What is the average amount of scenes in a play?

Answer 1

It depends on what time period you are talking about, and what your definition of "scene" is. To the French, a scene starts and ends when any character leaves or enters the stage, whereas to the English, a scene starts and ends when the stage is emptied and there is a change of location or time or both. Obviously most plays contain many more French scenes than English ones. Also, Elizabethan plays generally were divided into five acts, each act having between one and eight English scenes, so a play might have sixteen or more scenes. More modern plays have fewer acts and fewer scenes, often three acts which contain one or two scenes each.

Answer 2

It depends on what you mean by a scene and when the play was written. The French consider a scene to begin or end when someone enters or leaves the stage. The English consider a scene to begin or end when the stage is emptied and there is a change of location or time or both. Obviously there are always a lot more "French Scenes" in any play. Historically, Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote plays which were divided into five acts, which could have as few as two or as many as eight scenes in each. Twenty scenes would not be unusual for them. But more modern playwrights, who are not using candles to light their stages and so can write longer acts, and who often prescribe realistic sets which are hard to move, usually have two or three acts, each of which may have one or two scenes. For example, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599) has 18 scenes, but Joseph Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace (1941) has only 4.