aware with them, or more aware than they. The first way, of
course, has always been a favourite of mystery writers -- including
the Gothic novelists and dramatists of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, who chose to represent a villain or a hero-
villain as bearing in his bosom some dark and agonizing secret that
is kept from us until its potential of suspense has been exhausted.
The second, if one were to make a statistical survey, would doubt-
less be found the most prevalent way for both dramatic and narra-
tive story-tellers past and present; it might be considered the
'normal' or standard way.

But the third way is Shakespeare's. It is a way of other great
dramatists also -- of Sophocles, Jonson, Ibsen, Goldsmith, Sheridan,
Oscar Wilde -- but it is not so consistently the way of any other
dramatist.

The degree of Shakespeare's devotion to a dramatic method that
gives the audience an advantage in awareness, and thus opens ex-
ploitable gaps both between audience and participants and between
participant and participant, can be partially suggested through some
simple but extraordinary statistics. The seventeen comedies and
romances include 297 scenes, in 170 of which an arrangement of
discrepant awarenesses is the indispensable condition of dramatic
effect; that is to say, we hold significant advantage over participants
during these scenes. Further, the comedies include 277 named
persons (and unnamed ones whose roles have some importance),
of whom 151 stand occasionally, frequently, or steadily in a con-
dition of exploitable ignorance; that is to say, we hold significant
advantage at some time over these persons.

Or to put these general facts in another way: more than half the
persons in the comedies and romances are shown as speaking and
acting 'not knowing what they do' in about two-thirds of the
scenes in which they appear. When only principal persons and
scenes (omitting, for example, the many mainly expository scenes)
are counted, the proportion is far higher: then roughly four of five
persons are shown acting ignorantly in four of five scenes. Or to
put the matter in yet another way: if a comedy requires two hours
and a half to perform, attention is centred for nearly two hours on
persons whose vision is less complete than ours, whose sense of the
facts of situations most pertinent to themselves is either quite mis-
taken or quite lacking, and whose words and actions would be very
different if the truth known to us were known to them.

Though these figures barely hint the story, they do suggest that
Shakespeare's dramatic method relied heavily on arrangements of
discrepant awarenesses, and that examination of his management of

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