Act (theater)

See also: Act

A act is the principal subdivision of a Play or a opera. It is the part of a dramatic work separated from following by a Entracte or interval during which the Scène either empty or is filled by a foreign Intermède with the action represented.

An act is characterized by a unit of time and, in general, by a unity of place. A change of act often makes it possible the author to carry out a temporal ellipse or a change of place and thus to make progress the intrigue.

In the French traditional theater, a part comprised five acts. However to respect the Règle of the three units no change proceeded from one act to another. The length of the act corresponded to the lifespan of the candles laid out to light the room, that is to say approximately a score of minutes.

Two acts are separated by a Entracte, short period during which the representation is stopped. Each act can be itself subdivided in Scène S, or tables. The passage from one scene to another corresponds in general to the entry or the exit of a character.

The Greek theater was unaware of the division of the parts in acts. Theoretically, the Greek parts consisted of several quite distinct parts, named protase , épitase , catastase , and catastrophe , but actually no interval separated these parts. When the main actors disappeared from the scene, they were replaced by the chorus, whose songs remained generally related to the action. None old which quoted passages of Comédie S or Greek Tragédie S them indicated by the act from where they are drawn, and Aristote does not make null mention in its Poétique of a similar division.

The Roman theater used, on the other hand, division by acts. The comedies of Plaute and Terence, the tragedies of Sénèque attest it and, already time of Horace, it had become an absolute precept:

Firn minor, neu sit quinto productior actu

Confabulated, qua posci vult and spectata reponi.

All the theater of more or less observed this rule. Corneille praises exactitude with which it obeys there in its first comedies, at the point of going until compelling itself not to insert two worms moreover in one act that in another.

Division by act is, in fact, very arbitrary and has raison d'être only in the tiredness of the spectator or the actor. The rigorous determination of the number of acts is even justified. The modern theater, which proportions the number of the acts to the nature and the importance of the subject, thus did not apply the precept of Horace with a scrupulous fidelity, and one counts parts in one, two, three, four or five acts, division in four acts seeming to have the favor of the serious comedy.

The former French rhetoricians, Vossius inter alia, justified the devoted number, by saying that the subject had initially to be exposed, to develop the intrigue per degrees then, to arrive at the node, to prepare the outcome and finally to conclude. Actually, several parts of this multiple task can be achieved at the same time.

Division by acts is a dramatic provision which also meets in the theaters in Persia, in India and as far as China, where it is essential to one duration old spectacles sometimes of several days.

Source

Gustave Vapereau, universal Dictionary of the literatures , Paris, Hatchet, 1876, p. 24

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