the act division was perfectly familiar to Shakespeare, and was used by him to give to the action of his plays a rhythm which ought not, in representation, to be obscured or falsified.  It is true that in the Elizabethan theatre there was no need of long interacts for the change of scenes, and that such interacts are an abuse that calls for remedy.  But we have abundant evidence that the act division was sometimes marked on the Elizabethan stage, and have no reason to doubt that it was always more or less recognized, and was present to Shakespeare’s mind no less than to Ibsen’s or Pinero’s.

Influenced in part, perhaps, by the Elizabethan theorists, but mainly by the freakishness of his own genius, Mr. Bernard Shaw has taken to writing plays in one continuous gush of dialogue, and has put forward, more or less seriously, the claim that he is thereby reviving the practice of the Greeks.  In a prefatory note to Getting Married, he says—­

“There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this play.  The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused, and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the ancient Greek drama.  In the foregoing tragedy, The Doctor’s Dilemma, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year.  No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice that the Greek form is inevitable when the drama reaches a certain point in poetic and intellectual evolution.  Its adoption was not, on my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable to it, which turned out to be the classical form.”

It is hard to say whether Mr. Shaw is here writing seriously or in a mood of solemn facetiousness.  Perhaps he himself is not quite clear on the point.  There can be no harm, at any rate, in assuming that he genuinely believes the unity of Getting Married to be “a return to the unity observed in,” say, the Oedipus Rex, and examining a little into so pleasant an illusion.

It is, if I may so phrase it, a double-barrelled illusion. Getting Married has not the unity of the Greek drama, and the Greek drama has not the unity of Getting Married.  Whatever “unity” is predicable of either form of art is a wholly different thing from whatever “unity” is predicable of the other.  Mr. Shaw, in fact, is, consciously or unconsciously, playing with words, very much as Lamb did when he said to the sportsman, “Is that your own hare or a wig?” There are, roughly speaking, three sorts of unity:  the unity of a plum-pudding, the unity of a string or chain, and, the unity of the Parthenon.  Let us call them, respectively, unity of concoction, unity of concatenation, and structural or organic unity.  The second form