oduce in many cases a feeling of
bald artifice. This the later technic will do all in its power to avoid,
while clinging persistently to the principle of climax, a principle of
life just as truly as a principle of art. Physicians speak in a
physiological sense of the grand climacteric of a man's age.

A test of any play may be found in the readiness with which it lends
itself to a simple threefold statement of its story; the proposition, as
it is called by technicians. This tabloid summary of the essence of the
play is valuable in that it reveals plainly two things: whether there is
a play in hand, and what and where is its obligatory scene. All who wish
to train themselves to be critical rather than captious or silly in
their estimate of drama, cannot be too strongly urged to practice this
exercise of reducing a play to its lowest terms, its essential elements.
It will serve to clarify much that might remain otherwise a muddle. And
one of the sure tests of a good play may be found here; if it is not a
workable drama, either it will not readily reduce to a proposition or
else cannot be stated propositionally at all. Further, a play that is a
real play in substance, and not a hopelessly undramatic piece of writing
arbitrarily cut up into scenes or acts, and expressed in dialogue (like
some of the dramas of the Bengalese Taghore), can be stated clearly and
simply in a brief paragraph. This matter of reduction to a skeleton
which is structurally a _sine qua non_ may be illustrated.

A proposition, to define it a little more carefully, is a threefold
statement of the essence of a play, so organically related that each
successive part depends upon and issues from the other. It contains a
condition (or situation), an action, and a result. For instance, the
proposition of _Macbeth_ may be expressed as follows:

I. A man, ambitious to be king, abetted by his wife, gains the throne
through murder.

II. Remorse visits them both.

III. What will be the effect upon the pair?

Reflection upon this schematic summary will show that the interest of
Shakespeare's great drama is not primarily a story interest; plot is not
the chief thing, but character. The essential crux lies in the painful
spectacle of the moral degeneration of husband and wife, sin working
upon each according to their contrasted natures. Both have too much of
the nobler elements in them not to experience regret and the prick of
conscience. This makes the drama c