, develops,
and ends before our very eyes. In _The Winter's Tale_, a brief
conversation between Camillo and Archidamus informs us that the King of
Bohemia is paying a visit to the King of Sicilia; and that is absolutely
all we need to know. It was not even necessary that it should be
conveyed to us in this way. The situation would be entirely
comprehensible if the scene between Camillo and Archidamus were omitted.

It is needless to go through the whole list of comedies. The broad fact
is that in all the plays commonly so described, excepting only _The
Tempest_, the whole action comes within the frame of the picture. In
_The Tempest_ the poet employs a form of opening which otherwise he
reserves for tragedies. The first scene is simply an animated tableau,
calculated to arrest the spectator's attention, without conveying to him
any knowledge either of situation or character. Such gleams of character
as do, in fact, appear in the dialogue, are scarcely perceived in the
hurly-burly of the storm. Then, in the calm which ensues, Prospero
expounds to Miranda in great detail the antecedents of the crisis now
developing. It might almost seem, indeed, that the poet, in this, his
poetic last-will-and-testament, intended to warn his successors against
the dangers of a long narrative exposition; for Prospero's story sends
Miranda to sleep. Be this as it may, we have here a case in which
Shakespeare deliberately adopted the plan of placing on the stage, not
the whole crisis, but only its culmination, leaving its earlier stages
to be conveyed in narrative.[2] It would have been very easy for him to
have begun at the beginning and shown us in action the events narrated
by Prospero. This course would have involved no greater leap, either in
time or space, than he had perpetrated in the almost contemporary
_Winter's Tale_; and it cannot be said that there would have been any
difficulty in compressing into three acts, or even two, the essentials
of the action of the play as we know it. His reasons for departing from
his usual practice were probably connected with the particular occasion
for which the play was written. He wanted to produce a masque rather
than a drama. We must not, therefore, attach too much significance to
the fact that in almost the only play in which Shakespeare seems to have
built entirely out of his own head, with no previous play or novel to
influence him, he adopted the plan of going straight to the catastrophe,
i