The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters
rejected from one play, and used them in another. Thus Boletta and Hilda
Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and
Beata; and the delightful Foldal of _John Gabriel Borkman_ was a
character left over from _The Lady from the Sea_.
The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without
determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to
employ. There are in every play essential characters, without whom the
theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the
theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on
the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is
essential or auxiliary--it depends upon how we define the theme. In
_Hamlet_, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly
essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain
temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and
murderer of his father.
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