How to Write a Play | Page 3

existence.
As to the talented authors of these letters, they know excellently
well--every one of them--how to write a play--or did while still
alive--even tho 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 Émile 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
* * * * *

II.
From Théodore 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 naïf 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 Siècles,'
Good Luck!
Yours truly,
Théodore de Banville
* * * * *

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.
* * * * *

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