"The stage is the realm of convention," they argue. "If
you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of
an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at
the idea--in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely
impossible--that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing
through his mind?"
It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there
is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is
the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we
admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There
are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give
as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory
realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its platform stage
under the open sky, any pictorial exactness of reproduction was clearly
impossible. Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly[4] a
maximum of convention; therefore such conventions as blank verse and the
soliloquy were simply of a piece with all the rest.
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