But as he has totally
omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning
for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.]
[Footnote 4: The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a
foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that
the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is
ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night
audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's
vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not
prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.]
[Footnote 5: See pp. 118, 240.]
[Footnote 6: There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and
entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.]
[Footnote 7: This might be said of the scene of the second act of _The
Benefit of the Doubt_; but here the actual stage-topography is natural
enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the
acoustic relations of the two rooms.
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