ur days have to be told to the audience in
dialogue--dialogue written under severe limitations. In consequence, the
mechanical difficulties of construction were then very small. Nowadays,
except in the case of melodrama, complicated stories have to be told in
three or four acts, with no change of scenery during an act.

Let anyone who doubts whether this creates a difficulty take an ordinary
famous old comedy and rewrite it in a form in which it would be accepted
as a new play by a London manager, and he will find the difficulty
enormous. To the youthful dramatist this exercise is very valuable means
of studying the art of construction. When, unassisted by the work of
former adapters, he has succeeded in converting half-a-dozen
eighteenth-century comedies into three or four act comedies, without any
changes of scenery during an act, and has used all the matter of the old
comedies in his versions and yet avoided the employment of the
soliloquy, or the aside, or the explanatory dialogue in which A tells B
what B knows already, he will have learnt a great deal of his craft.
This explanatory dialogue is the sort of passage in which a son reminds
his mother of the date of his birth, and the profession of his father,
and of the period when she sent him to school and so on.

It may be doubted confidently whether a change of style, which has
increased so enormously the practical difficulties of writing acceptable
plays, has been beneficial to drama. There are writers with wit and a
sense of character who under the freer system of old days might have
produced successful plays, but are never able to acquire the mechanical
skill now demanded, and are kept off the stage by artificial
regulations, some of them not based upon essential ideas of drama but in
reality upon questions connected with scenery.

One cannot have many changes of the elaborate scenery nowadays employed
in comedy, and the illusion sought and to some extent obtained by these
costly, complicated sets makes the very useful carpenter's scene
impossible. It often happens that incongruities and absurdities in
modern plays are due to desperate efforts to overcome these
difficulties. Scenes take place in the drawing-room that ought to have
been out of doors; things are said that should have been done; and there
are long passages of dialogue where short scenes of action would be
preferable.

In a large number of cases the manuscripts we read are unacceptable
because