of course, be a
trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it
will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in
buckram). Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the
characters to whom the narration is addressed. But in these cases its
purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience--it belongs,
not to the "intelligence department," but to the department of
analysis.]

[Footnote 7: I say "variety" rather than complexity because I take it
that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very
complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly
increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the
King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.]

[Footnote 8: This excludes _Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt_, and
_Emperor and Galilean_.]

[Footnote 9: See, for example, _King Henry VIII_, Act IV, and the
opening scene of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_.]

[Footnote 10: This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group
of characters performing something like the function of the antique
Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less
disinterested point of view. The function of _Kaffee-Klatsch_ in
_Pillars of Society_ is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that
of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.]

[Footnote 11: It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in
_La Gioconda_, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention,
by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a
crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated
by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be
interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of
the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.]

[Footnote 12: Dryden, in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, represents this
method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic
poet, he says, "set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race
is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing
the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you
not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you."
Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by "the rule
of time."]

[Footnote 13: It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but