conjuncture of affairs, in which two, at least, of the persons concerned are ignorantly and blindly moving towards issues of which they do not dream.  We are, in fact, in the position of superior intelligences contemplating, with miraculous clairvoyance, the stumblings and tumblings of poor blind mortals straying through the labyrinth of life.  Our seat in the theatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus, whence we can view with perfect intelligence, but without participation or responsibility, the intricate reactions of human destiny.  And this sense of superiority does not pall upon us.  When Othello comes on the scene, radiant and confident in Desdemona’s love, our knowledge of the fate awaiting him makes him a hundred times more interesting than could any mere curiosity as to what was about to happen.  It is our prevision of Nora’s exit at the end of the last act that lends its dramatic poignancy to her entrance at the beginning of the first.

There is nothing absolutely new in this theory.[7] “The irony of fate” has long been recognized as one of the main elements of dramatic effect.  It has been especially dwelt upon in relation to Greek tragedy, of which the themes were all known in advance even to “first-day” audiences.  We should take but little interest in seeing the purple carpet spread for Agamemnon’s triumphal entry into his ancestral halls, if it were not for our foreknowledge of the net and the axe prepared for him.  But, familiar as is this principle, I am not aware that it has hitherto been extended, as I suggest that it should be, to cover the whole field of dramatic interest.  I suggest that the theorists have hitherto dwelt far too much on curiosity[8]—­which may be defined as the interest of ignorance—­and far too little on the feeling of superiority, of clairvoyance, with which we contemplate a foreknown action, whether of a comic or of a tragic cast.  Of course the action must be, essentially if not in every detail, true to nature.  We can derive no sense of superiority from our foreknowledge of an arbitrary or preposterous action; and that, I take it, is the reason why a good many plays have an initial success of curiosity, but cease to attract when their plot becomes familiar.  Again, we take no pleasure in foreknowing the fate of wholly uninteresting people; which is as much as to say that character is indispensable to enduring interest in drama.  With these provisos, I suggest a reconstruction of our theories of dramatic interest, in which mere first-night curiosity shall be relegated to the subordinate place which by right belongs to it.