to be driven to keep the hero off the stage for a long time while the counter-action is rising; Macbeth, Hamlet and Coriolanus during about 450 lines, Lear for nearly 500, Romeo for about 550 (it matters less here, because Juliet is quite as important as Romeo).  How can a drama in which this happens compete, in its latter part, with Othello?  And again, how can deliberations between Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, between Malcolm and Macduff, between the Capulets, between Laertes and the King, keep us at the pitch, I do not say of the crisis, but even of the action which led up to it?  Good critics—­writers who have criticised Shakespeare’s dramas from within, instead of applying to them some standard ready-made by themselves or derived from dramas and a theatre of quite other kinds than his—­have held that some of his greatest tragedies fall off in the Fourth Act, and that one or two never wholly recover themselves.  And I believe most readers would find, if they examined their impressions, that to their minds Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth have all a tendency to ‘drag’ in this section of the play, and that the first and perhaps also the last of these four fail even in the catastrophe to reach the height of the greatest scenes that have preceded the Fourth Act.  I will not ask how far these impressions are justified.  The difficulties in question will become clearer and will gain in interest if we look rather at the means which have been employed to meet them, and which certainly have in part, at least, overcome them.

(a) The first of these is always strikingly effective, sometimes marvellously so.  The crisis in which the ascending force reaches its zenith is followed quickly, or even without the slightest pause, by a reverse or counter-blow not less emphatic and in some cases even more exciting.  And the effect is to make us feel a sudden and tragic change in the direction of the movement, which, after ascending more or less gradually, now turns sharply downward.  To the assassination of Caesar (III. i.) succeeds the scene in the Forum (III. ii.), where Antony carries the people away in a storm of sympathy with the dead man and of fury against the conspirators.  We have hardly realised their victory before we are forced to anticipate their ultimate defeat and to take the liveliest interest in their chief antagonist.  In Hamlet the thrilling success of the play-scene (III. ii.) is met and undone at once by the counter-stroke of Hamlet’s failure to take vengeance (III. iii.) and his misfortune in killing Polonius (III. iv.).  Coriolanus has no sooner gained the consulship than he is excited to frenzy by the tribunes and driven into exile.  On the marriage of Romeo follows immediately the brawl which leads to Mercutio’s death and the banishment of the hero (II. vi. and III. i.).  In all of these instances excepting that of Hamlet the scene of the counter-stroke is at least as exciting