Theorists tend to agree about the limitations that characterize drama in the West, but they differ about its social goals. Some follow Aristotle’s argument that it is cathartic, others agree with Plato that it is exemplary, and many modern critics tend to claim that the shared dramatic experience itself is the chief social justification. Most theorists accept all three goals but tend to foreground one of them. These differences over goals shape the key moments of the play, when the audience is suddenly moved to tears, terror, laughter, or other big emotions. These climactic moments in a play seem to take three basic forms, as described by classical, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century critics. The first to be named is also the most striking and powerful: the recognition scene that reveals a person’s nature, identity, or situation, correcting either an error or a lie. The second is the scene of repentance, forgiveness, or other reconciliation, healing a conflict or restoring the equilibrium after an inruption into or disruption of a previously stable world. The third is the scène à faire, the righting a wrong, the punishing or scolding a villain, or making justice triumph in such a way as to unify an audience in its shared satisfaction at the outcome. The strongest dramas, and some weak ones, tend to use all three kinds of climax, exploiting our shared thirst for truth, security, and justice. These are not the only moments when the plot suddenly moves the audience to tears or terror or laughter, but other key moments tend to operate on a smaller scale. These include scenes of extraordinary fidelity, often by servants or family members who sacrifice all they have to save their lord or loved one. A related type of scene displays extraordinary and often unwarranted generosity, and a third, the stubborn assertion of one’s will despite inevitable consequent pain. These may also be combined with the climactic scenes or with one another.
A recognition scene needs a lie or an error. A reconciliation scene needs conflict. A scène à faire needs a villain, big or small. It has been claimed that the three most important elements in a dramatic plot are conflict, conflict, and conflict. Aristotle has little to say about conflict because the Greeks took it for granted. Greek theatrical practice tended to revolve around the agon, or the struggle between a protagonist and his or her antagonist. Sometimes, one of the two is good and the other evil, but often villainy remains ambiguous. Later classical drama often locates the struggle between good and evil inside a character, although the two moral drives may have representatives in the cast of characters. The conflict may take place between competing characters or competing values that are equally good or evil, such as love and duty. Even then, the hero may hover between two characters representing different sets of values, as Neoptolemus does between Philoctetes and Odysseus, so that the abstract internal conflict can be represented on stage. Usually, the conflict erupts between human beings possessing different kinds of power. In Oedipus at Colonus, Creon possesses political and military power while Oedipus possesses the chthonic power of mysterious prophecies and of the deep taboos that he has broken, as well as the nasty personal power of vindictive old age. In Oedipus the King, the comparable conflict between the able king and the authoritative old priest drives only a part of the plot; the rest represents the conflict between Oedipus and the destiny he has been warned about.
The presence of a conflict produces suspense as to its outcome, and it often involves the audience on one side or the other as the conflict moves toward a climax. The end of a conflict may be a triumph of some representative of the status quo, of the underdog, or of some other figure, but the sequel to it is normally a reconciliation of some sort. Once Claudius is dead, Hamlet can forgive Laertes, and Fortinbras can restore the equilibrium that was destroyed by the inruption of the students from Wittenberg and the murder of two kings, though it is restored at a reduced and saddened level. At the end of Plautus’s Menaechmi, the young lovers and the villainous whoremaster go off to dinner together. An Aristotelian reading treats this ending as the aftermath of catharsis, while a Platonist in our terms will regard it as a model for behavior, involving the audience in the reconstruction of the polity.
For many modern theorists of drama, this audience involvement constitutes not a means, but an end. The play exists not to purge the society of undesirable emotions, nor yet to educate the audience in desirable ones, but to provide a moment of solidarity in a shared vicarious experience at a great ceremony. In the commercial theatre of the nineteenth century, the center of the plot was often not primarily a conflict but, as in the fairy tales Propp studied, an injustice or other wrong, and the central moment was the scène à faire, the moment when the villain received their comeuppance or the hero or heroine told the villain off. This moment was justified not by the needs of the polity or those of society, but by the shared desires of the individual members of the audience. Eugène Scribe’s scène à faire would often show the villain’s ruin, but the satisfaction it gave outweighed any terror or pity, and civic usefulness played little part in the author’s plan. Jerzy Grotowski and a number of the finest theatrical minds of the twentieth century have adopted this ideal of the theatrical as an end in itself, constructing their productions in an avant-garde variant of the nineteenth-century melodrama, with the audience as moral or immoral participants in the action rather than its spectacle.
Let us look last at recognition scenes. The concern with terror and pity that have long shaped our discussions may have originated in Aristotle’s departure from Plato over the dangers of drama, but it took on a life of its own in the Poetics and helped Aristotle give a name to a pattern that has characterized most of the most successful tragedies and comedies in Western culture ever since: the recognition scene that causes or discloses a reversal in the fortunes of the hero. For Aristotle’s mind, the most exciting experience in life was probably what the Gestalt psychologists called an “aha”: the moment when a body of data or experience suddenly shifts from incomprehensibility or from an incorrect and unsatisfactory understanding to something that clearly makes sense. This experience matches what Aristotle sought in a recognition scene and is not far from his definition of happiness in the Ethics (1177b). Shakespeare was as Aristotelian in this respect as the ancient tragedians, using the same technique to produce terror, pity, and, in comedy, laughter.
The recognition must take place in the mind of a character in the drama, but it may or may not also take place in the minds of the audience. If the audience knows what one or more characters do not, the audience experiences the powerful effect of dramatic irony. If the audience does not know, it experiences its own “aha,” rather than a vicarious one. Both systems work well, and as Aristotle himself pointed out, in some cases a small part of the audience experiences dramatic irony, while the majority do not know the myth that forms the basis for a play and experiences the same “aha” as the hero. In the Iphigenia in Tauris, until Iphigenia identifies her brother whom she is about to sacrifice, only the goddess Aphrodite shares the audience’s knowledge. In Philoctetes, Odysseus’s elaborate falsehood about Neoptolemus’s mission makes the audience and Neoptolemus squirm when Philoctetes trusts him, and fills the recognition scene with terror and pity that the audience shares with Neoptolemus. Both these recognition scenes are preceded at first by curiosité and then by suspense, as the audience comes to realize the impending horror, which in these two plays is averted by a god winched down to the stage, since classical tragedy did not depend on an unhappy outcome.
Shakespeare’s predilection for recognition scenes peaks in the fifth scene of the fifth act of Cymbeline, a play whose plot has attracted little praise over the centuries, though the play’s beauty can move us deeply. The scene opens with ten bewildered characters on stage. Five of them are disguised, standing around awaiting royal, mutual, and, in two cases, self-recognition scenes. Not recognizing them after many years, Cymbeline rewards his own now grown sons and their abductor for turning the tide of a battle and saving England, regretting at the same time the absence of their co-fighter, whom the audience knows to be Posthumus, the son-in-law he had exiled. The first recognition, oddly enough, involves none of the disguised figures. It comes in the classical tradition, with a report that Cymbeline’s queen has died, confessing that she had planned to poison Cymbeline and his daughter, Imogen. The king’s recognition of his uxorious delusion gives this moment some of the gratifying quality of a scène à faire, but his justification of his blindness ends with self-reproach and a prayer:
Mine eyes
Were not at fault, for she was beautiful;
Mine ears, that heard her flattery; nor my heart,
That thought her like her seeming. It had been vicious
To have mistrusted her. Yet, (O my daughter!)
That it was folly in me thou mayst say
And prove it in thy feeling. Heaven mend all!
(5.5.62–68)
This moment leaves Shakespeare with a dozen recognitions and less than four hundred lines to go. But he takes his time. Cymbeline half-recognizes his daughter, dressed as a page: “His favor is familiar to me. Boy, / thou hast looked thyself into my grace / and art mine own” (5.5.93–95). But Imogen has recognized the Machiavellian villain Iachimo among a group of captives and, in a great reversal, has power over him through the king. Iachimo confesses on stage, and it costs Shakespeare many more lines than the queen’s reported confession. The disguised Posthumus, listening, realizes that he has ordered his wife to be killed for a fabricated adultery. His outburst leads all hands to recognize him and his hysterical attack unveils Imogen, forcing the doctor to admit to deceiving the evil queen and several others by substituting sleeping medicine for the deadly poison she had ordered. Shakespeare slips into narration to generate several further recognitions, but the emotional center of the scene shifts from recognition to reconciliation. Posthumus embraces his wife in answer to her tender reproach, saying, “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / till the tree die” (5.5.263–64). And the king has said, “If this be so, the Gods do mean to strike me / to death with mortal joy” (5.5.234–35), and finally realizes that it is so: “How now, my flesh, my child? / What, mak’st thou me a dullard in this act? / Wilt thou not speak to me?” (5.5.264–66). When she requests his blessing, he answers, “My tears that fall / prove holy water on thee” (5.5.268–69). Almost unimaginably in such a tangle, these tears prove contagious, and a good actor can make his listeners weep. The reconciliations even include a pardon for Iachimo and a peace with the Roman Empire.
In this way, Shakespeare uses all three kinds of climax, prepared for throughout the play, and gives up any semblance of unity. Shakespeare, if anyone ever understood it, knew and treasured the dramatic in drama, but more than a third of this scene is narrative. Narrative is commonplace at the beginning of a play to lay out the opening situation and at the end to divulge crucial secrets to the audience or to avoid having too many corpses lying around the stage, but this narration is entirely about matters that the audience has seen in the past hour or two. Scholars have argued that Shakespeare was simply experimenting with a new style, the dramatic romance, which he only mastered in The Tempest. One could argue that The Tempest works well on stage, while in Cymbeline the complexities are too numerous. This final scene suggests something else. It is an epilogue, a genre that forms an important part of nineteenth-century novels and certain other genres, but is hardly necessary in a play. In the Romantic period major poets often switched to novels. Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and, to some extent, Goethe did, and Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov were moving in that direction when their careers were cut short. Shakespeare knew many novellas and novels and romances—classical, medieval, and Renaissance—but he had no fully developed novelistic models. He was working on Pericles in the same years as Cymbeline, and Pericles is closer to Greek romance than any other Shakespearean play. I would claim that Shakespeare, having created the central canon for the English sonnet and the central canon for English comedy and tragedy—history plays having been in place before him—was preparing himself to invent the modern English novel when he was cut off by death. Part 3 of this book will deal with novelistic plots, but here it will suffice to say that if Shakespeare had lived as long as Tolstoy did, he might have read Cervantes, and the modern novel would have begun in England, rather than in France or Spain.