n, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him--thus!"

What is the essence of Shakespeare's achievement in this marvellous
passage? What is it that he has done? He has thrown his audience, just
as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a
sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation. 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.

Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be
found in the first act of Ibsen's _Little Eyolf_. The lame boy, Eyolf,
has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water,
and been drowned. This is the bare fact: how is it to be conveyed to the
child's parents and to the audience?

A Greek dramatist would probably have had recourse to a long and
elaborately worked-up "messenger-speech," a pathetic recitation. That
was the method best suited to the conditions, and to what may be called
the prevailing tempo, of the Greek theatre. I am far from saying that it
was a bad method: no method is bad which holds and moves an audience.
But in this case it would have had the disadvantage of concentrating
attention on the narrator instead of on the child's parents, on the mere
event instead of on the emotions it engendered. In the modern theatre,
with greater facilities for reproducing the actual movement of life, the
dramatist naturally aims at conveying to the audience the growing
anxiety, the suspense and the final horror, of the father and mother.
The most commonplace playwright would have seen this opportunity and
tried to make the most of it. Every one can think of a dozen commonplace
ways in which the scene could be arranged and written; and some of them
might be quite effective. The great invention by which Ibsen snatches
the scene out of the domain of the commonplace, and raises it to the
height of dramatic poetry, consists in leaving it doubtful to the father
and mother what is the meaning of the excitement on the beach and the
confused cries which reach their ears, until one cry comes home