One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice.  If you choose to write a blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive ear.  Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved even temporary success.  If you cannot save your blank verse from monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone.  Again, in spite of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back again.  It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness.  We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, “Look you now!  I am going to be eloquent and impressive!” The most destructive fault a dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of art, from one plane of convention to another.[3]

* * * * *

We must now consider for a moment the question—­if question it can be called—­of the soliloquy and the aside.  The example of Ibsen has gone far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all self-respecting playwrights.  But theorists spring up every now and then to defend them.  “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.  In the theatre of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the proscenium arch—­the frame of the picture—­made pictorial realism theoretically possible.  But no one recognized the possibility; and indeed, on a candle-lit stage, it would have been extremely difficult.  As a matter of fact, the Elizabethan platform survived in the shape of a long “apron,” projecting in front of the proscenium, on which the most important parts of the action took place.  The characters,