Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Great Plays French and German
Mtg - have but a single story, that it should take place and be completed within a single day, and that it should be shown in a single scene. These rules were the result of the speculative spirit of Italian scholarship, but they were adopted eagerly in France and applied rigorously. They were supposed to be contained in Aristotle's treatise on Poetry, but only one of them is to be found there. Aristotle did declare that every work of art should have a single subject, a unity 'of theme; but he did not prescribe any limitations of either time or place; and the great Greek dramatists (from a study of whose masterpieces the great Greek critic deduced his precepts) have left us plays in which there are violations of these alleged unities of time and of place. From Italy and from France the theory of the three unities spread to England, only to be rejected by the stalwart common sense of the English poets. It spread to Spain also, but the playwrights there were frankly trying to please the populace. Lope de Vega tells us that when he sat down to write a play he locked up Plautus and Terence out of sight.
Why was it that the Rule of the Three Unities, rejected in Spain and England, was adopted in France? Partly can we account for this by the character of the French themselves, by their liking for law and order, by their willingness to have their actions regulated for them, by their inheritance of the Latin tradition. But there is another reason peculiar to France and calling for detailed consideration.
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