Therefore, dramatic effect implies more than contact of different characters. It is concerned with such a placing of the characters as will reveal something of motives.
Two men may meet continually in society or in the ordinary and conventional relations of business and the peculiar characteristics of neither may ever be revealed. Steel and flint may lie passively side by side or may be frozen in the same ice without any suggestion of heat. The steel must strike the flint suddenly to bring forth a spark of fire. In the same way, character must collide with character in such a situation, such a conflict of interests, such opposite determinations or ambitions, as will cause a revelation of motives and dispositions. Steel and flint illustrate character. The stroke is the situation, the spark the dramatic result. Place, accordingly, is often of great importance in dramatic art.
The monologue is no exception to this. The reader must definitely imagine not only a speaker and a listener, but also a location or situation. From a dramatic point of view, situation is perhaps more necessary to a monologue than to a play. Without a situation, nothing can be dramatic.
In Browning's "Up at a Villa--Down in the City," is the speaker located in the city, at the villa, or at some point between the two?
(AS DISTINGUISHED BY AN ITALIAN PERSON OF QUALITY)
Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square; Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!
Something to see, by Bacchus, something to hear, at least! There, the whole day long, one's life is a perfect feast; While up at a villa one lives, I maintain it, no more than a beast.
Well now, look at our villa! stuck like the horn of a bull Just on a mountain's edge as bare as the creature's skull, Save a mere shag of a bush with hardly a leaf to pull! --I scratch my own, sometimes, to see if the hair's turned wool.
But the city, oh the city--the square with the houses! Why? They are stone-faced, white as a curd, there's something to take the eye! Houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry! You watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who hurries by: Green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the sun gets high; And the shops with fanciful signs which are painted properly.