Freytag: Dramatic Technique, Chapter 1, Section 7

VII. WHAT IS TRAGIC?

It is well known how busily the German poets since Lessing’s time, have been occupied in exploring that mysterious property of the drama which is called the tragic. It should be the quality which the poet’s moral theory of life deposits in the piece; and the poet should be, through moral influences, a fashioner of his time. The tragic should be an ethical force with which the poet has to fill his action and his characters; and in this case, there have been only diverse opinions as to the essential nature of dramatic ethical force. The expressions, tragic guilt, inner purification, poetic justice, have become convenient watchwords of criticism, conveying, however, a different meaning to different persons. But in this all agree, that the tragic effect of the drama depends on the manner in which the poet conducts his characters through the action, portions their fate to them, and guides and terminates the struggle of their one-sided desire against opposing forces.

Since the poet with freedom joins the parts of his action so as to produce unity, and since he produces this unity by setting together the individual elements of the represented events in rational, internal consistency, it is, of course, clear that the poet’s representations of human freedom and dependence, his comprehension of the general consistency of all things, his view of Providence and destiny, must be expressed in a poetic invention, which derives from the inner nature of some important personage sustaining great relations, his deeds and his sorrows. It is further plain that it devolves on the poet to conduct this struggle to such a close as shall not shock the humanity and the reason of the hearer, but shall satisfy it; and that for the good effect of his drama, it is not at all a matter of indifference whether in deducing guilt from the soul of the hero, and in deriving retribution from the compelling force of the action, he shows himself a man of good judgment and just feeling. But it is quite evident that the feeling and judgment of poets have been quite unlike in different centuries, and in individual poets, cannot be graduated in the same manner. Manifestly he who has developed in his own life a high degree of culture, a comprehensive knowledge of men, and a manly character, will, according to the view of his contemporaries, best direct the destiny of his hero; for what shines forth from the drama is only the reflection of the poet’s own conception of the great world-relations. It cannot be taught; it cannot be inserted into a single drama like a rôle or a scene.

Therefore, in answer to the question, how the poet must compose his action so that it may be tragic in this sense, the advice, meant in all seriousness, is given that he need trouble himself very little about it. He must develop in himself a capable and worthy manhood, then go with glad heart to a subject which offers strong characters in great conflict, and leave to others the high-sounding words, guilt and purification, refining and elevating. Unsettled must is sometimes put into bottles worthy of the purest wine. What is, in truth, dramatic will have an earnest tragic effect in a strongly moving action if it was a man who wrote it; if not, then assuredly not.

The poet’s own character determines the highest effects in an elevated drama more than in any other species of art. But the error of former art theories has been that they have sought to explain from the morale or ethics of the drama the combined effect in which sonorousness of words, gesture, costume, and not much else, are concerned.

The word, tragic, is used by the poet in two different meanings; it denotes, first, the peculiar general effect which a successful drama of elevated character produces upon the soul of the spectator; and, second, a definite kind of dramatic causes and effects which in certain parts of the drama are either useful or indispensable. The first is the physiological signification of the expression; the second, a technical denotation.

To the Greeks, a certain peculiarity in the aggregate effect of the drama was well known. Aristotle has sharply observed the special influence of the dramatic effects on the life of the spectators, and has understood them to be a characteristic property of the drama; so that he has included them in his celebrated definition of tragedy. This explanation, “Tragedy is artistic remodeling of a worthy, undivided, complete event, which has magnitude,” and so forth, closes with the words, “and effects through pity and fear the purification of such passions.” In another place, he explains in detail (Rhetoric, II. 8) what pity is, and how it may be awakened. Awakening pity is to him exhibiting the whole realm of human sorrows, circumstances, and actions, the observation of which produces what we call emotion and strong agitation. The word purification (katharsis), however, which as an expression of the old healing art, denoted the removal of diseased matter, and, as an expression of divine worship, denoted the purging of man by atonement from what polluted, is evidently an art term adopted by him for the proper effect of tragedy on the hearer. These peculiar effects which the critical observer perceived upon his contemporaries, are not entirely the same which the representation of a great dramatic masterpiece produces upon our audience, but they are closely related; and it is worth while to notice the difference.

Any one who has ever observed the influence of a tragedy upon himself, must have noticed with astonishment how the emotion and perturbation caused by the excitement of the characters, joined with the mighty suspense which the continuity of the action produces, take hold upon his nerves. Far more easily than in real life the tears flow, the lips twitch; this pain, however, is at the same time accompanied with intense enjoyment, while the hearer experiences immediately after the hero, the same thoughts, sorrows, calamities, with great vividness, as if they were his own. He has in the midst of the most violent excitement, the consciousness of unrestricted liberty, which at the same time raises him far above the incidents through which his capacity to receive impressions seems to be levied upon. After the fall of the curtain, in spite of the intense strain which he has been under for hours, he will be aware of a rebound of vital force; his eye brightens, his step is elastic, every movement firm and free. The dread and commotion are followed by a feeling of security; in his mental processes of the next hour, there is a greater elevation; in his collocation of words, emphatic force; the aggregate production, now his own, has raised him to a high pitch. The radiance of broader views and more powerful feeling which has come into his soul, lies like a transfiguration upon his being. This remarkable affection of body and soul, this elevation above the moods of the day, this feeling of unrestrained comfort after great agitation, is exactly what, in the modern drama, corresponds to Aristotle’s “purification.” There is no doubt that such a consequence of scenic exhibitions among the finely cultured Greeks, after a ten hours’ suspense, through the most powerful effects, came out all the more heightened and more striking.

The elevating influence of the beautiful, upon the soul, is no entirely unusual art; but the peculiar effect which is produced by a union of pain, horror, and pleasure, with a great, sustained effort of the fancy and the judgment, and through the perfect satisfying of our demands for a rational consistency in all things, – this is the prerogative of the art of dramatic poetry alone. The penetrating force of this dramatic effect is, with the majority of people, greater than the force of effects produced by any other form of art. Only music is able to make its influence more powerfully felt upon the nerves; but the thrill which the musical tone evokes, falls rather within the sphere of immediate emotions, which are not transfigured into thought; they are more rapturous, less inspired.

Naturally the effects of the drama are no longer the same with us as they were in Aristotle’s time. He, himself, makes that clear to us. He who knew so well that the action is the chief thing in the drama, and that Euripides composed his actions badly, yet called him the most tragic of the poets, that is, one who knew how to produce most powerfully the effects peculiar to a play. Upon us, however, scarcely a play of Euripides produces any general effect, however powerfully the stormy commotions of the hero’s soul, in single ones of his better plays, thrill us. Whence comes this diversity of conception? Euripides was a master in representing excited passion, with too little regard for sharply defined personages and rational consistency of the action. The Greek drama arose from a union of music and lyric poetry; from Aristotle’s time forward, it preserved something of its first youth. The musical element remained, not in the choruses, but the rhythmical language of the hero easily rose to climaxes in song; and the climaxes were frequently characterized by fully elaborated pathos scenes. The aggregate effect of the old tragedy stood between that of our opera and our drama, perhaps still nearer the opera; it retained something of the powerful inflammatory influence of music..

On the other hand, there was another effect of the ancient tragedy, only imperfectly developed, which is indispensable to our tragedy. The dramatic ideas and actions of the Greeks lacked a rational conformity to the laws of nature, that is, such a connecting of events as would be perfectly accounted for by the disposition and one-sidedness of the characters. We have become free men, we recognize no fate on the stage but such as proceeds from the nature of the hero himself. The modern poet has to prepare for the hearer the proud joy, that the world into which he introduces him corresponds throughout to the ideal demands which the heart and judgment of the hearer set up in comparison with the events of reality. Human reason appears in the new drama, as agreeing with and identical with divine; it remodels all that is incomprehensible in the order of nature, according to the need of our spirit and heart. This peculiarity of the action specially strengthens for the spectator of the best modern plays, beautiful transparence and joyous elevation; it helps to make himself for hours stronger, nobler, freer. Here is the point in which the character of the modern poet, his frank manliness, exercises greater influence upon the aggregate effect than in ancient times.

The Attic poet also sought this unity of the divine and the rational; but it was very difficult for him to find it. This boldly tragical, of course, shines forth in single dramas of the ancient world. And that can be explained; for the vital laws of poetical creation control the poet long before criticism has found rules for it; and in his best hours, the poet may receive an inward freedom and expansion which raise him far above the restrictions of his time. Sophocles directed the character and fate of his heroes sometimes, almost in the Germanic fashion. In general, however, the Greeks did not free themselves from a servitude which seems to us, in the highest art effects, a serious defect. The epic source of their subjects was thoroughly unfavorable for the free direction of their heroes’ destiny. An incomprehensible fate reached from without into their action; prophecies and oracular utterances influence the conclusion; accidental misfortunes strike the heroes; misdeeds of parents control the destiny of later generations; personifications of deity enter the action as friends and as enemies; between what excites their rage and the punishments which they decree, there is, according to human judgment, no consistency, much less a rational relation. The partiality and arbitrariness with which they rule, is frightful and terrifying; and when they occasionally grant a mild reconciliation, they remain like something foreign, not belonging here. In contrast to such cold excess of power, meek-spirited modesty of man is the highest wisdom. Whoever means to stand firmly by himself in his own might, falls first before a mysterious power which annihilates the guilty as well as the innocent. With this conception, which in its ultimate foundation was gloomy, sad, devouring, there remained to the Greek poet only the means of putting even into the characters of his fettered heroes, something that to a certain degree would account for the horrors which they must endure. The great art of Sophocles is shown, among other things, in the way he gives coloring to his personages. But this wise disposition of characters does not always extend far enough to establish the course of their destiny; it remains not seldom an inadequate motive. The greatness which the ancients produced, lay first of all in the force of passions, then in the fierceness of the struggles through which their heroes were overthrown, finally in the intensity, unfeelingness, and inexorableness, with which they made their characters do and suffer.

The Greeks felt very well that it was not advisable to dismiss the spectator immediately after such effects of the efforts of the beautiful art. They therefore closed the exhibition of the day with a parody, in which they treated the serious heroes of the tragedy with insolent jest, and whimsically imitated their struggles. The burlesque was the external means of affording the recreation which lies for us in the tragedy itself.

From these considerations, the last sentence of Aristotle’s definition, not indeed without limitation, avails for our drama. For him as well as for us, the chief effect of the drama is the disburdening of the hearer from the sad and confining moods of the day, which come to us through wretchedness and whatever causes apprehension in the world. But when in another place, he knows how to account for this, on the ground that man needs to see himself touched and shaken, and that the powerful pacifying and satisfying of this desire gives him inward freedom, this explanation is, indeed, not unintelligible to us; but it accepts as the ultimate inner reason for this need pathological circumstances, where we recognize a joyous emotional activity of the hearer.

The ultimate ground of every great effect of the drama lies not in the necessity of the spectator passively to receive impressions, but in his never-ceasing and irresistible desire to create and to fashion. The dramatist compels the listener to repeat his creations. The whole world of characters, of sorrow, and of destiny, the hearer must make alive in himself. While he is receiving with a high degree of suspense, he is in most powerful, most rapid creative activity. An ardor and beatifying cheerfulness like that which the poet himself has felt, fills the hearer who repeats the poet’s efforts; therefore the pain with the feeling of pleasure; therefore the exaltation which outlasts the conclusion of the piece. And this stimulation of the creative imagination is, in the new drama, penetrated with still a milder light; for closely connected with it, is an exalting sense of eternal reason in the severest fates and sorrows of man. The spectator feels and recognizes that the divinity which guides his life, even where it shatters the individual human being, acts in a benevolent fellowship with the human race; and he feels himself creatively exalted, as united with and in accord with the great world-guiding power.

So the aggregate effect of the drama, the tragic, is with us related to that of the Greek, but still no longer the same. The Greeks listened in the green youth of the human race, for the tones of the proscenium, filled with the sacred ecstacy of Dionysus; the German looks into the world of illusion, not less affected, but as a lord of the earth. The human race has since then passed through a long history; we have all been educated through historical science.

But more than the general effect of the drama is denoted by the word tragic. The poet of the present time, and sometimes also the public, use the word in a narrower sense. We understand by it, also, a peculiar kind of dramatic effects.

When at a certain point in the action, there enters suddenly, unexpectedly, in contrast with what has preceded, something sad, sombre, frightful, that we yet immediately feel has developed from the original course of events, and is perfectly intelligible from the presuppositions of the play, this new element is a tragic force or motive. This tragic force must possess the three following qualities: (1) it must be important and of serious consequence to the hero; (2) it must occur unexpectedly; (3) it must, to the mind of the spectator, stand in a visible chain of accessory representations, in rational connection with the earlier parts of the action. When the conspirators have killed Caesar and, as they think, have bound Antony to themselves, Antony, by his speech stirs up against the murderers themselves the same Romans for whose freedom Brutus had committed the murder. When Romeo has married Juliet, he is placed under the necessity of killing her cousin, Tybalt, in the duel, and is banished. When Mary Stuart has approached Elizabeth so near that a reconciliation of the two queens is possible, a quarrel flames up between them, which becomes fatal to Mary. Here the speech of Antony, the death of Tybalt, the quarrel of the queens, are tragic forces; their effect rests upon this, that the spectator comprehends the ominous occurrences as surprising, and yet inseparably connected with what has preceded. The hearer keenly feels the speech of Antony to be a result of the wrong which the conspirators have done Caesar; through the relation of Antony to Caesar, and his behavior in the previous dialogue scene with the conspirators, the speech is conceived as the necessary consequence of the sparing of Antony, and the senseless and over-hasty confidence which the murderers place in him. That Romeo must kill Tybalt, will be immediately understood as an unavoidable consequence of the mortal family quarrel and the duel with Mercutio; the quarrel of the two queens, the hearer at once understands to be the natural consequence of their pride, hatred, and former jealousy.

In the same technical signification, the word tragic is also sometimes used for events in real life. The fact, for example, that Luther, that mighty champion of the freedom of conscience, became in the last half of his life an intolerant oppressor of conscience, contains, thus stated, nothing tragic. Overweening desire for rule may have developed in Luther; he may have become senile. But from the moment when it becomes clear to us, through a succession of accessory ideas, that this same intolerance was the necessary consequence of that very honest, disinterested struggle for truth, which accomplished the Reformation; that this same pious fidelity with which Luther upheld his conception of the Bible against the Roman Church, brought him to defend this conception against an adverse decision; that he would not despair when in his position outside of the church, but remained there, holding obstinately to the letter of his writings; from the moment, also, when we conceive of the inner connection of his intolerance with all that is good and great in his nature, this darkening of his later life produces the effect of the tragic. Just so with Cromwell. That the Protector ruled as a tyrant, produces, in itself, nothing tragic. But that he must do it against his will, because the partisan relations through which he had arisen, and his participation in the execution of the king, had stirred the hearts of the conservative against him; that the great hero from the pressure which his earlier life had laid upon him, could not wrest himself free from his office, this makes the shadow which fell upon his life through his unlawful reign, tragic for us. That Conradin, child of the Hohenstaufens, gathered a horde, and was slain in Italy by his adversary, this is not in itself dramatic, and in no sense of the word tragic. A weak youth, with slender support, it was in order that he should succumb. But when it is impressed upon our souls, that the youth only followed the old line of march of his ancestors toward Italy, and that in this line of march, almost all the great princes of his house had fallen, and that this march of an imperial race was not accidental, but rested on ancient, historical union of Germany with Italy, – then the death of Conradin appears to us specially tragic, not for himself, but as the final extinction of the greatest race of rulers of that time.

With peculiar emphasis, it must again be asserted that the tragic force must be understood in its rational causative connection with the fundamental conditions of the action. For our drama, such events as enter without being understood, incidents the relation of which with the action is mysteriously concealed, influences the significance of which rests on superstitious notions, motives which are taken from dream-life, prophesyings, presentiments, have merely a secondary importance. If a family picture which falls from its nail, shall portentously indicate death and destruction; if a dagger which was used in a crime, appears burdened with a mysterious, evil-bringing curse, till it brings death to the murderer, – these kinds of attempts which ground the tragic effect upon an inner connection which is incomprehensible to us, or appears unreasonable, are for the free race of the present day, either weak or quite intolerable. What appears to us as an accident, even an overwhelming one, is not appropriate for great effects on the stage. It is now several centuries since the adoption of such motives and many others, has been tried in Germany.

The Greeks, it may be remarked incidentally, were somewhat less fastidious in the use of these irrational forces for tragic effect. They could be contented if the inner connection of a suddenly entering tragic force, with what had preceded, were felt in an ominous shudder. When Aristotle cites as an effective example in this direction, that a statue erected to a man, in falling down, kills him who was guilty of the man’s death, we should feel in every-day life such an accident is significant. But in art, we should not deem it worthy of success. Sophocles understands how, with such forces, to make conspicuous a natural and intelligible connection between cause and effect so far as his fables allow anything of the sort. For example, the manner in which he explains, with realistic detail, the poisonous effect of the shirt of Nessos, which Deianeira sends to Hercules, is remarkable.

The tragic force, or incident, in the drama is one of many effects. It may enter only once, as usually happens; it may be used several times in the same piece. Romeo and Juliet has three such forces: the death of Tybalt after the marriage; the betrothal of Juliet and Paris after the marriage night; the death of Paris before the final catastrophe. The position which this force takes in the piece, is not always the same; one point, however, is specially adapted for it, so that the cases in which it demands another place, can be considered as exceptions; and it is relevant in connection with the foregoing to speak of this here, though the parts of the drama will be discussed in the following chapter.

The point forward from which the deed of the . hero reacts upon himself, is one of the most important in the play. This beginning of the reaction, sometimes united in one scene with the climax, has been noted ever since there has been a dramatic art. The embarrassment of the hero and the momentous position into which he has placed himself, must be impressively represented; at the same time, it is the business of this force to produce new suspense for the second part of the piece, and so much the more as the apparent success of the hero has so far been more brilliant, and the more magnificently the scene of the climax has presented his success. Whatever enters into the play now must have all the qualities which have been previously explained – it must present sharp contrasts, it must not be accidental, it must be pregnant with consequences. Therefore it must have importance and a certain magnitude. This scene of the tragic force either immediately follows the scene of the climax, like the despair of Juliet after Romeo’s departure; or is joined by a connecting scene, like the speech of Antony after Caesar’s murder; or it is coupled with the climax scene into scenic unity, as in Mary Stuart; or it is entirely separated from it by the close of an act, as in Love and Intrigue, where Louise’s writing the letter indicates the climax, and Ferdinan’s conviction of the infidelity of his beloved forms the tragic force. Such scenes almost always stand in the third act of our plays, sometimes less effective in the beginning of the fourth. They are not, of course, absolutely necessary to the tragedy; it is quite possible to bring along the increasing reaction by several strokes in gradual reinforcement. This will most frequently be the case where the catastrophe is effected by the mental processes of the hero, as in Othello.

It is worth while for us in modern times to recognize how important this entrance of the tragic force into the action appeared to the Greeks. It was under another name exactly the same effect; and it was made still more significantly prominent by the Attic critic than is necessary for us. Even to their tragedies, this force was not indispensable, but it passed for one of the most beautiful and most effective inventions. Indeed, they classed this effect according to its producing a turn in the action itself or in the position of the chief characters relative to one another; and they had for each of these cases special names, apparently expressions of the old poetic laboratory, which an accident has preserved for us in Aristotle’s Poetics. [9]

Revolution (Peripeteia), is the name given by the Greeks to that tragic force which by the sudden intrusion of an event, unforeseen and overwhelming but already grounded in the plan of the action, impels the volition of the hero, and with it the action itself in a direction entirely different from that of the beginning. Examples of such revolution scenes are the change in the prospects of Neoptolemus in Philoctetes, the announcement of the messenger and the shepherd to Jocasta and the king in King Oedipus, the account of Hyllos to Deianeira, concerning the effect of the shirt of Nessos, in The Trachinian Women. Through this force specially there was produced a powerful movement in the second part of the play; and the Athenians distinguished carefully between plays with revolution and those without. Those with revolution prevailed in general, being considered the better. This force of the ancient action is distinguished from the corresponding newer only in this, that it does not necessarily indicate a turning toward the disastrous, because the tragedy of the ancients did not always have a sad ending, but sometimes the sudden reversion to the better. The scenes claimed scarcely less significance, in which the position of the persons concerned in the action was changed with relation to each other, by the unexpected revival of an old and important relation between them. These scenes of the anagnorisis, recognition scenes, it was especially, in which the agreeable relations of the heroes became apparent in magnificent achievement. And since the Greek stage did not know our love scenes, they occupied a similar position, though good-will did not always appear in them, and sometimes even hatred flamed up. The subjects of the Greeks offered ample opportunity for such scenes. The heroes of Greek story are, almost without exception, a wandering race. Expedition and return, the finding of friends and enemies unexpectedly, are among the most common features of these legends. Almost every collection of stories contains children who did not know their parents, husbands and wives, who after long separation came together again under peculiar circumstances, host and guest, who prudently sought to conceal their names and purposes. There was, therefore, in much of their material, scenes of meetings, finding the lost, reminiscences of significant past events, some of decisive importance. Not only the recognizing of former acquaintances but the recognition of a region, of an affair having many relations, could become a motive for a strong movement. Such scenes afforded the old-time poet welcome opportunity for the representation of contrasts in perception and for favorite pathetic performances in which the excited feeling flowed forth in great waves. The woman who will kill an enemy, and just before or just after the deed recognizes him as her own son; the son who in his mortal enemy finds again his own mother, like Ion; the priestess who is about to offer up a stranger, and in him recognizes her brother, like Iphigenia; the sister who mourns her dead brother, and in the bringer of the burial urn receives back again the living; and Odysseus’s nurse who, in a beggar, finds out the home-returning master by a scar on his foot, these are some of the numerous examples. Frequently such recognition scenes became motives for a revolution, as in the case already mentioned of the account of the messenger and the shepherd to the royal pair of Thebes. One may read in Aristotle how important the circumstances were to the Greeks through which the recognition was brought about; by the great philosopher, they were carefully considered and prized according to their intrinsic worth. And it is a source of satisfaction to observe that even to the Greek, no accidental external characteristic passed for a motive suitable to art, but only the internal relations of those recognizing each other, which voluntarily and characteristically for both, manifested themselves in the dialogue. Just a glimpse assures us how refined and fully developed the dramatic criticism of the Greeks was, and how painfully conscientious they were to regard in a new drama what passed for a beautiful effect according to their theory of art.

Freytag: Dramatic Technique, Chapter 1, Section 6

VI. Movement and Rise of the Action.

The dramatic action must represent all that is important to the understanding of the play, and the strong excitement of the characters, and in a continuously progressive increase of effects.

The action must, first of all, be capable of the strongest dramatic excitement; and this must be universally intelligible. There are great and important fields of human activity, which do not make the growth of a captivating emotion, a passionate desire, or a mighty volition easy; and again, there are violent struggles which force to the outside men's mental processes, while the subject of the struggle is little adapted to the stage, the importance and greatness are not lacking to it. For example, a politic prince, who negotiates with the powerful ones of his land, who wages war and concludes peace with his neighbors, will perhaps do all this without once exhibiting the least excited passion; and if this does come to light as secret desire or resentment toward others, it will be noticeable only by careful observation, and in little ripples. But even when it is allowed to represent his whole being in dramatic suspense, the subject of his volition, a political success or a victory, is capable of being shown only very imperfectly and fragmentarily in its stage setting. And the scenes in which this round of worldly purposes is specially active, state trials, addresses, battles, are for technical reasons not the part most conveniently put on the stage. From this point of view, warning must be given against putting scenes from political history on the boards. Of course the difficulties which this field of the greatest human activity offers, are not unsurmountable; but it requires not only maturity of genius but very peculiar and intimate knowledge of the stage to overcome them. But the poet will never degrade his action by reducing it to an imperfect and insufficient exposition of such political deeds and aims; he will need to make use of a single action, or a small number of actions, as a background, before which he presents – and in this he is infinitely superior to the historian – a most minute revelation of human nature, in a few personages, and in their most intimate emotional relations with each other. If he fails to do this, he will in so far falsify history without creating poetry.

An entirely unfavorable field for dramatic material is the inward struggles which the inventor, the artist, the thinker has to suffer with himself and with his time. Even if he is a reformer by nature, who knows how to impress the stamp of his own spirit on thousands of others; indeed, if his own material misfortunes may lay claim to unusual sympathy, the dramatist will not willingly conclude to bring him forward as the hero of the action. If the mental efforts, the mode of thought of such a hero, are not sufficiently known to the living audience, then the poet will have first to show his warrant for such a character by artful discourse, by a fullness of oral explanation, and by a representation of spiritual import. This may be quite as difficult as it is undramatic. If the poet presupposes in his auditors a living interest in such personages, acquaintance with the incidents of their lives, and makes use of this interest in order to avail himself of an occurrence in the life of such a hero, he falls into another danger. On the stage the good which is known beforehand of a man, and the good that is reported of him, have no value at all, as opposed to what the hero himself does on the stage. Indeed, the great expectations which the hearer brings with him in this case, may be prejudicial to the unbiased reception of the action. And if the poet succeeds, as is probable in the case of popular heroes, in promoting the scenic effects through the already awakened ardor of the audience for the hero, he must credit his success to the interest which the audience brings with it, not to the interest which the drama itself has merited. If the poet is conscientious, he will adopt only those moments from the life of the artist, poet, thinker, in which he shows himself active and suffering quite as significantly toward others as he was in his studio. It is clear that this will be the case only by accident; it is quite as clear that in such a case it will be only an accident, if the hero bears a celebrated name. Therefore, the making use of anecdotes from the life of such great men, the meaning of which does not show itself in the action but in the non-representable activity of their laboratory, is intrinsically right undramatic. The greatness in them is non-representable; and what is represented borrows the greatness of the hero from a moment of his life lighting outside the piece. The personality of Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, is in this respect worse on the stage than in a novel or romance, and all the worse the more intimately their lives are known.

Of course, opinions as to what may be represented on the stage, and what is effective, are not the same in all ages. National custom as well as the arrangement of the theater direct the poet. We have no longer the susceptibility of the Greeks to epic narratives which are brought upon the scene by a messenger; we have greater pleasure in what can be acted, and risk upon our stage the imitation of actions which would have appeared entirely impossible on the Athenian stage, in spite of its machines, its devices for flying and its perspective painting, – popular tumults, collision of armies, and the like. And as a rule the later poet will be inclined to do too much rather than too little in this direction.

It may happen to him rather than to the Greek, therefore, that through full elaboration of the action, the inner perturbation of the chief figures may be disproportionately restricted, and that an important transition, a portentous series of moods, remains unexpressed. A well known example of such a defect is in Prince of Homburg, the very piece in which the poet has superbly achieved one of the most difficult scenic tasks, the disposition of an army for battle and the battle itself. The prince has taken his imprisonment light-heartedly; when his friend, Hohenzollern, brings him the news that his death-warrant is awaiting the signature, his mood naturally becomes serious, and he determines to entreat the intercession of the electoral princess. And in the next scene, the young hero throws himself powerless, and without self-control, at the feet of his protectress, because, as he relates, he has seen on his way to her, men digging his grave by torchlight; he begs for his life, though he may be shamefully degraded. This sudden plunge to a cowardly fear of death, does painful violence to the character of a general. It is certainly not untrue in itself, even if we unwillingly tolerate lack of self-control in a general under such circumstances. And the drama demanded the severest humiliation of the hero; just this lack of courage is the turning point of the piece; in his confusion he must plunge down to this, in order to redeem himself worthily in the second part of the action. It was therefore a chief task to present the abasement of a youthful heroic nature even to the fear of death, and indeed, in such a manner that the sympathy of the hearer should not be dissipated through contempt. That could happen only by an accurate exhibition of the inner perturbations, even to the bursting forth of the death anguish, which terminated in the prostration at the princess’s feet – a difficult task for even powerful poetic genius, but one which must be performed. And here a rule may be mentioned, which has force for the poet as well as for the actor: it is preposterous to hasten over parts of the action which for any reason are necessary to the play, but have not the merit of pleasing motives; on the contrary, upon such passages, the highest technical arts must be expended, in order to give poetic beauty to what is in itself unsuitable. Before just this kind of tasks, the artist must achieve the proud feeling that for him there are no unconquerable difficulties.

Another case in which the forcing forward of the chief effect has been neglected, is the third act of Antony and Cleopatra. A defect in Shakespeare does not, indeed, originate in want of insight, nor in haste. The striking thing is that the piece lacks climax. Antony has withdrawn from Cleopatra, has been reconciled with Octavianus, and has reestablished his authority. But the spectator has long had a presentment that he will return to Cleopatra. The inner necessity of this relapse is amply motivated from the first act. Notwithstanding this, one demands rightly to see this momentous relapse, with its violent passions and mental disturbances; it is the point on which all that has gone before is suspended, and which must account for all that follows, the degradation of Antony, even to his cowardly flight, and his death. And yet, it is presented in only brief sections; the culmination of the action is divided up into little scenes, and the joining of these into one well-executed scene was the more desirable, because the important occurrence in the last half of the play, that flight of Antony from the naval battle, cannot be represented on the stage, but can be made intelligible only through the short account of the subordinate commander and the thrilling struggle of the broken-down hero which follows. [7]

But the poet has not the task, let it be understood, of representing through what is done on the stage every individual impulse which is necessary to the inner connection of the action as actually occurring. Such a representation of accessories would rather conceal the essentials than make them impressive, by taking time from the more important; it would also divide up the action into too many parts and thereby injure the effects. Upon our stage, also, many heroic accounts of events are necessary in vivid representation. Since they always produce resting places in the action, however excitedly the disclaimer may speak, the law applies to them, that they must come in as relief from a strongly worked-up suspense. The spectator must be previously aroused by the excited emotion of the persons concerned. The length of the narration is to be carefully calculated; a line too much, the least unnecessary elaboration, may cause weariness. If the narrative contains individual parts of some extent, it must be divided and interspersed with short speeches of other characters, which indicate the narrator’s mood; and the parts must be carefully arranged in the order of climax, both as to meaning and style. A celebrated example of excellent arrangement is the Swedish captain’s story in Wallenstein. An elaborate narrative must not occur when the action is moving forward with energy and rapidity.

One variety of messenger scene is the portrayal of an occurrence thought of as behind the scenes, when the persons on the stage are represented as observers; also the presentation of an occurrence from the impressions which it has made on the characters. This kind of recital allows more easily of dramatic excitement; it may be almost a mere, quiet narrative; it may possibly occasion or increase passionate excitement on the stage.

The grounds upon which the poet has something happening behind the scenes, are of various kinds. First of all, occasion is given by unavoidable incidents which, because of their nature, cannot be represented on the stage at all, or only through elaborate machinery – a conflagration, a naval battle, a popular tumult, battles of cavalry and charioteers – everything in which the mighty forces of nature or great multitudes of men are active in widespread commotion. The effect of such reflected impressions may be greatly enhanced by little scenic indications: calls from without, signals, lurid lights, thunder and lightning, the roar of cannon, and similar devices which excite the fancy, and the appropriateness of which is easily recognized by the hearer. These indications and shrewd hints of something in the distance, will be most successful when they are used to show the doings of men; not so favorable are the representation of the unusual operations of nature, descriptions of landscape, all spectacles to which the spectator is not accustomed to give himself over before the stage. In such a case the designed effect may entirely fail, because the audience is accustomed to strive against attempts to produce strange illusions.

This representation of mirrored impressions, the laying a part of the action behind the scene, has peculiar significance for the drama in moments when what is frightful, terrifying, or horrible is to be exhibited. If it is desired by the present-day poet that he should follow the example of the Greeks, and discreetly lay the decisive moment of a hideous deed as much as possible behind the scenes, and bring it to light only through the impressions which it makes on the minds of those concerned, then an objection must be made against this restriction in favor of the newer art; for an imposing deed is sometimes of the greatest effect on our stage, and is indispensable to the action. First, if the dramatically presentable individual parts of the deed give significance to what follows; next, if we recognize in such a deed the sudden culmination of an inner process just perfected; third, if only through the contemplation of the action itself the spectators may be convinced how the affair really happened, – nowhere need we fear the effects on the stage, of death, murder, violent collision of figures, though in themselves not the highest effects of the drama. While the Greek stage was developed out of a lyric representation of passionate emotions, the German has arisen from the epic delineation of events. Both have preserved some traditions of their oldest conditions; the Greek remained just as inclined to keep in the background the moment of the deed, as the Germans rejoiced to picture fighting and rapine.

But if the Greeks avoided violent physical efforts, blows, attacks, wrestlings, overthrows, perhaps not the foresight of the poet, but the need of the actors was the ultimate reason. The Greek theatre costume was very inconvenient for violent movements of the body; the falling of a dying person in the cothurnus must be gradual and very carefully managed if it would not be ridiculous. And the mask took away any possibility of representing the expression of the countenance, indispensable in the moments of highest suspense. Aeschylus appears to have undertaken something also in this direction; and the shrewd Sophocles went just as far as he dared. He ventured to have even Antigone dragged by an armed force from the grove of Colonos, but he did not venture, in Electra, to have Aegisthos killed on the stage; Orestes and Pylades must pursue him with drawn swords behind the scenes. Perhaps Sophocles perceived, as well as we, that in such a place this was a disadvantage, a restriction which was laid upon him by the leather and padding of his actors, and, too, by the religious horror which the Greeks felt for the moment of death. Then this is one of the places in the drama where the spectator must see that the action completes itself. Even if pursued by two men, Aegisthos could either have defended himself against them or have escaped them.

Through the greater ease and energy of our imitation, we are freed from such considerations; and in our pieces, numerous effects, great and small, rest on the supreme moment of action. The scene in which Coriolanus embraces Aufidius before the household altar of the Volscians, receives its full significance only through the battle scene in the first act, in which the embittered antagonists are seen to punish each other. The contest is necessary between Prince Henry and Percy. And again in Love and Intrigue, how indispensable, according to the premises, is the death of the two lovers on the stage. In Romeo and Juliet, how indispensable the death of Tybalt, of Paris, and of the loving pair, before the eyes of the spectators. Could we believe it, were Emilia Galotti stabbed by her father behind the scenes? And would it be possible to dispense with the great scene in which Caesar was murdered?

On the other hand, again, there is an entire series of great effects, when the deed itself does not busy the eye, but is so concealed that the attending circumstances stimulate the imagination, and cause the terrible to be felt through those impressions which fall into the soul of the hero. Wherever there is room to make impressive the moments preparatory to a deed; wherever the deed does not enter into the sudden excitement of the hero; finally, wherever it is more useful to excite horror, and hold in suspense, than sorrowfully to relax excited suspense, – the poet will do well to have the deed itself performed behind the scenes. We are indebted to such a concealment for many of the most powerful effects which have been produced at all. When in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the captive Cassandra announces the individual circumstances of the murder which occurs in the house; when Electra, as the death shrieks of Clytemnestra press upon the stage, cries to her brother behind the scene, “Strike once more!” – the fearful power of these effects has never been surpassed. Not less magnificent is the murdering of King Duncan in Macbeth – the delineating of the murderer’s frame of mind before and after the deed.

For the German stage, the suspense, the undefined horror, the unearthly, the exciting, produced by skilful treatment, through this concealing of momentous deeds, are especially to be esteemed in the part of the action tending toward climax. In the more rapid course and the more violent excitement of the second part, they will not be so easily made use of. At the last exit of the hero, they can be used only in cases where the moment of death itself is not capable of presentation on the stage, – execution on the scaffold, military execution, and where the impossibility of any other solution is a matter of course, on account of the undoubtedly greater strength of the death-dealing antagonist. An interesting example of this is the last act of Wallenstein. The gloomy figure of Buttler, the soliciting of the murderers, the drawing together of the net about the unsuspecting one, – all this is impressed upon the soul of the spectator, in a long and powerfully exciting climax; after such a preparation, the accomplishment of the murder itself would not add intensity; one sees the murderer press into the sleeping room; the creaking of the last door, the clanking of arms, the succeeding sudden silence, hold the imagination in the same unearthly suspense which colors the whole act; and the slow awakening of the fancy, the anxious expectation, and the last concealment of the deed itself, are exceedingly well adapted to what is visionary and mysterious in the inspired hero, as Schiller has conceived him.

The poet has not only to exhibit, but as well to keep silence. First of all, there are certain illogical ingredients of the material, which the greatest art is not able always to manage, this will be further treated in the discussion of dramatic material. Then there is the repulsive, the disgusting, the hideous, all that shocks dramatic taste, which depends on the crudeness of otherwise serviceable material; what, in this respect may be repugnant to art, the artist must himself feel; it cannot be taught him.

But further, the poet must continually heighten his effects from the beginning to the end of his play. The listener is not the same in every part of the performance. At the beginning of the piece, he acquiesces with readiness, as a rule, in what is offered, and with slight demands; and as soon as the poet has shown his power by some respectable effect, and has shown his manly judgment, through his language, and a firm kind of characterization, the hearer is inclined to yield himself confidently to the poet’s leading. This frame of mind lasts till toward the climax of the piece. But in the further course, the listener becomes more exacting; his capability for receiving what is new becomes less; the effects enjoyed have been exciting more powerfully, have in many respects afforded satisfaction; with increasing suspense, comes impatience; with the greater number of impressions received, weariness comes more easily. With all this in view, the poet must carefully arrange every part of his action. Indeed, so far as the import of the play is concerned, he need not, with a skilful arrangement of tolerable material, be anxious about the listener’s increasing interest. But he must see to it, that the performance becomes gradually greater and more impressive. During the first acts, in general, a light and brief treatment may be made possible; and here sometimes the heavy exaction is laid on the poet, perhaps even to moderate a great effect; but the last acts from the climax on, require the summoning of all his resources. It is not a matter of indifference, where a scene is placed, whether a messenger recites his narrative in the first or in the fourth act, whether an effect closes the second or the fourth act. It was wise foresight that made the conspiracy scene in Julius Caesar so brief, in order not to prejudice the climax of the piece, and the great tent scene.

Another means of heightening effects lies in the multiplicity of moods that may be aroused, and of characters which may bear forward the action. Every piece, as has been said, has a ground mood, which may be compared to a musical chord or a color. From this controlling color, there is necessary a wealth of shadings, as well as of contrasts. In many cases the poet does not find it essential to make this necessity apparent by cool investigation; for it is an unwritten law of all artistic creation, that anything discovered suggests its opposite, – the chief character, his counterpart, one scene effect, that which contrasts with it. Among the Germans, particularly, there is need that they fondly and carefully infuse into everything which they create, a certain totality of their feeling. Yet, during the work, the critical examination of the figures, which by natural necessity have challenged one another, will supply many important gaps. For in our plays, rich in figures, it is easily possible, by means of a subordinate figure, to give a coloring which materially aids the whole. Even Sophocles is to be admired for the certainty and delicacy with which, in every tragedy, he counterbalances the one-sidedness of some of his characters, by means of the suggested opposites. In Euripides, again, this feeling for harmony is very weak. All great poets of the Germanic race, from Shakespeare to Schiller, considered all together, create, in this direction, with admirable firmness; and in their works we seldom find a character which is not demanded by a counterpart, but is introduced through cool deliberation, like Parricida in William Tell. It is a peculiarity of Kleist that his supplementary characters come to him indistinctly; here and there arbitrariness or license violates, in the ground lines of his figures.

From this internal throng of scenic contrasts in the action, there has originated what, to the Germans, is the favorite scene of tragedy – the luminous and fervid part which, as a rule, embraces the touching moments, in contrast with the thrilling moments of the chief action. These scenic contrasts, however, are produced not only through a variation of meaning, but also through a change of amplified and concise scenes, of scenes of two, and of many persons. Among the Greeks, scenes moved in a much narrower circle, both as to matter and form. The variation is made in this way: the scenes have a peculiar, regular, recurring construction, each according to its contents; dialogues and messenger scenes are interrupted by pathos scenes; for each of these kinds there arose, in essentials, an established form.

Not only sharp contrast, but the repetition of the same scenic motive, may produce a heightened effect, as well through parallelism as through fine contrarieties in things otherwise similar. In this case, the poet must give diligent care, that he lay peculiar charm in the returning motive, and that before the recurrence, he arouse suspense and enjoyment in the motive. And in this he will not be allowed to neglect the law, that on the stage, in the last part of the action, even very fine work will not easily suffice to produce heightened effects by means already used, provided the same receive a broader elaboration. There is special danger if the performer wants the peculiar art of setting in strong contrast the repeated motive, and one that has preceded it. Shakespeare is fond of repeating a motive to heighten effects. A good example is the heavy sleepiness of Lucius in Julius Caesar, which in the oath scene shows the contrast in the temper of the master and the servant, and in the tent scene is repeated almost word for word. The second sounding of the chord has to introduce the ghost here, and its soft minor tone reminds the hearer very pleasingly of that unfortunate night and Brutus’s guilt. Similarly, in Romeo and Juliet, the repetition of the deed with fatal result, works as well through consonance as through contrasted treatment. Further, in Othello, the splendid recurring variations of the same theme in the little scenes between Iago and Roderigo. But success with these effects is not always accorded to even great poets. The repetition of the weird-sister motive, in the second half of Macbeth, is no strengthening of the effect. The ghostly resists, indeed, a more ample elaboration in the second place. A very remarkable example of such a repetition is the repeated wooing of Richard III., the scene at the bier, and the interview with Elizabeth Rivers. [8] That the repetition stands here as a significant characterizing of Richard, and that a strong effect is intended, is perfectly clear from the great art and full amplification of both scenes. The second scene, also, is treated with greater fondness; the poet has made use of a technique, new to to him, but very fine; he has treated it according to antique models, giving to speech and response the same number of lines. And our criticism is accustomed to account for a special beauty of the great drama from this scene. It is certainly a disadvantage on the stage. The monstrous action presses already toward the end, with a power which takes from the spectator the capability of enjoying the extended and artistic battle of words in this interview. A similar disadvantage for our spectators, is the thrice-repeated casket scene in the Merchant of Venice. The dramatic movement of the first two scenes is inconsiderable, and the elegance in the speeches of those choosing has not sufficient charm, Shakespeare might gladly allow himself such rhetorical niceties, because his more constant audience found peculiar pleasure in polite, cultured discourse.

Freytag, Dramatic Technique: Chapter 1, Section 5

V. Importance and Magnitude of the Action.

The action of the serious drama must possess importance and magnitude.

The struggles of individual men must affect their inmost life; the object of the struggle must, according to universal apprehension, be a noble one, the treatment dignified. The characters must correspond to such a meaning of the action, in order that the play may produce a noble effect. If the action is constructed in conformity with the stated law, and the characters are inadequate to the demands thus created, or if the characters evince strong passion and extreme agitation, while these elements are wanting to the action, the incongruity is painfully apparent to the spectator. Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis contains what affords to the stage the most frightful struggles of the human soul; but the characters, at least with the exception of Clytemnestra, are poorly invented, disfigured either through unnecessary meanness of sentiment, or through lack of force, or through sudden, unwarranted change of feeling; thus Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, Iphigenia. Again, in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, the character of the hero, from the moment when he is aroused to activity, has an ever-increasing energy and power, to which a gloomy grandeur is not at all lacking, but idea and action stand in incongruity with it. That a warm-hearted, trusting spendthrift should, after the loss of external possessions, become a misanthrope through the ingratitude and meanness of his former friends, presupposes the weakness of his own character and the pitiableness of his surroundings; and this instability, lamentableness of all the relations represented, restrains the sympathy of the hearer in spite of great poetic scale.

But even the environment, the sphere of life of the hero, influences the dignity and magnitude of the action. We demand rightly that the hero whose fate is to hold us spellbound, shall possess a character whose force and worth shall exceed the measure of the average man. This force of his being, however, does not lie wholly in the energy of his will and the violence of his passion, but as well in his possessing a rich share of the culture, manners, and spiritual capacity of his time. He must be represented as superior in the important relations of his surroundings; and his surroundings must be so created as easily to awaken in the hearer a keen interest. It is, therefore, no accident that when an action is laid in past time, it always seeks the realm in which what is greatest and most important is contained, the greatest affairs of the people, the life of its leaders and rulers, those heights of humanity that have developed not only a mighty spiritual significance, but also a significant power of will. Scarce any but the deeds and destinies of such commanding figures have been handed down to us from the former times.

With material from later times, the relations, of course, are changed. No longer are the most powerful passions and the sublimest soul-struggles to be recognized that courts and among political rulers alone, nor even generally. There remains, however, to these figures for the drama a pre-eminence which may be, for their life and that of their contemporaries, a positive disadvantage. They are now less exposed the compulsion which middle-class society exercises on the private citizen. They are not, to the same degree as a private citizen, subjected to civil law, and they know it. In domestic and foreign conflicts, their own self has not greater right but greater might. So they appear exposed to freer, more powerful temptation, and capable of greater self-direction. It must be added that the relations in which they live, and the directions in which they exert influence, offer the greatest wealth of colors and the most varied multiplicity of figures. Finally the counterplay against their characters and against their purposes is most effective; and the sphere of the interests for which they should live, embraces the most important affairs of the human race.

The life of the private citizen has also been for centuries freeing itself from the external restraint of restricting traditions, has been gaining nobility and spiritual freedom, and become full of contradictions and conflicts. In any realm of reality, where worldly aims and movements resulting from the civilization of the times have penetrated, a tragic hero may be generated and developed in its atmosphere. It depends only on whether a struggle is possible for him, which, according to the general opinion of the audience, has a great purpose, and whether the opposition to this develops a corresponding activity worthy of consideration. Since, however, the importance and greatness of the conflict can be made impressive only by endowing the hero with the capability of expressing his inmost thought and feeling in a magnificent matter, with a certain luxuriance of language; and since these demands increase among men as belong to the life of modern times, – to the hero of the modern stage a suitable measure of the culture of the time is indispensable. For only in this way does he receive freedom of thought and will. Therefore, such classes of society has remained until our own time under the sway of epic relations, whose life is specially directed by the customs of their circle; such classes as still languish under the pressure of circumstances which the spectator observes and decides to be unjust; finally, such classes as are not specially qualified to transpose, in a creative manner, their thoughts and emotions into discourse, – such are not available for heroes of the drama, however powerfully passion works in their natures, however their feeling, in single hours, breaks out with spontaneous, native force.

From what has been said, it follows that tragedy must forego grounding its movement on motives which the judgment of the spectator will condemn as lamentable, common, or unintelligible. Even such motives may force a man into violent conflicts with his environment; but the dramatic art, considered in general, may be in a position to turn such antagonisms to account. He who from a desire for gain, robs, steals, murders, counterfeits; who from cowardice, acts dishonorably; who through stupidity, short-sightedness, frivolity, and thoughtlessness, becomes smaller and weaker than his relations demand, – he is not at all suitable for hero of a serious play.

If a poet would completely degrade his art, and turned to account in the action of the play full of contention and evil tendency, the social perversion of real life, the despotism of the rich, the torments of the oppressed, the condition of the poor who receive from society only suffering, – by such work he would probably excite the sympathy of the audience to a high degree; but at the end of the play the sympathy would sink into a painful discord. The delineating of the mental processes of a common criminal belongs to halls where trial by jury is held; efforts for the improvement of the poor and oppressed classes should be an important part of our labor in real life; the muse of art is no Sister of Mercy.

Freytag, Dramatic Technique: Chapter 1, Section 4

IV. Probability of the Action.

The action of the serious drama must be probable.

Poetic truth is imparted to material taken from real life, by its being raised above its casual connections and receiving a universally understood meaning and significance. In dramatic poetry, this transformation of reality with poetic truth is effected thus: the essential parts, bound together and unified by some causative connection, and all the accessory inventions, are conceived as probable and credible motives of the represented events. But more than this, poetic truth is needed in the drama. He entertained hearer surrenders himself gladly to the invention of the poet; he gladly lets the presumption of a piece please him, and it is in general quite inclined to approve of the invented human relations in the world of beautiful illusion; but he is not able entirely to forget the reality; he holds close to this poetic picture, which rises full of charm before him, the picture of the real world in which he breathes. He brings with him before the stage a certain knowledge of historical relations, definite, ethical and moral demands upon human life, presages and a clear knowledge of the course of events. To a certain extent, it is impossible for him to renounce this purport of his own life; and sometimes he feels it very strongly when the poetic picture contradicts it. That ocean vessels should land on the coast of Bohemia, that Charlemagne should use cannon, appears to our spectators a serious mistake.

That the Jew, Shylock, is promised mercy if he will turn Christian, shocks the moral sense of the spectator, and he is probably not inclined to concede that a just judge has so decided. That Thoas, who in so refined and dignified a manner seeks the hand of the priestess Iphigenia, allows human sacrifices in his kingdom, appears as an internal contradiction between the noble personality of the characters in the presuppositions of the piece; and however shrewdly the poet conceals this irrational element, it yet may be injurious to the effect of the play. That Oedipus rules many years without troubling himself about the death of Laius, appears to the Athenians, even at the first presentation of the play, as a doubtful supposition.

Now it is well known that this picture of the real, which the spectator holds up against the single drama, does not remain the same in every century, but is changed by each advance of human culture. The interpretation of past times, moral and social demands, the social relations, are nothing firmly established; but every spectator is a child of his time; for each the comprehension of what is commonly acceptable, is limited through his personality and the culture of his age.

And it is further clear that this picture of real life shades off differently in the mind of each person, and that the poet, however fully and richly he is taken into his own life the culture of his race, still is confronted with conceptions of reality in a thousand different tones. He has, indeed, the great calling to be, in his time, the apostle of the highest and most liberal culture, and without posturing as a teacher, to draw his hearers upward toward himself. But to the dramatic poet there are for this reason private bounds staked out. He must not exceed these bounds. He must not, in many cases, leave vacant any of the space which they enclose. Where they arise invisible, they may be defined in each single case only through delicate sensibility and trustworthy feeling.

The effects of dramatic art are, so to speak, sociable. As the dramatic work of art, in a combination of several arts, is represented through the general activity of numerous adjuncts, so is the audience of the poet a body composed of many changing individuals and yet, as a whole, a unit, which like every human congregation, mightily influences the individuals who compose it; a certain agreement in feeling and contemplation develops, elevates one, depresses another, and to a great extent equalizes mood and judgment through a common opinion. This community of feeling in the audience expresses itself continually by its reception of the dramatic effects; it may increase their power prodigiously, it may weaken them in an equal degree. Scarcely will a single hearer escape the influence which an unsympathetic house or an enthusiastic audience exercises on him. Indeed, everyone has felt how different the impression is which the same piece makes, equally well presented on different stages before a differently constituted audience. The poet, while composing, is invariably directed, perhaps without knowing it, by his conception of the intelligence, taste, and intellectual requirements of his audience. He knows that he must not attribute too much to it, nor dare he offer it too little. He must, moreover, so arrange his action that it shall not bring into collision with its presuppositions a good average of his hearers, who bring these from actual life before the stage; that is, he must make the connection of events in the motives and outlines of his heroes probable. If he succeeds in this respect with the groundwork of his piece, the action and the outlines of his characters, as for the rest, he may trust to his hearers the most refined culture and the keenest understanding which his performance contains.

This consideration must guide the poet most when he is tempted to put forward what is strange or marvelous. To make charming what is strange, is, indeed, possible. The dramatic art specially has rich means of making it understood, and of laying stress upon what is intelligible to us; but for this there is needed a special expenditure of force and time; and frequently the question is justified, whether the effect aimed at warrants the expenditure of time and compensates for the limitation of the essentials occasioned. Especially the newer poets, with no definitely marked out field of material, in the midst of the period of culture to which the ready reception of extraneous pictures is peculiar, can easily be enticed to gather material from the culture-relations, the civilization of a dark age, of remote peoples. Perhaps just what is marvelous in such material has appeared peculiarly valuable for sharply delineating individual portraiture. Already a minute observation of early times in Germany, or of the old world, offers numerous peculiarities, circumstances unknown to the life of later times, in which a striking and significant meaning is manifested of highest import to the historian of culture. These can be used by the poet, however, only in exceptional cases, with most skillful treatment, and as accessories which deepen a color. For not out of the peculiarities of human life, but out of its immortal import, out of what is common to us and to the old times, blossom his successes. Still more will he avoid presenting such strange peoples as stand entirely outside the great forward movements of civilization. That which is unusual in their manners and customs, their costumes, or even the color of their skins, is distracting and excites attendant images which are unfavorable to serious art effects. In a crude way, the ideal world of poetry is joined in the hearer's mind with the picturing of real circumstances, which can claim an interest only because they are real. But even the inner life of such foreigners is unsuitable for dramatic expression; for, without exception, the capability is in reality wanting in them of presenting in any fullness the inner mental processes which our art finds necessary. And the transferring of such a degree of culture into their souls, rightly arouses in the hearer a feeling of impropriety. Anyone who would lay the scene of his actions among the ancient Egyptians were the present-day fellahs, among the Japanese or even Hindoos, would perhaps awaken an ethnographic interest of the strange character of his people; but this interest of curiosity in the unusual would not increase for the hearer before the stage the real interest in what may be the poetical meaning, but would thwart it and prejudice it. It is no accident that only such peoples are a fitting basis for the drama as have advanced so far in their development of their intellectual life that they themselves could produce a popular drama – Greeks, Romans, cultured peoples of modern times; after these, a people merely like them, whose nationality has grown up with hours, or with the ancient culture, like the Hebrews – scarcely yet the Turks.

How far the marvelous may be deemed worthy of the drama, cannot be doubtful even to us Germans, upon whose stage the most spirited and most amiable of all devils has received citizenship. Dramatic poetry is poorer and richer than her sisters, lyric and epic, in this respect, that she can represent only men, and, if one looks more closely, only cultivated men, these, however, fully and profoundly as no other art can. She must arrange historical relations by inventing for them an inner consistency which is thoroughly comprehensible to human understanding. How shall she embody the supernatural?

But granted that she undertakes this, she can do it only in so far as the superhuman, already poetically prepared through the imagination of the people, and provided with a personality corresponding to the human, is personifiable to sharply stamped features even to details. Thus given form, the Greek gods lived in the Greek world among their people; thus hover among us still, fashioned with affection, images of many of the holy ones of Christian legend, almost numberless shadowy forms, from the household faith of German primitive times. Not a few of the images of fancy have come through poetry, legend, painting, and the spirit of our people, which, credulous or incredulous, is still busied with them, received so rich an amplification, that they surrounded the creating artist during his labor like old, trusted friends. The Virgin Mary, St. Peter at the gate of heaven, many saints, archangels, and angels, and not last the considerable swarm of devils, live among our people, credulously associated with women in white, the wild huntsman, elves, giants and dwarfs. But, however alluringly the colors gleam which they wear in their twilight, before the shark elimination of the tragic stage, they vanish into unsubstantial shadows. For it is true they have received through the people a share in human feeling, and in the conditions of human life. But this participation is only of the epic kind; they are not fashioned for dramatic mental processes. In some of the most beautiful legends, the Germans make the little spirits complain that they cannot be happy; that is that they have no human soul. The same difference, which already in the middle ages the people felt, keeps them in a different way from the modern stage – inward struggles are wanting in them, freedom fails to test and to choose, they stand outside of morals, law, right; neither a complete lack of changeableness, nor perfected purity, nor complete wickedness are presentable, because they exclude all inward agitation. Even the Greeks felt this. When the gods should rather be represented on the stage and speak a command ex machina, they must either become entirely men, with all the pain and rage, like Prometheus, or they must sink beneath the nobility of human nature, without the poets being able to hinder, down to blank generalizations of love and hate, like Athene, in the prologue of Ajax.

While gods and spirits have bad standing in the serious drama, they have far better success in the comedy. And the now worn-out magic tricks give only a very pale representation of what our spirit world could be to a poet, in a whimsical and humorous representation. If the Germans shall ever be ripe for political comedy, then will they learn to use the wealth, the inexhaustible treasure of motives and resistance which can be mined from this world of phantasy, for droll freaks, political satire, and humorous portraiture.

For what has been said, Faust is the best proof; and in this play, the rôle of Mephistopheles. Here the genius of the greatest of German poets has created a stage problem which has become the favorite task of our character players. Each of them seats in his own manner to solve, with credit to himself, the riddle of which can not be solved; the one brings out the mask of the old wood-cut devil, another, the cavalier youth Voland; at best, the player will succeed with the business who contents himself prudently and with spirit to render intelligible the fine rhetoric of the dialogue, and exhibits in the comic scenes a suitable bearing and good humor. The poet has indeed made it exceedingly difficult for the player, of whom, during the composition of the piece, he did not think at all; for the rôle changes into all colors, from the true-hearted speech of Hans Sachs, to the subtle discussion of a Spinozist, from the grotesque to the terrifying. And if one examines more closely how the representation of this piece still becomes possible on the stage, the ultimate reason is the entrance of a comic element. Mephistopheles appears in some serious situations, but is a comic figure treated in a grand style; and so far as he produces an effect on the stage, he does it in this direction.

By this is not meant that the mysterious, that which has no foundation in human reason, should be entirely banished from the province of the drama. Dreams, portents, prophesyings, ghost-seers, the intrusion of the spirit world upon human life, everything for which there may be supposed to be a certain susceptibility in the soul of the hearer, the poet may employ as a matter of course for the occasional strengthening of his effects. It is understood in this that he must appreciate rightly the susceptibility of his contemporaries; we are no longer of much inclined to care for this, and only very sparing use of side effects is now accorded to the poet. Shakespeare was allowed to use this kind of minor accessories with greater liberty; for in the sentiments of even his educated contemporaries, the popular tradition was very vivid, and the connection with the world of spirits was universally conceived far differently. The soul-processes of a man struggling under a heavy burden, were, not only among the people but with the more pretentious, very differently thought of. In the case of the intense fear, qualm of conscience, remorse, the power of imagination conjured up before the sufferer the image of the frightful, still as something external; the murder saw the murdered rise before him as a ghost; clutching into the air, he felt the weapon with which he committed the crime; he heard the voice of the dead ringing in his ear. Shakespeare and his hearers conceived, therefore, Macbeth’s dagger even on the stage, and the ghosts of Banquo, Caesar, the elder Hamlet, and the victims of Richard III., far differently from ourselves. To them this was not yet a bold, customary symbolizing of the inward struggles of their heroes, an accidental, shrewd invention of the poet, who supported his effects by this ghostly trumpery; but it was to them the necessary method, customary in their land, in which themselves experienced, dread, horror, struggles of soul. Dread was not artistically excited by recollection of nursery tales; the stage presented only what had been frightful in their own lives, or what could be. For while young Protestantism had laid the severest struggles in men's consciences, and while the thoughts and the most passionate moods of the excited soul had been already more carefully and critically observed by individuals, the mode of thinking natural to the middle ages, had not, for that reason, quite disappeared. Therefore Shakespeare could make use of this kind of effects, and expect more from them than we can.

But he finishes at the same time the best example of how these ghost-like apparitions may be rendered artistically worthy of the drama. Whoever must present heroes of past centuries according to the view of life of their time, will not entirely conceal men's lack of freedom from and dependence on legendary figures; but he will use them as Shakespeare used his witches in the first act of Macbeth, as arabesques which mirror the color and mood of the time, and which only give occasion for forcing from the inner man of the hero what has grown up in his own soul, with the liberty necessary for a dramatic figure.

It is to be observed that in the work of the modern poet, such accessories of the action serve especially to give color and mood. They belong also to the first half of the play. But even when they are interwoven with the effects of the later parts, their appearance must be arranged for in the first part, by a coloring in harmony with them; and besides this, the way must be paved for them otherwise, with great care. Thus the appearance of The Black Knight in the Maid of Orleans is a disturbing element, because his ghostly form comes to view with no preparation of the audience, and is thoroughly unsuitable to the brilliant, thoughtful language of Schiller, to the tone and color of the piece. The time and the action would, in themselves, have very well allowed such an apparition; and it appeared to the poet a counterpart to the Blessed Virgin who bears banner and sword in the play. But Schiller did not bring the Blessed Virgin herself upon the stage; he only had her reported in his magnificent fashion. Had the prologue presented the decisive interview between the shepherdess and the Mother of God in such language and with such naïve address as the material from the middle ages would suggest, then there would have been a better preparation for the later appearance of the evil spirit. In costume and speech, the rôle is not advantageously equipped. Schiller was an admirable master in the disposition of the most varied historical coloring; but the glimmer of the legendary was not to the taste of one who always painted in full colors, and if a playful simile is allowed, used most fondly, gleaming golden yellow, and dark sky blue. On the other hand, Goethe, the unrestrained master of lyric moods, has made an admirable use of the spirit-world to give color to Faust, but not at all with a view to its presentation on the stage.

Freytag, Dramatic Technique: Chapter 1, Section 3

III. Unity of Action.

By action is meant, an event or occurrence, arranged according to a controlling idea, and having its meaning made apparent by the characters. It is composed of many elements, and consists in a number of dramatic efficients (momente), which become effective one after the other, according to a regular arrangement. The action of the serious drama must possess the following qualities:

It must present complete unity.

This celebrated law has undergone a very different application with the Greeks and Romans, with the Spanish and French, with Shakespeare and the Germans, which has been occasioned partly by those learned in art, partly by the character of the stage. The restriction of its claims through the French classics, and the strife of the Germans with the three unities, of place, of time, and of action, have for us only a literary-historical interest. [3]

No dramatic material, however perfectly its connections with other events have been severed, is independent of something presupposed. These indispensable presupposed circumstances must be so far presented to the hearer, in the opening scenes, that he may first survey the groundwork of the piece, not in detail, indeed, lest the field of the action itself, be limited; then immediately, time, people, place, establishment of suitable relations between the chief persons who appear, and the unavoidable threads which come together in these, from whatever has been left outside the action. When, for instance, in Love and Intrigue, an already existing love affair forms the groundwork, the hearer must be given a sharp informing glance into this relation of the two leading characters, and into the family life from which the tragedy is to be developed. Moreover, in the case of historical material, which is furnished by the vast and interminable connections of the great events of the world, this exposition of what has gone before is no easy undertaking; and the poet must take heed that he simplify it as much as possible.

From this indispensable introduction, the beginning of the impassioned action must arise, like the first notes of a melody from the introductory chords. This first stir of excitement, this stimulating impulse, is of great importance for the effect of the drama, and will be discussed later. The end of the action must, also, appear as the intelligible and inevitable result of the entire course of the action, the conjunction of forces; and right here, the inherent necessity must be keenly felt; the close must, however, represent the complete termination of the strife and excited conflicts.

Within these limits, the action must move forward with uniform consistency. This internal consistency is produced by a representing an event which follows another, as an effect of which that other is the evident cause; let that which occasions, be the logical cause of occurrences, and the new scenes and events be conceived as probable, and generally understood results of previous actions; or let that which is to produce an effect, be a generally comprehensible peculiarity of a character already made known. If it is unavoidable that, during the course of events, new incidents appear, unexpected to the auditor, are very surprising, these must be explained imperceptibly, but perfectly, through what has preceded. This laying the foundations of the drama is called, assigning the motive (motiviren). Through the motives, the elements of the action are bound into an artistic, connected whole. This binding together of incidents by the free creation of a causative connection, is the distinguishing characteristic of this species apart. Through this linking together of incidents, dramatic idealization is effected.

Let the remodeling of the narrative into a dramatic action serve as an example. There lived in Verona, two noble families, in enmity and feuds of long standing. As chance would have it, the son of one of them only, together with his companions, play the presumptuous trick of thrusting themselves disguised into a masked ball, given by the chief of the other house. At this ball the intruder beholds the daughter of his enemy, and in both arises a reckless passion. They determine upon a clandestine marriage and are wedded by the father confessor of the maiden. Then fate directs that the new bridegroom is betrayed into a conflict with the cousin of his bride, and because he has slain him in the duel, is banished from his country by the prince of the land, under penalty of death. Meantime a distinguished suitor has visited the parents to sue for the hand of the newly married wife. The father disregards the despairing entreaties of his daughter, and appoints the day for the marriage. In these fearful circumstances, the young woman receives from her priest, a sleep-potion which shall give her the appearance of death; the priest undertakes to remove her privately from the coffin and communicate her embarrassing situation to her distant husband. But again an unfortunate chance directs that the husband, in a foreign land, is informed of the death of his wife, before the messenger of the priest arrives. He hastens, in secret, back to his native city, and forces his way into the vault, where lies the body of his wife. Unfortunately, he meets there the man destined by her parents to be her bridegroom, kills him, and upon the coffin of his beloved, drinks the fatal poison. The loved one awakes, sees her dying husband, and stabs herself with his dagger. [4]

This narrative is a simple account of a striking occurrence. The fact, that all this so happened, is told; how and why it came about, does not matter. The sequence of narrated incidents possesses no close connection. Chance, the caprice of fate, an unaccountable conjunction of unfortunate forces, occasions the progress of events and the catastrophe. Indeed, just this striking sport of chance is what gives enjoyment. Such a material appears specially unfavorable for the drama; and yet a great poet has made from it one of his most beautiful plays.

The facts have remained, on the whole, unchanged; only their connection has become different. The task of the poet was not to present the facts to us, on the stage, but to make them perceptible in the feeling, desire, and action of his persons, to make them more evident, to develop them in accordance with probability and reason. He had, in the first place, to set forth what was naturally prerequisite to the action; the brawls in an Italian city, in a time when swords were carried, and combativeness quickly laid hand to weapon, the leaders of both parties, the ruling power which had trouble to restrain the restless within proper limits; then the determination of the Capulets to give a banquet. Then he must represent the marry conceit which brought Romeo and his attendants into the Capulets’ house. This exciting impulse, the beginning of the action, must not appear an accident; it must be accounted for from the characters. Therefore it was necessary to introduce the companions of Romeo, fresh, in uncontrolled, youthful spirits, playing with life. To this necessity for establishing motives, Mercutio owes his existence. In contrast with his mad companions, the poet had fashioned the dejected Romeo, whose nature, even before his entrance into the excited action, must express its amorous passion. Hence his vagaries about Rosalind. This availed to make probable the awakening passion of the lovers. For this, the masque-scene and the balcony-scene were constructed. Every enchantment of poetry is here used to the greatest purpose, to make apparent, conceivable and as a matter of course, that henceforward the sweet passion of the lovers determines their lives.

The accessory figures, which enter into the piece from this point, must forward the complication, and aid in giving motive toward the tragic outcome. For the narrative, it was sufficient that a priest performed the marriage rights, and gave directions of the unfortunate intrigue; such aids have always been at hand; as soon, however, as he himself has stepped upon the stage, and by his words has entered the action, he must receive a personality which accounts for all that follows; – he must be good-hearted and sympathetic, and through the goodness of heart, merit full confidence; he must be unpracticed, and inclined to quiet artifices as frequently the better priests of the Italian church are, in order to venture later, the doubtful play of death for his penitent. Thus originated Laurence.

After the wedding, the unfortunate affair with Tybalt comes into the story. Here the dramatic poet had special motive in taking from the character entering so suddenly, all that was merely casual. It could not suffice for him to introduce Tybalt as a hot-headed brawler; without letting the spectator sees purpose, he must lay the foundation in what had gone before, for the peculiar hatred toward Romeo and his companions. Hence the little side scene at the masked ball, in which Tybalt’s anger flames up at the intrusion of Romeo. And in this scene itself, the poet had to bring to bear the strongest motive, to compel Romeo to engage in the duel. Mercutio must first be slain for this reason, and for the further purpose of heightening the tragic power of the scene, and accounting for the wrath of the prince.

To send a Romeo immediately into banishment, as is done in the narrative, would be impossible in the drama. To show the spectator that the loving pair were bound inseparably to each other, there was the most pressing necessity to give to their excited passion the deepest intensity. How the poet succeeded in this is known to all. The scene on the marriage eve is the climax of the action; and by poetic elaboration, which need not be explained here, it arises to the highest beauty. But this scene was necessary on other grounds. Juliet's character renders necessary a rising into what is noble. It must be shown that the lovely heroine is capable of magnificent emotion, of mighty passion in order that her later, despairing determination may be found consistent with her nature. Her marvelous inward conflict over Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment must precede the wedding night, to impart to her natural longing the beautifully pathetic element which increases the interest in this always delicate scene. But even the possibility of this scene must be made clear. Its accessory persons, Friar Laurence and the nurse, are again significant. The character of the nurse, one of Shakespeare's unsurpassable inventions, is, likewise, not fashioned accidentally; just as she is, she is a suitable accomplice; and she makes explicable Juliet's inward withdrawal from her and the catastrophe.

Immediately after her wedding night, the command is given to Juliet to be married to Paris. But the beautiful daughter of the wealthy Capulet would find a distinguished suitor, and that her father, – for whose hot-headedness a sufficient ground has already been laid, – would exercise harsh compulsion in the matter, would be conceded by the hearer without further preparation, as probable and a matter of course. But it is a matter of much consequence to the dramatist, to lay beforehand the foundation for this important event. Already, before the marriage of Juliet, he has Paris receive her father's promise; he would throw this dark shadow upon the great love scene; and he would account right distinctly, and to the common understanding for the approaching calamity.

Now the fate of the loving pair has been put into the weak hands of Friar Laurence. Up to this point, the drama has carefully excluded every intrusion of any chance. Even to the most minute accessory fact, all is accounted for by the kind of characters. Now a tremendous destiny is weighing down upon two unfortunates: spilled blood, deadly family hate, a clandestine marriage, banishment, a new wooing, – all this is pressing upon the hearer's sensibility with a certain compulsion. The introduction of a little explanatory motives is no longer effective, and no longer necessary. Now the stratagem of the stupid visionary priest can be thwarted by an accident; for the feeling that it was desperate and presumptuous in the highest degree, to expose a living person to the incalculable chances of a sleep-potion and burial, has become so strong in the hearer’s mind, that he already considers an unhappy result as probable.

Thus the catastrophe is introduced and given a foundation. But that the hope of a happy outcome may entirely vanish from the mind of the spectator, and that the inherent necessity of ruin may yet at the last moment overtop the foreboding of unavoidable fatalities in the burial vault, Romeo must slay Paris before the tomb.

The death of the stranger is the last force furthering the sad end of the lovers. Even when Juliet now in a fortunate moment awakes, her path and Romeo’s is so overflowed with blood, that any good fortune, or even life, has become improbable to them.

The task undertaken here has been only to point out in a few chief particulars the contrast between inner dramatic unification and epic narration. The piece contains still an abundance of other motives; and even the minute details are so dovetailed and riveted as to evince the dramatist's special purpose.

The internal unity of a dramatic action is not secured merely by making a succession of events appear as deeds and sufferings of the same hero. No great fundamental law of dramatic creation is more frequently violated, even by great poets, than this one; and this disregard has always interfered with the effects of even the power of genius. The Athenian stage suffered on this account; and Aristotle attempted to meet the evil, when in his firm way he said: “The action is the first and most important thing, the characters only second;” and, “The action is not giving unity by being made to concern only one person.” Especially, we later ones, who are most frequently attracted by the charm of historical material, have urgent reason to cling to the law, that union about a person alone does not suffice to gather and bind to the events into unity.

It still frequently happens that a poet undertakes to present the life of an heroic prince, as he is at variance with his vassals, as he wages war with his neighbors and the church, and is again reconciled to them, and that he finally perishes in one of these conflicts; the poet distributes the principal moving forces of the historical life among the five acts and three hours of the acting play, makes in speech and response an exposition of political interests and party standpoints, interweaves well or ill a love episode, and thinks to have changed the historical picture into a poetic one. He is positively a weak-hearted destroyer of history, and no priest of his proud goddess. What he has produced is not history, and not drama. He has, sure enough, yielded to some of the demands of his art; he has omitted weighty events which did not suit his purpose; he has fashioned the character of his hero simply and according to rule, has not been sparing in the additions, small and great, as here and there are substituted for the complicated connections of historical events, invented ones. Through all this, however, he has attained a general effect which is at best a weak reflection of the sublime effect that the life of the hero would have produced, if well presented by the historian; and his error has been in putting the historic idea in the place of the dramatic idea.

Even the poet who thinks more worthily of his art, is in danger, when busied with historical matter, of seeking a false unity. The historical writer has taught him that the shifting events of historical life are accounted for by the peculiarities of characters, which assume results, which conjure up a fatality. The effect which the intimate connections of an historic life produce, is powerful, and excites wonder. Determined by such a force of the real, the poet seeks to comprehend the inner connections of the events in the characteristic elements of the hero's life. The character of the hero is to him the last motive in laying the foundation for the various vicissitudes of an active existence. A German prince, for example, powerful and high spirited, is forced by sheer violence into conflicts and submission; in heart-rending humiliation and deepest abasement, he finds again his better self, and subdues his soaring pride; such a character may possess all the qualities of a dramatic hero, – what is universally comprehensible and significant gushes forth powerfully from the casual in his earthly life; and his lot in life shows the relation between guilt and punishment, which takes hold in men's minds; he appears as the artificer of his own happiness or misery; the germ and essence of his life may be very like a poetic idea. But just before such a similarity, let the poet pause in distrust. He has to ask himself whether through his art he can infuse anything more powerful or effective than the story itself offers; or, indeed, whether he is at all in a position to enlarge through his art any part of the effects which, perceiving in advance, he admires in the historical material. Of course he may intensify the character of his hero. What was working in the soul of Henry IV. as he journeyed toward Canossa and stood in his penitential garment by the castle wall, is the secret of the poet; the historian knows very little to tell about it. To such impelling forces of a real life, the poet has an inalienable right. But the disposition and transformations of the historical hero do not fashion themselves completely in short periods of personal isolation; and what the poet was lured by was exactly an heroic nature whose original texture showed itself in various occurrences. Now these occurrences which the historian reports, are very numerous. The poet is obliged to limit himself to a very few. He is obliged to remodel these few in order to give them the significance which in reality the course of the whole had. He will see with astonishment how difficult this is, and how by this means his hero becomes smaller and weaker, and that his historic idea is completed with so little. But, even in the representation of these selected events, the poet is poorer than the historian. Every one of his impelling forces must have an introduction that will account for it; he must introduce to the spectator his Hannos, his Ottos, his Rudolphs and Henrys; he must to a certain extent make their affairs attractive; two or three times in the piece he will create excitement, then allay it; the persons will throng and conceal each other on the narrow stage; the rising interest of hearers will every now and then relapse. He will make the astonishing discovery that the hearer’s suspense is usually not produced by the characters, however interesting these may be, but only through the progress of the action; and he will at best attain only one or the other greatly elaborated scene with pure dramatic life, which stands alone in the desert of sketchy, brief suggestions of mutilated history, and cramped invention.

Engaged in such labor upon the abundant beautiful material offered in history, the poet has probably often abandoned the material without seeing its beauty. To idealize an entire political human life is a prodigious undertaking. Cyclic dramas, trilogies, tetralogies, may in most cases scarcely suffice for this. A single historic movement may give the dramatist superabundant material. For, as faith begins when knowledge ends, so poetry begins when history leaves off. What history is able to declare can be to the poet only the frame within which he paints his most brilliant colors, the most secret revelations of human nature; how shall space and inward freedom remain to him for this, when he must toil and moil to present a succession of historical events? Schiller has made use, in his two greatest historical pieces, of the historical catastrophe only, the last scenes of a real historical life; and for so small an historic segment he has required in Wallenstein three dramas. Let this example be taken to heart. It is true Götz von Berlichingen will always be considered a very commendable poem, because the chivalric anecdotes which are excellently presented with short, sharp strokes, hold the reader spellbound; but upon the stage the piece is not an effective drama; and the same is true of Egmont, although its feeble action, and the lack of characterization of its hero, is to a certain extent compensated for in the greater elaboration of its vigorous female characters.

Concerning the heartless treatment of historical material through the epic traditions of our old stage, Shakespeare, above all others, has given hints to the Germans. His historic place, taken from English history, the structure of which, except Richard III. we should not imitate, had a far different justification. At that time there was no writing of history, as we understand the term; and as the poet made use of material from historic resources for his artistic figures, he wrought from an abundance, and opened up the immediate past to his nation, in a multitude of masterly character sketches. But he, himself, achieved from the stage of his time the wonderful advance to a complete action; and we owe to him, after he began to make use of the material in Italian novels, our comprehension of how irreplaceable and noble effects are which are produced by a unified and well-ordered action. His Roman plays, if one makes allowance for a few of the practices of the stage, and the third act of Antony and Cleopatra, are models of an established construction. We do not do well to imitate what he has overcome.

Without doubt, the influence of the characters on the texture of the action, is greater in the modern drama than on the stage of the ancients. As the first impulse toward creation comes to the Germanic mind frequently through the characteristic features of an historic hero; as the delineation of the characters and their representation by actors have received a finer finish than was possible in the Greek masque tragedy, so will the character of the hero exert greater influence on the structure of the action, but only that we may thereby account for the inner, consistent, unified action through the characteristic peculiarities of the hero. Such an establishing of motive was not unknown to the Greeks. Already in one of the older plays of Aeschylus, The Suppliants, the vacillating character of the King of Argos is made so prominent that one distinctly recognizes how, in the missing piece which followed, the poet has laid the motive in this for the surrender of the Danaids, who were begging protection. Sophocles is specially skillful in introducing as controlling motive some marked trait of his characters, for example, Antigone, Ajax, Odysseus. Indeed, Euripides is even more like the Germans than Sophocles in this, that he delights in making more prominent the peculiarities of his characters. In general, however, the epic trend of the fable was much stronger than with us; as a rule the persons were fashioned according to the demands of the well known and already prepared network of events, as in the case of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes. This was an advantage to the Greeks, but to us it seems a restraint. With us the poet not seldom finds himself in the position, that his hero is seeking an action which shall be a luminous center, throwing light on everything that approaches it. We will be able to explain from his nature, what is more profound and hidden. But however rigidly we construct the action according to his needs, it must always be composed of individual parts which belong to the same event, and this must extend from the beginning to the end of the piece. Among the Greeks, Sophocles is our master in the management of this dramatic unity, Euripides unconscionably against it. How, in his serious plays, Shakespeare disclosed this law to himself, and gradually to us, in the face of the sixteenth century stage, has already been mentioned. Among the Germans, Lessing preserves the unity with great care; Goethe, in the short action of Clavigo, and in the later plays in which he had thought of the stage – Tasso and Iphigenia. Schiller has observed the law faithfully in Love and Intrigue. Is it an accident that in his last plays, in Tell, and in Demetrius, so far as this play may be judged from notices of it, he has neglected the law? Whenever he approached the bounds of license, it occurred through his delight in episodes ending double heroes, as in Don Carlos, Mary Stuart, and Wallenstein.

Of kinds of material, those taken from epic legends make it not difficult to preserve the unity of action, but their action is not easily permit dramatic elaboration of characters. Material from novels preserves well the unity of action, but the characters, on account of the entangled action, are easily thrown about too little freedom of movement, are they are restrained in their movement through the portrayal of situations. Historical material offers the greatest and most beautiful opportunities; but it is very difficult to combine it into a good action.

The poet's interest in the characters of his counter-players easily mounts so high that to them is accorded a rich, detailed portrayal, a sympathetic exposition of their striving and their fighting moods, and a peculiar destiny. Thereby arises a double action for the drama; or the action of the piece may be of such a nature as to require for its illumination and completion a subordinate action, which through the exposition of concurrent or opposing relations brings into greater prominence the chief persons, with what they do and what they suffer.

Various defects – especially one-sidedness – in material, may make such a completion desirable. One play is not to run through the whole wide range of affecting and thrilling moods; it is not to play from its sober ground color, through all the possible color-tones; but a variation in mood and modest contrast and color are as necessary to the drama as it is that in a painting in which there are many figures, the swing of lesser lines should be in contrast with the greater lines and groups, and that in contrast with the ground color, use should be made of dependent, supplementary colors. A specially somber material renders necessary the introduction of bright accessory figures. To contrast with the defined characters of Iphigenia and Creon, the milder counterparts, Ismene and Haemon, were invented; through the introduction of Tecmessa, the despair of Ajax receives an affecting tone, the magic charm of which we still feel to-day. The gloomy, pathetic Othello requires opposed to him some one in whom the unrestrained freedom of humor is apparent. The somber figure of Wallenstein and his companions in intrigue imperatively demands that the brilliant Max be joined with them.

If, for this reason, the Greeks classed their plays into those with single action, and those with double action, the modern drama has much less avoided the extension of counter-play into an accessory action. The interweaving of this with the main action has occurred sometimes at the expense of the combined effect. The Germans, especially, who were always inclined, during their labor, to grasp the significance of the accessory persons with great ardor, must guard themselves against too wide an extension of the subordinate action. Even Shakespeare has occasionally, in this way, injured the effect of the drama, most strikingly in Lear, in which the whole parallel action of the house of Gloucester, but loosely connected with the main action, and treated with no particular fondness, retards the movement, and needlessly renders the whole more bitter. The poet allowed the episodes in both parts of Henry IV. to develop into an accessory action, the immortal humor of which outshines the serious effect of the play; and this has made these dramas favorites of the reader. Every admirer of Falstaff will grant, however, that the general effect on the stage is not the corresponding power, in spite of this charm. Let it be noticed, in passing, that in Shakespeare's comedies the double action belongs to the nature of the play; he strives to take from his clowns the episodical, while he interweaves them with the serious action. The genial humor which beams from their scenes must sometimes conceal the harder elements in the material; as when the constables help to prevent the sad fate threatening the heroine. Among German poets, Schiller was most in danger of injury from the double action. The disproportion of the accessory action in Don Carlos and Mary Stuart rests upon this, it is harder for the character set in contrast to the hero, becomes too great; in Wallenstein, the same principle has extended the piece to a trilogy. In Tell, three actions run parallel. [5]

It is the business of the action to represent to us the inner consistency of the event, as it corresponds to the demands of the intellect and the heart. Whatever, in the crude material, does not serve this purpose, the poet is in duty bound to throw away. And it is desirable that he adheres strictly to this principle, to give only what is indispensable to unity. Yet he may not avoid a deviation from this; for there will be occasional deviations desirable which may strengthen the color of the piece, in a manner conformable to its purpose; which may intensify the meaning of the characters, and enhance the general effect by the introduction of a new color, or a contrast. These embellishing editions of the poet are called episodes. They are of various kinds. At a point where the action suffers a short pause, a characterizing moment may be enlarged into a situation; opportunity may be given a hero to exhibit some significant characteristic of his being in an attractive manner, in connection with some subordinate person; some subordinate rôle of the piece may, through ampler elaboration, be developed into an attractive figure. By a modest use, which must not take time from what is more important, these may become an embellishment to the drama. And the poet has to treat them as ornaments, and to compensate for them with serious work, if they ever retard the action. The episodes perform different duties, according to the parts of the drama in which they appear. While at the beginning they enter into the rôles of the chief persons to delineate these in the idiosyncrasies, they are allowed in the last part as enlargements of those new rôles which afford lesser aids to the movement of the action; in each place, however, they must be felt to be advantageous additions. [6]

The Greeks understood this word in a somewhat broader sense. That which in the plays of Sophocles his contemporaries called episode, we no longer so name: for the ingenious art of this great master consisted, among other things, in this, that he interwove his beautifying additions very intimately with his action, for the most part to set the characters of the chief heroes in a stronger light, by means of contrast. Thus, in Electra, in addition to the Ismene scene, mentioned later, Chrysomethis is indispensable according to our feeling for the chief heroine, and no longer as episode, but as part of the action. Moreover, where he paints a situation more broadly, as in the beginning of Oedipus at Colonos, such a portrayal corresponds throughout to the customs of our stage. Shakespeare treats his episodes almost exactly in the same way. Even in those serious plays, which have a more artistic construction, there are, in almost every act, partly extended scenes, partly whole rôles of episodical elaboration; but there is so much of the beautiful worked in and with this, so much that is efficient for the combined effect, that the severest manager of our stage, who may be compelled to shorten the drama, rarely ever allows these passages to be expunged. Mercutio, with his Queen Mab, and the jests of the nurse, the interviews of Hamlet with the players and courtiers, as well as the grave-digger scene, are such examples as recur in almost all his plays. Almost superabundantly, and with apparent carelessness, the great artist adorns all parts of his piece with golden ornaments; but he who approaches to unclasp them, finds them fastened as if with steel, grown inseparably into what they adorn. Of the Germans, Lessing, with a reverential regularity joined his episodes to the carefully planned structure of his piece, according to his own method, which was transferred to his successors. His episodes are little character rôles. The painter and Countess Orsina, In Emilia Galotti (the last, the better prototype of Lady Milford), Ricault, In Minna von Barnhelm, indeed even the Dervise in Nathan The Wise, became models for the German episodes of the eighteenth century. Goethe has not honored them with a place in his regular plays, Clavigo, Tasso, Iphigenia. In Schiller, they throng abundantly in every form, as portrayals, as detailed situations, as accessory figures in the conjoined action. Frequently, through their peculiar beauty, they are adapted to be effective adjuncts to the stilted, tedious movement, but not always; for we would gladly spare some single ones, like Parricida in William Tell, just because in this case the understood purpose is so striking; and The Black Knight in the Maid of Orleans; and not seldom the long-drawn observations and delineations in his dialogue-scenes.