themselves ill provided for unless they were shown in two hours from Genesis to the Day of Judgment:

'la cólera

De un Español sentado no se templa

Si no le representen en dos horas

Hasta el final juicio desde el Genesis '.'

The Unities which had been exemplified (though not always strictly) by the authors of correct Tragedy, such as Jodelle, Garnier, and Montchrestien, were neglected in the popular drama of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, in the tragicomedies of Alexandre Hardy and his contemporaries. For tragedy they were still requisite; for the popular drama they were unnecessary. The correct tragedies were for the popular dramatist in France. what Gorboduc was to Marlowe and his companions; something to be taken into consideration by the practical playwright, not something to be followed religiously as an authority, unless he chose for his own purposes to commit himself to the stricter and more learned kind of composition. But the same thing happened with the Unity of Time as with the Unity of Action. The popular practice came to approximate to the learned. ideal practice in dramatic writing taught the playwright to work for concentration, and without pedantry his natural instincts led him to restrict the time of his story. This spontaneous concentration and compression led to increased respect for the critical theory of the Unities. The success of Mairet's Sophonisbe does not seem to have been due to pedantry, but to the genuine satisfaction of the audience in neat workmanship. The process of approximation may be partly traced in the Examens of Corneille's early comedies, which show how the French dramatist about 1635,

El Nuevo Arte de hacer Comedias,

like the English forty years before, had shortened the time of the action, because it was convenient and effective to have it so. Corneille goes further than the English, and comes under the influence of the revival of the learned rules, but his treatment of the Unity of Time in his Discourses is generally free enough. It helps the effect of the Drama to have the imaginary action taking up no more than the two hours required to play it. But more time may be taken, if

necessary.

Dryden follows in Corneille's spirit, and goes further. He was evidently touched with sympathy for Corneille's struggles against the pedants; he quotes with approval as a full expression of his own opinion the concluding words of Corneille in his Discourse of the Unities:"Tis easy for speculative persons to judge severely; but if they would produce to public view ten or twelve pieces of this nature, they would perhaps give more latitude to the rules than I have done, when by experience they had known how much we are bound up and constrained by them, and how many beauties of the stage they banished from it' (p. 75). Dryden thought of the Unity of Time in the same general way as Corneille, and in the same way as he thought of the Unity of Action: both of them were good negative or corrective rules, prohibiting waste of time, prohibiting incoherent plots; but they were not to be allowed to fix any positive limit for the dramatic poet; and the English poet (this is Dryden's main contention) will take more liberty than the French. He will require more time for his story, as he puts more into it than the French authors, and embraces more subordinate actions under the control of his primum mobile, his principal dramatic theme.

THE UNITIES. 3. Place.

Dryden found comfort in Corneille's explicit refusal to accept the Unity of Place as one of the ancient rules. Crites had spoken, in the usual manner, of the Unity of Place as one of the rules derived from Aristotle. Eugenius, following Corneille, will not accept this conventional pedigree: 'in the first place give me leave to tell you that the Unity of Place, however it might be practised by them, was never any of their rules; we neither find it in Aristotle, Horace, or any who have written of it, till in our age the French poets first made it a precept of the stage' (p. 48).

The Unity of Place is in a different class from the other two. Action and Time were to be considered by the dramatist in shaping and proportioning his story; Place was naturally restricted along with Time and Action, and did not need special consideration until it came to be a question of the decoration of the stage, a matter for the scene-painter. Here came in an organic difference between French and English customs which led to a great deal of confusion when the French critics were studied in England.

The Elizabethan stage, not being hampered with scenery, made no unnecessary difficulty or absurdity for the audience in changing the scene. It all depended on the story; if the story required it, the change was all right; if the change was wrong, it was not on account of any absurdity in pretending to move from Venice to Cyprus, or from Sicily to Bohemia; it was as easy to make the scene in one place as in another; the change must be criticized, and approved or condemned, by reference to the standards of Time and of Action, not of Place; Place was not an independent category but a subordinate species dependent

on the other two. The introduction of painted scenery made no difference in this respect. Whether and how often the scene should be changed, must be determined by the structure of the play, by the manner in which the plot was developed.

In France things were different, and the Unity of Place meant a different thing, something scarcely intelligible to an untravelled Englishman. Considerations of Place were forced upon the French dramatists not only by the arrangement of their stories but more forcibly by the mechanical conditions of their stage.

The popular stage of the Hôtel de Bourgogne at the beginning of the seventeenth century was more antique in its appliances than anything in London in the time of Marlowe or Shakespeare. The Hôtel de Bourgogne had inherited the goodwill of the Confraternity of the Passion, and the stage devices of the medieval religious drama. The Elizabethan Drama, by a 'divine chance,' had got rid of the medieval stage management, except for incidental purposes, as in Peter Quince's entertainment. The French stage, when Corneille began to write, was still faithful to the old traditions, in accordance with which all the different scenes required in the play were represented on the stage at once. Some compromises had indeed been made; a kind of shorthand or symbolic representation. The old mansions of the Mystères were placed side by side on a long stage which might have seven or eight different places represented on it, as in the Mystery of the Passion described by M. Petit de Julleville, where the mansions represent (1) Paradise; (2) Nazareth; (3) the Temple; (4) Jerusalem; (5) the Palace; (6) the Golden Gate; (7) the Sea of Galilee; and (8) Limbo and Hell'.

1 Cf. Eugène Rigal, Alexandre Hardy, p. 170, and Histoire de la

In the Hôtel de Bourgogne there was more art: the decoration was often in the form of a perspective view, which could give beside the central picture two or more different places on each side, one behind the other. The commonly accepted theory of the scenes is represented in a passage quoted by M. Rigal' from La Poëtique of Jules de La Mesnardière (c. xi. La Disposition du Théâtre) :—

'Si l'Avanture s'est passée moitié dans le Palais d'un Roy en plusieurs appartemens, et moitié hors de la Maison en beaucoup d'endroits différens; il faut que le grand du Théâtre, le pоokývlov des Grecs, je veux dire cette largeur qui limite le parterre, serve pour tous les dehors où ces choses ont été faites; et que les Renfondremens soient divisez en plusieurs Chambres, par les divers Frontispices, Portaux, Colonnes ou Arcades. Car il faut que les Spectateurs distinguent, par ces différences, la diversité des endroits où les particularitez que le Poëte aura démeslées, seront exactement depeintes, et que les Distinctions de Scene empeschent que l'on ne treuve de la confusion en ces Lieux, qui

Littérature Française, ed. Petit de Julleville, t. ii., where a reproduction of the original picture of the stage is given.

1 ibid. p. 173. M. Rigal gives illustrations-pictures as well as descriptions from the MS. notebook of Laurent Mahelot, head of the scenery and properties department at the Hôtel de Bourgogne about 1630. Perhaps the most interesting of all the notes is that of the scene required for Hardy's Pandoste, Première Journée (A Winter's Tale): Au milieu du théâtre il faut un beau palais; à un des côtés, une grande prison où l'on paraît tout entier; à l'autre côté, un temple; au-dessous, une pointe de vaisseau, une mer basse, des roseaux, et marches de degrés; un réchaud, une aiguière, un chapeau de fleurs, une fiole pleine de vins, un cornet d'encens, un tonnerre, des flammes; au quatrième acte, il faut un enfant; il faut aussi deux chandeliers et des trompettes.' Compare also the chapters on the Drama by M. Rigal and M. Lemaître in Petit de Julleville, Hist. Litt. Fr. t. iv.