[1] Especially is there a tendency to rebel against the
requirement that a play should have an end. We have seen a good many
plays of late which do not end, but simply leave off: at their head we
might perhaps place Ibsen's _Ghosts_. But let us not anticipate. For the
moment, what we have to inquire is where, and how, a play ought
to begin.
In life there are no such things as beginnings. Even a man's birth is a
quite arbitrary point at which to launch his biography; for the
determining factors in his career are to be found in persons, events,
and conditions that existed before he was ever thought of. For the
biographer, however, and for the novelist as a writer of fictitious
biography, birth forms a good conventional starting-point. He can give a
chapter or so to "Ancestry," and then relate the adventures of his hero
from the cradle onwards. But the dramatist, as we have seen, deals, not
with protracted sequences of events, but with short, sharp crises. The
question for him, therefore, is: at what moment of the crisis, or of its
antecedents, he had better ring up his curtain? At this point he is like
the photographer studying his "finder" in order to determine how much of
a given prospect he can "get in.
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