Scott disclaimed any special knowledge of stage-craft.  “I know as little about the division of a drama as the spinster about the division of a battle, to use Iago’s simile,"[114] he once wrote to a friend.  Yet as a critic he had of course some general ideas about the making of plays, without having worked out any subtle theories on the subject.  In criticising a play by Allan Cunningham, who had asked for his judgment on it, he remarked first that the plot was ill-combined.  “If the mind can be kept upon one unbroken course of interest, the effect even in perusal is more gratifying.  I have always considered this as the great secret in dramatic poetry, and conceive it one of the most difficult exercises of the invention possible, to conduct a story through five acts, developing it gradually in every scene, so as to keep up the attention, yet never till the very conclusion permitting the nature of the catastrophe to become visible,—­and all the while to accompany this by the necessary delineation of character and beauty of language."[115] And again he said to the same person, “I hope you will make another dramatic attempt; and in that case I would strongly recommend that you should previously make a model or skeleton of your incidents, dividing them regularly into scenes and acts, so as to insure the dependence of one circumstance upon another, and the simplicity and union of your whole story."[116] Here we find Scott giving advice which by his own admission he was not himself able to follow in the composition of fiction.  “I never could lay down a plan, or having laid it down I never could adhere to it,” he wrote in his journal[117].  And the “Author” in the introductory epistle to Nigel remarks, “It may pass for one good reason for not writing a play, that I cannot form a plot.”

The few experiments that he made he did not seem to regard seriously at any time, though he was rather favorably impressed on rereading the Doom of Devorgoil after it had lain unused for several years.[118] Of Halidon Hill he said, “It is designed to illustrate military antiquities and the manners of chivalry.  The drama (if it can be called one) is in no particular either designed or calculated for the stage."[119] He seems to have been “often urged” to write plays, if one may trust Captain Clutterbuck’s authority, and the effectiveness of the many poetical mottoes improvised by the Author of Waverley for the chapters of his novels, and subscribed “Old Play,"[120] was naturally used as an argument.[121] Scott’s own judgment in the matter was expressed thus:  “Nothing so easy when you are full of an author, as to write a few lines in his taste and style; the difficulty is to keep it up.  Besides, the greatest success would be but a spiritless imitation, or, at best, what the Italians call a centone [sic] from Shakspeare."[122] When Elliston became manager of Drury Lane in 1819 he applied to Scott for plays, but without effect.[123] Scott seems never to have felt any concern over the fact that the dramatized versions of his novels were often very poor, but Hazlitt wished that he would “not leave it to others to mar what he has sketched so admirably as a ground-work,” for he saw no good reason why the author of Waverley could not write “a first-rate tragedy as well, as so many first-rate novels."[124]