This continues to the end, except that a scene of such CH.XVIII. metrical varieties cannot be wound up with merely the

ordinary couplet, but has for its coda a couple of couplets

followed by a quatrain of alternate rhymes.

Bir. For revels, dances, masks and merry hours

Forerun fair Love, strewing her way with flowers. King. Away, away! no time shall be omitted

Bir.

That will betime, and may by us be fitted.
Allons! allons! Sow'd cockle reap'd no corn;
And justice always whirls in equal measure:
Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn;
If so, our copper buys no better treasure.

CH. XIX.

Idea of

WE

Plot as the action.

XIX.

INTEREST OF PLOT: STATICS.

E now come to the third great division of Dramatic
Criticism-Plot, or the purely intellectual side of
Action itself has been treated above as the mutual

application connection and interweaving of all the details in a work of
of design to
human life art so as to unite in an impression of unity. But we have
found it impossible to discuss Character and Passion en-
tirely apart from such action and interworking: the details
of human interest become dramatic by being permeated with
action-force. When however this mutual relation of all the
parts is looked at by itself, as an abstract interest of design,
the human life being no more than the material to which
this design is applied, then we get the interest of Plot. So
defined, I hope Plot is sufficiently removed from the vulgar
conception of it as sensational mystery, which has done so
much to lower this element of dramatic effect in the eyes of
literary students. If Plot be understood as the extension of
design to the sphere of human life, threads of experience
being woven into a symmetrical pattern as truly as vari-
coloured threads of wool are woven into a piece of wool-
work, then the conception of it will come out in its true
dignity. What else is such reduction to order than the
meeting-point of science and art? Science is engaged in
mants in the beautiful confusion of

external nature to regular species and nice gradations of life. CH. XIX. Similarly, art continues the work of creation in calling ideal order out of the chaos of things as they are. And so the tangle of life, with its jumble of conflicting aspirations, its crossing and twisting of contrary motives, its struggle and partnership of the whole human race, in which no two individuals are perfectly alike and no one is wholly independent of the rest-this has gradually in the course of ages been laboriously traced by the scientific historian into some such harmonious plan as evolution. But he finds himself long ago anticipated by the dramatic artist, who has touched crime and seen it link itself with nemesis, who has transformed passion into pathos, who has received the shapeless facts of reality and returned them as an ordered economy of design. This application of form to human life is Plot: and Shakespeare has had no higher task to accomplish than in his revolutionising our ideas of Plot, until the old critical conceptions of it completely broke down when applied to his dramas. The appreciation of Shakespeare will not be complete until he is seen to be as subtle a weaver of plots as he is a deep reader of the human heart.

As with Character and Passion, so Plot is to be considered in its three aspects of unity, complexity and movement. But the last is at once of special importance in itself, and different in nature from the other two. It has been already noted how the analysis which traces unity and complexity treats the drama as a finished whole, and may piece together into one elements of effect drawn from different parts of the play; movement, on the contrary, is tied to the succession of incidents as they stand in the story. The difference is parallel to the difference between the two sides of mechanical science: Statics treating matter in repose, and Dynamics considering matter in relation to motion. It will be con

CH. XIX. interest of Plot which is Statical1, and the Dynamics of Plot will be left to the following Chapter.

Unity applied to

The simplest element of Plot is the Single Action, which may be defined as any train of incidents in a drama which The Single can be conceived as a separate whole. Thus a series of

Plot.

Action.

Action.

details bringing out the idea of a crime and its nemesis will constitute a Nemesis Action, an oracle and its fulfilment will make up an Oracular Action, a problem and its solution a Problem Action. Throughout the treatment of Plot the root idea of pattern should be steadily kept in mind: in the case of these Single Actions—the units of Plot--we have as it were the lines of a geometrical design, made up of their details as Forms of a geometrical line is made up of separate points. The Form Dramatic of a dramatic action-the shape of the line, so to speak-will be that which gives the train of incidents its distinctiveness: the nemesis, the oracle, the problem. An action may get its distinctiveness from its tone as a Comic, a Tragic or a Humorous Action; or it may be a Character Action, when a series of details acquire a unity in bringing out the character of Hastings or Lady Macbeth; an action may be an Intrigue, or the Rise and Fall of a person, or simply a Story like the Caskets Story; it may be a Motive Action, bringing about, as it progresses, the general changes in the fortunes of the story; or it may be a Stationary Action that is kept entirely outside the dramatic movement. Finally, an action may combine several different forms at the same time, just as a geometrical line may be at once, say, an arch and a spiral. The action that traces Macbeth's career has been treated as exhibiting a triple form of Nemesis, Irony, and Oracular Action; further, it is a Tragic Action in tone, it is a Character Action in its contrast with the career of Lady Macbeth, and

1 I borrow these terms from an able article by Mr. F. Ryland on the Illustrated Magazine for October,

it stands in the relation of Main Action to others in the CH. XIX. play1.

Action: a

Now what I have called Single Action constituted the Complexity whole conception of Plot in ancient Tragedy; in the applied to Shakespearean Drama it exists only as a unit of Complex distinction Action. The application of complexity to action is ren- Drama. of Modern dered particularly easy by the idea of pattern, patterns which appeal to the eye being more often made up of several lines crossing and interweaving than of single lines. Ancient tragedy clung to 'unity of action,' and excluded such matter as threatened to set up a second interest in a play. Modern Plot has a unity of a much more elaborate order, perhaps best expressed by the word harmony-a harmony of distinct actions, each of which has its separate unity. The illustration of harmony is suggestive. Just as in musical har-. mony each part is a melody of itself, though one of them leads and is the melody, so a modern plot draws together into a common system a Main Action and other inferior yet distinct actions. Moreover the step from melody alone to melody harmonised, or that from the single instruments of the ancient world to the combinations of a modern orchestra, marks just the difference between ancient and modern art which we find reflected in the different conception of Plot held by Sophocles and by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plots are federations of plots: in his ordering of dramatic events we trace a common self-government made out of elements which have an independence of their own, and at the same time merge a part of their independence in common action.

1 A Sub-Action is either an action distinctly subordinate to another action (Merchant of Venice), or of inferior importance in the general scheme of the play (Love's Labour's Lost); or it is so called because its