How to Write a Play | Page 3

some of them see fit to deny it; but they cannot tell us how to do it for the very good reason that it cannot be told. Their charming efforts to find a way out when cornered by such an inquiry as appears to have been made to them are surely worth all their trouble and annoyance--not to speak of their highly probable exasperation.
William Gillette (May, 1916)
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How to Write a Play

I.
From ��mile Augier.
My dear Dreyfus:
You ask me the recipe for making comedies. I don't know it; but I suppose it should resemble somewhat the one given by the sergeant to the conscript for making cannon:
"You take a hole and you pour bronze around it."
If this is not the only recipe, it is at least the one most followed. Perhaps there should be another which would consist in taking bronze and making a hole thru the center and an opening for light at the end. In cannon this hole is called the core. What should it be called in dramatic work? Find another name, if you don't like that one.
These are the only directions I can give you. Add to them, if you wish, this counsel of a wise man to a dramatist in a difficulty:
"Soak your fifth act in gentle tears, and salt the other four with dashes of wit."
I do not think that the author followed this advice.
Cordially yours,
E. Augier
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II.
From Th��odore de Banville.
My dear friend:
Like all questions, the question of the theater is infinitely more simple than is imagined. All poetics, all dramatic criticism is contained in the admirable dictum of Adolphe Dennery: "It is not hard to succeed in the theater, but it is extremely hard to gain success there with a fine play."
To see this clearly you must consider two questions which have no relation to each other:
1. How should one set about composing a dramatic work which shall succeed and make money?
2. How shall one set about composing a dramatic work which shall be fine and shall have some hope of survival?
Reply to the first question: Nothing is known about it; for if anything were known every theater would earn six thousand francs every evening. Nevertheless, a play has some chance of succeeding and earning money if, when read to a na?f person, it moves him, amuses him, makes him laugh or weep; if it falls into the hands of actors who play it in the proper spirit; and if at the public performance the leader of the claque sees no hitch in it.
Reply to the second question: To compose a dramatic work which shall be fine and shall live, have genius! There is no other way. In art talent is nothing. Genius alone lives. A poet of genius combines in himself all poets past and future, just as the first person you meet combines in himself all humanity past and present. A man of genius will create for his theater a form which has not existed before him and which after him will suit no one else.
That, my friend, is all that I know, and I believe that anything further is a delusion. Those who are called "men of the theater" (that is, in plain words, unlettered men who have not studied anywhere but on the stage) have decreed that a man knows the theater when he composes comedies according to the particular formula invented by M. Scribe. You might as well say that humanity began and ended with M. Scribe, that it is he who ate the apple with Eve and who wrote the 'Legendes des Si��cles,' Good Luck!
Yours truly,
Th��odore de Banville
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III.
From Adolphe Dennery.
Take an interesting theme, a subject neither too new nor too old, neither too commonplace or too original,--so as to avoid shocking either the vulgar-minded or the delicate-souled.
Adolphe Dennery.
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IV.
From Alexandre Dumas Fils.
My dear fellow-craftsman and friend:
You ask me how a play is written. You honor me greatly, but you also greatly embarrass me.
With study, work, patience, memory, energy, a man can gain a reputation as a painter, or a sculptor, or a musician. In those arts there are material and mechanical procedures that he can make his own, thanks to ability, and can attain to success. The public to whom these works are submitted, having none of the technical knowledge involved, from the beginning regard the makers of these works as their superiors: They feel that the artist can always reply to any criticism: "Have you learned painting, sculpture, music? No? Then don't talk so vainly. You cannot judge. You must be of the craft to understand the beauties," and so on. It is thus that the good-natured public is frequently imposed on, in painting, in sculpture, in music, by certain schools and celebrities. It