CHAPTER V

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The theme being chosen, the next step will probably be to determine what characters shall be employed in developing it.  Most playwrights, I take it, draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious work of construction.  Ibsen seems always to have done so; but, in some of his plays, the list of persons was at first considerably larger than it ultimately became.  The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters rejected from one play, and used them in another.  Thus Boletta and Hilda Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and Beata; and the delightful Foldal of John Gabriel Borkman was a character left over from The Lady from the Sea.

The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to employ.  There are in every play essential characters, without whom the theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on the action.  It is not always possible to decide whether a character is essential or auxiliary—­it depends upon how we define the theme.  In Hamlet, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly essential:  for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and murderer of his father.  But is Ophelia essential, or merely auxiliary?  Essential, if we consider Hamlet’s pessimistic feeling as to woman and the “breeding of sinners” a necessary part of his character; auxiliary, if we take the view that without this feeling he would still have been Hamlet, and the action, to all intents and purposes, the same.  The remaining characters, on the other hand, are clearly auxiliary.  This is true even of the Ghost:  for Hamlet might have learnt of his father’s murder in fifty other ways.

Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, and the rest might all have been utterly different, or might never have existed at all, and yet the essence of the play might have remained intact.

It would be perfectly possible to write a Hamlet after the manner of Racine, in which there should be only six personages instead of Shakespeare’s six-and-twenty:  and in this estimate I assume Ophelia to be an essential character.  The dramatis personae would be:  Hamlet, his confidant; Ophelia, her confidant; and the King and Queen, who would serve as confidants to each other.  Indeed, an economy of one person might be affected by making the Queen (as she naturally might) play the part of confidant to Ophelia.