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