hat managers should talk thus, seeing the low
state of the drama, because in any art rules and reaction always
flourish when creative energy is sick. The mandarins have ever said and
will ever say that a technique which does not correspond with their own
is no technique, but simple clumsiness. There are some seven situations
in the customary drama, and a play which does not contain at least one
of those situations in each act will be condemned as "undramatic," or
"thin," or as being "all talk." It may contain half a hundred other
situations, but for the mandarin a situation which is not one of the
seven is not a situation. Similarly there are some dozen character
types in the customary drama, and all original--that is,
truthful--characterisation will be dismissed as a total absence of
characterisation because it does not reproduce any of these dozen types.
Thus every truly original play is bound to be indicted for bad
technique. The author is bound to be told that what he has written may
be marvellously clever, but that it is not a play. I remember the
day--and it is not long ago--when even so experienced and sincere a
critic as William Archer used to argue that if the "intellectual" drama
did not succeed with the general public, it was because its technique
was not up to the level of the technique of the commercial drama!
Perhaps he has changed his opinion since then. Heaven knows that the
so-called "intellectual" drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all
literary art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama could
hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the most successful
commercial plays of modern times. I tremble to think what the mandarins
and William Archer would say to the technique of _Hamlet_, could it by
some miracle be brought forward as a new piece by a Mr Shakspere. They
would probably recommend Mr Shakspere to consider the ways of Sardou,
Henri Bernstein, and Sir Herbert Tree, and be wise. Most positively they
would assert that _Hamlet_ was not a play. And their pupils of the daily
press would point out--what surely Mr Shakspere ought to have perceived
for himself--that the second, third, or fourth act might be cut
wholesale without the slightest loss to the piece.

In the sense in which mandarins understand the word technique, there is
no technique special to the stage except that which concerns the moving
of solid human bodies to and fro, and the limitations of the human
senses. The dramati