This effect is brought about technically by focusing on a single scene and a continuous critical period.[15] The whole tragedy, as has been quaintly said, is compressed within the fifth act; or, to speak in still more modern terms, the Greeks composed their tragedies as long one-act plays. Such a play differs from _Henry IV_ or _A Winter’s Tale_ essentially; it differs from _Othello_ only in removable accidents. The characteristic is not brevity, nor even unity, but continuity. That the habit of continuity was fostered by Greek stage conditions, the habit of discontinuity by Elizabethan, there can be no doubt; but neither can there be any doubt that the Greek stage conditions were modified more than once by a dramatist, or that the Elizabethan stage conditions did not determine the growth of Shakspere’s art. In both great ages a dramatist took the stage as he found it, but built up his dramatic technic as he chose. The continuity of Greek tragedy is not merely a fact of archæology; it is an achievement of technic. The limiting to a single place and time has been objected to as forcing off-stage some events that the audience would like to see, and as unnaturally crowding the action. In a word, the one-act form, for an action of some magnitude, has been called artificial. Any form may seem artificial if it is realized imperfectly; and the limits of this form impose merely a higher degree of the difficulty inherent in any dramatic form, the difficulty of focus. Even a five-act play imposes limits, prescribes selection, by the very conditions of the stage itself. The peculiar opportunity arising from the stage conditions of the Greek theater was discerned to be emotional intensity. Intensity has even been urged as the characteristic opportunity of all drama. Whether this be granted or not, undoubtedly the Greeks conceived drama so, and developed their technic accordingly. They worked for intensity. Though they were not content with two actors, they were content with one stage set and with one period of time. Not only so, but the difficulties of their form stimulated their art. In these conditions playwrights heightened intensity by a technic of progressive continuity.