a scenario is almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an architect.  There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along.  That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw.  I have no absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for Getting Married or Misalliance, he has sedulously concealed the fact—­to the detriment of the plays.[1]

The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian commedia dell’ arte wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to do the rest.  The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as one or two MS.  “Plats,” designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant to testify.  The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scenario to the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of the German stage.  It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation, that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits, and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy prompted.  So, at least, the copious fluency of their dialogue seems to suggest.  But the typical modern play is a much more close-knit organism, in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by playwrights who stood near to the days of improvisation, and could indulge in “the large utterance of the early gods.”  Consequently it would seem that, until a play has been thought out very clearly and in great detail, any scheme of entrances and exits ought to be merely provisional and subject to indefinite modification.  A modern play is not a framework of story loosely draped in a more or less gorgeous robe of language.  There is, or ought to be, a close interdependence between action, character and dialogue, which forbids a playwright to tie his hands very far in advance.

As a rule, then, it would seem to be an unfavourable sign when a drama presents itself at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline.  The result may be a powerful, logical, well-knit piece of work; but the breath of life will scarcely be in it.  Room should be left as long as possible for unexpected developments of character.  If your characters are innocent of unexpected developments, the less characters they.[2] Not that I, personally, have any faith in those writers of fiction, be they playwrights or novelists, who contend that they do not speak through the mouths of their personages, but rather let their personages speak through them.  “I do not invent or create” I have heard an eminent novelist say:  “I simply record; my characters speak and act, and I write down their sayings and doings.”  This author may be a fine psychologist for purposes of fiction, but I question his insight into his own mental processes.  The apparent spontaneity of a character’s proceedings is a pure illusion.  It means no more than that the imagination, once set in motion along a given line, moves along that line with an ease and freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural and almost uncanny.[3]