And this is how Verrall solves the difficulty “with lucidity, skill and brilliance,” so Professor Norwood tells us. The story of the series of beacons is a lie concocted by the wife and her lover. There is only one beacon, which Ægisthus lights when he discovers the landing of Agamemnon; it is to warn his accomplice that she may make ready to murder her husband. And as Agamemnon is actually on shore when this single beacon flames up, he is able to arrive in the middle of the play. If we accept this solution of the difficulty we are compelled to believe that Æschylus wrote a play, instantly accepted as a masterpiece, which had to wait for more than two thousand years for a British scholar to explain away an impossibility. This explanation is undoubtedly lucid and skilful and brilliant; but none the less is it a specimen of undramatic criticism. It could never have been put forward by anyone who had an elementary knowledge of the principles of playmaking. A dramatist never tells lies to his audience; and the audience always accepts the statements of his characters as true—unless he himself takes care to suggest that a given statement is false. The play has to be taken at its face value. The characters talk on purpose to convey all needful information to the spectators. Æschylus may make the queen lie to the king, but when she does this the audience is aware of the truth or surmises it. The dramatist never hesitates to let his characters deceive one another; but if he knows his business he does not deceive the spectators. In real life Agamemnon could not arrive for a fortnight after Troy had fallen; but the Athenian audience could not wait in their seats two weeks, so Æschylus frankly brings on Agamemnon; and the spectators were glad to behold him, asking no inconvenient questions, because they were eager to see what would happen to him. It might be a contradiction of the fact, but it was not a departure from the truth, since the king would assuredly come home sooner or later. Everyone familiar with Sarcey’s discussion of the conventions of the drama is aware that the spectators in the theater are never sticklers for fact; they are willing to accept a contradiction of fact, if that contradiction is for their own profit, as it was in this case. And they accept it unthinkingly; and it is only when they hold the play in their hands to pick it to pieces that they discover any “difficulty.” III