of any mechanical truc, as the French call it, or feat of theatrical sleight-of-hand, it is futile to trust to its taking unawares any audience after the first.  Nine-tenths of all subsequent audiences are sure to be on the look-out for it, and to know, or think they know, “how it’s done."[4] These are the things which theatrical gossip, printed and oral, most industriously disseminates.  The fine details of a plot are much less easily conveyed and less likely to be remembered.

To sum up this branch of the argument:  however oft-repeated and much-discussed a play may be, the playwright must assume that in every audience there will be an appreciable number of persons who know practically nothing about it, and whose enjoyment will depend, like that of the first-night audience, on the skill with which he develops his story.  On the other hand, he can never rely on taking an audience by surprise at any particular point.  The class of effect which depends on surprise is precisely the class of effect which is certain to be discounted.[5]

We come now to a third reason why a playwright is bound to assume that the audience to which he addresses himself has no previous knowledge of his fable.  It is simply that no other assumption has, or can have, any logical basis.  If the audience is not to be conceived as ignorant, how much is it to be assumed to know?  There is clearly no possible answer to this question, except a purely arbitrary one, having no relation to the facts.  In any audience after the first, there will doubtless be a hundred degrees of knowledge and of ignorance.  Many people will know nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of knowledge.  Some people will have read and remembered a detailed newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten almost all of it.  Some will have heard a correct and vivid account of the play, others a vague and misleading summary.  It would be absolutely impossible to enumerate all the degrees of previous knowledge which are pretty certain to be represented in an average audience; and to which degree of knowledge is the playwright to address himself?  If he is to have any firm ground under his feet, he must clearly adopt the only logical course, and address himself to a spectator assumed to have no previous knowledge whatever.  To proceed on any other assumption would not only be to ignore the all-powerful first-night audience, but to plunge into a veritable morass of inconsistencies, dubieties and slovenlinesses.

These considerations, however, have not yet taken us to the heart of the matter.  We have seen that the dramatist has no rational course open to him but to assume complete ignorance in his audience; but we have also seen that, as a matter of fact, only one audience will be entirely in this condition, and that, the more successful the play is, the more widely will subsequent audiences tend to depart from it.  Does it not follow that interest of plot, interest of curiosity as to coming events, is at best an evanescent factor in a play’s attractiveness—­of a certain importance, no doubt, on the first night, but less and less efficient the longer the play holds the stage?