An action with a gap of twenty years in it may
be all very well in melodrama or romance, but scarcely in higher and
more serious types of drama.[4] Especially is it to be desired that
interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not
be frittered away on subsidiary or preliminary personages. Take, for
instance, the case of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. It would have been
theoretically possible for Sir Arthur Pinero to have given us either (or
both) of two preliminary scenes: he might have shown us the first Mrs.
Tanqueray at home, and at the same time have introduced us more at large
to the characters of Aubrey and Ellean; or he might have depicted for us
one of the previous associations of Paula Ray--might perhaps have let us
see her "keeping house" with Hugh Ardale. But either of these openings
would have been disproportionate and superfluous. It would have excited,
or tried to excite, our interest in something that was not the real
theme of the play, and in characters which were to drop out before the
real theme--the Aubrey-Paula marriage--was reached.
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