Alter

metre and

The extension of this usage by which variations between CH.XVIII one metre and another are added to variations between metre and prose, as devices for conveying changes of tone, is nations characteristic, as has been already remarked, of Shakespeare's between one early plays. In his later works it has left only slight traces. another. Every reader is familiar with the use of a rhymed couplet at the close of a scene. Akin to this is the indication by a rhymed couplet of a resolution formed, or the termination of a train of thought. A fine example of this is to be found in Macbeth's rhymed soliloquy breaking a scene of blank verse.

The Prince of Cumberland! that is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires:
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

It is, again, only natural that the more artificial measure
should be used to convey what is consciously artificial
language; thus, when Desdemona, to fill up a moment of
waiting, calls upon Iago for an exercise in praising her, he
puts his praises of women in rhyme, till he reaches the famous
conclusion :

She was a wight, if ever such wight were-
To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer.

One of the plays treated in this book, Love's Labour's Lost,
has claims to be considered Shakespeare's earliest original
play, and it is found to be the one in which his metrical
repertoire is most varied. We may erect a metrical scale,
at the bottom of which is prose; next in order comes blank
verse; rhymed couplets are a degree more elevated; and

played out. Then the Shepherd and Clown enter and discover the child-the resolution of the plot and the Bohemian side of the story begin. This change from complication to resolution is marked by a change from verse to prose.

A a

i. iv. 48; compare iii. 146.

iv. iii.

26.

&c.

CH.XVIII. at the top come measures more lyrical than the couplet, such as alternate rhyming, or even trochaic and anapæstic rhythms'. The alternation of these three metrical styles is well illustrated in the central scene of the play, where the perjured celibates discover one another. Biron is the first on the ground, and his soliloquy is in prose. The scene can hardly be said to have commenced until the arrival of another of the band, to be followed at intervals by the rest, each to expose in fancied solitude the perjury which is to be overheard. From this point the scene may be said to be in the medium measure of rhymed couplets, broken by brief drops e.g. 21, 48, to prose or irregular verse where the different parts of the scene join on to one another, and rising to climaxes of the elaborate lyrics. Thus three of the lovers read amatory effusions in lyrics2; the comments on these are in couplets, 45-6,85-6, and often a line of comment from one place of concealment &c. is, to the ear of the audience, capped by a rhyme from another. Where the lovers spring in succession from their concealment the battle still rages in couplets, until a great change is made in the spirit of the scene by Biron, who abandons his annoyance at being discovered for justification of his perjury on the ground that his Rosaline surpasses the mistresses of all the rest. This change is reflected in a change to alternate rhyming, and in this metre the climax of the scene continues. At last another break in the scene comes when the king proposes to take things as they are and boldly justify them, and he calls on Biron for reasons, such as may serve to cheat the devil. Biron responds, and his immensely long speech is in blank verse, here heard for the first time in the scene.

214.

284.

1 Trochaics in iv. iii. 101-20; anapæstics ii. i. from 217 to end. The Globe edition marks a good deal of the talk between Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel as verse: but it is verse such as these pedants alone could scan and classify. [E.g. iv. ii.]

2 A piece of lyrics in alternate rhyme regularly closes with rhymed couplets; e.g. Longaville's effusion, 60-73.

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

XIX.

INTEREST OF PLOT: STATICS.

WE now come to or the

Plot as the action.

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
tracing rhythmic movements in the beautiful confusion of
the heavenly bodies, or reducing the bewildering variety 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 convenient in the present treatment to separate movement from the other two divisions: the present Chapter will deal with the