When do public-domain craft manuals say a character should change, and when should it stay constant or be only revealed?

Archer (1912, Ch. XXII) argues that critics who complain of 'no development' usually mean no unveiling of latent qualities, not no change: within one play-length crisis a real change of habits would have to be catastrophic and hard to believe, so the stage character should be put to a new test that discloses more of him. In the novel, gradual alteration has time. Archer's Ch. XIX adds a rule for conversions: a change of resolve needs a new fact or motive, never just the clock. Hamilton (1908) defines static versus dynamic characters by change over the story and calls developing a character one of fiction's greatest possibilities; his 1910 theatre book uses 'dynamic' for will-driven characters, a different meaning. Curator qualifications: 7 of 7 excerpts present. Hamilton 1908 context: 'The recurrent characters of Mr. Kipling's early tales, such as Mrs. Hauksbee, Strickland, Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, are static figures'; 'To show a character developing under stress or ripening easily beneath beneficent influences is one of the greatest possibilities of fiction.' Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

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      "url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10865/pg10865.txt",
      "note": "Archer, Play-Making Ch. XIX, XXII; Hamilton 1908 Materials and Methods of Fiction (Gutenberg 30776; equals pin); Hamilton 1910 Theory of the Theatre (Gutenberg 13589; equals pin)"
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      "url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30776/pg30776.txt",
      "note": "Archer, Play-Making Ch. XIX, XXII; Hamilton 1908 Materials and Methods of Fiction (Gutenberg 30776; equals pin); Hamilton 1910 Theory of the Theatre (Gutenberg 13589; equals pin)"
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      "url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13589/pg13589.txt",
      "note": "Archer, Play-Making Ch. XIX, XXII; Hamilton 1908 Materials and Methods of Fiction (Gutenberg 30776; equals pin); Hamilton 1910 Theory of the Theatre (Gutenberg 13589; equals pin)"
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