[This passage appears to point to some antecedent drama not at present known.

[The latter drama was not written till some months after this and the ensuing piece, and was intended as a sort of sequel to the plays on the history of Robin Hood.]

[Unless it be the drama printed in 1604 under the title of the "Wit of a Woman."

I don't believe you'll find an instance of a charitable act in all Greek history, drama, and biography!

When a man is in love with two women at the same time, it really is a little unlikely that he should fall in love with a third!' 'Mr. Griggs says that marriage is a drama which only succeeds if people preserve the unities!' 'Griggs is always trying to coax the Djin back into the bottle, like the fisherman in the Arabian Nights,' answered Logotheti.

"I was immensely interested in the case, and journeyed down to Edinburgh in order to get a good view of the chief actors in the thrilling drama which was about to be unfolded there.

" The period from 1780 to 1837 had only two great writers of fiction,Scott and Jane Austen; but the Victorian age saw the novel gain the ascendancy that the drama enjoyed in Elizabethan times.

Dyce, in a note on this passage (Dyce's Peele, II. 88) writes: 'No drama called Charlemagne has come down to us, nor am I acquainted with any old play in which that monarch figures.'

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Such was the first act of the bustling drama.

We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called primary and secondary suspense or surprisethat is to say between suspense or surprise actually experienced by the spectator to whom the drama is new, and suspense or surprise experienced only sympathetically, on behalf of the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is to follow.

In other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly, and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.

To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention.

This is clearly a dramatic crisis within our definition; but, no less clearly, it is not a piece of rational or commendable drama.

To say that such-and-such a factor is necessary, or highly desirable, in a dramatic scene, is by no means to imply that every scene which contains this factor is good drama.

Let those who have the artthe extremely delicate and difficult artof making drama without the characteristically dramatic ingredients, do so by all means; but let them not seek to lay an embargo on the judicious use of these ingredients as they present themselves in life.

[Footnote 8: If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others.

It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation, that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits, and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy prompted.

As a rule, then, it would seem to be an unfavourable sign when a drama presents itself at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline.

Again, we take no pleasure in foreknowing the fate of wholly uninteresting people; which is as much as to say that character is indispensable to enduring interest in drama.

In relation to the characters in the drama, the audience are as gods looking before and after.

A drama of Hamlet is only possible because the one sceptic is surrounded by characters who have some positive faith, who do their work for good or evil undoubtingly while he is speculating about his.

The change did not follow at once, but as the catastrophe of a little social drama, upon the rights and wrongs of which a good deal of controversy has been expended.

There was a frightful incongruity between civilization and his lifebetween broad, flat, comfortable, every-day, police-regulated civilization, and the hideous drama in which he was suddenly a principal actor.

It kept her from anticipating the details of the melancholy drama which was now being enacted before her eyes.