[The following excerpt is taken from a work that first appeared in Swedish in 1948. Using the historical drama The Glass of Water as his model, Lamm investigates Scribe's dramatic technique and assesses his influence on subsequent playwrights throughout Europe, most notably Henrik Ibsen]

[The German poet and playwright Friedrich Hebbel] writes in his diary; "A real drama can be compared with a big building, which has as many rooms and passages under the ground as above it. Ordinary people only see the latter, but the builder knows both".

Scribe never wrote a "real drama" in this sense. There are no underground passages and rooms in his works; everything is above the ground. He took to heart La Bruyére's maxim, that writing a book is as much a craft as making a clock. In his chosen craft, moreover, Scribe achieved a mastery which was to stand his successors during the next fifty years in good stead. In particular, his skill in the construction of plots provided a firm framework which the shapeless bourgeois dramas had previously lacked. He succeded in writing plays which gave a real impression of contemporary life; he dealt with live issues in a way which made the stage seem their natural setting. It remained for the next generation of playwrights to give the stage drama greater depth. Scribe was not the man to compose literary drama; he wrote for a wider public. To some extent he resembles those playwrights who created the folk drama of the late renaissance in Spain and England. Like them he was an educated man and had originally intended to become a lawyer. Economic reasons had compelled him to turn to playwriting. He wrote his plays to be acted, not to be read, but he knew how to use his education to the best advantage. He was the first of the 19th century playwrights to succeed in living by his pen alone. Hitherto authors had received only a single and very meagre payment for their plays. Scribe however introduced a system of royalties which made him a millionaire and the owner of a great chateau in France. He also formed an association of playwrights to defend their interests against the theatre directors, thanks to which dramatic authors were enabled for the rest of the century to devote themselves wholly to their craft.

It was this system of royalties which Scribe introduced that enabled the younger Dumas, Augier and Ibsen to live a life free from financial worries.

The changes which Scribe introduced into the drama were the most valuable of all reforms during this period. There had been no lack of good poets, shrewd psychologists and profound thinkers ready to try their hand at drama in the early 19th century. The majority, however, had little stage sense, or if they had, stifled it with their theories. Scribe had no great gift for characterization, no high moral or philosophical ideas; he had no style, and was indifferent to all aesthetic theories; but he understood stagecraft better than anyone. His skill at weaving plots was such that he gave to the 19th century drama just what it had hitherto lacked—a firm internal structure. It is surprising to note how rapidly modern drama developed after Scribe, though his disciples soon revolted against the excessive artificiality of their master's plots.

Scribe's dramatic works, including those which he wrote in collaboration with other authors, are estimated at three or four hundred. Not all of these are plays. Scribe also completely transformed the libretti of opera and opéra comique. Opera had not yet shaken itself free from the classical subjects, and the same situations and themes were repeated again and again. Scribe was the creator (as far as the text is concerned) of Grand Opera, his first work being La Muette de Portici (The Mute from Portici). Later he wrote some of the best-known operas of his day, Les Huguenots (The Huguenots), Le Prophète (The Prophet), L'Africaine (The African Woman), and many more. As an opera librettist, his taste was for romantic and colourful subjects, though otherwise he was no romantic. Many of his libretti were not original, but adaptations of others' work; he even had the courage to rewrite Shakespeare's The Tempest as an opera. Of all Scribe's works, his elegant comic operas have perhaps held their place on the stage longest—La dame blanche (The White Lady), Le domino noir (The Black Domino), Fra Diavolo, and many others.

It was for the half-musical Vaudeville theatre that Scribe wrote his first and most of his later plays, and it was here that he first won his reputation. Vaudeville was a light form of drama, dating back to the 17th century. The name really referred to the couplets which occurred in it. For instance in Beaumarchais' Le mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), which is a comedy, there is a vaudeville, that is a series of couplets, at the end of the play. During the 18th century the name came to signify a short musical play with a delicate and sometimes improvised plot, with interspersed couplets, which often have a topical or political significance. During the 18th century this peculiarly French form spread all over Europe.

The reason why Scribe came to write so many vaudevilles or vaudeville-comedies was that the Théâtre Français had special priveleges for the production of both comedies and tragedies. But Scribe was too prolific a writer for the Théâtre Français to take all his works. He had therefore come to an agreement with the Director of the Gymnase Theatre, whereby the latter undertook to stage all Scribe's vaudeville plays—an arrangement, incidentally, which made this director a multi-millionaire.

Scribe was least happy as a writer of lyrics, and he gradually whittled away the couplets until he had removed from vaudeville the last traces of the pastoral drama and the rural idyll. Instead he invested it with a lively Parisian atmosphere. He devoted his attention to devising more elegant and ingenious plots, based on stories both old and new, real and imaginary. Even at this stage he was giving expression to a sober bourgeois attitude that was later to be reflected in modern French drama.

It was above all as a writer of vaudeville that Scribe made his name. In this capacity he became a master from whom Heiberg, Hertz and Hostrup learned much, as did also the distinguished Swedish vaudeville playwrights of whom Blanche was the best. Even when, in his more serious plays, he deals with social problems, there always lingers a faint echo of the gaiety of vaudeville.

Scribe's straight plays are either historical comedies or domestic dramas. In both types his technique is the same, but as his historical plays have retained their popularity longer it is proposed to deal first with them, and in particular with his play Le Verre d'Eau (The Glass of Water). This drama was first produced in 1840 and is still being played to-day. This play gives in essence Scribe's whole philosophy of dramatic art, in so far as he can be said to have had one.

The Glass of Water has the high-sounding sub-title, Les effects et les causes. A glass of water spilt on Queen Anne's dress by the Duchess of Marlborough is the cause of her own disgrace, the collapse of the Whigs, the rise of Bolingbroke and ultimately a revolution in English foreign policy. Scribe wishes to show that from the most trivial incident can result the most catastrophic reversals of fortune. This point of view is put by Boling-broke himself in his famous tirade in the first act; he concludes it by telling how he became a statesman and a Minister of the Crown because he could dance a saraband, and was dismissed because he caught a cold.

This discovery made by Scribe and Bolingbroke is as old as the hills, and many authors at many times have expressed it in more or less the same terms. Scribe found it first in Voltaire who had previously quoted this very same historical incident, the spilling of a glass of water. In direct contrast to Schiller, Scribe conceived a historical event as the result of cunning intrigue, and as set in motion by trivial causes such as personal ambition or vanity. This conception naturally deprived his plays of all semblance of historical reality, but enhanced their dramatic quality. About the actual clash of ideas behind the conflict between Bolingbroke and his enemy we learn nothing.

Significantly enough, it is only against the Duchess of Marlborough that Bolingbroke is fighting; as plotters and counter-plotters they are well matched in cunning. The remaining characters—the Queen who is always vacillating, and the young lovers, Masham and Abigail Churchill—are mere puppets in their hands. The whole play hinges on the rather improbable supposition that Masham is the unconscious object of admiration of two rivals, the Queen and the Duchess. Bolingbroke contrives to make good use of their jealousy, and by the fourth act causes a quarrel to break out between them, at the very moment when the Queen bids Masham hand her the fateful glass of water. The jealous Duchess seizes it and spills the water over the Queen's dress.

Scribe often builds his plays round two young people who fall in love, and are happily united at the end of the fifth act. But their fates are playfully interwoven with serious political struggles and they are used as catspaws by both sides for their own ends. The general idea is to allow the characters to fall victims to all kinds of misunderstandings, which the audience knows all about already and therefore finds all the more entertaining to watch as they see the characters becoming innocently and unconsciously embroiled. If Masham is anxious to confide in one or other of the noble ladies, or they are about to confess their affection for him, the author is sure to interrupt their conversation by some device which leaves them with false impressions of each other's feelings. Letters are intercepted, secret whisperings over-heard and misunderstood, assignations are made, but the person who turns up is always the one whose presence is least desired; this is all according to the convention.

Plots of this kind go far back into dramatic history, and are to be found fully developed in the French playwrights of the 18th century, Marivaux and Beaumarchais. One can even find 18th century examples of comedy based on some historical incident—a type of which Scribe was so fond. What was new in Scribe was the importance which he gave to the plot. In The Glass of Water the love of the Queen and the Duchess of Marl-borough for Masham is regarded solely as a factor in the development of the plot, and the author makes no effort whatever to explain their motives in psychological terms.

The Exposition, which was such an important element in most 19th century drama, is almost entirely missing in Scribe's works. He plunges straight into the action, and from the first moment dramatic tension is high. Scribe then gives himself plenty of time; the real climax is not reached until the fourth act, the fifth being reserved for setting all to rights. Meanwhile the audience is held in suspense. Every new character who appears on the stage adds a new twist to the plot, and leads the audience to look for a solution in a different quarter. To ensure that they fully appreciate the dangers of the situation, the author allows the principal characters to exchange asides which show how the game is going. At the end of the third act Bolingbroke whispers to Abigail, "The match goes well". "It is lost", says Abigail. "It is won", answers Bolingbroke.

At the end of the fourth act comes the big scene which everyone has been waiting for, the same which later on, in the plays of Dumas the younger and Augier was to be known as the scène à faire. In The Glass of Water we have in this scene the fateful glass of water which brings disgrace to the Duchess of Marlborough. The purpose of this technique is of course to ensure that right up to the moment when the curtain rises for the last act the spectator's heart shall be in his mourn. Plays were constructed on this principle not only by the younger Dumas and Augier, but also by Ibsen in his earliest plays.

The last act, however, always brings a happy solution to every problem. The plot is by now so complicated that the audience is quite incapable of guessing the solution, though at the same time entirely confident that all will be well in the end. The dramatic critic Sarcey, who, unlike his contemporaries, cherished an abiding affection for Scribe, was very irritated when the great tragic actress, Madame Bartet, overacted her part in one of Scribe's plays and gave her despair too realistic an expression. The incident occurred in a scene in La bataille de dames (The Ladles' Battle), when her lover was being dragged away to execution by the police. So movingly did the actress depict the agony of young Léonie that Sarcey felt himself compelled in the name of the public to reprove her. "Dear Lady", he said, "Pray do not be so anxious. You are in M. Scribe's hands; he is a fine fellow and he won't let you down. In the last act he will restore your handsome lover and see that you are married. Your young man pretends to put his head on the block, and we pretend to believe that he may lose it. You must pretend to be anxious, because courtesy demands it, but if you are more than reasonably anxious you embarrass both the author and all of us. The emotion that you show must bear some relation to the truth of the situation—and the truth is that none of this is really true: it has never happened".

This passage shows the atmosphere of unreality which pervades Scribe's plays. They are good theatre, and good theatre they are meant to be: they have no pretensions to reality.

The last line of a Scribe play often contains some allusion to the title. In The Glass of Water, Bolingbroke hands Masham his seals of office, and receives the answer "And all this thanks to a glass of water". The Ladies' Battle ends in the same way; "It's not enough to play well in order to win", says the triumphant Countess. "True", replies her opponent, "you need to hold the aces and kings". At which the Countess, with a glance at the happy lover, exclaims, "Especially the King, when ladies wage war". Allusions to card games or chess are characteristic of Scribe, and may be noted in as late a play as Strindberg's Gustav III.

Plots such as those of Scribe would seem quite incredible if he had not also created characters expressly for them. These characters fall into two categories, the intriguers and their victims.

At the centre of his plays there is always a brilliant conspirator, who carries on his intrigues for the sheer joy of intriguing. To enable him to display his art in all its glory, it is necessary that the other characters shall be, if not fools, at least easily led and unsuspecting. The audience are in the chief conspirator's confidence from the very first moment, and by means of his asides they are kept informed of the progress of his plots. Thus they can derive great amusement from the spectacle of those poor credulous wretches who think they are behaving as heroes, when in fact they are being used as pawns by others, or else are chivvied along in ignorance of the fearful dangers around them, until at last they are safe in their lovers' arms, as happens to Masham in The Glass of Water. If ever Scribe tries to create a real character he fails miserably, and his dramas are almost always at their best when they are so full of incident that no one has any time to gain a real impression of the characters.

The dialogue is also determined by the plot. In no way does it resemble ordinary conversation—indeed, it hardly pretends to do so. A typical dramatic dialogue of Scribe's is one where the brilliant characters sparkle like fireworks, while the stupid, the pompous and the gullible betray themselves in every sentence they utter. Scribe's style is considered to be dull, but it is at any rate economical: it carries the reader straight into the action and anchors his attention there.

It is above all in these historical plays that Scribe's virtuosity as a constructor of plots is made plain. For the development of modern drama, however, his contemporary plays have been of at least equal significance. On the whole they are written after the same pattern; but however slight their connexion with real life, these plays, because of the subject with which they deal and the technique employed, have had a considerable effect on modern drama as developed by Augier and Dumas the younger.

The construction of La Camaraderie (Comradeship) is similar to that of the historical plays. Conspiracy and intrigue are represented in a contemporary setting of cliques and coteries. The play introduces us first to a group of people who have made a compact to secure each other's advancement to posts of honour and profit by every available means. To this end they influence opinion in journals and salons, and whisper confidences in the ears of ministers—with such success that all members of the group achieve fame and distinction, while outsiders are discredited and disgraced. As the leader of the conspiracy we find Madame de Mirémont, a former schoolmistress, who has succeeded in marrying a peer of France. There is also a hero, an honest young lawyer who is pushed forward to advancement without his being aware of it. Exactly like Masham in The Glass of Water, he falls in love with a girl, and to win her hand must secure election to Parliament. To achieve this his friends succeed in persuading the influential Mme. de Mirémont that he is in love with her. The ruse is not discovered until too late, when she can no longer take counter-measures, and in the final scene the hero makes this naive recantation: "How wrong I was to lament my fate and the wickedness of mankind. Why, even this morning, I was cursing the age for its plots and intrigues. Now I perceive that friendships can indeed be disinterested, and that one may succeed without recourse to cliques and shameful manœuvres". The play was immensely popular because it openly satirized the cliques which have always flourished in French politics. It is superficial, but it is also witty and entertaining, and it is certainly a fore-runner of the "Comedy of Manners", in which Augier was later to display the sores on the body of French society.

Une Chaîne (A Chain) is probably the play of Scribe's which most foreshadows the dramas of the younger Dumas, a playwright on whom Scribe's technique was to have great influence. It tells of a young man who falls in love with a girl, but feels himself still bound to a former mistress, as if by a heavy chain, and it introduces several characters who are later to become stock figures in modern French drama; the grande dame who falls in love with a young genius, the deceived husband whose duelling pistols are always cocked, the innocent girl led to the altar without knowing anything about her husband or the extent of his affections, and finally the honest and prosperous father-in-law from the country. The issue is really a profoundly serious one, but Scribe cannot resist the temptation to contrive intrigues and really succeeds (without unduly straining our credulity) in presenting a series of highly dramatic situations.

The play shows both Scribe's strength and his weakness. It was written in 1841, and portrayed both characters and situations with a realism that modern drama was not to develop to the full until ten years later. As soon as the complexities of the plot begin to appear, the atmosphere changes, the characters become mere puppets in the author's hands, and the whole thing becomes just an ingenious piece of stagecraft. The novel at this period had already achieved a much higher degree of realism. Ten years before A Chain appeared, Stendhal had written in France Le Rouge et le Noir, a study of a similar situation, but executed with supreme realism and with very shrewd psychological insight.

The attention which Scribe gave to his plots was a very necessary element in the reform and growth of drama, which needed to recover some of the logic it had lost since the great days of the French classical period. The trouble is, however, that the mechanism of Scribe's plots is too obvious, and dramatic tension becomes the dominating factor in his plays. The play becomes a sort of chess problem where the spectator is presented with a situation for which there seems no solution until the author's skill suddenly reveals the move which resolves it. Scribe was once watching a performance of one of his own early plays whose plot he had forgotten; turning to his neighbour he said, "I am curious to see how I got myself out of this one". Perhaps it is the weakness of Scribe's plays that the spectator is more interested in the author's solution to the problem than in the psychological consistency of his characters' behaviour.

Scribe was very fond of placing one character at the mercy of two powerful personalities, each pulling him in a different direction. The typical example of this is The Glass of Water, where young Masham is tossed like a shuttle between the Duchess of Marlborough and Boling-broke. Again in Comradeship the hero is placed between two intriguing ladies, and with various modifications the same situation is found in most of his main plays. The solution is usually so contrived that the main conspirator achieves his object, and removes the last obstacle to the union of the young lovers in the final scene.

By his skill in the construction of plots Scribe became the obvious teacher, to whom young dramatists of succeeding generations looked. It is said of Sardou, his most faithful disciple and the heir of his crown, that he began his career by reading the first act of a Scribe drama with which he was not familiar, then composing the rest of the play, and finally comparing the result with Scribe's original.

The more ambitious playwrights of the realistic modem drama school which followed Scribe also made use of his technique. This holds true even of the younger Dumas, who rather ungratefully described Scribe as the Shakespeare of the shadow theatre, the master who could construct plays with characters who never came alive. Naturally Björnson and Ibsen were not such close intimates of Scribe, but in their young days, when they were theatre directors, they came much under his influence, because the Norwegian repertory gave pride of place to his plays. Björnson, indeed, in his early theatre reviews expressly warned his contemporaries not to omit that stage in development which could be described by the name of "the man with the new theatre machine". The influence of Scribe on Björnson's plays is apparent, not only in the early Norse dramas, but also in later contemporary plays. In his great feminist play, Leonardo, a forerunner of Ibsen's A Doll's House, the resemblance to The Ladies' Battle was so plain that he found it advisable to make one of his heroines say that she had just read the play.

The influence of Scribe also dominated Ibsen when he wrote his early historical plays, especially Fru Inger til Östråt (Lady Inger of Östråt), while his play, De unges forbund (The League of Youth), has as its hero, Stensgård, a mere puppet of the Scribe type who is tossed to and fro between two experienced plotters, Daniel Hejre and Lundestad. Gradually Ibsen cut the threads that bound him to Scribe's involved plots, but he never quite succeeded in freeing himself entirely from the tendency to over-elaborate his plots. Without those years of apprentice-ship to Scribe, however, he might never have become the greatest master of technique in modem drama.