VIII. Avoid fine points, and have plenty of action at the beginning of the first act.
This rule, however safe and sensible, is hampered by the necessities of the subject, to which everything must be subordinated. Let us see how the greatest masters of dramatic construction in modern times open their first acts. Of these Boucicault comes first, facile princeps. We will take the "Shaughraun" and "Flying Scud" for examples. Both open in a similar manner: in the first a young woman, in the second an old man, engaged in household work, singing away at nothing particular. A quiet picture not requiring close attention. To each, enter a disturber, somewhat disagreeable, arresting attention. A short squabble, then more characters coming on, one or more at a time, till the stage is pretty full, and no flagging of interest. The act does not drag. Compare this with Sardou's "Frou-Frou," "Fernande," and others. Sardou's first acts almost invariably drag, and the success does not come till afterward. One great difference is immediately perceptible. Sardou almost always brings on his people in pairs, and takes them off together, leaving the first act a succession of dualogues, with very little action. Now take "The Lady of Lyons," an old success, which nowhere drags. It opens with a picture, mother and daughter, doing nothing particular. Enter disagreeable Beauseant, who makes an offer and is rejected. A mild excitement at once arises, shut in by a front scene, short, lively, and spirited, where Glavis and Beauseant plot for revenge on Pauline. The scene ends in suspense, the actors having gone for Claude Melnotte, and the flats draw aside, revealing Melnotte's cottage and introducing the hero. By this time the audience is quiet and can take the fine points, so the third scene of the first act can be made exciting. There is thus no flagging of interest in either Bulwer or Boucicault. One does the thing in three scenes, the other in a single scene, but both employ the same means, which are thus expressed:
IX. Open the first act with a quiet picture, and bring in the disturbing element at once. Having aroused attention, bring on all your characters, and end with an excitement. Avoid bringing on characters in pairs in this act.
The first act of a play is always surrounded with difficulties. The interest of the audience has to be aroused, and all the characters brought in. Every part of it must hang together, and the attention must be excited more and more as the act progresses. This rule applies to the whole play likewise, but in the first act it is especially necessary, because there are so many things to divert attention, and the object of the act is to catch it. After a certain period it must flag, and the object of the dramatist must be to close his act before that dreadful period. The office of the first act is to prepare for the second; therefore it resembles the front scene in one important principle—it should end in suspense, and make the audience eager for the second act. Ending as it should in a full scene, it has the advantage over the front scene that a tableau is possible, and should be used. This tableau must be natural, and must come, as all tableaux come, out of a climax, but the climax must not be complete. It must leave the audience in suspense, and give them something to talk about in the inter-act. It must not be too long delayed, or the act will drag. These and various other reasons have led to this further canon, generally observed:
X. The first act should be the shortest, and as soon as a partial climax is reached the curtain should come down. The tableau and action should indicate suspense and preparation.
This general rule indicates that the villain should be temporarily triumphant, if the play is to end in his discomfiture. If his first scheme fails in the first act, it is difficult to arouse interest in the nominally imperilled innocence which is left in danger. The structure becomes too artificial, and the dictum ars est celare artem has been violated. No rule is so safe in dramatic writing, as also in acting. The end is—illusion.
The rule of putting only suspensory and preparatory action in the first act is universally followed by Shakespeare and all other successful writers of plays, and is better settled than any other. The first act occupies the office of the first volume of a novel, explaining all the story. Very frequently, in the modern French drama especially, it assumes the form of a prologue, the action transpiring at an interval of several years, sometimes a whole generation, before the rest of the play. Only one instance of this character is found in Shakespeare, in the "Winter's Tale," where the action of the drama demands a prologue, but it is quite common in modern times, while another custom of Shakespeare's—that of dividing a historical play into two "parts"—has quite gone out of fashion. Its only modern example is that of Wagner's opera of the "Niebelungen Ring," which takes a week to get through. The Chinese and Japanese have a strong taste for this kind of play, but the practice has vanished from Anglo-Saxon civilization. It must be confessed that the employment of a prologue is rather a clumsy way of opening a play. It is too apt to be complete in itself, and to join clumsily to the rest of the drama. Besides this, it is hard to preserve the illusion that the small child who appears in the prologue has developed into the good-looking young person who is the heroine of the rest of the play. The "Sea of Ice" is a familiar instance of this sort of thing, where the same actress who personates the mother in the first act, and gets drowned, blossoms into a girl of eighteen in the second act, supposed to be her own daughter, last seen as a small child. In "Winter's Tale" there is nothing of this. The supposed Perdita of Act I. is merely a rag baby, and mother and child reappear together thereafter. In cases where the interval between prologue and play is limited to a year or two, this objection does not apply; in fact such prologues are quite common and useful. The fanciful and magic prologue to the "Marble Heart" is a very happy instance of conquest of the difficulties inherent in long separated prologues. The wrench is so sudden from a Greek sculptor to a French sculptor, from Athenian dresses to Parisian, that the main interest of the play lies in the identification of the ancient characters in the new dress, and the very fanciful absurdity of the plot lends it an air of reality essentially dramatic. The end is illusion, and illusion it is.
There is little more clear and positive to be said about the first act. Study of the best models will reveal many points inherent in all, but no general rules so clear as those of brevity, action, and suspense. The practical limit of time is from fifteen to thirty minutes, the medium of twenty being common to mono-scenic acts, but on this no positive canon can be ascertained. It depends on the interest, and only this general rule is partially true, that no interest can carry an audience through a first act of forty-five minutes.
We next come to the middle acts of the play, and here again general rules are hard to find. The number of acts varies so much that nothing positive can be said except as regards fixed lengths of drama. Treating all between the first and last acts as a whole, the first certain rule that meets us is this truism:
XI. From the second to the last act the interest must be regularly increased, and each act must end in suspense, leading to the next.