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 studying his “finder” in order to determine how much of a given prospect he can “get in.”

The answer to the question depends on many things, but chiefly on the nature of the crisis and the nature of the impression which the playwright desires to make upon his audience.  If his play be a comedy, and if his object be gently and quietly to interest and entertain, the chances are that he begins by showing us his personages in their normal state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our eyes.  If, on the other hand, his play be of a more stirring description, and he wants to seize the spectator’s attention firmly from the start, he will probably go straight at his crisis, plunging, perhaps, into the very middle of it, even at the cost of having afterwards to go back in order to put the audience in possession of the antecedent circumstances.  In a third type of play, common of late years, and especially affected by Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which is presently found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, it may be for many years.

Let us glance at a few of Shakespeare’s openings, and consider at what points he attacks his various themes.  Of his comedies, all except one begin with a simple conversation, showing a state of affairs from which the crisis develops with more or less rapidity, but in which it is as yet imperceptibly latent.  In no case does he plunge into the middle of his subject, leaving its antecedents to be stated in what is technically called an “exposition.”  Neither in