the fact that in almost the only play in which Shakespeare seems to have
built entirely out of his own head, with no previous play or novel to
influence him, he adopted the plan of going straight to the catastrophe,
in which he had been anticipated by Sophocles (_Oedipus Rex_), and was
to be followed by Ibsen (_Ghosts_, _Rosmersholm_, etc.).

Coming now to the five great tragedies, we find that in four of them
Shakespeare began, as in _The Tempest_, with a picturesque and stirring
episode calculated to arrest the spectator's attention and awaken his
interest, while conveying to him little or no information. The opening
scene of _Romeo and Juliet_ is simply a brawl, bringing home to us
vividly the family feud which is the root of the tragedy, but informing
us of nothing beyond the fact that such a feud exists. This is, indeed,
absolutely all that we require to know. There is not a single
preliminary circumstance, outside the limits of the play, that has to be
explained to us. The whole tragedy germinates and culminates within what
the prologue calls "the two hours' traffick of the stage." The opening
colloquy of the Witches in _Macbeth_, strikes the eerie keynote, but
does nothing more. Then, in the second scene, we learn that there has
been a great battle and that a nobleman named Macbeth has won a victory
which covers him with laurels. This can in no sense be called an
exposition. It is the account of a single event, not of a sequence; and
that event is contemporary, not antecedent. In the third scene, the
meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the Witches, we have what may be
called an exposition reversed; not a narrative of the past, but a
foreshadowing of the future. Here we touch on one of the subtlest of the
playwright's problems--the art of arousing anticipation in just the
right measure. But that is not the matter at present in hand.[3]

In the opening scene of _Othello_ it is true that some talk passes