Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship

William Archer

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• Publié par: vaug
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 31
• Langue: English

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Title: Play-Making
A Manual of Craftsmanship
Author: William Archer
Release Date: January 29, 2004 [EBook #10865]
Language: English
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PLAY-MAKING
A Manual of Craftsmanship
by William Archer
With a New Introduction to the Dover Edition
by John Gassner
Sterling Professor of Playwriting and Dramatic Literature, Yale UniversityPREFATORY NOTE
This book is, to all intents and purposes, entirely new. No considerable portion of it
has already appeared, although here and there short passages and phrases from articles of
bygone years are embedded--indistinguishably, I hope--in the text. I have tried,
wherever it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the student
may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason, among others, which
led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of my illustrations, was that they are
the most generally accessible of playwrights.
If the reader should feel that I have been over lavish in the use of footnotes, I have
two excuses to allege. The first is that more than half of the following chapters were
written on shipboard and in places where I had scarcely any books to refer to; so that a
great deal had to be left to subsequent enquiry and revision. The second is that several of
my friends, dramatists and others, have been kind enough to read my manuscript, and to
suggest valuable afterthoughts.
LONDON
January, 1912
To
Brander Matthews
Guide Philosopher and Friend
CONTENTS
BOOK I
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER II THE CHOICE OF A THEME
CHAPTER III DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC
CHAPTER IV THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION CHAPTER V DRAMATIS PERSONAE
BOOK II
THE BEGINNING
CHAPTER VI THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN
CHAPTER VII EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS
CHAPTER VIII THE FIRST ACT
CHAPTER IX CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST"
CHAPTER X FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING
BOOK III
THE MIDDLE
CHAPTER XI TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION
CHAPTER XII PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST
CHAPTER XIII THE OBLIGATORY SCENE
CHAPTER XIV THE PERIPETY
CHAPTER XV PROBABILITY, CHANCE AND COINCIDENCE
CHAPTER XVI LOGIC
CHAPTER XVII KEEPING A SECRET
BOOK IV
THE END
CHAPTER XVIII CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX
CHAPTER XIX CONVERSION
CHAPTER XX BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS
CHAPTER XXI THE FULL CLOSE
BOOK V
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER XXII CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY
CHAPTER XXIII DIALOGUE AND DETAILSBOOK I
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down negative
recommendations--to instruct the beginner how not to do it. But most of these "don'ts"
are rather obvious; and those which are not obvious are apt to be questionable. It is
certain, for instance, that if you want your play to be acted, anywhere else than in China,
you must not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who needs a
text-book to tell him that? On the other hand, most theorists of to-day would make it an
axiom that you must not let your characters narrate their circumstances, or expound their
motives, in speeches addressed, either directly to the audience, or ostensibly to their
solitary selves. But when we remember that, of all dramatic openings, there is none finer
than that which shows Richard Plantagenet limping down the empty stage to say--
"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean
buried"-we feel that the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no absolute rules, in fact,
except such as are dictated by the plainest common sense. Aristotle himself did not so
much dogmatize as analyse, classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic
dramatists. He said, "you had better" rather than "you must." It was Horace, in an age of
deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian formulas of the
Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas of art.
How comes it, then, that there is a constant demand for text-books of the art and craft
of drama? How comes it that so many people--and I among the number--who could not
write a play to save their lives, are eager to tell others how to do so? And, stranger still,
how comes it that so many people are willing to sit at the feet of these instructors? It is
not so with the novel. Popular as is that form of literature, guides to novel-writing, if
they exist at all, are comparatively rare. Why are people possessed with the idea that the
art of dramatic fiction differs from that of narrative fiction, in that it can and must betaught?
The reason is clear, and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to justify, such works as the
present. The novel, as soon as it is legibly written, exists, for what it is worth. The page
of black and white is the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain.
Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal: it does not alter its nature.
But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at all, must be run through a highly
complex piece of mechanism--the theatre--the precise conditions of which are, to most
beginners, a fascinating mystery. While they feel a strong inward conviction of their
ability to master it, they are possessed with an idea, often exaggerated and superstitious,
of its technical complexities. Having, as a rule, little or no opportunity of closely
examining or experimenting with it, they are eager to "read it up," as they might any
other machine. That is the case of the average aspirant, who has neither the instinct of
the theatre fully developed in his blood, nor such a congenital lack of that instinct as to
be wholly inapprehensive of any technical difficulties or problems. The intelligent
novice, standing between these extremes, tends, as a rule, to overrate the efficacy of
theoretical instruction, and to expect of analytic criticism more than it has to give.
There is thus a fine opening for pedantry on the one side, and quackery on the other,
to rush in. The pedant, in this context, is he who constructs a set of rules from
metaphysical or psychological first principles, and professes to bring down a dramatic
decalogue from the Sinai of some lecture-room in the University of Weissnichtwo. The
quack, on the other hand, is he who generalizes from the worst practices of the most
vulgar theatrical journeymen, and has no higher ambition than to interpret the oracles of
the box-office. If he succeeded in so doing, his function would not be wholly
despicable; but as he is generally devoid of insight, and as, moreover, the oracles of the
box-office vary from season to season, if not from month to month, his lucubrations are
[1]about as valuable as those of Zadkiel or Old Moore.
What, then, is the excuse for such a discussion as is here attempted? Having admitted
that there are no rules for dramatic composition, and that the quest of such rules is apt to
result either in pedantry or quackery, why should I myself set forth upon so fruitless and
foolhardy an enterprise? It is precisely because I am alive to its dangers that I have some
hope of avoiding them. Rules there are none; but it does not follow that some of the
thousands who are fascinated by the art of the playwright may not profit by having their
attention called, in a plain and practical way, to some of its problems and possibilities. I
have myself felt the need of some such handbook, when would-be dramatists have
come to me for advice and guidance. It is easy to name excellent treatises on the drama;
but the aim of such books is to guide the judgment of the critic rather than the creative
impulse of the playwright. There are also valuable collections of dramatic criticisms; but
any practical hints that they may contain are scattered and unsystematic. On the other
hand, the advice one is apt to give to beginners--"Go to the theatre; study its conditions
and mechanism for yourself"--is, in fact, of very doubtful value. It might, in many cases,
be wiser to warn the aspirant to keep himself unspotted from the playhouse. To send
him there is to imperil, on the one hand, his originality of vision, on the other, hisindividuality of method. He may fall under the influence of some great master, and see
life only through his eyes; or he may become so habituated to the current tricks of the
theatrical trade as to lose all sense of their conventionality and falsity, and find himself,
in the end, better fitted to write what I have called a quack handbook than a living play.
It would be ridiculous, of course, to urge an aspirant positively to avoid the theatre; but
the common advice to steep himself in it is beset