]
[Footnote 7: I say "variety" rather than complexity because I take it
that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very
complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly
increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the
King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.]
[Footnote 8: This excludes _Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt_, and
_Emperor and Galilean_.]
[Footnote 9: See, for example, _King Henry VIII_, Act IV, and the
opening scene of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_.]
[Footnote 10: This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group
of characters performing something like the function of the antique
Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less
disinterested point of view. The function of _Kaffee-Klatsch_ in
_Pillars of Society_ is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that
of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.]
[Footnote 11: It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in
_La Gioconda_, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention,
by giving us three actors and four confidants.
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