Down by the brook

"It is less effective to tell the whole news at once than to recount it detail by detail," writes Quintilian in a passage about evidentia as a virtue of style (Institutio Oratoria, 8,6,69). So this is about evidence not as logical proof, but evidence in the form of vivid description which makes remote things present, draws them before the eyes of the listeners and appeals to our emotions. About graphic details which give us a strong sense of having seen things for ourselves which we haven't.

A good detailed report comes from an eye witness whose ethos adds an air of documentation to the moving descriptions and assures us that in some sense they are factual. They may be highly selective, perhaps, but they're factual.

Sometimes, however, we may need and enjoy a detailed account so much that even if we know it's partly or wholly fabricated we still want to keep it. And we do keep it, if only because striking images tend to stay on our mind.

Queen Gertrude tells Laertes the whole news at once:

One woe doth tread upon another's heel,
So fast they follow; your sister's drown'd, Laertes.

But Laertes asks for details - Drown'd! O, where? - and then follows a gently spun account of Ophelia's suicide. Accurate facts are either unavailable or useless to live on by, and/so still we're allowed to see this for ourselves:

Queen: There is a willow grows askant the brook,
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream;
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

We know that noone witnessed this and that we've witnessed it nonetheless.