Mrs. Warren:  You’re very rough with me, Vivie.

  Vivie:  Nonsense.  What about bed?  It’s past ten.

  Mrs. Warren (passionately):  What’s the use of my going to bed?  Do
  you think I could sleep?

  Vivie:  Why not?  I shall.

Then the mother turns upon the daughter’s stony self-righteousness, and pours forth her sordid history in such a way as to throw a searchlight on the conditions which make such histories possible; until, exhausted by her outburst, she says, “Oh, dear!  I do believe I am getting sleepy after all,” and Vivie replies, “I believe it is I who will not be able to sleep now.”  Mr. Shaw, we see, is at pains to emphasize his peripety.

Some “great scenes” consist, not of one decisive turning of the tables, but of a whole series of minor vicissitudes of fortune.  Such a scene is the third act of The Gay Lord Quex, a prolonged and thrilling duel, in which Sophy Fullgarney passes by degrees from impertinent exultation to abject surrender and then springs up again to a mood of reckless defiance.  In the “great scene” of The Thunderbolt, on the other hand—­the scene of Thaddeus’s false confession of having destroyed his brother’s will—­though there is, in fact, a great peripety, it is not that which attracts and absorbs our interest.  All the greedy Mortimore family fall from the height of jubilant confidence in their new-found wealth to the depth of disappointment and exasperation.  But this is not the aspect of the scene which grips and moves us.  Our attention is centred on Thaddeus’s struggle to take his wife’s misdeed upon himself; and his failure cannot be described as a peripety, seeing that it sinks him only one degree lower in the slough of despair.  Like the scene in Mrs. Dane’s Defence, this is practically a piece of judicial drama—­a hard-fought cross-examination.  But as there is no reversal of fortune for the character in whom we are chiefly interested, it scarcely ranks as a scene of peripety.[5]

Before leaving this subject, we may note that a favourite effect of romantic drama is an upward reversal of fortune through the recognition—­the anagnorisis—­of some great personage in disguise.  Victor Hugo excelled in the superb gestures appropriate to such a scene:  witness the passage in Hernani, before the tomb of Charlemagne, where the obscure bandit claims the right to take his place at the head of the princes and nobles whom the newly-elected Emperor has ordered off to execution: 

  Hernani: 

  Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna
  M’a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,
  Marquis de Monroy, comte Albatera, vicomte
  De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j’ignore le compte. 
  Je suis Jean d’Aragon, grand maitre d’Avis, ne
  Dans l’exil, fils proscrit d’un pere assassine
  Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille.

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