The Greek tragic poets ended the action of their plays in the modern manner, at the great scene, but, unlike us, they delayed the departure of the audience for some minutes more, generally by a chorus of men and women who expounded the moral value of the action in noble verse. The audience came away calmed. If a Greek had constructed _Julius Caesar_, he would have ended the action at the murder. A chorus of senators would then have chanted something noble about the results of pride, the vanity of human glory, and the strangeness of the ways of the gods. A modern writer would have caused the curtain to fall at the murder, for to-day, when the brains are out the play dies and there an end. Shakespeare carries on his play for two acts after Caesar is dead. In _Macbeth_ he constructs the last half of his play in much the same manner. In both plays he is considering the conception, the doing, and the results of a violent act. In both plays this act is the murder of the head of a State. In neither case is he deeply interested in the victim. Duncan, in _Macbeth_, is a generous gentleman; Caesar, in this play, is a touchy man of affairs whose head is turned. Shakespeare's imagination broods on the fact that the killers were deluded into murder, Macbeth by an envious wife and the belief that Fate meant him to be king, Brutus by an envious friend and the belief that he was saving Rome. In both cases the killers show base personal ingratitude and treachery. In both plays, an avenging justice makes even the scales. The mind of the poet follows them from the moment when the guilty thought is prompted, through the agony and exultation of dreadful acts, to the unhappiness that dogs the treacherous, till Fate's just sword falls in vengeance. His imagination is most keenly stirred just as ours is, by the great event, the murder of the victim: but his subject is not the murder, nor yet the tragical end of a ruler. His subject in both plays is the working of Fate who prompts to murder, uses the murderer, and then destroys him. We are interested in crisis and in topic. The Elizabethans, with a wider vision, could not detach an act from its place in the pageant of history. In a modern play the heroine is put into an unpleasant position, or an evil is exposed, or our faults are made visible and laughable. The point of view is that of the sympathiser, reformer, and moralist looking on from the window near by. The field of vision is restricted and the object brought near. In this great play, as in _Macbeth_, Shakespeare strove to present a violent act and its consequences from the point of view of a great just spirit outside life.