Ernest. Sensation! Explosion! Hardly, and that only just upon the fall of the curtain.
D. Julian. Which means that the play begins when the curtain falls?
Ernest. I am inclined to admit it. But I will endeavour to give it a little warmth.
D. Julian. My dear lad, what you have to do is to write the second play, the one that begins where the first ends. For the other, according to your description, would be difficult to write, and is not worth the trouble.
Ernest. 'Tis the conclusion I have come to myself.
D. Julian. Then we agree, thanks to your skill and logic. And what is the name?
Ernest. That's another difficulty. I can find none.
D. Julian. What do you say? No name either?
Ernest. No, unless, as Don Hermogenes[1] says, we could put it into Greek for greater clarity.
D. Julian. Of a surety, Ernest, you were dozing when I came in. You have been dreaming nonsense.
Ernest. Dreaming! yes. Nonsense! perhaps. I talk both dreams and nonsense. But you are sensible and always right.
D. Julian. In this case it does not require much penetration. A drama in which the chief personage cannot appear; in which there is hardly any love; in which nothing happens but what happens every day; that begins with the fall of the curtain upon the last act, and which has no name. I don't know how it is to be written, still less how it is to be acted, how it is to find an audience, nor how it can be called a drama.
- ↑ A pedant in Moratin's Comedia Nueva, who quotes Greek incessantly to make himself better understood.—Tran.
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