inent actor nearly every time he leaves the
stage; and this custom has made it necessary for the dramatist to precede
an exit with some speech or action important enough to justify the
interruption. Though Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew nothing of the
curtain-fall, they at least understood fully the emphasis of exit speeches.
They even tagged them with rhyme to give them greater prominence. An actor
likes to take advantage of his last chance to move an audience. When he
leaves the stage, he wants at least to be remembered.

In general it may be said that any pause in the action emphasises by
position the speech or business that immediately preceded it. This is true
not only of the long pause at the end of an act: the point is illustrated
just as well by an interruption of the play in mid-career, like Mrs.
Fiske's ominous and oppressive minute of silence in the last act of _Hedda
Gabler_. The employment of pause as an aid to emphasis is of especial
importance in the reading of lines.

It is also customary in the drama to emphasise by proportion. More time is
given to significant scenes than to dialogues of subsidiary interest. The
strongest characters in a play are given most to say and do; and the extent
of the lines of the others is proportioned to their importance in the
action. Hamlet says more and does more than any other character in the
tragedy in which he figures. This is as it should be; but, on the other
hand, Polonius, in the same play, seems to receive greater emphasis by
proportion than he really deserves. The part is very fully written.
Polonius is often on the stage, and talks incessantly whenever he is
present; but, after all, he is a man of small importance and fulfils a
minor purpose in the plot. He is, therefore, falsely emphasised. That is
why the part of Polonius is what French actors call a _faux bon role_,--a
part that seems better than it is.

In certain special cases, it is advisable to emphasise a character by the
ironical expedient of inverse proportion. Tartufe is so emphasised
throughout the first two acts of the play that bears his name. Although he
is withheld from the stage until the second scene of the third act, so much
is said about him that we are made to feel fully his sinister dominance
over the household of Orgon; and at his first appearance, we already know
him better than we know any of the other characters. In Victor Hugo's
_Marion Delorme_, the indomitable will of Card