This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group of characters performing something like the function of the antique Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less disinterested point of view. The function of Kaffee-Klatsch in Pillars of Society is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.
It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in La Gioconda, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention, by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.
Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, represents this method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic poet, he says, "set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you." Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by "the rule of time."
It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one cannot help wondering how he would have planned A Doll's House had he written it in the 'eighties instead of the 'seventies. One can imagine a long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have heightened by contrast the effect of the great final duologue as we now possess it. Such information as could not possibly have been conveyed in dialogue with Helmer might, one would think, have been left for Nora's first scene with Krogstad, the effect of which it would have enhanced. Perhaps Mrs. Linden might with advantage have been retained, though not in her present character of confidant, in order to show Nora in relation to another woman.
See Chapter XXIII.