sienne, Amoureuse, A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Master Builder,
Little Eyolf, Johannisfeuer, Caste, Candida, The Benefit of the Doubt,
The Importance of Being Earnest, The Silver Box_; and, furthermore, many
old plays which are nominally in five acts really fall into a triple
rhythm, and might better have been divided into three. Alexandrian
precept, handed on by Horace, gave to the five act division a purely
arbitrary sanction, which induced playwrights to mask the natural rhythm
of their themes beneath this artificial one.[2] But in truth the
three-act division ought no more to be elevated into an absolute rule
than the five-act division. We have seen that a play consists, or ought
to consist, of a great crisis, worked out through a series of minor
crises. An act, then, ought to consist either of a minor crisis, carried
to its temporary solution, or of a well-marked group of such crises; and
there can be no rule as to the number of such crises which ought to
present themselves in the development of a given theme. On the modern
stage, five acts may be regarded as the maximum, simply by reason of the
time-limit imposed by social custom on a performance. But one frequently
sees a melodrama divided into "five acts and eight tableaux," or even
more; which practically means that the play is in eight, or nine, or ten
acts, but that there will be only the four conventional interacts in the
course of the evening. The playwright should not let himself be
constrained by custom to force his theme into the arbitrary mould of a
stated number of acts. Three acts is a good number, four acts is a good
number,[3] there is no positive objection to five acts. Should he find
himself hankering after more acts, he will do well to consider whether
he be not, at one point or another, failing in the art of condensation
and trespassing on the domain of the novelist.

There is undoubted convenience in the rule of the modern stage: "One
act, one scene." A change of scene in the middle of an act is not only
materially difficult, but tends to impair the particular order of
illusion at which the modern drama aims.[4] Roughly, indeed, an act may
be defined as any part of a given crisis which works itself out at one
time and in one place; but more fundamentally it is a segment of the
action during which the author desires to hold the attention of his
audience unbroken and unrelaxed. It is no mere convention, however,
which decrees that the flight of tim