This course would have involved no greater leap, either in
time or space, than he had perpetrated in the almost contemporary
_Winter's Tale_; and it cannot be said that there would have been any
difficulty in compressing into three acts, or even two, the essentials
of the action of the play as we know it. His reasons for departing from
his usual practice were probably connected with the particular occasion
for which the play was written. He wanted to produce a masque rather
than a drama. We must not, therefore, attach too much significance to
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.
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