the dramatist’s designs upon us.  Not that this is always so with Shakespeare.  In the opening scene of his early Comedy of Errors, and in the opening speech of Richard III., we feel that the speakers are addressing us; and in the second scene of the Tempest (for Shakespeare grew at last rather negligent of technique) the purpose of Prospero’s long explanation to Miranda is palpable.  But in general Shakespeare’s expositions are masterpieces.[21]

His usual plan in tragedy is to begin with a short scene, or part of a scene, either full of life and stir, or in some other way arresting.  Then, having secured a hearing, he proceeds to conversations at a lower pitch, accompanied by little action but conveying much information.  For example, Romeo and Juliet opens with a street-fight, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus with a crowd in commotion; and when this excitement has had its effect on the audience, there follow quiet speeches, in which the cause of the excitement, and so a great part of the situation, are disclosed.  In Hamlet and Macbeth this scheme is employed with great boldness.  In Hamlet the first appearance of the Ghost occurs at the fortieth line, and with such effect that Shakespeare can afford to introduce at once a conversation which explains part of the state of affairs at Elsinore; and the second appearance, having again increased the tension, is followed by a long scene, which contains no action but introduces almost all the dramatis personae and adds the information left wanting.  The opening of Macbeth is even more remarkable, for there is probably no parallel to its first scene, where the senses and imagination are assaulted by a storm of thunder and supernatural alarm.  This scene is only eleven lines long, but its influence is so great that the next can safely be occupied with a mere report of Macbeth’s battles,—­a narrative which would have won much less attention if it had opened the play.

When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety.  On the other hand, if the play opens with a quiet conversation, this is usually brief, and then at once the hero enters and takes action of some decided kind.  Nothing, for example, can be less like the beginning of Macbeth than that of King Lear.  The tone is pitched so low that the conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund is written in prose.  But at the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by the entrance of Lear and his court, and without delay the King proceeds to his fatal division of the kingdom.