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audience can be defended only with difficulty. But the soliloquy in which a character speaks "boldly of his most secret thoughts" stands on a higher plane. It lets a tortured hero unpack his heart; it opens a window into his soul; and it gives the spectator a pleasure not to be had otherwise. It allows us to listen to the communing of a character with himself, as though we were not overhearing what he is saying. Professor Bradley has remarked, in his stimulating discussion of Shaksperean Tragedy," that "in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are being addressed." He declared that in this respect, as in others, many of Shakspere's soliloquies are masterpieces; but he admitted that "in some the purpose of giving information lies bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks to the audience." And Molière is as vulnerable to this reproof as Shakspere.

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The fact is that when Shakspere and Molière came to the theater, they found the soliloquy a labor-saving contrivance that they took over without bestowing a thought on the principle underlying it. This principle, if formally declared, would be that the soliloquy is a means of exposing to the spectators the actual thoughts of a character when he is alone. In other words, an actor soliloquizing must be supposed to be thinking aloud. But so little did either Shakspere or Molière care for the principle involved, that both of them unhesitatingly set before us a character soliloquizing and yet overheard by some other character. This is a contradiction in terms, if we analyze it philosophically, but that is exactly what was not attempted by either of these great dramatists or by any of the playgoers of their times. What to us may seem an arrant

absurdity is to be found as early as Terence and as late as Beaumarchais. Shakspere lets Romeo overhear Juliet's soliloquizing on the balcony; and Molière is as careless in the "Miser."

There was a clever man once who justified his habit of talking to himself by two good reasons, he liked to talk to a man of sense and he liked to hear a man of sense talk. It is in the "Misérables" that Victor Hugo tried to justify the monologue by one bad reason; he declared that it was an error to believe that the soliloquy was not natural, since "often a strong agitation speaks out loud." But a strong agitation does not speak out loud a speech of a hundred lines and more, as the King does in "Hernani." There is no advantage in maintaining that the soliloquy is "natural.” It is not; and no more is blank verse or highly condensed prose. As Professor Bradley has remarked: "Neither soliloquy nor the use of verse can be condemned on the mere ground that it is unnatural. No dramatic language is natural."

It may seem strange that audiences which still admit without protest many another convention quite as contrary to the actual fact, should have awakened suddenly to the lack of yerisimilitude in the soliloquy. They accept it without cavil in "Rip Van Winkle,' in one act of which no voice is heard but Rip's talking to himself or speaking to the dumb specters. They accept it again in a protean piece like the oneact "Dick Turpin," in which all the parts are assumed by the same actor, and which is necessarily nothing but a succession of monologues. But they are annoyed when the characters in a modern play of real life take the liberty of soliloquizing, because both

authors and audiences have discovered that it is out of place on the picture-frame stage of to-day, however appropriate it may have been to the platformstage of yesterday. The dramatist can utilize it now only at his peril; at best he can use it on rare occasions and very briefly, merely to give a fleeting glimpse of the speaker's deeper emotion. If it is boldly employed in the fashion formerly acceptable, it will revolt us by what we now see to be its flagrant incompatibility with the conditions of the modern theater. It will probably survive as a tradition in the poetic drama, where we are glad always to listen to noble thoughts loftily phrased. It may even linger also in the lighter forms of comedy, where we shall not sharply feel its incongruity, because we do not take these humorous pieces seriously.

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CHAPTER VIII

DRAMATIC CHARACTERIZATION

Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What, then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself “too much i̇' th' sun"; whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known "the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes”; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a specter; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them - this is the true Hamlet. - WILLIAM HAZLITT, The Characters of Shakspere's Plays.

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} FOR immediate success on the stage, play must have a story strong enough to arouse and retain the interest of the spectators; and it is characteristic of Aristotle's shrewdness that he seized this fact firmly, and declared it sharply more than two thousand years ago, with only his experience in the Attic theater to guide him. But while a sufficient story is a prerequisite to

immediate success, it will bestow only a fleeting popularity, if the play is not peopled by characters that linger in the memory independently of the action in which they have been presented. Taste in stories varies from century to century and from country to country, and the number of possible situations is so strictly limited that the most the new dramatist can do is to shuffle the old plots and to carry them on with new characters. But human nature is much the same the wide world over, and generation after generation. A character which has once impressed itself upon the contemporaries of the author as vital and significant has a chance of long life; and in the final analysis, it is by his power of projecting characters that the dramatist survives.

On the plot, on the situations, on the sequence of } events, which the playwright needs first of all to win the favor of the throng, he must expend his invention, > and he must be as ingenious as may be in adroit devices to sustain the interest of his story. On the characters who live and move inside this plot, he must bestow the best of his imagination; and into them, he must breathe the breath of life, so that they will exist for us long after we have lost our liking for the kind of story in which they originally figured. To us nowadays, the central incidents of the "Merchant of Venice" are unconvincing, not to call them puerile; but Shylock is an unforgettable figure, as alive to-day as when he first strode on the stage of the Globe Theater. The plot of the "Winter's Tale" is a tissue of absurdities; but the young loves of Perdita and Florizel still enchant us because they are eternally human. In the "Merchant of Venice," we tolerate the impossibility of the situations for the sake of the central character;

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