When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him--thus!"

What is the essence of Shakespeare's achievement in this marvellous
passage? What is it that he has done? He has thrown his audience, just
as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a
sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation. In
other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly,
and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.

Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be
found in the first act of Ibsen's _Little Eyolf_. The lame boy, Eyolf,
has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water,
and been drowned. This is the bare fact: how is it to be conveyed to the
child's parents and to the audience?