unfamiliar, and therefore unwelcome, to the audience; and, even if
familiar, they are almost sure to be at first, if not permanently, less
interesting than those who figured in the ascending movement, and on
whom attention has been fixed. Possibly, too, their necessary prominence
may crowd the hero into the back-ground. Hence the point of danger in
this method of construction seems to lie in that section of the play
which follows the crisis and has not yet approached the catastrophe. And
this section will usually comprise the Fourth Act, together, in some
cases, with a part of the Third and a part of the Fifth.

Shakespeare was so masterly a playwright, and had so wonderful a power
of giving life to unpromising subjects, that to a large extent he was
able to surmount this difficulty. But illustrations of it are easily to
be found in his tragedies, and it is not always surmounted. In almost
all of them we are conscious of that momentary pause in the action,
though, as we shall see, it does not generally occur _immediately_ after
the crisis. Sometimes he allows himself to be driven to keep the hero
off the stage for a long time while the counter-action is rising;
Macbeth, Hamlet and Coriolanus during about 450 lines, Lear for nearly
500, Romeo for about 550 (it matters less here, because Juliet is quite
as important as Romeo). How can a drama in which this happens compete,
in its latter part, with _Othello_? And again, how can deliberations
between Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, between Malcolm and Macduff,
between the Capulets, between Laertes and the King, keep us at the
pitch, I do not say of the crisis, but even of the action which led up
to it? Good critics--writers who have criticised Shakespeare's dramas
from within, instead of applying to them some standard ready-made by
themselves or derived from dramas and a theatre of quite other kinds
than his--have held that some of his greatest tragedies fall off in the
Fourth Act, and that one or two never wholly recover themselves. And I