Of Pallas shared not in their perfidy;
Why should you hate such charming innocence?
Hippolytus. I should not need to fly, if it were hatred.
Theramenes. May I, then, learn the meaning of your flight?[8]
Another device is an intensely inquisitive stranger just returned from foreign parts who listens with patience not always shared by an auditor to any needed preliminary exposition.
The Opportunity,[9] by James Shirley, shows an ingenious adaptation of the device of the inquisitive stranger newly come to some city. Aurelio, a gentleman of Milan, coming to Urbino with his friend Pisauro, is mistaken for Borgia, who has been banished from Urbino. As one person after another, greeting Aurelio as Borgia, naturally talks to him of his past, his family, and what is to be expected of him now that he is returned, they identify and relate clearly to one another the chief people whom Aurelio is to meet in the play. A hearer would take in almost unconsciously the needed exposition, so amused would he be at the increasing bewilderment of Aurelio.
Such ways and means as these three—the servant, the confidant, the stranger—Buckingham ridiculed in the late seventeenth century in his Rehearsal:
Enter Gentleman-Usher and Physician
Physician. Sir, by your habit, I should guess you to be the Gentleman-Usher of this sumptuous palace.
Usher. And by your gait and fashion, I should almost suspect you rule the healths of both our noble Kings, under the notion of Physician.