and so forth.  In The Taming of the Shrew there are no antecedents whatever to be stated.  It is true that Lucentio, in the opening speech, is good enough to inform Tranio who he is and what he is doing there—­facts with which Tranio is already perfectly acquainted.  But this was merely a conventional opening, excused by the fashion of the time; it was in no sense a necessary exposition.  For the rest, the crisis of the play—­the battle between Katherine and Petruchio—­begins, develops, and ends before our very eyes.  In The Winter’s Tale, a brief conversation between Camillo and Archidamus informs us that the King of Bohemia is paying a visit to the King of Sicilia; and that is absolutely all we need to know.  It was not even necessary that it should be conveyed to us in this way.  The situation would be entirely comprehensible if the scene between Camillo and Archidamus were omitted.

It is needless to go through the whole list of comedies.  The broad fact is that in all the plays commonly so described, excepting only The Tempest, the whole action comes within the frame of the picture.  In The Tempest the poet employs a form of opening which otherwise he reserves for tragedies.  The first scene is simply an animated tableau, calculated to arrest the spectator’s attention, without conveying to him any knowledge either of situation or character.  Such gleams of character as do, in fact, appear in the dialogue, are scarcely perceived in the hurly-burly of the storm.  Then, in the calm which ensues, Prospero expounds to Miranda in great detail the antecedents of the crisis now developing.  It might almost seem, indeed, that the poet, in this, his poetic last-will-and-testament, intended to warn his successors against the dangers of a long narrative exposition; for Prospero’s story sends Miranda to sleep.  Be this as it may, we have here a case in which Shakespeare deliberately adopted the plan of placing on the stage, not the whole crisis, but only its culmination, leaving its earlier stages to be conveyed in narrative.[2] It would have been very easy for him to have begun at the beginning and shown us in action the events narrated by Prospero.  This course would have involved no greater leap, either in time or space, than he had perpetrated in the almost contemporary Winter’s Tale; and it cannot be said that there would have been any difficulty in compressing into three acts, or even two, the essentials of the action of the play as we know it.  His reasons for departing from his usual practice were probably connected with the particular occasion for which the play was written.  He wanted to produce a masque rather than a drama.  We must not, therefore, attach too much significance to the fact that in almost the only play in which Shakespeare seems to have built entirely out of his own head, with no previous play or novel to influence him, he adopted the plan of going straight to the catastrophe, in which he had been anticipated by Sophocles (Oedipus Rex), and was to be followed by Ibsen (Ghosts, Rosmersholm, etc.).