its later advocates, had his work ever been brought to their attention. In each of the two parts of 'Promos and Cassandra' the time extends over several days; and in the second part the place in one instance is transferred from the city, in which the scene is laid, to a goodly distance in the country. One further comment is to be made upon the value of the information supposed to be contained in the passage which has just been quoted. When so much of our early drama has perished, it is hardly proper to deny the veracity of any statement made about it by a writer then living. Still we may be permitted to doubt whether many, if indeed any, plays were produced which correspond closely to the description here given of the way in which, and the extent to which, the unities were violated. It seems a piece of rhetorical exaggeration employed to emphasize an opinion rather than a calm statement of fact. Ben Jonson in a similar manner boasted that he had not made a child just born at the beginning of a play become a graybeard at its end. No dramas corresponding either to his or to Whetstone's account of the passage of time have been handed down. Perhaps they never existed. At any rate, it will not do to take this sort of criticism too literally. During the eighteenth century Voltaire gave his readers the impression that about twenty-five years were wont to elapse between the beginning and the end of a play of Shakespeare's. He repeated the assertion so often that he probably came at last to believe it himself; and certainly his disciples among 1 Prologue to 'Every Man in his Humor.'

his countrymen had no suspicion that it was a mere figment of his own imagination.

But a far greater name than Whetstone lent its authority to this kind of attack upon the English stage. Sir Philip Sidney's 'Apology for Poetry' was not published until 1595, nine years after his death; but the date of its composition is usually ascribed to 1581. It could not have been later than 1585, the year of his departure to the war in which he fell. In this work he furnished ample evidence of the strength of the hold which the doctrine of the unities had taken upon the men of the critical school to which he belonged. Language is hardly contemptuous enough for Sidney to express his scorn for the neglect then prevailing upon the English stage of what he deemed the decencies of time and place. There is no hesitation in his utterance, no hint of uncertainty that he, and those who thought with him were not the people, and that wisdom should die with them. He first praised 'Gorboduc' as a noble play, which as it was in part the work of a noble lord, he was in all courtesy bound to do. "Yet in truth," he went on to say, "it is very defectious in the circumstances; which grieveth me, because it might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies. For it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions. For where the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day; there is both many days and many

places inartificially imagined. But if it be so in Gorboduc, how much more in all the rest, where you shall have Asia of the one side and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is; or else the tale will not be conceived. Now ye shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave. While in the mean time two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?"

This passage from Sidney is particularly interesting because it shows with what difficulties the early dramatist had to contend in designating place in a period when movable scenery was unknown. Still Sidney is just as earnest on the subject of time, in which the presence or absence of movable scenery is rarely a matter to be much considered, so far as concerns comprehension. He made it a point of special ridicule that a play should open with two persons falling in love with each other, and end in the space of two hours with the marriage of their child, including of course numerous adventures that had taken place between birth and maturity: "which," was his comment, "how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught

and all ancient examples justified." If we did not know that these words were written before Shakespeare made his appearance as a dramatist, we might almost fancy that the latter was the very writer Sidney had in view; for what the one described as absurd bears a reasonably close resemblance to what is represented as taking place in The Winter's Tale' of the other.

Opinions such as these which have been quoted would hardly have been expressed, had not controversial discussion preceded their utterance. It is manifest that at this early period the thoughts of men had been directed to the question of the unities. A party certainly existed then in England which recognized and loudly proclaimed the obligation of their observance. Probably it was not large in numbers; it was certainly feeble in influence. It did not affect appreciably the action of the great body of playwrights. The prominent earlier dramatists, Lyly, Greene, Peele, and Marlowe, university graduates though they were, - paid no heed to this doctrine. The disregard of the unities which they displayed could hardly have been owing in all cases to ignorance. At any rate, in so doing they followed the general practice of their time. The situation was materially changed, however, when Ben Jonson threw the weight of his name in favor of the observance of these rules. Several things contributed to the influence he exerted. He was a scholar as well as a dramatist, and great learning often overawes contemporaries more than great talents, and sometimes even more than great genius. But talents and genius Jonson had in addition to his learning. During the latter

half of his life, down even to his very death in 1637, he was the literary autocrat of his time. Both his influence and his unpopularity were augmented by the peculiarities of his character. In particular, besides his purely intellectual qualities, he had to a pronounced degree that pugnacity of disposition which in the case of many serves as an ample equivalent for actual ability, and as regards success in life frequently more than takes its place.

I am not forgetting the fact that long before the period of which we are now speaking, plays had appeared in which the unities are fully observed. There are indeed certain subjects, or certain ways of treating

subject, which may be said to exact this course. The plot of Gammer Gurton's Needle,' produced full thirty years before Jonson had written a word on this particular matter, almost compels the action to take place, as it does take place, in the space of a few hours; just as the plot of Randolph's Muses' Looking-Glass,' produced more than thirty years after Jonson began his propaganda, absolutely requires that the time of action shall be no longer than the time of representation. These are both plays which by the very nature of their being are obliged to observe the unities. Furthermore, before this same period there was a school of writers for the stage who in comedy professed to follow the practice of the ancients and in tragedy took as their model the dramas attributed to Seneca. In the latter pieces the chorus was retained after a fashion, monologue prevailed, and deference was paid to the unities, though they were not in all cases exactly observed.