as that of the crisis, perhaps more so.  Most people, if asked to mention the scene that occupies the centre of the action in Julius Caesar and in Coriolanus, would mention the scenes of Antony’s speech and Coriolanus’ banishment.  Thus that apparently necessary pause in the action does not, in any of these dramas, come directly after the crisis.  It is deferred; and in several cases it is by various devices deferred for some little time; e.g. in Romeo and Juliet till the hero has left Verona, and Juliet is told that her marriage with Paris is to take place ‘next Thursday morn’ (end of Act III.); in Macbeth till the murder of Duncan has been followed by that of Banquo, and this by the banquet-scene.  Hence the point where this pause occurs is very rarely reached before the end of the Third Act.

(b) Either at this point, or in the scene of the counter-stroke which precedes it, we sometimes find a peculiar effect.  We are reminded of the state of affairs in which the conflict began.  The opening of Julius Caesar warned us that, among a people so unstable and so easily led this way or that, the enterprise of Brutus is hopeless; the days of the Republic are done.  In the scene of Antony’s speech we see this same people again.  At the beginning of Antony and Cleopatra the hero is about to leave Cleopatra for Rome.  Where the play takes, as it were, a fresh start after the crisis, he leaves Octavia for Egypt.  In Hamlet, when the counter-stroke succeeds to the crisis, the Ghost, who had appeared in the opening scenes, reappears.  Macbeth’s action in the first part of the tragedy followed on the prediction of the Witches who promised him the throne.  When the action moves forward again after the banquet-scene the Witches appear once more, and make those fresh promises which again drive him forward.  This repetition of a first effect produces a fateful feeling.  It generally also stimulates expectation as to the new movement about to begin.  In Macbeth the scene is, in addition, of the greatest consequence from the purely theatrical point of view.

(c) It has yet another function.  It shows, in Macbeth’s furious irritability and purposeless savagery, the internal reaction which accompanies the outward decline of his fortunes.  And in other plays also the exhibition of such inner changes forms a means by which interest is sustained in this difficult section of a tragedy.  There is no point in Hamlet where we feel more hopeless than that where the hero, having missed his chance, moralises over his irresolution and determines to cherish now only thoughts of blood, and then departs without an effort for England.  One purpose, again, of the quarrel-scene between Brutus and Cassius (IV. iii), as also of the appearance of Caesar’s ghost just afterwards, is to indicate the inward changes.  Otherwise the introduction of this famous and wonderful scene can hardly be defended