Shakespeare, to be sure, did not deliberately choose between his own method and that of Racine.  Classic concentration was wholly unsuited to the physical conditions of the Elizabethan stage, on which external movement and bustle were imperatively demanded.  But the modern playwright has a wide latitude of choice in this purely technical matter.  He may work out his plot with the smallest possible number of characters, or he may introduce a crowd of auxiliary personages.  The good craftsman will be guided by the nature of his theme.  In a broad social study or a picturesque romance, you may have as many auxiliary figures as you please.  In a subtle comedy, or a psychological tragedy, the essential characters should have the stage as much as possible to themselves.  In Becque’s La Parisienne there are only four characters and a servant; in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac there are fifty-four personages named in the playbill, to say nothing of supernumeraries.  In Peer Gynt, a satiric phantasmagory, Ibsen introduces some fifty individual characters, with numberless supernumeraries; in An Enemy of the People, a social comedy, he has eleven characters and a crowd; for Ghosts and Rosmersholm, psychological tragedies, six persons apiece are sufficient.

It can scarcely be necessary, at this time of day, to say much on the subject of nomenclature.  One does occasionally, in manuscripts of a quite hopeless type, find the millionaire’s daughter figuring as “Miss Aurea Golden,” and her poor but sprightly cousin as “Miss Lalage Gay”; but the veriest tyro realizes, as a rule, that this sort of punning characterization went out with the eighteenth century, or survived into the nineteenth century only as a flagrant anachronism, like knee-breeches and hair-powder.

A curious essay might be written on the reasons why such names as Sir John Brute, Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, Sir Peter Teazle, Sir Anthony Absolute, Sir Lucius O’Trigger, Lord Foppington, Lord Rake, Colonel Bully, Lovewell, Heartfree, Gripe, Shark and the rest were regarded as a matter of course in “the comedy of manners,” but have become offensive to-day, except in deliberate imitations of the eighteenth-century style.  The explanation does not lie merely in the contrast between “conventional” comedy and “realistic” drama.  Our forefathers (whatever Lamb may say) did not consciously place their comedy in a realm of convention, but generally considered themselves, and sometimes were, realists.  The fashion of label-names, if we may call them so, came down from the Elizabethans, who, again, borrowed it from the Mediaeval Moralities.[1] Shakespeare himself gave us Master Slender and Justice Shallow; but it was in the Jonsonian comedy of types that the practice of advertising a “humour” or “passion” in a name (English or Italian) established itself most firmly.  Hence such strange appellatives as Sir Epicure Mammon, Sir Amorous La Foole, Morose,