One scholar argues that the clowning in Shakespeare's plays may have been intended as "an emotional vacation from the more serious business of the main action," in other words, comic relief. Clowning scenes in Shakespeare's tragedies mostly appear immediately after a truly horrific scene: the Gravediggers in "Hamlet" after Ophelia's suicide; the Porter in "Macbeth" just after the murder of the King; and as Cleopatra prepares herself for death in "Antony and Cleopatra." Others argue that Shakespeare's clowning goes beyond just comic relief, instead making the horrific or deeply complex scenes more understandable and "true to the realities of living, then and now." Shifting the focus from the fictional world to the audience's reality helps convey "more effectively the theme of the dramas."