The four nemeses formed into a system by nemesis as a link.
These four Nemesis Actions, it will be observed, are not separate trains of incident going on side by side, they are linked together into a system, the law of which is seen to be that those who triumph in one nemesis become the victims of the next; so that the whole suggests a 'chain of destruction,' like that binding together the orders of the brute creation which live by preying upon one another. When Clarence perished it was the King who dealt the doom and the Queen's party who triumphed: the wheel of Nemesis goes round and the King's death follows the death of his victim, the Queen's kindred are naked to the vengeance of their enemies, and Hastings is left to exult. Again the wheel of Nemesis revolves, and Hastings at the moment of his highest exultation is hurled to destruction, while Buckingham stands by to point the moral with a gibe. Once more the wheel goes round, and Buckingham hears similar gibes addressed to himself and points the same moral in his own person. Thus the portion of the drama we have so far considered yields us a pattern within a pattern, a series of Nemesis Actions woven into a complete underplot by a connecting-link which is also Nemesis.
The 'Enveloping Action' a nemesis.
Following out the same general idea we may proceed to notice how the dramatic pattern is surrounded by a fringe or border. The picture of life presented in a play will have the more reality if it be connected with a life wider than its own. There is no social sphere, however private, but is to some extent affected by a wider life outside it, this by one wider still, until the great world is reached the story of which is History. The immediate interest may be in a single family, but it will be a great war which, perhaps, takes away some member of this family to die in battle, or some great commercial crisis which brings mutation of fortune to the obscure home. The artists of fiction are solicitous thus to suggest connections between lesser and greater; it is the natural tendency of the mind to pass from the known to the unknown, and if the artist can derive the movements in his little world from the great world outside, he appears to have given his fiction a basis of admitted truth to rest on. This device of enclosing the incidents of the actual story in a framework of great events—technically, the 'Enveloping Action'—is one which is common in Shakespeare; it is enough to instance such a case as A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which play a fairy story has a measure of historic reality given to it by its connection with the marriage of personages so famous as Theseus and Hippolyta. In the present case, the main incidents and personages belong to public life; nevertheless the effect in question is still secured, and the contest of factions with which the play is occupied is represented as making up only a few incidents in the great feud of Lancaster and York. This Enveloping Action of the whole play, the War of the Roses, is marked with special clearness: two personages are introduced for the sole purpose of giving it prominence. ii. ii. 80.The Duchess of York is by her years and position the representative of the whole house; the factions who in the play successively triumph and fall are all descended from herself; she says:
Alas, I am the mother of these moans!
Their woes are parcell'd, mine are general.
i. iii, from 111; and iv. iv. 1-125.
And probabilities are forced to bring in Queen Margaret, the head and sole rallying-point of the ruined Lancastrians: when the two aged women are confronted the whole civil war is epitomised. It is hardly necessary to point out that this Enveloping Action is itself a Nemesis Action. All the rising and falling, the suffering and retaliation that we actually see going on between the different sections of the Yorkist house, constitute a detail in a wider retribution: esp. ii. ii; iv. i; iv. iv.the presence of the Duchess gives to the incidents a unity, ii. iii; and iv. iv.Queen Margaret's function is to point out that this unity of woe is only the nemesis falling on the house of York for their wrongs to the house of Lancaster. Thus the pattern made up of so many reiterations of nemesis is enclosed in a border which itself repeats the same figure.
The Enveloping Nemesis carried on into indefiniteness.
The effect is carried further. Generally the Enveloping Action is a sort of curtain by which our view of a drama is bounded; in the present case the curtain is at one point lifted, and we get a glimpse into the world beyond. Queen Margaret has surprised the Yorkist courtiers, and her prophetic denunciations are still ringing, in which she points to the calamities her foes have begun to suffer as retribution for the woes of which her fallen greatness is the representative—i. iii. 174-194.when Gloster suddenly turns the tables upon her.