in action is the grossest of technical blunders.[6] Hamlet senior, in other words, being indispensable in the spirit, was superfluous in the flesh.  But there was another and equally cogent reason for beginning the play after the commission of the initial crime or crimes.  To have done otherwise would have been to discount, not only the Ghost, but the play-scene.  By a piece of consummate ingenuity, which may, of course, have been conceived by the earlier playwright, the initial incidents of the story are in fact presented to us, in the guise of a play within the play, and as a means to the achievement of one of the greatest dramatic effects in all literature.  The moment the idea of the play-scene presented itself to the author’s mind, it became absolutely unthinkable that he should, to put it vulgarly, “queer the pitch” for the Players by showing us the real facts of which their performance was to be the counterfeit presentment.  The dramatic effect of the incidents was incalculably heightened when they were presented, as in a looking-glass, before the guilty pair, with the eye of the avenger boring into their souls.  And have we not here, perhaps, a clue to one of the most frequent and essential meanings of the word “dramatic”?  May we not say that the dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety[7] and intensity of the emotions involved in it?

All this may appear too obvious to be worth setting forth at such length.  Very likely it never occurred to Shakespeare that it was possible to open the play at an earlier point; so that he can hardly be said to have exercised a deliberate choice in the matter.  Nevertheless, the very obviousness of the considerations involved makes this a good example of the importance of discovering just the right point at which to raise the curtain.  In the case of The Tempest, Shakespeare plunged into the middle of the crisis because his object was to produce a philosophico-dramatic entertainment rather than a play in the strict sense of the word.  He wanted room for the enchantments of Ariel, the brutishnesses of Caliban, the humours of Stephano and Trinculo—­all elements extrinsic to the actual story.  But in Hamlet he adopted a similar course for purely dramatic reasons—­in order to concentrate his effects and present the dramatic elements of his theme at their highest potency.

In sum, then, it was Shakespeare’s usual practice, histories apart, to bring the whole action of his plays within the frame of the picture, leaving little or nothing to narrative exposition.  The two notable exceptions to this rule are those we have just examined—­Hamlet and The Tempest.  Furthermore, he usually opened his comedies with quiet conversational passages, presenting the antecedents of the crisis with great deliberation.  In his tragedies, on the other hand, he was apt to lead off with a crisp, somewhat startling passage of more or less vehement action, appealing rather to the nerves than to the intelligence—­such a passage as Gustav Freytag, in his Technik des Dramas, happily entitles an einleitende Akkord, an introductory chord.  It may be added that this rule holds good both for Coriolanus and for Julius Caesar, in which the keynote is briskly struck in highly animated scenes of commotion among the Roman populace.