a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.]




_CHAPTER V_

DRAMATIS PERSONAE


The theme being chosen, the next step will probably be to determine what
characters shall be employed in developing it. Most playwrights, I take
it, draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious
work of construction. Ibsen seems always to have done so; but, in some
of his plays, the list of persons was at first considerably larger than
it ultimately became. The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters
rejected from one play, and used them in another. Thus Boletta and Hilda
Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and
Beata; and the delightful Foldal of _John Gabriel Borkman_ was a
character left over from _The Lady from the Sea_.

The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without
determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to
employ. There are in every play essential characters, without whom the
theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the
theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on
the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is
essential or auxiliary--it depends upon how we define the theme. In
_Hamlet_, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly
essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain