e the vast number of facts and ideas necessary
to explain the exact relations between Rosmer and Rebecca West when the
play begins. However, it is hardly worth the while of the casual
playgoer to study the structure of dramas sufficiently to appreciate
fully such marvels of technique--the marvels are very rare.

Something might be said in favour of plays--and it was said by Prosper
Merimee--in which no knowledge of the previous histories of the parties
is necessary. It is doubtful, however, whether there exists any specimen
of this class of drama, and perhaps it is impossible completely to
comply with such conditions.

Whether much or little is told to the audience of the things that have
happened and the characters before the play begins, the last act in the
ordinary drama is of an extravagant importance in relation to the whole.
It has been said, with a fair amount of truth, that anybody can write a
good first act, and that most plays fail towards the end. Instead of
putting his confidence in the maxim "Well begun is half done," the
author must rely on another which may be expressed as "Well ended is
much mended."

The question how to bring a play to a close has been terribly difficult
on very many occasions to the dramatist. There are various kinds of
conclusion, most of them more or less formal or conventional. For
instance, everyone knows what will happen towards the last fall of the
curtain in the peculiarly exasperating species of drama founded upon a
misunderstanding which in real life would be cleared up in five minutes,
but on the stage remains unsolved for three hours or so. Countless plays
end with a definite engagement of young sweethearts the course of whose
love became rough at the close of the first act, or with the
reconciliation of youthful spouses who quarrelled in the earlier part
of the piece.

This, of course, is the so-called "happy-ever-after" ending: in most
cases the comedies of this type are so artificial that few of the
audience take sufficient interest in the characters to think of them as
people who live after the play, and to notice the fact that the
sweethearts are from their nature unlikely to live happily together, or
that the young husband and wife, on account of their dispositions, are
certain to quarrel within a week of the reconciliation. Plays of these
kinds are essentially unimportant. Nobody cares very much how they end
provided that the curtain falls not later than at a quar