Category: Play Writing

Beginning with the “Fils natured” he [Dumas fils] engaged in the development of social theories. To paint characters, ridicules, and passions was not enough. He wished to leave with the spectators “something to think over,” to make them hear “things good to be said. “-GEORGES PELLISSIER, Le Mouvement Littéraire au XIX Siècle. The truth is […]

Good plays are always wanted, and the anxiety to get hold of them is very great, the multiplicity of theatres increasing the demand. But is it to be wondered at, that a busy and harassed manager is not in a position to give serious thought to the enormous mass of written or printed matter that […]

One other law is no less essential: it is that which indicates that an action in the theatre must be conducted by wills, if not always free, always at least self-conscious. . . . This law is nothing more than the expression . . . of that which in the very definition of the theatre […]

Let us ask this direct question of every man and woman who reads these pages: Have you taken any pains to satisfy yourself that you possess this Inborn Talent? If not, do so without delay, before you scatter futile ink over another sheet of wasted paper. And it is not a question of having or […]

The climax must seem inevitable, though perhaps unexpected. The reader [the spectator, in the theatre] will almost surely look back and trace the movement of forces in the story which lead from the first causes up to the climax, and he demands that the climax be what its name implies—a ladder; and he is keen […]

The drama ought not to correspond in every respect with the scenes which we daily witness in real life. The mimic powers of the art are not without their bounds; and it is ever necessary that its deceptions should not be altogether concealed from our view.—SISMONDI, The Literature of the South of Europe. The dramatic […]

There is a gallery of them, and of all that gallery I may say that I know the tone of the voice, and the color of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these words or the other […]

Addison had sketched the Tory fox-hunter, clothing him in the characteristics of the class, “that he might give his readers an image of these rural statesmen.” Squire Western has all the distinguishing marks of Addison’s type, and beyond this, he is individualized.—WILBUR L. Cross, The Development of the English Novel. Verisimilitude, a quality much insisted […]

The plea that otherwise the plot would have been ruined, is ridiculous; such a plot should not in the first instance be constructed.—ARISTOTLE, Poetics. Though the subject of the imitation, who suggested the type, be inconsistent, still he must be consistently inconsistent-Ibid. It may be observed, too, that although the representation of no human character […]

Every phrase, with Dumas, hits the mark; as there is not in his plays an idle word, there is likewise none that is lost. His language is all muscles and nerves; it is action. And at the same time it gives to the idea a strict and decisive form, it sculptures it. If it often […]