It should be noted,
too, that _The Benefit of the Doubt_ is a three-act play, and that, in a
play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily
disproportionate. It is one thing to relax the tension in the last act
out of four or five; quite another thing in the last act out of three.
In other words, the culminating point of a four-or five-act play may be
placed in the penultimate act; in a three-act play, it should come, at
earliest, in the penultimate scene.[1]
In the works of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones we find several instances of the
unemphatic last act--some clearly justified, others much less so. Among
the former I unhesitatingly reckon the fourth act of _Mrs. Dane's
Defence_. It would not have been difficult, but surely most inartistic,
to huddle up the action in five minutes after Mrs. Dane's tragic
collapse under Sir Daniel Carteret's cross-examination. She might have
taken poison and died in picturesque contortions on the sofa; or Lionel
might have defied all counsels of prudence and gone off with her in
spite of her past; or she might have placed Lionel's hand in Janet's,
saying: "The game is up.
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