DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The theme being chosen, the next step will probably be to determine what
characters shall be employed in developing it. Most playwrights, I take
it, draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious
work of construction. Ibsen seems always to have done so; but, in some
of his plays, the list of persons was at first considerably larger than
it ultimately became. The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters
rejected from one play, and used them in another. Thus Boletta and Hilda
Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and
Beata; and the delightful Foldal of _John Gabriel Borkman_ was a
character left over from _The Lady from the Sea_.

The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without
determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to
employ. There are in every play essential characters, without whom the
theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the
theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on
the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is
essential or auxiliary--it depends upon how we define the theme. In
_Hamlet_, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly
essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain
temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and
murderer of his father. But is Ophelia essential, or merely auxiliary?
Essential, if we consider Hamlet's pessimistic feeling as to woman and
the "breeding of sinners" a necessary part of his character; auxiliary,
if we take the view that without this feeling he would still have been
Hamlet, and the action, to all intents and purposes, the same. The
remaining characters, on the other hand, are clearly auxiliary. This is
true even of the Ghost: for Hamlet might have learnt of his father's
murder in fifty other ways.

Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, and the rest might all have been utterly
different, or might never have existed at all, and yet the essence of
the play might have remained intact.

It would be perfectly possible to write a _Hamlet_ after the manner of
Racine, in which there should be only six personages instead of
Shakespeare's six-and-twenty: and in this estimate I assume Ophelia to
be an essential character. The dramatis personae would be: Hamlet, his
confidant; Ophelia, her confidant; and the King and Queen, who would