In the works of Sir Arthur Pinero I recall two cases in which the lack of a finger-post impairs the desired effect:  slightly, in the one instance, in the other, very considerably.  The third act of that delightful comedy The Princess and the Butterfly contains no sufficient indication of Fay Zuliani’s jealousy of the friendship between Sir George Lamorant and the Princess Pannonia.  We are rather at a loss to account for the coldness of her attitude to the Princess, and her perverse naughtiness in going off to the Opera Ball.  This renders the end of the act practically ineffective.  We so little foresee what is to come of Fay’s midnight escapade, that we take no particular interest in it, and are rather disconcerted by the care with which it is led up to, and the prominence assigned to it.  This, however, is a trifling fault.  Far different is the case in the last act of The Benefit of the Doubt, which goes near to ruining what is otherwise a very fine play.  The defect, indeed, is not purely technical:  on looking into it we find that the author is not in fact working towards an ending which can be called either inevitable or conspicuously desirable.  His failure to point forward is no doubt partly due to his having nothing very satisfactory to point forward to.  But it is only in retrospect that this becomes apparent.  What we feel while the act is in progress is simply the lack of any finger-post to afford us an inkling of the end towards which we are proceeding.  Through scene after scene we appear to be making no progress, but going round and round in a depressing circle.  The tension, in a word, is fatally relaxed.  It may perhaps be suggested as a maxim that when an author finds a difficulty in placing the requisite finger-posts, as he nears the end of his play, he will do well to suspect that the end he has in view is defective, and to try if he cannot amend it.

In the ancient, and in the modern romantic, drama, oracles, portents, prophecies, horoscopes and such-like intromissions of the supernatural afforded a very convenient aid to the placing of the requisite finger-posts—­“foreshadowing without forestalling.”  It has often been said that Macbeth approaches the nearest of all Shakespeare’s tragedies to the antique model:  and in nothing is the resemblance clearer than in the employment of the Witches to point their skinny fingers into the fated future.  In Romeo and Juliet, inward foreboding takes the place of outward prophecy.  I have quoted above Romeo’s prevision of “Some consequence yet hanging in the stars”; and beside it may be placed Juliet’s—­

  “I have no joy of this contract to-night;
  It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
  Too like the lightning which doth cease to be
  Ere one can say it lightens.”

In Othello, on the other hand, the most modern of all his plays, Shakespeare had recourse neither to outward boding, nor to inward foreboding, but planted a plain finger-post in the soil of human nature, when he made Brabantio say—­