ying his "finder" in order to determine how much of
a given prospect he can "get in."

The answer to the question depends on many things, but chiefly on the
nature of the crisis and the nature of the impression which the
playwright desires to make upon his audience. If his play be a comedy,
and if his object be gently and quietly to interest and entertain, the
chances are that he begins by showing us his personages in their normal
state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and
relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our
eyes. If, on the other hand, his play be of a more stirring description,
and he wants to seize the spectator's attention firmly from the start,
he will probably go straight at his crisis, plunging, perhaps, into the
very middle of it, even at the cost of having afterwards to go back in
order to put the audience in possession of the antecedent circumstances.
In a third type of play, common of late years, and especially affected
by Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which
is presently found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic
condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, it
may be for many years.

Let us glance at a few of Shakespeare's openings, and consider at what
points he attacks his various themes. Of his comedies, all except one
begin with a simple conversation, showing a state of affairs from which
the crisis develops with more or less rapidity, but in which it is as
yet imperceptibly latent. In no case does he plunge into the middle of
his subject, leaving its antecedents to be stated in what is technically
called an "exposition." Neither in tragedy nor in comedy, indeed, was
this Shakespeare's method. In his historical plays he relied to some
extent on his hearers' knowledge of history, whether gathered from books
or from previous plays of the historical series; and where such
knowledge was not to be looked for, he would expound the situation in
good set terms, like those of a Euripidean Prologue. But the
chronicle-play is a species apart, and practically an extinct species:
we need not pause to study its methods. In his fictitious plays, with
two notable exceptions, it was Shakespeare's constant practice to bring
the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a
point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be
conveyed in a few casual words. The exce