Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist / A Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism

by Richard G. Moulton

[XIV.]

Interest of Plot.

Idea of Plot as the application of design to human life.

WE now come to the third great division of Dramatic Criticism—Plot, or the purely intellectual side of action. Action itself has been treated above as the mutual connection and interweaving of all the details in a work of art so as to unite in an impression of unity. But we have found it impossible to discuss Character and Passion entirely apart from such action and interworking: the details of human interest become dramatic by being permeated with action-force. When however this mutual relation of all the parts is looked at by itself, as an abstract interest of design, the human life being no more than the material to which this design is applied, then we get the interest of Plot. So defined, I hope Plot is sufficiently removed from the vulgar conception of it as sensational mystery, which has done so much to lower this element of dramatic effect in the eyes of literary students. If Plot be understood as the extension of design to the sphere of human life, threads of experience being woven into a symmetrical pattern as truly as vari-coloured threads of wool are woven into a piece of wool-work, then the conception of it will come out in its true dignity. What else is such reduction to order than the meeting-point of science and art? Science is engaged in tracing rhythmic movements in the beautiful confusion of the heavenly bodies, or reducing the bewildering variety of external nature to regular species and nice gradations of life. Similarly, art continues the work of creation in calling ideal order out of the chaos of things as they are. And so the tangle of life, with its jumble of conflicting aspirations, its crossing and twisting of contrary motives, its struggle and partnership of the whole human race, in which no two individuals are perfectly alike and no one is wholly independent of the rest—this has gradually in the course of ages been laboriously traced by the scientific historian into some such harmonious plan as evolution. But he finds himself long ago anticipated by the dramatic artist, who has touched crime and seen it link itself with nemesis, who has transformed passion into pathos, who has received the shapeless facts of reality and returned them as an ordered economy of design. This application of form to human life is Plot: and Shakespeare has had no higher task to accomplish than in his revolutionising our ideas of Plot, until the old critical conceptions of it completely broke down when applied to his dramas. The appreciation of Shakespeare will not be complete until he is seen to be as subtle a weaver of plots as he is a deep reader of the human heart.

Unity applied to Plot.

We have to consider Plot in its three aspects of unity, complexity, and development. The Single Action.The simplest element of Plot is the Single Action, which may be defined as any train of incidents in a drama which can be conceived as a separate whole. Thus a series of details bringing out the idea of a crime and its nemesis will constitute a Nemesis Action, an oracle and its fulfilment will make up an Oracular Action, a problem and its solution a Problem Action. Throughout the treatment of Plot the root idea of pattern should be steadily kept in mind: in the case of these Single Actions—the units of Plot—we have as it were the lines of a geometrical design, made up of their details as a geometrical line is made up of separate points. Forms of Dramatic Action.The Form of a dramatic action—the shape of the line, so to speak—will be that which gives the train of incidents its distinctiveness: the nemesis, the oracle, the problem. An action may get its distinctiveness from its tone as a Comic Action or a Tragic Action; or it may be a Character Action, when a series of details acquire a unity in bringing out the character of Hastings or Lady Macbeth; an action may be an Intrigue, or the Rise and Fall of a person, or simply a Story like the Caskets Story. Finally, an action may combine several different forms at the same time, just as a geometrical line may be at once, say, an arch and a spiral. The action that traces Macbeth's career has been treated as exhibiting a triple form of Nemesis, Irony, and Oracular Action; further, it is a Tragic Action in tone, it is a Character Action in its contrast with the career of Lady Macbeth, and it stands in the relation of Main Action to others in the play.

Complexity applied to Action: a distinction of Modern Drama.

Now what I have called Single Action constituted the whole conception of Plot in ancient Tragedy; in the Shakespearean Drama it exists only as a unit of Complex Action. The application of complexity to action is rendered particularly easy by the idea of pattern, patterns which appeal to the eye being more often made up of several lines crossing and interweaving than of single lines. Ancient tragedy clung to 'unity of action,' and excluded such matter as threatened to set up a second interest in a play. Modern Plot has a unity of a much more elaborate order, perhaps best expressed by the word harmony—a harmony of distinct actions, each of which has its separate unity. The illustration of harmony is suggestive. Just as in musical harmony each part is a melody of itself, though one of them leads and is the melody, so a modern plot draws together into a common system a Main Action and other inferior yet distinct actions. Moreover the step from melody alone to melody harmonised, or that from the single instruments of the ancient world to the combinations of a modern orchestra, marks just the difference between ancient and modern art which we find reflected in the different conception of Plot held by Sophocles and by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plots are federations of plots: in his ordering of dramatic events we trace a common self-government made out of elements which have an independence of their own, and at the same time merge a part of their independence in common action.

Analysis of Action.

The foundation of critical treatment in the matter of Plot is the Analysis of Complex Action into its constituent Single[5] Actions. This is easy in such a play as The Merchant of Venice. Here two of the actions are stories, a form of unity readily grasped, and which in the present case had an independent existence outside the play. These identified and separated, it is easy also to see that Jessica constitutes a fresh centre of interest around which other details gather themselves; that the incidents in which Launcelot and Gobbo are concerned are separable from these; while the matter of the rings constitutes a distinct episode of the Caskets Story: already the junction of so many separate stories in a common working gratifies our sense of design. In other plays where the elements are not stories the individuality of the Single Actions will not always be so positive: all would readily distinguish the Lear Main plot from the Underplot of Gloucester, but in the subdivision of these difference of opinion arises. Canons of Analysis.In an Appendix to this chapter I have suggested schemes of Analysis for each of the five plays treated in this work: Analysis tentative not positive.I may here add four remarks. (1) Any series of details which can be collected from various parts of a drama to make up a common interest may be recognised in Analysis as a separate action. It follows from this that there may be very different modes of dividing and arranging the elements of the same plot: such Analysis is not a matter in which we are to look for right or wrong, but simply for better or worse. No scheme will ever exhaust the wealth of design which reveals itself in a play of Shakespeare; and the value of Analysis as a critical process is not confined to the scheme it produces, but includes also the insight which the mere effort to analyse a drama gives into the harmony and connection of its parts. Design as the test of Analysis.(2) The essence of Plot being design, that will be the best scheme of Analysis which best brings out the idea of symmetry and design. Analysis exhaustive.(3) Analysis must be exhaustive: every detail in the drama must find a place in some one of the actions. The elementary actions not mutually exclusive.(4) The constituent actions will of course not be mutually exclusive, many details being common to several actions: these details are so many meeting-points, in which the lines of action cross one another.—With these sufficiently obvious principles I must leave the schemes of analysis in the Appendix to justify themselves.