One word may perhaps be said on the recent fashion—­not to say fad—­of suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of “Dramatis Personae.”  Bjoernson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan.  I do not know whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, or whether they arrived independently at the same austere principle, by sheer force of individual genius.  The matter is a trifling one—­so trifling that the departure from established practice has something of the air of a pedantry.  It is not, on the whole, to be approved.  It adds perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and appreciable pleasure of anticipation.  There is a peculiar and not irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and thinking:  “In the course of three hours, I shall know these people:  I shall have read their hearts:  I shall have lived with them through a great crisis in their lives:  some of them may be my friends for ever.”  It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist’s calling that he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of conversational novel.  A list of characters, it is true, may also affect one with acute anticipations of boredom; but I have never yet found a play less tedious by reason of the suppression of the “Dramatis Personae.”

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[Footnote 1:  Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity; but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names.  Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque appellations employed.  For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time probable enough in daily life.  For example, a slave might be called Onesimus, “useful,” or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function; but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.]

BOOK II

THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER VI

THE POINT OF ATTACK:  SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN

Though, as we have already noted, the writing of plays does not always follow the chronological sequence of events, in discussing the process of their evolution we are bound to assume that the playwright begins at the beginning, and proceeds in orderly fashion, by way of the middle, to the end.  It was one of Aristotle’s requirements that a play should have a beginning, middle and end; and though it may seem that it scarcely needed an Aristotle to lay down so