a play at all. But this tricky ultimate
portion of the drama, seemingly so minor, may prove that which will
trip him in the full flush of his victory with the obligatory scene.

At first blush, it would seem as if, with the big scene over, little
remained to be done with the play, so far as story is concerned. In a
sense this is true. The important elements are resolved; the main
characters are defined for good or bad; the obstacles which have
combined to make the plot tangle have been removed or proved
insurmountable. The play has, with an increasing sense of struggle,
grown to its height; it must now fall from that height by a plausible
and more gentle descent. If it be a tragedy, the fall spells
catastrophe, and is more abrupt and eye-compelling. If comedy be the
form, then the unknotting means a happy solution of all difficulties.
But in either case, the chief business of this final part of the play
would appear to be the rounding out of the fable, the smoothing off of
corners, and the production of an artistic effect of finish and
finality. If any part of the story be incomplete in plot, it will be in
all probability that which has to do with the subplot, if there be one,
or with the fates of subsidiary characters. If the playwright, wishing
to make his last act of interest, and in order to justify the retention
of the audience in the theater for twenty minutes to half an hour more,
should leave somewhat of the main story to be cleared up in the last
act, he has probably weakened his obligatory scene and made a strategic
mistake. And so his instinct is generally right when he prefers to get
all possible dramatic satisfaction into the _scene a faire_, even at the
expense of what is to follow.

A number of things this act can, however, accomplish. It can, with the
chief stress and strain over, exhibit characters in whom the audience
has come to have a warm interest in some further pleasant manifestation
of their personality, thus offering incidental entertainment. The
interest in such stage persons must be very strong to make this a
sufficient reason for prolonging a play. Or, if the drama be tragic in
its nature, some lighter turn of events, or some brighter display of
psychology, may be presented to mitigate pain and soften the awe and
terror inspired by the main theme; as, for instance, Shakespeare
alleviates the deaths of the lovers in Romeo and Juliet by the
reconciliation of the estranged families over their f