the happenings and characterization of the next act. For any needed statement of what has happened since the close of a preceding act he must depend only on deft exposition within the act in question.

Recent usage no longer insists that acts may not somewhat overlap. “Toward the end of Act II of Eugene Walter’s Paid in Full, Emma Brooks is disclosed making an appointment with Captain Williams over a telephone. In the next act we are transferred to Captain Williams’s quarters, and the dramatic clock has, in the meanwhile, been turned back some fifteen minutes, for presently the telephone bell rings, and the same appointment is made over again. In other words, Act II partly overlaps Act I in time, but the scene is different.”[33] There is a similar use in Under Cover. At the beginning of the last act, a group, sleepily at cards, is startled by the burglar alarm. The climax of the preceding act was that same alarm.

The most difficult kind of off-stage time to treat comes not within or between the acts. It is the time before the play begins in which events took place which must be known as soon as the play opens, if auditors are to follow the play understandingly. Every dramatist, as he turns from his story to his plot, faces the problem: How plant in the mind of the audience past events and facts concerning the characters which are fundamental in understanding the play. The Chorus and the Dumb Show again were, among early dramatists, the clumsy solution of this problem.

THE PROLOGUE