So long as the fashion of late dinners continues, however, it must remain a measure of prudence to let nothing absolutely essential to the comprehension of a play be said or done during the first ten minutes after the rise of the curtain.  Here, again, A Doll’s House may be cited as a model, though Ibsen, certainly, had no thought of the British dinner-hour in planning the play.  The opening scene is just what the ideal opening scene ought to be—­invaluable, yet not indispensable.  The late-comer who misses it deprives himself of a preliminary glimpse into the characters of Nora and Helmer and the relation between them; but he misses nothing that is absolutely essential to his comprehension of the play as a whole.  This, then, would appear to be a sound maxim both of art and prudence:  let your first ten minutes by all means be crisp, arresting, stimulating, but do not let them embody any absolutely vital matter, ignorance of which would leave the spectator in the dark as to the general design and purport of the play.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1:  See Chapter XXIII.]

[Footnote 2:  Henri Becque’s two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two types of opening.  In Les Corbeaux we have almost an entire act of calm domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to Vigneron’s attacks of vertigo.  In La Parisienne Clotilde and Lafont are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter.  It proceeds for ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, “Prenez garde, voila mon mari!”—­and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but wife and lover.]

[Footnote 3:  Mrs. Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes”) opened her very successful play, The Ambassador, with a scene between Juliet Desborough and her sister Alice, a nun, who apparently left her convent specially to hear her sister’s confession, and then returned to it for ever.  This was certainly not an economical form of exposition, but it was not unsuited to the type of play.]

[Footnote 4:  In that charming comedy, Rosemary, by Messrs. Parker and Carson, there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its predecessor; but the so-called last act is only an “epi-monologue.”]

[Footnote 5:  Or at most two closely connected characters:  for instance, a husband and wife.]

CHAPTER VIII

THE FIRST ACT

Both in the theory and in practice, of late years, war has been declared in certain quarters against the division of a play into acts.  Students of the Elizabethan stage have persuaded themselves, by what I believe to be a complete misreading of the evidence, that Shakespeare did not, as it were, “think in acts,” but conceived his plays as continuous series of events, without any pause or intermission in their flow.  It can, I think, be proved beyond any shadow of doubt that they are wrong in this; that