Roughly, one may put dramas into three categories--the play of anecdote, the play of idea, and the play of character. "Percival" recognises the third category by his remark that "sometimes your French dramatist just takes people with characteristics and lets them work out their own play for him." As a matter of fact, few plays belong exclusively to any one of these categories. In which would "Percival" place Shakespeare's? He began to write a play by borrowing the plot from somebody, and primarily all his pieces may be regarded as anecdotal, but, in the passage of the story through his mind to the pen, in some cases it became the vehicle for an idea, and, in all, the story grew to be of infinitely less importance than the characters. Take _Othello_. You may give an account of it as a story in which it is merely an adaptation of another man's work. You may treat it as a study of the idea of jealousy, and be uncertain whether suspicion is not more correct as a definition than jealousy, or you may consider it as an amazing gallery of pictures of character. It may be put into each category, and belongs to all. Probably the question whether a drama belongs primarily to this, that, or the other of the categories is as otiose as the discussion whether the hen or the egg came first. No play lives that does not belong to the second and third category, and it cannot be put upon the boards without some reliance upon the first. On the other hand, whatever may be the belief of individual dramatists, it is doubtful whether any dramas are produced primarily based upon "taking people with characteristics and letting them work out their own play." It is obvious that people, even people with strongly marked characteristics, can live for years in juxtaposition without their relation to one another resulting in anything dramatic, or even theatrical. Paula Tanqueray and her husband might have lived and died unhappily together without offering any materials to the playwright, and so indeed might any of the characters in any of the plays by the brilliant author. Only when facts exterior to them begin to play upon the characters dramatically is there room for drama. There is an enormous amount of plot, psychological or physical, in every play. Next to the first, the second category produces the plays most clearly defined. One might take the plays of Brieux, and some of the dead-and-gone dramas of Charles Reade. Here we have dramas of idea, more accurately of subject, still more accurately of problem. They are works in which the dramatist tries to prove something, or, at least, present some problem of social life, leaving to the audience the task of coming to a conclusion.