The second ending merely connects the play more closely with history.
Colonel Rutger’s Orchard, the next morning. The scene is an orchard whose trees are heavy with red and yellow fruit. The centre tree has a heavy dark branch jutting out, which is the gallows; from this branch all the leaves and the little branches have been chopped off; a heavy coil of rope with a noose hangs from it, and against the trunk of the tree leans a ladder. It is the moment before dawn, and slowly at the back through the trees is seen a purple streak, which changes to crimson as the sun creeps up. A dim gray haze next fills the stage, and through this gradually breaks the rising sun. The birds begin to wake, and suddenly there is heard the loud, deep-toned, single toll of a bell, followed by a roll of muffled drums in the distance. Slowly the orchard fills with murmuring, whispering people; men and women coming up through the trees make a semicircle amongst them, about the gallows tree, but at a good distance. The bell tolls at intervals, and muffled drums are heard between the twittering and happy songs of birds. There is the sound of musketry, of drums beating a funeral march, which gets nearer, and finally a company of British soldiers marches in, led by Fitzroy, Nathan Hale in their midst, walking alone, his hands tied behind his back. As he comes forward the people are absolutely silent, and a girl in the front row of the spectators falls forward in a dead faint. She is quickly carried out by two bystanders. Hale is led to the foot of the tree before the ladder. The soldiers are in double lines on either side.
Fitzroy. (To Hale.) Nathan Hale, have you anything to say? We are ready to hear your last dying speech and confession!
(Hale is standing, looking up, his lips moving slightly, as if in prayer. He remains in this position a moment, and then, with a sigh of relief and rest, looks upon the sympathetic faces of the people about him, with almost a smile on his face.)
Hale. I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country!
(Fitzroy makes a couple of steps toward him; Hale turns and places one foot on the lower rung of the ladder, as the curtain falls.)[31]
Watch, then, the beginning and the ending of scenes and acts, lest an unconscious and undesired emphasis result.
An important means of emphasis is contrast—in character, situation, and even dialogue. Melodrama has always rested, in large part, for its definite emotional appeals on sharply contrasted characters—the spotless hero, the double-dyed villain, the adventuress, and the heroine so innocent of the world as to provide unlimited dramatic situations. Recall the impetuous Julia and the gentle Sylvia of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. If it be said that such direct contrasting of dissimilar figures belongs more to the earlier plays of dramatists, this is not true. In The Gay Lord Quex,[32] contrast of the old and the young roués, Quex and Bastling, helps to make clear and to emphasize the point of the play. The Princess and the Butterfly[33] largely depends upon contrast,—among the restless women of Act I, the restless men of Act II, between the Princess and Sir George, between the love of Fay Zuliani for Sir George and that of Edward for the Princess.
Contrast in situation was a great reliance with the Elizabethans and, even when very crudely used, remains popular with the American public today. So much pleasure did the Elizabethan derive from contrasted situation that he was willing to have it worked up as a separate sub-plot, at times very slightly connected with the main plot. Take The Changeling of Middleton: the titular part, written for comic value, deals with scenes in a madhouse; the other intensely tragic plot of De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna is but slightly connected with it. Think of the grave-diggers in Hamlet, just before the burial of Ophelia, and, above all, consider in Macbeth the consummate use of a contrasting scene, in the porter at the gate just after the murder of Duncan.
It is a sense of the value of contrasting situation which produces the best dramatic irony. When in Scene 2, Act I, of Hindle Wakes, we listen to Alan Jeffcote’s father and mother planning for his marriage, the fine dramatic irony comes from the contrast we feel with the facts of his conduct, known to us from the preceding scene, which may make his marriage impossible. Dramatic irony depends on a preceding planting in the minds of the auditors of information which makes what is true contrast sharply with what the characters of the particular scene suppose to be true. Contrast, then, underlies dramatic irony. An audience, feeling the dramatic irony of a scene, is put into a state of suspense as to how and when the blow they anticipate will fall. Evidently, then, emphasis by means of contrast, when it results in dramatic irony, makes for dramatic suspense.