a sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted lathe) impending over someone’s head:  and when once we are confident that it will fall at the fated moment, we do not mind having our attention momentarily diverted to other matters.  A rather flagrant example of suspended attention is afforded by Hamlet’s advice to the Players.  We know that Hamlet has hung a sword of Damocles over the King’s head in the shape of the mimic murder-scene; and, while it is preparing, we are quite willing to have our attention switched off to certain abstract questions of dramatic criticism.  The scene might have been employed to heighten the tension.  Instead of giving the Players (in true princely fashion) a lesson in the general principles of their art, Hamlet might have specially “coached” them in the “business” of the scene to be enacted, and thus doubly impressed on the audience his resolve to “tent” the King “to the quick.”  I am far from suggesting that this would have been desirable; but it would obviously have been possible.[1] Shakespeare, as the experience of three centuries has shown, did right in judging that the audience was already sufficiently intent on the coming ordeal, and would welcome an interlude of aesthetic theory.

There are times, moreover, when it is not only permissible to suspend the tension, but when, by so doing, a great artist can produce a peculiar and admirable effect.  A sudden interruption, on the very brink of a crisis, may, as it were, whet the appetite of the audience for what is to come.  We see in the Porter scene in Macbeth a suspension of this nature; but Shakespeare used it sparingly, unless, indeed, we are to consider as a deliberate point of art the retardation of movement commonly observable in the fourth acts of his tragedies.  Ibsen, on the other hand, deliberately employed this device on three conspicuous occasions.  The entrance of Dr. Rank in the last act of A Doll’s House is a wholly unnecessary interruption to the development of the crisis between Nora and Helmer.  The scene might be entirely omitted without leaving a perceptible hiatus in the action; yet who does not feel that this brief respite lends gathered impetus to the main action when it is resumed?  The other instances are offered by the two apparitions of Ulric Brendel in Rosmersholm. The first occurs when Rosmer is on the very verge of his momentous confession to Kroll, the second when Rosmer and Rebecca are on the very verge of their last great resolve; and in each case we feel a distinct value (apart from the inherent quality of the Brendel scenes) in the very fact that the tension has been momentarily suspended.  Such a rallentando effect is like the apparent pause in the rush of a river before it thunders over a precipice.