Interest of Plot.

WE now come to the third great division of Dramatic Criticism—Plot, or the purely intellectual side of action. Action itself has been treated above as the mutual connection and interweaving of all the details in a work of art so as to unite in an impression of unity. But we have found it impossible to discuss Character and Passion entirely apart from such action and interworking: the details of human interest become dramatic by being permeated with action-force. When however this mutual relation of all the parts is looked at by itself, as an abstract interest of design, the human life being no more than the material to which this design is applied, then we get the interest of Plot. So defined, I hope Plot is sufficiently removed from the vulgar conception of it as sensational mystery, which has done so much to lower this element of dramatic effect in the eyes of literary students. If Plot be understood as the extension of design to the sphere of human life, threads of experience being woven into a symmetrical pattern as truly as vari-coloured threads of wool are woven into a piece of wool-work, then the conception of it will come out in its true dignity. What else is such reduction to order than the meeting-point of science and art? Science is engaged in tracing rhythmic movements in the beautiful confusion of the heavenly bodies, or reducing the bewildering variety of external nature to regular species and nice gradations of life. Similarly, art continues the work of creation in calling ideal order out of the chaos of things as they are. And so the tangle of life, with its jumble of conflicting aspirations, its crossing and twisting of contrary motives, its struggle and partnership of the whole human race, in which no two individuals are perfectly alike and no one is wholly independent of the rest—this has gradually in the course of ages been laboriously traced by the scientific historian into some such harmonious plan as evolution. But he finds himself long ago anticipated by the dramatic artist, who has touched crime and seen it link itself with nemesis, who has transformed passion into pathos, who has received the shapeless facts of reality and returned them as an ordered economy of design. This application of form to human life is Plot: and Shakespeare has had no higher task to accomplish than in his revolutionising our ideas of Plot, until the old critical conceptions of it completely broke down when applied to his dramas. The appreciation of Shakespeare will not be complete until he is seen to be as subtle a weaver of plots as he is a deep reader of the human heart.

We have to consider Plot in its three aspects of unity, complexity, and development. The Single Action.The simplest element of Plot is the Single Action, which may be defined as any train of incidents in a drama which can be conceived as a separate whole. Thus a series of details bringing out the idea of a crime and its nemesis will constitute a Nemesis Action, an oracle and its fulfilment will make up an Oracular Action, a problem and its solution a Problem Action. Throughout the treatment of Plot the root idea of pattern should be steadily kept in mind: in the case of these Single Actions—the units of Plot—we have as it were the lines of a geometrical design, made up of their details as a geometrical line is made up of separate points. Forms of Dramatic Action.The Form of a dramatic action—the shape of the line, so to speak—will be that which gives the train of incidents its distinctiveness: the nemesis, the oracle, the problem. An action may get its distinctiveness from its tone as a Comic Action or a Tragic Action; or it may be a Character Action, when a series of details acquire a unity in bringing out the character of Hastings or Lady Macbeth; an action may be an Intrigue, or the Rise and Fall of a person, or simply a Story like the Caskets Story. Finally, an action may combine several different forms at the same time, just as a geometrical line may be at once, say, an arch and a spiral. The action that traces Macbeth's career has been treated as exhibiting a triple form of Nemesis, Irony, and Oracular Action; further, it is a Tragic Action in tone, it is a Character Action in its contrast with the career of Lady Macbeth, and it stands in the relation of Main Action to others in the play.

Now what I have called Single Action constituted the whole conception of Plot in ancient Tragedy; in the Shakespearean Drama it exists only as a unit of Complex Action. The application of complexity to action is rendered particularly easy by the idea of pattern, patterns which appeal to the eye being more often made up of several lines crossing and interweaving than of single lines. Ancient tragedy clung to 'unity of action,' and excluded such matter as threatened to set up a second interest in a play. Modern Plot has a unity of a much more elaborate order, perhaps best expressed by the word harmony—a harmony of distinct actions, each of which has its separate unity. The illustration of harmony is suggestive. Just as in musical harmony each part is a melody of itself, though one of them leads and is the melody, so a modern plot draws together into a common system a Main Action and other inferior yet distinct actions. Moreover the step from melody alone to melody harmonised, or that from the single instruments of the ancient world to the combinations of a modern orchestra, marks just the difference between ancient and modern art which we find reflected in the different conception of Plot held by Sophocles and by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plots are federations of plots: in his ordering of dramatic events we trace a common self-government made out of elements which have an independence of their own, and at the same time merge a part of their independence in common action.

The foundation of critical treatment in the matter of Plot is the Analysis of Complex Action into its constituent Single[5] Actions. This is easy in such a play as The Merchant of Venice. Here two of the actions are stories, a form of unity readily grasped, and which in the present case had an independent existence outside the play. These identified and separated, it is easy also to see that Jessica constitutes a fresh centre of interest around which other details gather themselves; that the incidents in which Launcelot and Gobbo are concerned are separable from these; while the matter of the rings constitutes a distinct episode of the Caskets Story: already the junction of so many separate stories in a common working gratifies our sense of design. In other plays where the elements are not stories the individuality of the Single Actions will not always be so positive: all would readily distinguish the Lear Main plot from the Underplot of Gloucester, but in the subdivision of these difference of opinion arises. Canons of Analysis.In an Appendix to this chapter I have suggested schemes of Analysis for each of the five plays treated in this work: Analysis tentative not positive.I may here add four remarks. (1) Any series of details which can be collected from various parts of a drama to make up a common interest may be recognised in Analysis as a separate action. It follows from this that there may be very different modes of dividing and arranging the elements of the same plot: such Analysis is not a matter in which we are to look for right or wrong, but simply for better or worse. No scheme will ever exhaust the wealth of design which reveals itself in a play of Shakespeare; and the value of Analysis as a critical process is not confined to the scheme it produces, but includes also the insight which the mere effort to analyse a drama gives into the harmony and connection of its parts. Design as the test of Analysis.(2) The essence of Plot being design, that will be the best scheme of Analysis which best brings out the idea of symmetry and design. Analysis exhaustive.(3) Analysis must be exhaustive: every detail in the drama must find a place in some one of the actions. The elementary actions not mutually exclusive.(4) The constituent actions will of course not be mutually exclusive, many details being common to several actions: these details are so many meeting-points, in which the lines of action cross one another.—With these sufficiently obvious principles I must leave the schemes of analysis in the Appendix to justify themselves.

In the process of analysis we are led to notice special forms of action: in particular, the Enveloping Action. This interesting element of Plot may be described as the fringe, or border, or frame, of a dramatic pattern. It appears when the personages and incidents which make up the essential interest of a play are more or less loosely involved with some interest more wide-reaching than their own, though more vaguely presented. It is seen in its simplest form where a story occupied with private personages connects itself at points with public history: homely life being thus wrapped round with life of the great world; fiction having reality given to it by its being set in a frame of accepted fact. We are familiar enough with it in prose fiction. Almost all the Waverley Novels have Enveloping Actions, Scott's regular plan being to entangle the fortunes of individuals, which are to be the main interest of the story, with public events which make known history. Thus in Woodstock a Cavalier maiden and her Puritan lover become, as the story proceeds, mixed up in incidents of the Commonwealth and Restoration; or again, the plot of Redgauntlet, which consists in the separate adventures of a pair of Scotch friends, is brought to an issue in a Jacobite rising in which both become involved. The Enveloping Action is a favourite element in Shakespeare's plots. In the former part of the book I have pointed out how the War of the Roses forms an Enveloping Action to Richard III; how its connection with the other actions is close enough for it to catch the common feature of Nemesis; and how it is marked with special clearness by the introduction of Queen Margaret and the Duchess of York to bring out its opposite sides. In Macbeth there is an Enveloping Action of the supernatural centring round the Witches: the human workings of the play are wrapped in a deeper working out of destiny, with prophetic beings to keep it before us. Julius CÆsar, as a story of political conspiracy and political reaction, is furnished with a loose Enveloping Action in the passions of the Roman mob: this is a vague power outside recognised political forces, appearing at the beginning to mark that uncertainty in public life which can drive even good men to conspiracy, while from the turning-point it furnishes the force the explosion of which is made to secure the conspirators' downfall. A typical example is to be found in Lear, all the more typical from the fact that it is by no means a prominent interest in the play. The Enveloping Action in this drama is the French War. The seeds of this war are sown in the opening incident, i. i. 265.in which the French King receives his wife from Lear with scarcely veiled insult: i. ii. 23.it troubles Gloucester in the next scene that France is 'in choler parted.' Then we get, in the second Act, a distant hint of rupture from the letter of Cordelia read by Kent in the stocks. ii. ii. 172.In the other scenes of this Act the only political question is of 'likely wars toward' between the English dukes; ii. i. 11.but at the beginning of the third Act Kent directly connects these quarrels of the dukes with the growing chance of a war with France: iii. i. 19-34.the French have had intelligence of the 'scattered kingdom,' and have been 'wise in our negligence.' In this Act Gloucester confides to Edmund the feeler he has received from France, iii. iii.and his trustfulness is the cause of his downfall; iii. iii. 22.Edmund treacherously reveals the confidence to Cornwall, iii. v. 18.and makes it the occasion of his rise. Gloucester's measures for the safety of Lear have naturally a connection with the expected invasion, iii. vi. 95-108.and he sends him to Dover to find welcome and protection. iii. vii. 2, &c.The final scene of this Act, devoted to the cruel outrage on Gloucester, shows from its very commencement the important connection of the Enveloping Action with the rest of the play: the French army has landed, and it is this which is felt to make Lear's escape so important, and which causes such signal revenge to be taken on Gloucester. Throughout the fourth Act all the threads of interest are becoming connected with the invading army at Dover; if this Act has a separate interest of its own in Edmund's intrigues with both Goneril and Regan at once, iv. ii. 11, 15; iv. v. 12, 30 &c.yet these intrigues are possible only because Edmund is hurrying backwards and forwards between the princesses in the measures of military preparation for the battle. The fifth Act has its scene on the battlefield, and the double issue of the battle stamps itself on the whole issue of the play: the death of Lear and Cordelia is the result of the French defeat, while, on the other hand, v. iii. 238, 256.all who were to reap the fruits of guilt die in the hour of victory. Thus this French War is a model of Enveloping Action—outside the main issues, yet loosely connecting itself with every phase of the movement; originating in the incident which is the origin of the whole action; the possibility of it developed by the progress of the Main story, alike by the cruelty shown to Lear and by the rivalry between his daughters; the fear of it playing a main part in the tragic side of the Underplot, and the preparation for it serving as occasion for the remaining interest of intrigue; finally, breaking out as a reality in which the whole action of the play merges.

From Analysis we pass naturally to Economy. Considered in the abstract, as a phase of plot-beauty, Economy may be defined as that perfection of design which lies midway between incompleteness and waste. Its formula is that a play must be seen to contain all the details necessary to the unity, no detail superfluous to the unity, and each detail expanded in exact proportion to its bearing on the unity. In practice, as a branch of treatment in Shakespeare-Criticism, Economy, like Analysis, deals with complexity of plot. The two are supplementary to one another. The one resolves a complexity into its elements, the other traces the unity running through these elements. Analysis distinguishes the separate actions which make up a plot, while Economy notes the various bonds between these actions and the way in which they are brought into a common system: it being clear that the more the separateness of the different interests can be reduced the richer will be the economy of design.

It will be enough to note three Economic Forms. ConnectionThe first is simple Connection: the actual contact of action with action, the separate lines of the pattern meeting at various points. In other words, the different actions have details or personages in common. Bassanio is clearly a bond between the two main stories of The Merchant of Venice, in both of which he figures so prominently; and it has been pointed out that the scene of Bassanio's successful choice is an incident with which all the stories which enter into the action of the play connect themselves. and Linking.There are Link Personages, who have a special function so to connect stories, and similarly Link Actions: Gloucester in the play of Lear and the Jessica Story in The Merchant of Venice are examples. Or Connection may come by the interweaving of stories as they progress: they alternate, or fill, so to speak, each other's interstices. from ii. i. to iii. ii. 319.Where the Story of the Jew halts for a period of three months, the elopement of Jessica comes to occupy the interval; or again, scenes from the tragedy of the Gloucester family separate scenes from the tragedy of Lear, until the two tragedies have become mutually entangled. Envelopment too serves as a kind of Connection: the actions which make up such a play as Richard III gain additional compactness by their being merged in a common Enveloping Action.

Another Form of Economy is Dependence. This term expresses the relation between an underplot and main plot, or between subactions and the actions to which they are subordinate. compare i. i. 35, 191.The fact that Gloucester is a follower of Lear—he would appear to have been his court chamberlain—makes the story of the Gloucester family seem to spring out of the story of the Lear family; that we are not called upon to initiate a fresh train of interest ministers to our sense of Economy.

But in the Shakespearean Drama the most important Economic Form is Symmetry: between different parts of a design symmetry is the closest of bonds. Balance.A simple form of Symmetry is the Balance of actions, by which, as it were, the mass of one story is made to counterpoise that of another. If the Caskets Story, moving so simply to its goal of success, seems over-weighted by the thrilling incidents of the Jew Story, we find that the former has by way of compensation the Episode of the Rings rising out of its close, while the elopement of Jessica and her reception at Belmont transfers a whole batch of interests from the Jew side of the play to the Christian side. Or again, in a play such as Macbeth, which traces the Rise and Fall of a personage, the Rise is accompanied by the separate interest of Banquo till he falls a victim to its success; to balance this we have in the Fall Macduff, who becomes important only after Banquo's death, and from that point occupies more and more of the field of view until he brings the action to a close. Similarly in Julius CÆsar the victim himself dominates the first half; Antony, his avenger, succeeds to his position for the second half. Parallelism and Contrast.More important than Balance as forms of Symmetry are Parallelism and Contrast of actions. Both are, to a certain extent, exemplified in the plot of Macbeth: the triple form of Nemesis, Irony, and Oracular binding together all the elements of the plot down to the Enveloping Action illustrates Parallelism, and Contrast has been shown to be a bond between the interest of Lady Macbeth and of her husband. But Parallelism and Contrast are united in their most typical forms in Lear, which is at once the most intricate and the most symmetrical of Shakespearean dramas. A glance at the scheme of this plot shows its deep-seated parallelism. A Main story in the family of Lear has an Underplot in the family of Gloucester. The Main plot is a problem and its solution, the Underplot is an intrigue and its nemesis. Each is a system of four actions: there is the action initiating the problem with the three tragedies which make up its solution, there is again the action generating the intrigue and the three tragedies which constitute its nemesis. The threefold tragedy in the Main plot has its elements exactly analogous, each to each, to the threefold tragedy of the Underplot: Lear and Gloucester alike reap a double nemesis of evil from the children they have favoured, and good from the children they have wronged; the innocent Cordelia has to suffer like the innocent Edgar; alike in both stories the gains of the wicked are found to be the means of their destruction. Even in the subactions, which have only a temporary distinctness in carrying out such elaborate interworking, the same Parallelism manifests itself. e.g. i. iv. 85-104; ii. ii, &c.They run in pairs: where Kent has an individual mission as an agency for good, Oswald runs a course parallel with him as an agency for evil; e.g. iv. ii. 29; v. iii, from 59.of the two heirs of Lear, Albany, after passively representing the good side of the Main plot, has the function of presiding over the nemesis which comes on the evil agents of the Underplot, while Cornwall, who is active in the evil of the iii. vii.Main plot, is the agent in bringing suffering on the good victims of the Underplot; iv. ii; iv. v; v. iii. 238.once more from opposite sides of the Lear story Goneril and Regan work in parallel intrigues to their destruction. Every line of the pattern runs parallel to some distant line. Further, so fundamental is the symmetry that we have only to shift the point of view and the Parallelism becomes Contrast. If the family histories be arranged around Cordelia and Edmund, as centres of good and evil in their different spheres, we perceive a sharp antithesis between the two stories extending to every detail: though stated already in the chapter on Lear, I should like to state it again in parallel columns to do it full justice.

The play of Lear is itself sufficient to suggest to the critic that in the analysis of Shakespeare's plots he may safely expect to find symmetry in proportion to their intricacy.

Movement applied to Plot becomes Motive Form: without its being necessary to take the play to pieces Motive Form is the impression of design left by the succession of incidents in the order in which they actually stand. Simple Movement: the Line of Motion a straight line.The succession of incidents may suggest progress to a goal, as in the Caskets Story. This is preeminently Simple[6] Movement: the Line of Motion becomes a straight line. We get the next step by the variation that is made when a curved line is substituted for a straight line: in other words, when the succession of incidents reaches its goal, but only after a diversion. Complicated Movement: the Line of Motion a curve.This is what is known as Complication and Resolution. A train of events is obstructed and diverted from what appears its natural course, which gives the interest of Complication: after a time the obstruction is removed and the natural course is restored, which is the Resolution of the action: the Complication, like a musical discord, having existed only for the sake of being resolved. No clearer example could be desired than that of Antonio, whose career when we are introduced to it appears to be that of leading the money-market of Venice and extending patronage and protection all around; by the entanglement of the bond this career is checked and Antonio turned into a prisoner and bankrupt; then Portia cuts the knot and Antonio becomes all he has been before. iii. ii. 173.Or again, the affianced intercourse of Portia and Bassanio begins with an exchange of rings; iv. ii.by the cross circumstances connected with Antonio's trial one of them parts with this token, and the result is a comic interruption to the smoothness of lovers' life, v. i. 266.until by Portia's confession of the ruse the old footing is restored.

Such Complicated Movement belongs entirely to the Action side of dramatic effect. It rests upon design and the interworking of details; its interest lies in obstacles interposed to be removed, doing for the sake of undoing, entanglement for its own sake; in its total effect it ministers to a sense of intellectual satisfaction, like that belonging to a musical fugue, in which every opening suggested has been sufficiently followed up. We get a movement of quite a different kind when the sense of design is inseparable from effects of passion, and the movement is, as it were, traced in our emotional nature. In this case a growing strain is put upon our sympathy which is not unlike Complication. But no Resolution follows: the rise is made to end in fall, the progress leads to ruin; in place of the satisfaction that comes from restoring and unloosing is substituted a fresh appeal to our emotional nature, and from agitation we pass only to the calmer emotions of pity and awe. There is thus a Passion-Movement distinct from Action-Movement; and, analogous to the Complication and Resolution of the latter, Passion-Movement has its Strain and Reaction. The Line of Passion a Regular Arch,The Line of Passion has its various forms. A chapter has been devoted to illustrating one form of Passion-Movement, which may be called the Regular Arch—if we may found a technical term on the happy illustration of Gervinus. The example was taken from the play of Julius CÆsar, the emotional effect in which was shown to pass from calm interest to greater and greater degree of agitation, until after culminating in the centre it softens down and yields to the different calmness of pity and acquiescence. an Inclined PlaneThe movement of Richard III and many other dramas more resembles the form of an Inclined Plane, iv. ii. 46.the turn in the emotion occurring long past the centre of the play. or a Wave Line.Or again, there is the Wave Line of emotional distribution, made by repeated alternations of strain and relief. This is a form of Passion-Movement that nearly approaches Action-Movement, and readily goes with it in the same play; in The Merchant of Venice the union of the two stories gives such alternate Strain and Relief, and the Episode of the Rings comes as final Relief to the final Strain of the trial.

The distinction between Action-Movement and Passion-Movement is of special importance in Shakespeare-Criticism, inasmuch as it is the real basis of distinction between the two main classes of Shakespearean dramas. Every one feels that the terms Comedy and Tragedy are inadequate, and indeed absurd, when applied to Shakespeare. The distinction these terms express is one of Tone, and they were quite in place in the ancient Drama, in which the comic and tragic tones were kept rigidly distinct and were not allowed to mingle in the same play. Applied to a branch of Drama of which the leading characteristic is the complete Mixture of Tones the terms necessarily break down, and the so-called 'Comedies' of The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure contain some of the most tragic effects in Shakespeare. The true distinction between the two kinds of plays is one of Movement, not Tone. In The Merchant of Venice the leading interest is in the complication of Antonio's fortunes and its resolution by the device of Portia. In all such cases, however perplexing the entanglement of the complication may have become, the ultimate effect of the whole lies in the resolution of this complication; and this is an intellectual effect of satisfaction. In the plays called Tragedies there is no such return from distraction to recovery: our sympathy having been worked up to the emotion of agitation is relieved only by the emotion of pathos or despair. Thus in these two kinds of dramas the impression which to the spectator overpowers all other impressions, and gives individuality to the particular play, is this sense of intellectual or of emotional unity in the movement:—is, in other words, Action-Movement or Passion-Movement. 'Action-Drama,' 'Passion-Drama.'The two may be united, as remarked above in the case of The Merchant of Venice; but one or the other will be predominant and will give to the play its unity of impression. The distinction, then, which the terms Comedy and Tragedy fail to mark would be accurately brought out by substituting for them the terms Action-Drama and Passion-Drama.

With complexity of action comes complexity of movement. Compound Movement takes in the idea of the relative motion amongst the different actions into which a plot can be analysed. A play of Shakespeare presents a system of wheels within wheels, like a solar system in motion as a whole while the separate members of it have their own orbits to follow. Its three Modes of Motion: Similar Motion,The nature of Compound Movement can be most simply brought out by describing its three leading Modes of Motion. In Similar Motion the actions of a system are moving in the same form. The plot of Richard III, for example, is a general rise and fall of Nemesis made up of elements which are themselves rising and falling Nemeses. Such Similar Motion is only Parallelism looked at from the side of movement. A variation of it occurs when the form of one action is distributed amongst the rest: the main action of Julius CÆsar is a Nemesis Action, the two subactions are the separate interests of CÆsar and Antony, which put together amount to Nemesis.

In Contrary Motion the separate actions as they move on interfere with one another, that is, each acts as complicating force to the other, turning it out of its course; in reality they are helping one another's advance, seeing that complication is a step in dramatic progress. The Merchant of Venice furnishes an example. The Caskets Story progresses without check to its climax; in starting it complicates the Jew action—for before Bassanio can get to Belmont he borrows of Antonio the loan which is to entangle him in the meshes of the Jew's revenge; then the Caskets Story as a result of its climax resolves this complication in the Story of the Jew—for the union of Portia with Bassanio provides the deliverer for Bassanio's friend. But in thus resolving the Story of the Jew the Caskets Story, in the new phase of it that has commenced with the exchange of betrothal rings, itself suffers complication—the circumstances of the trial offering the suggestion to Portia to make the demand for Bassanio's ring. Thus of the two actions moving on side by side the one interferes with and diverts the other from its course, and again in restoring it gets itself diverted. This mutual interference makes up Contrary Motion.

A third mode of Compound movement is Convergent Motion, by which actions, or systems of actions, at first separate, become drawn together as they move on, and assist one another's progress. Once more the play of Lear furnishes a typical example. This play, it will be recollected, includes two distinct systems of actions tracing the story of two separate families. Moreover the main story after its opening incident presents, so far as movement is concerned, three different sides, according as its incidents centre around Lear, Goneril, or Regan. The first link between these diverse actions is Gloucester, the central personage of the whole plot. i. i. 35, 191.Gloucester has been the King's chamberlain and his close friend, ii. i. 93.the King having been godfather to his son. Accordingly, in the highly unstable political condition of a kingdom divided equally between two unprincipled sisters, Gloucester represents a third party, the party of Lear: he holds the balance of power, and the effort to secure him draws the separate interests together. i. v. 1.Thus as soon as Lear and Goneril have quarrelled Lear sends Kent to Gloucester, and our actions begin to approach one another. ii. i. 9.Before this messenger can arrive we hear of 'hints and ear-kissing arguments' as to rupture between the dukes, and we see Regan and her husband making a hasty journey—'out of season threading dark-eyed night'—ii. i. 121.in order to be the first at Gloucester's castle; ii. iv. 192.when Goneril in self-defence follows, all the separate elements of the main plot have found a meeting-point. But this castle of Gloucester in which they meet is the seat of the underplot, and the two systems become united in the closest manner by this central linking. ii. i. 88-131, esp. 112.Regan arrives in time to use her authority in furthering the intrigue against Edgar as a means of recommending herself to the deceived Gloucester; the other intrigue of the underplot, iii. v, &c.that against Gloucester himself, is promoted by the same means when Edmund has betrayed to Regan his father's protection of Lear; while the meeting of both sisters with Edmund lays the foundation of the mutual intriguing which forms the further interest of the entanglement between underplot and main story. All the separate lines of action have thus moved to a common centre, and their concentration in a common focus gives opportunity for the climax of passion which forms the centrepiece of the play. Then the Enveloping Action comes in as a further binding force, and it has been pointed out above how throughout the fourth and fifth Acts all the separate actions, whatever their immediate purpose, have an ultimate reference to Dover as the landing-place of the invading army: in military phrase Dover is the common objective on which all the separate trains of interest are concentrating. In this way have the actions of this intricate plot, so numerous and so separate at first, been found to converge to a common centre and then move together to a common dÉnouement.

The distinction of movement from the other elements of Plot leads also to the question of Turning-points, an idea equally connected with movement and with design. In the movement of every play a Turning-point is implied: movement could not have dramatic interest unless there were a change in the direction of events, and such change implies a point at which the change becomes apparent. Changes of a kind may be frequent through the progress of a play, but one notable point will stand out at which the ultimate issues present themselves as decided, the line of motion changing from complication to resolution, the line of passion from strain to reaction. The Catastrophe: or Focus of Movement.Such a point is technically a Catastrophe: a word whose etymological meaning suggests a turning round so as to come down. The Centre of Plot.In Shakespeare's dramatic practice we find a not less important Turning-point in relation to the design of the plot. This is always at the exact centre—the middle of the middle Act—and serves as a balancing-point about which the plot may be seen to be symmetrical: it is a Centre of Plot as the Catastrophe is a Focus of Movement. The Catastrophe of The Merchant of Venice is clearly Portia's judgment in the Trial Scene, by which in a moment the whole entanglement is resolved. iv. i. 305.In an earlier chapter it has been pointed out how the union of Portia and Bassanio—iii. ii.at the exact centre of the play—is the real determinant of the whole plot, uniting the complicating and resolving forces, and constituting a scene in which all the four stories find a meeting-point. In Richard III, iv. ii. 45.while the Catastrophe comes in the hero's late recognition of his own nemesis, yet there has been, before this and in the exact centre, a turn in the Enveloping Action, iii. iii. 15.which includes all the rest, shown by the recognition that Margaret's curses have now begun to be fulfilled. The exact centre of Macbeth, as pointed out above, iii. iv. 20.marks the hero's passage from rise to fall, that is from unbroken success to unbroken failure: the corresponding Catastrophe in this play is double, iii. iv. 49; v. viii. 13.a first appearance of Nemesis in Banquo's ghost, its final stroke in the revelation of Macduff's secret of birth. iii. i. 122.Julius CÆsar presents the interesting feature of the Catastrophe and Central Turning-point exactly coinciding, in the triumphant appeal of the conspirators to future history. Lear, according to the scheme of analysis suggested in this work, has its Catastrophe at the close of the initial scene, by which time the problem in experience has been set up in action, and the tragedies arising out of it thenceforward work on without break to its solution. iii. iv. 45.A Centre of Plot is found for this play where, in the middle Scene of the middle Act, the third of the three forms of madness is brought into contact with the other two and makes the climax of passion complete. This regular union by Shakespeare of a marked catastrophe, appealing to every spectator, with a subtle dividing-point, interesting to the intellectual sense of analysis, illustrates the combination of force with symmetry, which is the genius of the Shakespearean Drama: it throughout presents a body of warm human interest governed by a mind of intricate design.