Has the conception of the peripety, as an almost obligatory element in drama, any significance for the modern playwright?  Obligatory, of course, it cannot be:  it is easy to cite a hundred admirable plays in which it is impossible to discover anything that can reasonably be called a peripety.  But this, I think, we may safely say:  the dramatist is fortunate who finds in the development of his theme, without unnatural strain or too much preparation, opportunity for a great scene, highly-wrought, arresting, absorbing, wherein one or more of his characters shall experience a marked reversal either of inward soul-state or of outward fortune.  The theory of the peripety, in short, practically resolves itself for us into the theory of the “great scene,” Plays there are, many and excellent plays, in which some one scene stands out from all the rest, impressing itself with peculiar vividness on the spectator’s mind; and, nine times out of ten, this scene will be found to involve a peripety.  It can do no harm, then, if the playwright should ask himself:  “Can I, without any undue sacrifice, so develop my theme as to entail upon my leading characters, naturally and probably, an experience of this order?”

The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they are apt to be too small in scale, or else too fatally conclusive, to provide material for drama.  One of the commonest, perhaps, is that of the man who enters a physician’s consulting-room to seek advice in some trifling ailment, and comes out again, half an hour later, doomed either to death or to some calamity worse than death.  This situation has been employed, not ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic drama, The Fires of Fate; but it is very difficult to find any dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.[2] The moral peripety—­the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air—­is a no less characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the playwright’s uses.  Certainly there are few things more impressive in drama than to see a man or woman—­or a man and woman—­come upon the stage, radiant, confident, assured that

  “God’s in his heaven,
   All’s right with the world,”

and leave it crushed and desperate, after a gradual and yet swift descent into Avernus.  Such a scene is of the very marrow of drama.  It is a play within a play; a concentrated, quintessentiated crisis.

In the third act of Othello we have a peripety handled with consummate theatrical skill.  To me—­I confess it with bated breath—­the craftsmanship seems greatly superior to the psychology.  Othello, when we look into it, succumbs with incredible facility to Iago’s poisoned pin-pricks; but no audience dreams of looking into it; and there lies the proof of Shakespeare’s technical mastery.  In the Trial Scene in The Merchant of Venice