In discussing what Freytag calls the _erregende Moment,_ we might have
defined it as the starting-point of the tension. A reasonable audience
will, if necessary, endure a certain amount of exposition, a certain
positing of character and circumstance, before the tension sets in; but
when it once has set in, the playwright must on no account suffer it to
relax until he deliberately resolves it just before the fall of the
curtain. There are, of course, minor rhythms of tension and resolution,
like the harmonic vibrations of a violin-string. That is implied when we
say that a play consists of a great crisis worked out through a series
of minor crises. But the main tension, once initiated, must never be
relaxed. If it is, the play is over, though the author may have omitted
to note the fact. Not infrequently, he begins a new play under the
impression that he is finishing the old one. That is what Shakespeare
did in _The Merchant of Venice._ The fifth act is an independent
afterpiece, though its independence is slightly disguised by the fact
that the _erregende Moment_ of the new play follows close upon the end
of the old one, with no interact between.
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