preference, wherever it is reasonably possible, to
the cheap emotions of curiosity and surprise. But this is a criticism,
not of dramatic art, but of human nature. We may wish that mankind took
more pleasure in pure apprehension than in emotion; but so long as the
fact is otherwise, that way of handling an incident by which the
greatest variety of poignancy of emotion can be extracted from it will
remain the specifically dramatic way.

We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called
primary and secondary suspense or surprise--that 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. The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not
distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term
"dramatic." It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion
must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any
ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the
larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it
beforehand, in outline, if not in detail.

As a typical example of a dramatic way of handling an incident, so as to
make a supreme effect of what might else have been an anti-climax, one
may cite the death of Othello. Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem.
Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture;
how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut
of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a
mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In
no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius
more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. We all remember
how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture,
and thus addresses them:

"Soft you; a word or two, before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know 't;
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base India