The opening of _Macbeth_ is even more remarkable, for
there is probably no parallel to its first scene, where the senses and
imagination are assaulted by a storm of thunder and supernatural alarm.
This scene is only eleven lines long, but its influence is so great that
the next can safely be occupied with a mere report of Macbeth's
battles,--a narrative which would have won much less attention if it had
opened the play.
When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes
people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out
of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes
with anxiety. On the other hand, if the play opens with a quiet
conversation, this is usually brief, and then at once the hero enters
and takes action of some decided kind. Nothing, for example, can be less
like the beginning of _Macbeth_ than that of _King Lear_. The tone is
pitched so low that the conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund
is written in prose. But at the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by
the entrance of Lear and his court, and without delay the King proceeds
to his fatal division of the kingdom.
This tragedy illustrates another practice of Shakespeare's. _King Lear_
has a secondary plot, that which concerns Gloster and his two sons.
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