modern requirements of photoplay producers—there must be a theme, a sort of philosophic cement, as it were, which holds the entire structure and the characters together.
Perhaps Shakespeare consciously and intentionally set out to write a play on "youthful love crossed by ancestral hate" when he wrote Romeo and Juliet." But it is more likely that he concluded to write a story, using "youthful love crossed by ancestral hate" as the basis for conflict, or drama. Hence, as he worked out the play, he did not fall into a tirade against ancestral hate, but rather exposed in masterly and entertaining style what might come of such ancestral hate under a given set of circumstances into which he placed his characters.
I saw a picture of Charles Ray's not long ago, in which he characterized with his usual skill the small town youth who went to the city, became imbued with the notion of waking up his little home town, which had always treated him with indifference, and returned there to arouse the village from its lethargic sleep. It was fun, entertainment, all the way through. Yet it had its theme; for behind it there was the lesson that possibly we do not appreciate the ability of those around us; or that we do not take advantage of the opportunities afforded by our own little world.
Such, then, is theme. It is the social environment, the condition of life, the phase of human activity, or the moral principle into which we plunge our fictional characters, and order them to work out their destinies.
And if we do not give these characters some such driving force, they are likely to amble about aimlessly, getting nowhere and doing nething. The lack of the definite theme, tenaciously and intelligently clung to from start to finish, has been the cause of failure of many a picture upon which fortunes have been lavishly wasted.
In considering the necessity of having a theme, let us turn for a moment to one of our foremost American teachers of dramatic art, Professor George Pierce Baker,
