e
proceeds, the further revelations made by the same stranger lead Jocasta
to recognize in Oedipus her own child, who was exposed on Mount
Kithairon; and, in the subsequent scene, the evidence of the old
Shepherd brings Oedipus himself to the same crushing realization. No
completer case of _anagnorisis_ and _peripeteia_ could well be
conceived--whatever we may have to say of the means by which it is
led up to.[1]

Has the conception of the peripety, as an almost obligatory element in
drama, any significance for the modern playwright? Obligatory, of
course, it cannot be: it is easy to cite a hundred admirable plays in
which it is impossible to discover anything that can reasonably be
called a peripety. But this, I think, we may safely say: the dramatist
is fortunate who finds in the development of his theme, without
unnatural strain or too much preparation, opportunity for a great scene,
highly-wrought, arresting, absorbing, wherein one or more of his
characters shall experience a marked reversal either of inward
soul-state or of outward fortune. The theory of the peripety, in short,
practically resolves itself for us into the theory of the "great scene,"
Plays there are, many and excellent plays, in which some one scene
stands out from all the rest, impressing itself with peculiar vividness
on the spectator's mind; and, nine times out of ten, this scene will be
found to involve a peripety. It can do no harm, then, if the playwright
should ask himself: "Can I, without any undue sacrifice, so develop my
theme as to entail upon my leading characters, naturally and probably,
an experience of this order?"

The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they are apt to be too
small in scale, or else too fatally conclusive, to provide material for
drama. One of the commonest, perhaps, is that of the man who enters a
physician's consulting-room to seek advice in some trifling ailment, and
comes out again, half an hour later, doomed either to death or to some
calamity worse than death. This situation has been employed, not
ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic
drama, _The Fires of Fate_; but it is very difficult to find any
dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.[2] The
moral peripety--the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of
some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air--is a no less
characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable