of the evidence, that Shakespeare did not, as
it were, "think in acts," but conceived his plays as continuous series
of events, without any pause or intermission in their flow. It can, I
think, be proved beyond any shadow of doubt that they are wrong in this;
that 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 illusi