very much bored. In many minds there will be left a feeling that,
whether they have enjoyed the play or not, they are puzzled: there are
odd effects, conventions, suggestions.

For example, the main deed of the Tragedy, the slaying of hero or
heroine, is not done on the stage. That disappoints some modern minds
unconsciously avid of realism to the point of horror. Instead of a fine
thrilling murder or suicide before his very eyes, the spectator is put
off with an account of the murder done off the stage. This account is
regularly given, and usually at considerable length, in a "messenger's
speech." The messenger's speech is a regular item in a Greek play, and
though actually it gives scope not only for fine elocution, but for real
dramatic effect, in theory we feel it undramatic, and a modern actor has
sometimes much ado to make it acceptable. The spectator is told that all
these, to him, odd conventions are due to Greek restraint, moderation,
good taste, and yet for all their supposed restraint and reserve, he
finds when he reads his Homer that Greek heroes frequently burst into
floods of tears when a self-respecting Englishman would have suffered in
silence.

Then again, specially if the play be by Euripides, it ends not with a
"curtain," not with a great decisive moment, but with the appearance of
a god who says a few lines of either exhortation or consolation or
reconciliation, which, after the strain and stress of the action itself,
strikes some people as rather stilted and formal, or as rather flat and
somehow unsatisfying. Worse still, there are in many of the scenes long
dialogues, in which the actors wrangle with each other, and in which the
action does not advance so quickly as we wish. Or again, instead of
beginning with the action, and having our curiosity excited bit by bit
about the plot, at the outset some one comes in and tells us the whole