This chapter develops the correspondence, begun in Chapter 3, between the structure of the verse sentence and the disposition of dramatic action in the romances. The audience's journey through the syntactical thicket of the late style produces both frustration and pleasure, and having concentrated on the baffles and complications within the sentence, here I turn to the payoff, the expectation and achievement of closure. The aggressively digressive syntax carries the listener on a winding and difficult semantic course, a congeries of grammatical inversions, accumulated clauses, interpolations, unexpected breakings off, and other such obstacles and sidetracks. But in a striking number of instances, essential elements of grammar, particularly the verbal phrase, often the direct object, and sometimes even the subject, are withheld until the very end of the sentence. We might say, speaking not as Latinists but as literary critics, that such sentences are organized periodically, since semantic gratification is withheld until just before the full stop or period.