hould sweep upward in intensity until the highest point is
reached. In the Shakespearean drama the highest point came somewhat early
in the piece, usually in the third act of the five that Shakespeare wrote;
but in contemporary plays the climax is almost always placed at the end of
the penultimate act,--the fourth act if there are five, and the third act
if there are four. Nowadays the four-act form with a strong climax at the
end of the third act seems to be most often used. This is the form, for
instance, of Ibsen's _Hedda Gabler_, of Mr. Jones's _Mrs. Dane's Defense_,
and of Sir Arthur Pinero's _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, _The Notorious Mrs.
Ebbsmith_, and _The Gay Lord Quex_. Each begins with an act of exposition,
followed by an act of rising interest. Then the whole action of the play
rushes upward toward the curtain-fall of the third act, after which an act
is used to bring the play to a terrible or a happy conclusion.

A less familiar means of emphasis is that which owes its origin to
surprise. This expedient must be used with great delicacy, because a sudden
and startling shock of surprise is likely to diseconomise the attention of
the spectators and flurry them out of a sane conception of the scene. But
if a moment of surprise has been carefully led up to by anticipatory
suggestion, it may be used to throw into sharp and sudden relief an
important point in the play. No one knows that Cyrano de Bergerac is on the
stage until he rises in the midst of the crowd in the Hotel de Bourgogne
and shakes his cane at Montfleury. When Sir Herbert Tree played D'Artagnan
in _The Musketeers_, he emerged suddenly in the midst of a scene from a
suit of old armor standing monumental at the back of the stage,--a _deus ex
machina_ to dominate the situation. American playgoers will remember the
disguise of Sherlock Holmes in the last act of Mr. Gillette's admirable
melodrama. The appearance of the ghost in the closet scene of _Hamlet_ is
made emphatic by its unexpectedness.

But perhaps the most effective form of emphasis in the drama is emphasis by
suspense. Wilkie Collins, who with all his faults as a critic of life
remains the most skilful maker of plots in English fiction, used to say
that the secret of holding the attention of one's readers lay in the
ability to do three things: "Make 'em laugh; make 'em weep; make 'em wait."
There is no use in making an audience wait, however, unless you first give
them an inkling of what the