This is not so in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, because here, although the hero perishes, the side opposed to him, being the more faulty or evil, cannot be allowed to triumph when he falls.  Otherwise the type of construction is the same.  The fortunes of Romeo and Juliet rise and culminate in their marriage (II. vi.), and then begin to decline before the opposition of their houses, which, aided by accidents, produces a catastrophe, but is thereupon converted into a remorseful reconciliation.  Hamlet’s cause reaches its zenith in the success of the play-scene (III. ii.).  Thereafter the reaction makes way, and he perishes through the plot of the King and Laertes.  But they are not allowed to survive their success.

The construction in the remaining Roman plays follows the same plan, but in both plays (as in Richard II. and Richard III.) it suffers from the intractable nature of the historical material, and is also influenced by other causes.  In Coriolanus the hero reaches the topmost point of success when he is named consul (II. iii.), and the rest of the play shows his decline and fall; but in this decline he attains again for a time extraordinary power, and triumphs, in a sense, over his original adversary, though he succumbs to another.  In Antony and Cleopatra the advance of the hero’s cause depends on his freeing himself from the heroine, and he appears to have succeeded when he becomes reconciled to Octavius and marries Octavia (III. ii.); but he returns to Egypt and is gradually driven to his death, which involves that of the heroine.

There remain two of the greatest of the tragedies, and in both of them a certain difficulty will be felt. King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action.  Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.  If we attempt to do so, we must either find the crisis in the First Act (for after it Lear’s course is downward), and this is absurd; or else we must say that the usual movement is present but its direction is reversed, the hero’s cause first sinking to the lowest point (in the Storm-scenes) and then rising again.  But this also will not do; for though his fortunes may be said to rise again for a time, they rise only to fall once more to a catastrophe.  The truth is, that after the First Act, which is really filled by the exposition, Lear suffers but hardly initiates action at all; and the right way to look at the matter, from the point of view of construction, is to regard Goneril, Regan and Edmund as the leading characters.  It is they who, in the conflict, initiate action.  Their fortune mounts to the crisis, where the old King is driven out into the storm and loses his reason, and where Gloster is blinded and expelled from his home (III. vi. and vii.).  Then the counter-action begins to gather force, and their cause to decline; and, although they win the battle, they are involved in the catastrophe which they bring on Cordelia and Lear.  Thus we may still find in King Lear the usual scheme of an ascending and a descending movement of one side in the conflict.