Coming now to the five great tragedies, we find that in four of them Shakespeare began, as in The Tempest, with a picturesque and stirring episode calculated to arrest the spectator’s attention and awaken his interest, while conveying to him little or no information.  The opening scene of Romeo and Juliet is simply a brawl, bringing home to us vividly the family feud which is the root of the tragedy, but informing us of nothing beyond the fact that such a feud exists.  This is, indeed, absolutely all that we require to know.  There is not a single preliminary circumstance, outside the limits of the play, that has to be explained to us.  The whole tragedy germinates and culminates within what the prologue calls “the two hours’ traffick of the stage.”  The opening colloquy of the Witches in Macbeth, strikes the eerie keynote, but does nothing more.  Then, in the second scene, we learn that there has been a great battle and that a nobleman named Macbeth has won a victory which covers him with laurels.  This can in no sense be called an exposition.  It is the account of a single event, not of a sequence; and that event is contemporary, not antecedent.  In the third scene, the meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the Witches, we have what may be called an exposition reversed; not a narrative of the past, but a foreshadowing of the future.  Here we touch on one of the subtlest of the playwright’s problems—­the art of arousing anticipation in just the right measure.  But that is not the matter at present in hand.[3]

In the opening scene of Othello it is true that some talk passes between Iago and Roderigo before they raise the alarm and awaken Brabantio; but it is carefully non-expository talk; it expounds nothing but Iago’s character.  Far from being a real exception to the rule that Shakespeare liked to open his tragedies with a very crisply dramatic episode, Othello may rather be called its most conspicuous example.  The rousing of Brabantio is immediately followed by the encounter between his men and Othello’s, which so finely brings out the lofty character of the Moor; and only in the third scene, that of the Doge’s Council, do we pass from shouts and swords to quiet discussion and, in a sense, exposition.  Othello’s great speech, while a vital portion of the drama, is in so far an exposition that it refers to events which do not come absolutely within the frame of the picture.  But they are very recent, very simple, events.  If Othello’s speech were omitted, or cut down to half a dozen lines, we should know much less of his character and Desdemona’s, but the mere action of the play would remain perfectly comprehensible.

King Lear necessarily opens with a great act of state, the partition of the kingdom.  A few words between Kent and Gloucester show us what is afoot, and then, at one plunge, we are in the thick of the drama.  There was no opportunity here for one of those picturesque tableaux, exciting rather than informative, which initiate the other tragedies.  It would have had to be artificially dragged in; and it was the less necessary, as the partition scene took on, in a very few lines, just that arresting, stimulating quality which the poet seems to have desired in the opening of a play of this class.