It can do no harm, then, if the playwright
should ask himself: "Can I, without any undue sacrifice, so develop my
theme as to entail upon my leading characters, naturally and probably,
an experience of this order?"
The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they are apt to be too
small in scale, or else too fatally conclusive, to provide material for
drama. One of the commonest, perhaps, is that of the man who enters a
physician's consulting-room to seek advice in some trifling ailment, and
comes out again, half an hour later, doomed either to death or to some
calamity worse than death. This situation has been employed, not
ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic
drama, _The Fires of Fate_; but it is very difficult to find any
dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.[2] The
moral peripety--the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of
some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air--is a no less
characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the
playwright's uses.
Pages:
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362