We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called primary and secondary suspense or surprise—­that is to say between suspense or surprise actually experienced by the spectator to whom the drama is new, and suspense or surprise experienced only sympathetically, on behalf of the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is to follow.  The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term “dramatic.”  It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it beforehand, in outline, if not in detail.

As a typical example of a dramatic way of handling an incident, so as to make a supreme effect of what might else have been an anti-climax, one may cite the death of Othello.  Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem.  Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture; how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut of blood?  How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy?  In no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem.  We all remember how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture, and thus addresses them: 

  “Soft you; a word or two, before you go. 
  I have done the state some service, and they know ’t;
  No more of that.  I pray you, in your letters,
  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
  Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
  Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak
  Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
  Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
  Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand,
  Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
  Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
  Albeit unused to the melting mood,
  Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
  Their medicinal gum.  Set you down this;
  And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
  Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
  Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
  I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
  And smote him—­thus!”

What is the essence of Shakespeare’s achievement in this marvellous passage?  What is it that he has done?  He has thrown his audience, just as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation.  In other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly, and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.

Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be found in the first act of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf.  The lame boy, Eyolf, has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water, and been drowned.  This is the bare fact:  how is it to be conveyed to the child’s parents and to the audience?