ntricity--that is what a name ought to be. As
the characteristic quality depends upon a hundred indefinable,
subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any
principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that
the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key
of the play--that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in
farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate
names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are
habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would
often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play,
until at last he arrived at one which seemed absolutely to fit the
character; but the appropriateness of his names is naturally lost upon
foreign audiences.

One word may perhaps be said on the recent fashion--not to say fad--of
suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of "Dramatis
Personae." Bjoernson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am
aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know
whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, or
whether they arrived independently at the same austere principle, by
sheer force of individual genius. The matter is a trifling one--so
trifling that the departure from established practice has something of
the air of a pedantry. It is not, on the whole, to be approved. It adds
perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking
up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and
appreciable pleasure of anticipation. There is a peculiar and not
irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and
thinking: "In the course of three hours, I shall know these people: I
shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a
great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever."
It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist's calling that
he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot
commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us
feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of
conversational novel. A list of characters, it is true, may also affect
one with acute anticipations of boredom; but I have never yet found a
play less tedious by reason of the suppression of the "Dramatis
Personae."

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