Amongst the many undertakings brought to a glorious end by the critics and treatise-writers of the sixteenth century, the best known is the establishment of the three unities of time, place and action. One cannot indeed see why they are called unities, for in strictness they could at most be spoken of as shortness of time, straitness of space and limitation of tragic subjects to a certain class of action. It is well known that Aristotle prescribed unity of action only, and reminded his hearers that theatrical custom alone imposed on the action a time-limit of one day. On this last point the critics of the sixteenth century accorded six, eight, or twelve hours according to individual taste or humour: some of them (amongst them Segni) allowed twenty-four hours, including the night as particularly propitious to assassinations and the other acts of violence which usually form the plot of tragedies; others extended the limit to thirty-six or forty-eight hours. The last, and most curious, unity, that of place, was slowly developed by Castelvetro, Riccoboni and Scaliger until the Frenchman Jean de la Taille joined it as a third to the existing two in 1572, and in 1598 Angelo Ingegneri finally formulated it more explicitly.
Poetics of the kinds and rules. Scaliger.
The Italian treatises were widely read and regarded as authoritative all over Europe, and awakened the first effort towards a learned theory of poetry in France, Spain. England and Germany. A good representative of his class is Julius Cæsar Scaliger, who has been considered, with some exaggeration, as the true founder of French pseudo-classicism or neo-classicism; as one who (it has been said) "laid the first stone of the classical Bastille." But if he was neither the first nor the only one, he certainly helped greatly to reduce "to a system of doctrines the principal consequences of the sovranty of Reason in works of literature," with his minute distinctions and classifications of kinds, the insurmountable barriers he erected between them, and his distrust of free inspiration and imagination.[7] Scaliger numbers among his descendants (beside Daniel Heinsius) d'Aubignac, Rapin, Dacier and other tyrants of French literature and drama: Boileau turned the rules of neo-classicism into neat verses.
Lessing.
It has been noticed that Lessing entered the same field; his opposition to the French rules (which was an opposition of rule to rule, in which he had been forestalled by Italian writers, for example by Calepio in 1732) is anything but radical. Lessing maintained that Corneille and other authors had misinterpreted Aristotle, to whose laws even the Shakespearian drama could be shown to conform;[8] but on the other hand he strongly opposed the abolition of all rules and those who shouted "genius, genius," placing genius above the law and saying that genius makes the law. For the very reason that genius is law, replied Lessing, laws have their value and can be determined: negation of them would entail the confinement of genius to its first trial flights, making example or practice useless.[9]
Compromises and extensions.
But the "kinds" and their "limits" could be maintained for centuries solely by means of infinitely subtle interpretations, analogical extensions and more or less concealed compromises. The Italian Renaissance critics, while working at their Poetics in the style of Aristotle, found themselves confronted with chivalric poetry, and had to make the best of it; this they did by assigning it to a kind of poem not foreseen by antiquity (Giraldi Cintio).[10] Here and there indeed a rigorist was heard protesting that romances were in no way different from heroic poetry, and were only "badly written heroics" (Salviati). And since it was impossible to deny a place in Italian literature to Dante's poem, Iacopo Mazzoni, in his Defence of Dante, overhauled once more the categories of Poetics in order to find a niche for the sacred poem.[11] Farces made their appearance at this time, and Cecchi (1585) declares "Farce is a third novelty, occupying a place between tragedy and comedy ..."[12] The Pastor fido of Guarini was published, neither tragedy nor comedy, but tragicomedy; and discovering no heading among the kinds deduced from moral or civil philosophy suitable for the intruder, Jason de Nores proceeded to rule it out of existence; Guarini made a valiant defence and claimed special protection for his beloved Pastor under a third, or mixed, style, representative of real life.[13] Another rigorist, Fioretti (Udeno Nisieli) proclaimed the poem "a poetic monster, so huge and deformed that centaurs, hippogriffs and chimæras are comparatively graceful and charming ..., fit to bring a blush to the cheek of the muse, a disgrace to poetry, a mixture of ingredients in themselves discordant, inimical and incompatible";[14] but will this bluster drive the delicious Pastor fido from the hands of lovers of poetry? The same thing occurred in the case of Marino's Adone, described by Chapelain as "a poem of peace" for want of a better definition, though other supporters called it "a new form of epic poem";[15] and the same thing happened again in the case of the comedy of art and musical drama. Corneille, who had called down a furious tempest from Scudéry and the Academicians on the head of his Cid, remarked in his discourse on Tragedy, though basing his position on that of Aristotle, that there was necessity for "quelque modération, quelque favorable interprétation,... pour n'être pas obligés de condamner beaucoup de poèmes, que nous avons vu réussir sur nos théâtres." "Il est aisé de nous accommoder avec Aristote..."[16] he says in another place: a piece of literary hypocrisy which startles by its verbal resemblance to "les accommodements avec le Ciel" of the Tartuffian ethics. The following century saw the accepted kinds augmented by "bourgeois tragedy" and pathetic comedy, nicknamed "lachrymose" by its enemies; de Chassiron[17] attacked, and Diderot, Gellert and Lessing[18] defended the new arrival. In this way the schematism of the kinds continued to suffer violence and to cut a very poor figure; nevertheless, in spite of adversity, it made every effort to retain power even at the sacrifice of dignity: just as an absolute king turns constitutional by force of circumstance, and chooses the lesser evil of squaring his divine right with the will of the nation.
Rebellion against rules in general.
This retention of power would have been more difficult had any success attended the attempts at rebellion against all laws, against law in general, which broke out in varying degrees at the end of the sixteenth century. Pietro Aretino made mock of the most sacred precepts: in a prologue to one of his comedies he remarks derisively, "If you see more than five characters on the stage at once, do not laugh; for chains which would fasten water-mills to the river could not hold the fools of to-day."[19]
G. Bruno. Guarini.