The rule of putting only suspensory and preparatory action in the first act is universally followed by Shakespeare and all other successful writers of plays, and is better settled than any other. The first act occupies the office of the first volume of a novel, explaining all the story. Very frequently, in the modern French drama especially, it assumes the form of a prologue, the action transpiring at an interval of several years, sometimes a whole generation, before the rest of the play. Only one instance of this character is found in Shakespeare, in the "Winter's Tale," where the action of the drama demands a prologue, but it is quite common in modern times, while another custom of Shakespeare's--that of dividing a historical play into two "parts"--has quite gone out of fashion. Its only modern example is that of Wagner's opera of the "Niebelungen Ring," which takes a week to get through. The Chinese and Japanese have a strong taste for this kind of play, but the practice has vanished from Anglo-Saxon civilization. It must be confessed that the employment of a prologue is rather a clumsy way of opening a play. It is too apt to be complete in itself, and to join clumsily to the rest of the drama. Besides this, it is hard to preserve the illusion that the small child who appears in the prologue has developed into the good-looking young person who is the heroine of the rest of the play. The "Sea of Ice" is a familiar instance of this sort of thing, where the same actress who personates the mother in the first act, and gets drowned, blossoms into a girl of eighteen in the second act, supposed to be her own daughter, last seen as a small child. In "Winter's Tale" there is nothing of this. The supposed Perdita of Act I. is merely a rag baby, and mother and child reappear together thereafter. In cases where the interval between prologue and play is limited to a year or two, this objection does not apply; in fact such prologues are quite common and useful. The fanciful and magic prologue to the "Marble Heart" is a very happy instance of conquest of the difficulties inherent in long separated prologues. The wrench is so sudden from a Greek sculptor to a French sculptor, from Athenian dresses to Parisian, that the main interest of the play lies in the identification of the ancient characters in the new dress, and the very fanciful absurdity of the plot lends it an air of reality essentially dramatic. The end is illusion, and illusion it is.