Shakespeare's units of action are not snapshot stills, episodes caught and frozen in time, as Mark Rose has suggested, or “a cycle of narrative paintings” on a museum wall. However useful it may be to isolate beats or sequences temporarily from their context, they are not static, like paintings. We do not stroll at our own pace past Shakespeare's sequences: they unfold before us. They are pregnant with change, thrusting forward restlessly toward experiences that lie in the future. As units of action sequences are characterized by movement, or – to use a more specific term – by direction.

Because in every sequence direction is itself a major structural factor, our third method of discovering the boundaries of the sequence entails plotting that direction. If the reader realizes where the sequence is going, he will be more aware of when and how it ends. In case this seems simplistic, we offer a more sophisticated statement of the principle – the sequence (to apply to it a definition proposed by Bernard Beckerman) “embraces a phase of action which contains a development, crux, and decrescence. The balancing of projects and resistance as extensions of the precipitating circumstances reveals the vector of a segment. By tracing the vector to its resolution, the reader can determine the conclusion of one segment and the commencement of another.”