t is
hard to hold the auditor's attention; whereas if the best card is still
up the sleeve we may assume willingness to prolong the game.

With the shift of climax from an earlier to a later place in the piece,
the technic of the handling is changed only according to these
commonsense demands. A knowledge of the psychology of human beings
brought together for the purpose of entertainment will go far toward
settling the question. And whether the playwright place his culminating
effect in act two or three, or whether for good and sufficient reasons
of story complication the three acts become four or even five, the
principles set forth in the above pages apply with only such
modifications as are made necessary by the change.

The theater-goer, seeking to pass an intelligent opinion upon a drama as
a whole, will during this period of growth ask of the playwright that
he keep the auditor's interest and increase it symmetrically; that he
show the plot unfolding in action, instead of talking about it; that he
do not reach the eagerly expected conflagration too soon, nor delay it
too long; and that he make more and more apparent the meaning of the
characters in their relations to each other and to the plot. If the
spectator be confused, baffled, irritated or bored, or any or all of
these, he has a legitimate complaint against the dramatist. And be it
noted that while the majority of a theater audience may not with
self-conscious analysis know why they are dissatisfied, under these
conditions, the dissatisfaction is there, just the same, and thus do
they become critics, though they know it not, even as M. Jourdain talked
prose all his days without being aware of it.

CHAPTER IX

CLIMAX

With the play properly introduced in act one, and the development
carried forward upon that firm foundation in the following act or acts,
the playwright approaches that part of his play which will, more than
anything else, settle the fate of his work. As we have noted, if he have
no such scene, he will not have a play at all. If on arrival it fail to
seem indispensable and to be of dynamic quality, the play will be
broken-winged, at best. The proof that he is a genuine playwright by
rightful calling and not a literary person, producing books for closet
reading, lies just here. The moment has come when, with his complication
brought to the point where it must be solved, and all that has gone
before waiting upon that solution, he must