But each form has its peculiar advantages.  You cannot, in a retrospective play like Rosmersholm, attain anything like the magnificent onward rush of Othello, which moves—­

               “Like to the Pontick sea
  Whose icy current and compulsive course
  Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
  To the Propontick and the Hellespont.”

The movement of Rosmersholm is rather like that of a winding river, which flows with a full and steady current, but seems sometimes to be almost retracing its course.  If, then, you aim at rapidity of movement, you will choose a theme which leaves little or nothing to retrospect; and conversely, if you have a theme the whole of which falls easily and conveniently within the frame of the picture, you will probably take advantage of the fact to give your play animated and rapid movement.

There is an undeniable attraction in a play which constitutes, so to speak, one brisk and continuous adventure, begun, developed, and ended before our eyes.  For light comedy in particular is this a desirable form, and for romantic plays in which no very searching character-study is attempted. The Taming of the Shrew no doubt passed for a light comedy in Shakespeare’s day, though we describe it by a briefer name.  Its rapid, bustling action is possible because we are always ready to take the character of a shrew for granted.  It would have been a very different play had the poet required to account for Katharine’s peculiarities of temper by a retrospective study of her heredity and upbringing.  Many eighteenth-century comedies are single-adventure plays, or dual-adventure plays, in the sense that the main action sometimes stands aside to let an underplot take the stage.  Both She Stoops to Conquer and The Rivals are good examples of the rapid working-out of an intrigue, engendered, developed, and resolved all within the frame of the picture.  Single-adventure plays of a more modern type are the elder Dumas’s Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, the younger Dumas’s Francillon, Sardou’s Divorcons, Sir Arthur Pinero’s Gay Lord Quex, Mr. Shaw’s Devil’s Disciple, Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, Mr. Galsworthy’s Silver Box.  Widely as these plays differ in type and tone, they are alike in this, that they do not attempt to present very complex character-studies, or to probe the deeps of human experience.  The last play cited, The Silver Box, may perhaps be thought an exception to this rule; but, though the experience of the hapless charwoman is pitiful enough, hers is a simple soul, so inured to suffering that a little more or less is no such great matter.  The play is an admirable genre-picture rather than a searching tragedy.