passage, a passage ever welcome, but of a length which could hardly be
defended on purely dramatic grounds; and still later, occupying some
hundred and twenty lines of the very last scene, we have the chatter of
Osric with Hamlet's mockery of it. But the acme of audacity is reached
in _Antony and Cleopatra_, where, quite close to the end, the old
countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra discourses on the virtues
and vices of the worm, and where his last words, 'Yes, forsooth: I wish
you joy o' the worm,' are followed, without the intervention of a line,
by the glorious speech,

Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me....

In some of the instances of pathos or humour just mentioned we have been
brought to that part of the play which immediately precedes, or even
contains, the catastrophe. And I will add at once three remarks which
refer specially to this final section of a tragedy.

(_f_) In several plays Shakespeare makes here an appeal which in his own
time was evidently powerful: he introduces scenes of battle. This is the
case in _Richard III._, _Julius Caesar_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_ and
_Antony and Cleopatra_. Richard, Brutus and Cassius, and Macbeth die on
the battlefield. Even if his use of this expedient were not enough to
show that battle-scenes were extremely popular in the Elizabethan
theatre, we know it from other sources. It is a curious comment on the
futility of our spectacular effects that in our theatre these scenes, in
which we strive after an 'illusion' of which the Elizabethans never
dreamt, produce comparatively little excitement, and to many spectators
are even somewhat distasteful.[22] And although some of them thrill the
imagination of the reader, they rarely, I think, quite satisfy the