In discussing what Freytag calls the erregende Moment, we might have defined it as the starting-point of the tension.  A reasonable audience will, if necessary, endure a certain amount of exposition, a certain positing of character and circumstance, before the tension sets in; but when it once has set in, the playwright must on no account suffer it to relax until he deliberately resolves it just before the fall of the curtain.  There are, of course, minor rhythms of tension and resolution, like the harmonic vibrations of a violin-string.  That is implied when we say that a play consists of a great crisis worked out through a series of minor crises.  But the main tension, once initiated, must never be relaxed.  If it is, the play is over, though the author may have omitted to note the fact.  Not infrequently, he begins a new play under the impression that he is finishing the old one.  That is what Shakespeare did in The Merchant of Venice. The fifth act is an independent afterpiece, though its independence is slightly disguised by the fact that the erregende Moment of the new play follows close upon the end of the old one, with no interact between.  A very exacting technical criticism might accuse Ibsen of verging towards the same fault in An Enemy of the People. There the tension is practically resolved with Dr. Stockmann’s ostracism at the end of the fourth act.  At that point, if it did not know that there was another act to come, an audience might go home in perfect content.  The fifth act is a sort of epilogue or sequel, built out of the materials of the preceding drama, but not forming an integral part of it.  With a brief exposition to set forth the antecedent circumstances, it would be quite possible to present the fifth act as an independent comedietta.

But here a point of great importance calls for our notice.  Though the tension, once started, must never be relaxed:  though it ought, on the contrary, to be heightened or tightened (as you choose to put it) from act to act; yet there are times when it may without disadvantage, or even with marked advantage, be temporarily suspended.  In other words, the stretching-forward, without in any way slackening, may fall into the background of our consciousness, while other matters, the relevance of which may not be instantly apparent, are suffered to occupy the foreground.  We know all too well, in everyday experience, that tension is not really relaxed by a temporary distraction.  The dread of a coming ordeal in the witness-box or on the operating-table may be forcibly crushed down like a child’s jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again the moment that effort ceases.  Sir Arthur Pinero’s play, The Profligate, was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed “The Sword of Damocles.”  That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension:  we see