4 Prosser Hall Frye 



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 the climate in which it is ripened even more than for the fruit 

 which it finally bears. It is as though the romantic playwright 

 were absorbed in demonstrating how such a result was brought 

 about by successive steps ; while the classic playwright is inter- 

 ested only in the nature and symptoms of the disease itself. 

 Scrupulous as is Sophocles in general, he is, to all appearance, 

 quite indififerent to the antecedent improbabilities of his CEdipiis 

 Tyrannus; evidently he recognizes no obligation to account for 

 his tragic consequences. In the romantic action this tragic matter 

 is anatomized or parcelled out into its various constituent inci- 

 dents, circumstances, and details, the which are all set forth sev- 

 erally and serially in such a manner that the spectator gains his 

 notion of the tragedy as a whole by a retrospective and discursive 

 act of the imagination. In the classic form the tragic affair is 

 caught at its culmination or crisis in such a way that it is made to 

 yield all it contains of human significance and purport. The 

 former is historical, the latter moral. The one views its subject 

 as a process or a becoming; the other as a state or a being. If I 

 were not afraid of being misleading in my turn, I should insist 

 upon this distinction and assert for the sake of contrast that in 

 the matter of procedure the one is dynamic or kinetic, the other 

 static — not that nothing happens in the latter but that what 

 does happen, happens inside the situation. At all events, as far 

 as names are concerned, the romantic drama, from the point of 

 view of method, may safely be described as analytic, the classic 

 as synthetic. 



That these two ways of handling plot are, in reality, so diverse 

 as to merit different names, and that the unities of time and place 

 are thoroughly incompatible with the romantic conception, no 

 modern reader with a sense for Shakespeare and Sophocles can 

 deny, when actually put to it. On the very surface of things it is 

 impossible to think of a moral fatality of tragic magnitude his- 

 torically as originating, developing, and terminating all in the 

 course of a single day — even a more or less elastic stage day — or 

 to treat it historically as confined to such a period : the prepara- 

 tion alone would be prohibitive. In Othello Shakespeare has in- 

 deed tried something of the sort ; but even here he has taken pains 



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