acts, and thereafter is innocent of any act division; and _Romeo and
Juliet_ has no such division at all. But with later editors, the classic
tradition became more and more a convention and the student with the
modernized text in hand has no reason to suspect the original facts. An
old-fashioned work like Freitag's _Technique of the Drama_ assumes this
form as final and endeavors to study dramatic construction on that
assumption.

The scenes, too, were many in the Elizabethan period, for the reason
that there was no scene shifting in the modern sense; as many scenes
might therefore be imagined as were desirable during the continuous
performance. It has remained for modern technic to discover that there
was nothing irrevocable about this fivefold division of acts; and that,
in the attempt at a general simplification of play structure, we can do
better by a reduction of them to three or four. Hence, five acts have
shrunk to four or three; so that to-day the form preferred by the best
dramatic artists, looking to Ibsen for leadership, is the three-act
play, though the nature of the story often makes four desirable. A
careful examination of the best plays within a decade will serve to show
that this is definitely the tendency.

The three-act play, with its recognition that every art structure should
have a beginning, middle and end--Aristotle's simple but profound
observation on the tragedy of his day--might seem to be that which marks
the ultimate technic of drama; yet it would be pedantic and foolish to
deny that the simplification may proceed further still and two acts
succeed three, or, further still, one act embrace the complete drama,
thus returning to the "scene individable" of the Greeks and Shakespeare.
Certainly, the whole evolution of form points that way.

But, whatever the final simplification, the play as a whole will present
certain constructive problems; problems which confront the aim ever to
secure, most economically and effectively, the desired dramatic result.
The first of these is the problem of the opening act, which we may now
examine in particular.

II

The first act has a definite aim and difficulties that belong to itself
alone. Broadly speaking, its business is so to open the story as to
leave the audience at the fall of the first curtain with a clear idea of
what it is about; not knowing too much, wishing to know more, and having
well in mind the antecedent conditions which made the story