690 POETRY 



when the itinerant stage of the Middle Ages found a welcome among 

 the French, as among the English people, but these exhibitions had 

 so dwindled during the miserable period of the Hundred Years' War, 

 that, at the close of the sixteenth century, one company of actors, in 

 the Hotel Bourgogne, was sufficient to satisfy the dramatic require- 

 ments of the whole country. When the taste for the stage began 

 to revive the poet was free to invent for himself, and he naturally 

 turned for his models to the tragedies of Seneca, never meant for 

 acting, in which an abstract situation is worked out by means of rhet- 

 orical harangues and sharply pointed dialogue. The form thus 

 adopted proved so acceptable to French taste, that, in spite of the 

 efforts of Voltaire and Diderot, it kept possession of the stage for 

 nearly 200 years. 



Having thus grounded the practice of the drama on the authority 

 of Seneca, the French poets proceeded to regulate it by the supposed 

 theory of Aristotle. Corneille was the first to define the law of the 

 stage in his Discourse on the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place. 

 He assumed that the external form of the Greek drama was some- 

 thing immutable; that Aristotle had defined its changeless rules in the 

 Poetics; and that these rules had been faithfully observed in his own 

 tragedies. Xow the only unity on which Aristotle really insists is 

 Unity of Action; and in his Discourse Corneille plainly shows that 

 he does not know what Aristotle meant by Unity of Action. Unity 

 of Action in the Poetics means simply the representation on the stage 

 of a fictitious story, with a proportioned beginning, middle, and end, 

 involving a display of human passion, character, and misfortune, in 

 such a form as to appear probable and lifelike to the spectator?. 



Shakespeare and the Greek poets perfectly understood the working 

 of this fundamental law. So vividly does Shakespeare conceive his 

 ideal situations as a whole, that he even realizes in his imagination 

 the state of the climate and temperature, as when Hamlet says to 

 Horatio: "The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold;" or when Duncan 

 praises the amenity of Macbeth's Castle: 



This guest of summer, 



The teniple-liaunting martlet, does approve, 

 .By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath 

 Smells wooinjrly here : no jutty, friese. 

 .Buttress, nor coiim of vantage, but this bird 

 Hath inade his pendent bed and proereant cradle : 

 '\Yhi-re they inn-1 bivd find hnunt. T have observe 

 The air is delicate. 



So again, in As You Like It, when Oliver asks the way to Rosa- 

 lind's cottar, wiih what particular d>,'t;'!i!s the poet bring? the ?cene 

 before n? ! 



