act and scene divisions
act and scene divisions.Of the original quartos of Shakespeare's plays, none is divided into numbered scenes (although in Q1 Romeo and Juliet a printer's ornament occasionally appears where new scenes begin) and only Othello (1622) is divided into acts. In the First Folio, nineteen of the plays are divided into acts and scenes, and another ten are divided into acts. Nicholas Rowe's edition (1709) was the first to divide all of the plays into numbered acts and scenes.
Division into scenes was a structural element of early English plays—a new scene began whenever the stage was clear and the action not continuous—but division into acts was a later convention, perhaps adopted from classical drama. Although very few plays written for the adult dramatic companies before 1607 are divided into acts, nearly every one of the extant printed plays written for those companies thereafter is divided into five acts. Gary Taylor has suggested that...
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