excessive emphasis on the constructive phase of the playwright's problem;
and allowance must of course be made for the divergent mental habits of
individual authors. But almost any playwright will tell you that he feels
as if his task were practically finished when he arrives at the point when
he finds himself prepared to begin the writing of his dialogue. This
accounts for the otherwise unaccountable rapidity with which many of the
great plays of the world have been written. Dumas _fils_ retired to the
country and wrote _La Dame aux Camélias_--a four-act play--in eight
successive days. But he had previously told the same story in a novel; he
knew everything that was to happen in his play; and the mere writing could
be done in a single headlong dash. Voltaire's best tragedy, _Zaïre_, was
written in three weeks. Victor Hugo composed _Marion Delorme_ between June
1 and June 24, 1829; and when the piece was interdicted by the censor, he
immediately turned to another subject and wrote _Hernani_ in the next three
weeks. The fourth act of _Marion Delorme_ was written in a single day. Here
apparently was a very fever of composition. But again we must remember that
both of these plays had been devised before the author began to write them;
and when he took his pen in hand he had already been working on them in
scenario for probably a year. To write ten acts in Alexandrines, with
feminine rhymes alternating with masculine, was still, to be sure, an
appalling task; but Hugo was a facile and prolific poet, and could write
very quickly after he had determined exactly what it was he had to write.

It was with all of the foregoing points in mind that, in the opening
sentence of this chapter, I defined a play as a story "devised," rather
than a story "written." We may now consider the significance of the next
phrase of that definition, which states that a play is devised to be
"presented," rather than to be "read."

The only way in which it is possible to study most of the great plays of