The minor situations of dramatic intensity might in many cases be built up.

The crisis would inevitably fail.

Iago and Othello and Lear, whatever their offices in their governments, are essentially private persons, individuals _in extremis_.

If you go to a motion picture and feel yourself suddenly gripped by the highest dramatic tension, as on the old stage, and reflect afterward that it was a fight between only two or three men in a room otherwise empty, stop to analyze what they stood for.

They were probably representatives of groups or races that had been pursuing each other earlier in the film.