Action, which man is not wont to attribute (except figuratively) to any but members of his own species and to the superior Being or beings in whose existence and power he believes, implies an operation of the will and an execution of its resolution, whether or not amounting to a fulfilment of its purpose. It implies a procedure from cause to result. Action must therefore present itself to the human mind as having its source in a human or superhuman will. Every imitation of action by action is in germ a drama. But to this point not all nations have advanced.

After this step has been taken, it only remains for the drama to assume a form regulated by literature, of which art it thus becomes a branch. We may then speak of a dramatic literature; but this only a limited number of nations has come to possess. A nation may, however, have a drama without a dramatic literature; it may even continue in possession of the former after having ceased to cultivate the latter. On the other hand, both before and after the drama of a nation has assumed a literary.form, it may allow one or more of its adventitious elements—music, dancing, decoration—predominantly to assert themselves, and thus eventually to bring about the formation of new, or the revival of disused, dramatic species. But as a branch of literature the drama necessarily includes speech among its means of imitation; and its beginnings as such are accordingly, in the history of all literatures known to us, preceded by the beginnings at least of other forms of poetic composition, the lyric and the epic, or by those of one of these forms at all events. It is in the combination of both that the drama in its literary form takes its origin in the case of all national civilizations in which it has found a place and with which we are more than superficially acquainted.

The art of acting is the indispensable adjunct of the dramatic art, while the aid of all other arts is merely an accident. But though really inseparable from one another, the courses of the dramatic and the histrionic arts do not at all times run parallel. The actor is only the temporary interpreter of the dramatist, though he may occasionally be left to supply some of the proper functions of his textgiver. On his side, the dramatist may in practice, though he cannot in theory, dispense with the actor’s interpretation; but though the term literary drama is sometimes used of works kept apart from the stage, it is in truth a misnomer, since, properly speaking, no drama is such till it is acted.

The whole body of the laws and rules of the drama, could it be written down with completeness, would indicate, together with the ends proper to the art, the means by which it is able to accomplish them. But neither the great authorities of dramatic theory—an Aristotle or a Lessing—nor the resolute apologists of more or less transitory fashions—a Corneille or a Dryden—have exhausted the exposition of the means which the drama has proved or may prove capable of employing. The multitude of technical terms and formulae which has gathered round the practice of the art has at no time seriously interfered with the operation of creative power, whose inventive activity the existence of, accepted systems has frequently—in the Greek drama, for instance, and in the Spanish—served to stimulate. On the other hand, it is self-evident that no dramaturgic theory has ever given rise to a single dramatic work of enduring value, unless the creative force was there to animate the form.

The task of this creative force begins with the beginnings of the dramatist’s labours. For it is in the dramatic idea that the germ of the action of a play lies—not in the subject, which is merely its dead material. The story of the Scottish thane as it stood written in the chronicle, is the subject, not the action, of Macbeth. To convert a subject—whatever its kind or source—into the action or fable of a play is the primary task, which in its progressive development becomes the entire task, of the dramatist; and though the conception may expand or modify itself with the execution, yet upon the former the latter depends. The range of subjects open to a dramatist may be wide as the world itself, or it may be limited by usage, by imperious fashion, by the tastes and tendencies of a nation or an age, by the author’s own range of sympathies, by a thousand restrictions of an historical, moral, or aesthetical origin; it may be virtually confined (as with the earlier Greek tragedians) to a body of legend, or (as with the English comedians of the Restoration) to the social experiences of a particular epoch. But in all cases the transformation of the subject into the action is equally indispensable; and an imperfect transformation is (as in the old Chronicle Histories) the work of a rude, or (as in ninety-nine out of a hundred modern plays “founded upon fact ”) that of a careless method of dramatic production.

What, then, are the laws which determine the nature of all actions properly such, however they may vary either in subjects or in form? In the first place, a dramatic action must possess unity— and this requirement at once distinguishes it from the subject which has suggested its idea. The events of real life, the facts of history, the incidents of narrative fiction, are like the waves of a ceaseless flood; that which binds a group or body of them into a single action is the bond of the dramatic idea, and this it is which the dramatist has to supply. Within the limits of a dramatic action all its parts claim to be connected together as contributions to a single stream; and upon the degree in which they are true to this purpose their primary dramatic significance depends. The unity of action which a drama should possess, therefore, means that everything in it should form a link in a single chain of cause and effect. This law is incumbent upon every kind of drama—alike upon the tragedy which solves the problems of a life, and upon the farce which sums up the follies of an afternoon.

Such is not, however, the case with certain rules which have at different times been set up for this or that kind of drama, but which have no absolute validity for any kind. The supposed necessity that an action should consist of one event is an erroneous interpretation of the law that it should be, as an action, one. Foran event is but an element in an action, though it may be an element of decisive moment. The assassination of Caesar is not the action of a Caesar tragedy; the loss of his treasure is not the action of The Miser. Again, unity of action does not exclude the introduction of one or even more subsidiary actions as contributing to the progress öf the main action. The sole indispensable law is that these should always be treated as what they are—subsidiary only; and herein lies the difficulty, which Shakespeare so successfully overcame, of solving a combination of subjects into the idea of a single action; herein also lies the danger in the use of that favourite device of the modern drama— bye- or under-plots. Ou the other hand, a really double or multiple action, logically carried out as such, is inconceivable in a single drama, though there is many a play which is palpably only two plays knotted into one. Every one is familiar with the dramatist who towards the drop of the curtain seems to be counting on his fingers whom he has killed or what couples he has to marry. Thirdly, unity of action need not imply unity of hero—for hero (or heroine) is merely a term signifying the principal personage of the action. And inasmuch as an action may consist in the joint contention of more than one will against the same obstacle—as in the instance of The Seven against Thebes, or Romeo and Juliet— it is only when the change in the degree of interest excited by different characters in a play results from a change in the conception of the action itself, that the consequent duality (or multiplicity) of heroes recalls a faulty uncertainty in the conception of the action they carry on. Such is the objection applying to the crucial case of Schiller’s Don Carlos. Lastly, the entirely arbitrary exactions of unity of time and of place are not, like that of unity of action, absolute dramatic laws. Their object is by representing an action as visibly continuous to render its unity more distinctly or easily perceptible; but the effect of their observance cannot be to render it more really one. Thus they may in one sense be regarded as devices to avoid the difficulty experienced by the human mind in regarding an action as one when the eye beholds its different parts occurring in what are supposed to be different places, or when the process of its advance from cause to effect extends over what is supposed to be a considerable period of time. But the imagination is capable of constructing for itself the bridges necessary to preserve to an action, conceived of as such, its character of continuousness. In another sense these rules were convenient usages conducing to a concise and clear treatment as actions of subjects in themselves of a limited nature; for they were a Greek invention, and the repeated resort to the same group of myths made it expedient for a Greek poet to seek the subject of a single tragedy in a part only of one of the myths open to him. Tlιe observance of unity of place, moreover, was suggested to the Greeks by certain outward conditions of their stage—as assuredly as it was adopted by the French in accordance with the construction and usages of theirs, and as the neglect of it by the Elizabethans was in their case encouraged by the established form of the English scene. The palpable artificiality of these laws needs no demonstration, so long as the true meaning of the term action be kept in view. Of the action of Othello part takes place at Venice and part at Cyprus, and yet the whole is one in itself; while the limits of time over which an action extends cannot be restricted by a revolution of the earth round the sun, or of the moon round the earth.

In a drama which presents its action as one, this action must be complete in itself. This law, like the first, distinguishes the dramatic action from its subject. The former may be said to have a real artistic, while the latter has only an imaginary real, completeness. The historian, for instance, aims indeed at a complete exposition of a body of events and transactions, and may even design to show their working to a definite end; but he is aλvare that this aim can never be more than partially accomplished, since he may present only what he knows, and all human knowledge is partial. But art is limited by no such uncertainty. The dramatist, in treating an action as one, comprehends the whole of it in the form of his work, since to him who has conceived it, all its parts, from cause to effect, are equally clear. Accordingly, every drama should represent in organic sequence the several stages of which a complete action consists, and which are essential to it. This law of completeness therefore lies at the foundation of all systems of dramatic construction.

Every action, if conceived of as complete, has its causes, growth, height, consequences, and close. There is no binding law to prescribe the relative length at which these several stages in the action should be treated in a drama, or to enforce a more or less exact correspondence between the successive presentment of each, and technical divisions, such as acts or scenes, which dramatic practice may find it convenient to adopt. Neither is there any law tc assert any obligatory regulation of the treatment of such subsidiary actions as may be introduced in aid of the main plot, or of such more or less directly connected episodes which may at the same time advance and relieve its progress. But experience, as the parent of usage, has necessarily from time to time established certain rules of practice, from which the dramatist, working under customary forms, will find it neither easy, nor in most cases advantageous, to swerve too widely; and from the adoption of particular systems of division for particular species of the drama—such as that into five acts for a regular tragedy or comedy, which Roman example has caused to be so largely followed—has naturally resulted a certain uniformity of relation between the conduct of an action and the outward sections of a play. Essentially, however, there is no difference between the laws regulating the construction of a Sophoclean or Shakespearean tragedy, a comedy of Molière or Congreve, and a ∖vell-built modern farce. And this, because all exhibit an action complete in itself.

The introduction or exposition forms an integral part of the action, and is therefore to be distinguished from the prologue in the more ordinary sense of the term, which, like the epilogtie (or the Greek pardbasifi), stands outside the action, and is a mere address to the public from author or actor occasioned by the play. Prologue and epilogue, greatly as they may have at times contributed to the success of a drama, are mere external adjuncts, and have as little to do with tíie construction of a play as the bill which announces it, or the musical prelude which disposes the mind for its reception. The introduction or exposition belongs to the action itself; it is, as the Hindu critics called it, the seed or circumstance from which the business arises. Clearness being its primary requisite, many expedients have been at various times adopted to secure this feature. Thus, the Euripi dean prologue, though spoken by one of the characters of the play, takes a narrative form, and places itself half without, half within the action of which it properly is part. The same purpose is served by the separate inductions in many of our old English plays, and the preludes or prologues, or by whatever name they may call themselves, in numberless modern dramas of all kinds— from Faust down to the favourites of the Ambigu and the Adelphi. Another such expedient is that of the inductive dumb-shows, which sought to secure rapidity together with impressiveness of exposition by the process of pantomimic summary. Such, again, are - the opening scenes in French tragedy between hero and confidant, and those in French comedy and its derivatives between observant valet and knowing lady’s-maid. But it is clear how all such expedients may be rendered unnecessary by the art of the dramatist, who is able outwardly also to present the introduction of his action as what it is—an organic part of that action itself; who seems to take the spectators in medias res while he is really building the foundations of his plot; who can dramatically account for an Iliad of woes without going back to Leda’s egg; who touches in the opening of his action the chord which is to vibrate throughout its course—“Down with the Capulets I down with the Montagues! ”—“With the Moor, sayest thou 1”

The introduction ends with the opening of the movement of the action, a passage which it may prove highly effective to mark with the utmost distinctness (as in Hamlet, where it is clearly to be sought in the actual meeting between the hero and the ghost), but which in other instances is advantageously marked by the insertion of subsidiary action or episode (as in King Lear, where the opening of the movement of the main action would follow too sharply upon its exposition, were not the beginning of the subsidiary action of Gloster and his sons opportunely introduced between them). From this point the second stage of the action—its growth— progresses to that third stage which is called its height or climax. All that has preceded the reaching of this constitutes that half of the drama—usually its much larger half—which Aristotle terms the 8«ns, or tying of the knot. The varieties in the treatment of the growth or second stage of the action are infinite, and it is here that the masters of the tragic and the comic drama—notably those unequalled weavers of intrigues, the Spaniards—are able most fully to exercise their inventive faculties. If the growth is too rapid, the climax will fail of its effect—and it is, therefore, at this stage that subsidiary actions and episodes are most largely used; if it is too slow, the interest will be exhausted before the greatest demand upon it has been made—a fault to which comedy is specially liable; if it is involved or inverted, a vague uncertainty will take the place of an eager or agreeable suspense, the action will seem to halt, or a fall will begin prematurely. In the contrivance of the climax itself lies one of the chief tests of the dramatist’s art; for while in the transactions of real life their climax is often only a matter of assumption, in the action of a drama its climax should present itself as self-evident. In the middle of everything, says the Greek poet, lies the strength; and this strongest or highest point it is the task of the dramatist to make manifest. Much here depends upon the niceties of constructive instinct; much (as in all parts of the action) upon a thorough dramatic transformation of the subject. The historical drama here presents peculiar difficulties, and perhaps the example of Henry VIII., as compared with Shakespeare’s other historical plays, may be held to furnish an instructive example of defective (because hasty) workmanship.

From the climax, or height, the action proceeds through its fall to its close, which in a drama with an unhappy ending we still call its catastrophe, while to terminations in general we apply the term denouement. This latter name would, however, more properly be used in the sense in which Aristotle employs its Greek equivalent Averts—the untying of the knot—of the whole of the second part of the action, from the climax downwards. If, in the management of the climax, everything depended upon making the effect, in the fall everything depends upon not marring it. This may be ensured by a rapid progress to the close; but neither does every action admit of such treatment, nor is it in accordance with the character of those actions which are of a complicated kind. With the latter, therefore, the fall is often a return—i.e., in Aristotle’s phrase, a change into the reverse of what is expected from the circumstances of the action (7r€pt7rereta),—as in Coriolanus, where the Roman story lends itself so admirably to dramatic demands. In any case the art of the dramatist is in this part of his work called upon for the surest exercise of its tact and skill. The effect of the climax has been to concentrate the interest; the fall must therefore, above all, avoid dissipating it. The use of episodes is not even now excluded; but they must be of a more directly significant kind than is necessary in the earlier stages of the drama;...