If we endeavor to isolate such a climax in Elizabethan tragedy, we run into many difficulties. For example, is the play-within-the-play scene, the prayer scene, or the closet scene the climax of Hamlet? All contain some reversal; all are highly intense; we are emotionally swept along by them, caught up in the melodrama of Hamlet’s device, in his mad exultation at its effect upon Claudius, in the pathos of Claudius’ contrition, and in the tortured uncertainty of Gertrude. But none of these scenes alone reveals a point of climax. If there is either recognition or reversal, it arises from accumulation of effect.
A more extended example of this diffusion of climax can be found in Lear. Commencing with the famous “Blow, winds” speech, there are four painfully intense scenes: three of Lear on the heath, one of the blinding of Gloucester, interspersed by two brief scenes leading to that cruel act. The Lear and Gloucester scenes alternate. In some ways the emotional hysteria of Lear’s
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples,
drown’d the cocks!
[III, ii, 1-3]
is the most intense moment, and yet the dramatic intensification brought about by weaving together the trials of Lear and those of poor Tom has yet to occur. Moulton regards the meeting of those two as the climax.[20] But in which scene? The first outside the hovel, or the second in the shelter, where Lear arraigns his false daughters? Granville-Barker selects an exact moment for the climax, in the second of the storm scenes “when the proud old king kneels humbly and alone in his wretchedness to pray. This is the argument’s absolute height.”[21] Must, as Granville-Barker goes on to suggest, the tension relax then during the two scenes Lear plays with mad Tom? The reading of the storm scenes should make it obvious that instead of a point of intensity with subsequent slackening, we have a succession of states of intense emotional experience: Lear’s self-identification with raging nature, Lear’s pathetic lucidity and new-forged humility, Lear’s ultimate madness during a fantastic trial. Each high point subsides before the next bursts forth, not like a solitary cannon shot but like the ebb and flow of the pounding sea. The truth seems to be that we find not a climactic point in the center of a Shakespearean play, but a climactic plateau, a “coordination of intense moments” sustained for a surprisingly extended period.
Othello alone of the tragedies does not have that complete relaxation of intensity after the central “plateau.” But here it is a matter of degree, for though the wringing of Othello’s heart by Iago effects the maximum reversal of attitude, Othello continues to oscillate between doubt of and belief in Desdemona’s guilt. Thereafter, while intensity mounts to Desdemona’s death, the tone changes. Instead of the struggle of the giant to break the bonds of his strangling jealousy, we find a painful pathos arising from the gap between Othello’s misconception and Desdemona’s innocence.
Those plays in which the climactic plateau is most easily perceived, in addition to Lear and Hamlet, are Twelfth Night, III, i-iv; Troilus and Cressida, IV, iv, v; V, i;[22] Macbeth, III, iv; IV, i; and Antony and Cleopatra, III, xi-xiii. Both Julius Caesar and Coriolanus have intense centers of action in the third act. In these plays, however, the crucial scenes seem to take on the nature of a climax in the Greek sense. Antony’s speech and the banishment of Coriolanus are points of reversal. A closer examination, however, reveals that these peaks are blunted. Antony does not seem to wish to let the mob depart. There are several moments when he rouses them to action, only to pull them back for further inspiration. The climax of Coriolanus is muted even more because Coriolanus and his friends struggle with the tribunes over the same issues twice (III, i, iii). The final banishment merely brings to an end a conclusion already foregone. In each scene Coriolanus’ patrician pride causes him to defy both friend and enemy. These last two plays contract the plateau only in degree, Julius Caesar moving furthest toward a single moment of intensity. Generally in Shakespeare we will find the centers of action dispersed rather than concentrated, sustained rather than released.