instead of a catastrophe.

But for Shakespeare's scanty use of this method there may have been a
deeper, though probably an unconscious, reason. The method suits a plot
based on intrigue. It may produce intense suspense. It may stir most
powerfully the tragic feelings of pity and fear. And it throws into
relief that aspect of tragedy in which great or beautiful lives seem
caught in the net of fate. But it is apt to be less favourable to the
exhibition of character, to show less clearly how an act returns upon
the agent, and to produce less strongly the impression of an inexorable
order working in the passions and actions of men, and labouring through
their agony and waste towards good. Now, it seems clear from his
tragedies that what appealed most to Shakespeare was this latter class
of effects. I do not ask here whether _Othello_ fails to produce, in the
same degree as the other tragedies, these impressions; but Shakespeare's
preference for them may have been one reason why he habitually chose a
scheme of construction which produces in the final Acts but little of
strained suspense, and presents the catastrophe as a thing foreseen and
following with a psychological and moral necessity on the action
exhibited in the first part of the tragedy.


4

The more minute details of construction cannot well be examined here,
and I will not pursue the subject further. But its discussion suggests a
question which will have occurred to some of my hearers. They may have
asked themselves whether I have not used the words 'art' and 'device'
and 'expedient' and 'method' too boldly, as though Shakespeare were a
conscious artist, and not rather a writer who constructed in obedience