Denouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and
no native word has as yet, by common consent, been accepted as its
equivalent. I sometimes wish we could adopt, and print without italics,
the excellent and expressive Greek word "lusis"; but I cannot, on my own
responsibility, attempt so daring an innovation. The second and
determining reason for not making the _denouement_ one of the heads of
my argument, is that, the play of intrigue being no longer the dominant
dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special
fitness. It is only in a somewhat strained and conventional sense that
the term _nodus_, or knot, can be applied to the sort of crisis with
which the modern drama normally deals; and if we do not naturally think
of the crisis as a knot, we naturally do not think of its close as an
unknotting.
Nevertheless, there are frequent cases in which the end of a play
depends on something very like the unravelling of a tangled skein; and
still more often, perhaps, is it brought about through the loosening of
some knot in the mind of one or more of the characters.
Pages:
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449