[2] Ibsen’s Ghosts; indeed, nearly every one of the problem master’s plays offer themselves as examples of the problem type.

And the same is likewise true of

The Pastoral-Rural Drama:  The form of drama dealing with rustic life. [3]

[3] The long play Way Down East is a fine example of the pastoral—­or rural—­drama of American life.

And also of

The Detective Drama:  [4] The form of drama dealing with the detection of crime and the apprehension of the criminal.  I cannot recollect a detective playlet—­or three-act play, for that matter—­that is not melodramatic.  When the action is not purely melodramatic, the lines and the feeling usually thrill with melodrama. [5] “The System,” which is a playlet dealing with the detection of detectives, is but one example in point.

[4] Mr. Charlton Andrews makes a series of interesting and helpful discriminations among the several dramatic forms, in his work The Technique of Play Writing, published uniform with this volume in “The Writer’s Library.”

[5] Sherlock Holmes, William Gillette’s masterly dramatization of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective stories, is melodramatic even when the action is most restrained.

Here, then, we have the four great kinds of playlet, and four out of the many variations that often seem to the casual glance to possess elemental individuality.

Remember that this chapter is merely one of definitions and that a definition is a description of something given to it after—­not before—­it is finished.  A definition is a tag, like the label the entomologist ties to the pin after he has the butterfly nicely dead.  Of questionable profit it would be to you, struggling to waken your playlet into life, to worry about a definition that might read “Here Lies a Polite Comedy.”

Professor Baker says that the tragedies of Shakespere may have seemed to the audiences of their own day “not tragedies at all, but merely more masterly specimens of dramatic story-telling than the things that preceded them.” [1] If Shakespere did not worry about the precise labels of the plays he was busy writing and producing, you and I need not.  Forget definitions—­forget everything but your playlet and the grip, the thrill, the punch, the laughter of your plot.

[1] Development of Shakespere as a Dramatist, by Prof.  Baker of Harvard University.

To sum up:  The limits of the playlet are narrow, its requirements are exacting, but within those limits and those requirements you may picture anything you possess the power to present.  Pick out from life some incident, character, temperament—­whatever you will—­and flash upon it the glare of the vaudeville spot-light; breathe into it the breath of life; show its every aspect and effect; dissect away the needless; vivify the series of actions you have chosen for your brief and trenchant crisis; lift it all with laughter or touch it all with tears.  Like a searchlight your playlet must flash over the landscape of human hearts and rest upon some phase of passion, some momentous incident, and make it stand out clear and real from the darkness of doubt that surrounds it.