* *

[Footnote 1: Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity;
but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names.
Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant
characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque
appellations employed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature
made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time
probable enough in daily life. For example, a slave might be called
Onesimus, "useful," or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function;
but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.]

_BOOK II_

THE BEGINNING

_CHAPTER VI_

THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN

Though, as we have already noted, the writing of plays does not always
follow the chronological sequence of events, in discussing the process
of their evolution we are bound to assume that the playwright begins at
the beginning, and proceeds in orderly fashion, by way of the middle, to
the end. It was one of Aristotle's requirements that a play should have
a beginning, middle and end; and though it may seem that it scarcely
needed an Aristotle to lay down so self-evident a proposition, the fact
is that playwrights are more than sufficiently apt to ignore or despise
the rule.[1] Especially is there a tendency to rebel against the
requirement that a play should have an end. We have seen a good many
plays of late which do not end, but simply leave off: at their head we
might perhaps place Ibsen's _Ghosts_. But let us not anticipate. For the
moment, what we have to inquire is where, and how, a play ought
to begin.

In life there are no such things as beginnings. Even a man's birth is a
quite arbitrary point at which to launch his biography; for the
determining factors in his career are to be found in persons, events,
and conditions that existed before he was ever thought of. For the
biographer, however, and for the novelist as a writer of fictitious
biography, birth forms a good conventional starting-point. He can give a
chapter or so to "Ancestry," and then relate the adventures of his hero
from the cradle onwards. But the dramatist, as we have seen, deals, not
with protracted sequences of events, but with short, sharp crises. The
question for him, therefore, is: at what moment of the crisis, or of its
antecedents, he had better ring up his curtain? At this point he is like
the photographer stud