of a length which could hardly be defended on purely dramatic grounds; and still later, occupying some hundred and twenty lines of the very last scene, we have the chatter of Osric with Hamlet’s mockery of it. But the acme of audacity is reached in Antony and Cleopatra, where, quite close to the end, the old countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra discourses on the virtues and vices of the worm, and where his last words, ‘Yes, forsooth: I wish you joy o’ the worm,’ are followed, without the intervention of a line, by the glorious speech.
Immortal longings in me. . . .
In some of the instances of pathos or humour just mentioned we have been brought to that part of the play which immediately precedes, or even contains, the catastrophe. And I will add at once three remarks which refer specially to this final section of a tragedy.
(f) In several plays Shakespeare makes here an appeal which in his own time was evidently powerful: he introduces scenes of battle. This is the case in Richard III., Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Richard, Brutus and Cassius, and Macbeth die on the battlefield. Even if his use of this expedient were not enough to show that battle-scenes were extremely popular in the Elizabethan theatre, we know it from other sources. It is a curious comment on the futility of our spectacular effects that in our theatre these scenes, in which we strive after an ‘illusion’ of which the Elizabethans never dreamt, produce comparatively little excitement, and to many spectators are even somewhat distasteful.[1] And although some of them thrill the imagination of the reader, they rarely, I think, quite satisfy the
- ↑ The end of Richard III. is perhaps an exception.
