If you deal with Napoleon, for instance, it is perfectly clear that he

must dominate the stage
If you deal with Napoleon, for instance, it is perfectly clear that he
must dominate the stage. As soon as you bring in the name, the idea, of
Napoleon Bonaparte, men have eyes and ears for nothing else; and they
demand to see him, in a general way, acting up to their general
conception of him. That was what Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin
Strong forgot in their otherwise clever play, _The Exile_. It is useless
to prove, historically, that at a given moment he was passive, supine,
unconscious, while people around him were eagerly plotting his escape
and restoration. That may have been so; but it is not what an audience
wants to see. It wants to see Napoleon Napoleonizing. For anomalies and
uncharacteristic episodes in Napoleon"s career we must go to books; the
playhouse is not the place for them. It is true that a dramatist like
Mr. Bernard Shaw may, at his own risk and peril, set forth to give us a
new reading of Caesar or of Napoleon, which may or may not be
dramatically acceptable.[5] But this is not what Messrs. Osbourne and
Strong tried to do. Their Napoleon was the Napoleon of tradition--only
he failed to act 'in a concatenation according.'