: Re: How long can a prologue be, and what should you not do? A while back I wrote a prologue about the beginning of time and space and all that. One thing I noticed later is that between the

@Gail2416123

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What do you count as a prologue? In some way, there are two types of prologue:

The explanatory first act

The Greek tradition demanded, that a play or piece starts with some kind of framing device that tells us who is to be depicted and where we are set.

For example, let's take Oedipus Rex. All the text in lines 1 to 150 is the prologue. It starts with the prologue of Oedipus sitting in his throne room and getting confronted with the plague. The whole reason is, to give us some background of who is who, and why he will send for the oracle and seers. But without telling the audience about the plague, showing that Oedipus tries to be a good and just king, how should the audience know? The appearance of Creon brings the audience a new plot element, revealing that the current plague is the result of some action happening in the past, the murder of the former king Laius and that they didn't pursue the murderer then because of the Sphinx. All in all, the Prologue is a huge infodump that puts the spotlight on why the whole drama is about to happen.

The outgrowth that delays the start

Roman writers took the Greek prologue and turned them into long, finely crafted pieces that were hugely elaborate... and took at times just as long to write as the rest of the play. It was around Plautus time when they started with using throwaway characters. On Plautus works did the Renaissance grow and fester, detatching the contents from the main story and making it pretty much superfluous.

How to do a good Prologue

Stay on track, it shall serve to introduce not tell the whole story.
Tie it into the actual story!

You might use the main cast1
or make the happenings appear later2

keep it reasonably short

Footnotes & Examples

As in Oedipus Rex
Example: The Prologue tells a scene of some hero slaying a dragon. The following up story tells us that this scene was the turning point of the last dragon war and later we encounter the tomb of the dragon slayer and the protagonist picks up his sword.

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