8 Prosser Hall Prye 



playwright needed them, for the purpose of carrying on the play. 

 In the hands of Racine, however, this convention becomes more 

 or less of a dramatic reality. There is some difficulty, to be sure, 

 in actualizing the " locations " of Phedre ; but as a general thing, 

 his action does take place in the chamber where it is cast, whether 

 the harem of a sultan or the anteroom of an emperor, the appear- 

 ance of his characters in that particular spot is reasonable, and a 

 violation of etiquette, if there is one, is alwa3^s excused by the 

 logic of the situation. 



Now, all this was possible — Racine was able to make the unities 

 of time and place a dramatic reality instead of a theatrical fiction 

 by means of his own contribution to French tragedy — a contribu- 

 tion which I have spoken of, properly or not, as the discovery of a 

 genuine unity of action. But no matter for the name ; his origi- 

 nality consisted in seeing — what is fairly obvious at present but 

 what at the time escaped the eye of the grand CorneiUe — that a 

 drama as a whole is determined by the plot and that in order to 

 have a certain kind of tragedy it is necessary to begin with a cer- 

 tain kind of action. Unlike Corneilk he was sufficiently in sym- 

 pathy with the Greek spirit to perceive the artificiality of the 

 Corneillean tragedy with its arbitrary limitations of the plot as 

 contrasted with the intimate connection between the action and 

 what vitually amounted to the unities of time and place in the 

 best Athenian tragedy, and to recognize that the success of the 

 same unities in French and the perfection of the type to which 

 they belonged hinged likewise upon the conception of an action 

 which should reduce the dimensions of tragedy to the proportions 

 of a crise or paroxysm. As Lemaitre points out, he begins 

 Britannicus twenty-four hours before Nero's first crime ; Berenice 

 twenty-four hours before the heroine leaves Rome ; and Andro- 

 niaque twenty-four hours before Pyrrhus decides in favour of 

 his captive. Only so was it possible to confine the drama to a 

 single room or even site and to a single revolution of the sun. 

 Tragedies do occur in rooms and they occur of a sudden, no 

 doubt ; but they are tragedies of emotion, not of incident. They 

 are afTective tragedies — tragedies in which much is felt and some- 

 thing is said, but in which comparatively little is done. They are 



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