in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme.
Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps
even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in
a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance,
and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is
almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an
architect. There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes
working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along.
That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have no
absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for
_Getting Married_ or _Misalliance_, he has sedulously concealed the
fact--to the detriment of the plays.[1]

The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a
dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian _commedia dell'
arte_ wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to
do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as
one or two MS. "Plats," designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant
to testify. The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scenario
to the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of
the German stage. It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may
have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation,
that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits,
and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy
prompted. So, at least, the copious fluency of their dialogue seems to
suggest. But the typical modern play is a much more close-knit organism,
in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by
playwrights who stood near to the days of improvisation, and could
indulge in "the large utterance of the early gods." Consequently it