Ficta voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris. HOR. ARS POET, 338.
See too the celebrated passage of Shakespeare himself—
Midsummer-night's Dream, Act v. Sc. 1; and Idler, 84.—Ed.
[5] The judgment of French poets on these points may be inferred from
the tenour of Boileau's admonitions:
Gardez donc de donner, ainsi que dans Clélie,
L'air ni l'esprit françois à l'antique Italie;
Et, sous des noms romains faisant notre portrait,
Peindre Caton galant, et Brutus dameret.
Art Poétique, iii.—Ed.
[6] The critic must, when he wrote this, have forgotten the Cyclops of Euripides, and also the fact, that when an Athenian dramatist brought out his three tragedies at the Dionysiac festival, he added, as a fourth, a sort of farce; a specimen of which Schlegel considers the Cyclops. Mr. Twining, in his amusing and instructive notes on Aristotle's Poetics, refers to the drunken jollity of Hercules in the Alcestis, and to the ludicrous dialogue between Ulysses and Minerva, in the first scene of the Ajax of Sophocles, as instances of Greek tragi-comedy. We may add the Electra of Euripides; for if the poet did not intend to burlesque the rules of tragic composition in many of the scenes of that play, and to make his audience laugh, he calculated on more dull gravity in Athens, than we are accustomed to give that city of song the credit for. The broad ridicule which Aristophanes casts against the tragedians is not half so laughable.
[7] Thus, says Dowries the Prompter, p. 22: "The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was made some time after [1662] into a tragi-comedy, by Mr. James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive; so that when the tragedy was revived again, 'twas played alternately, tragical one day, and tragi-comical another, for several days together." STEEVENS.
[8] This opinion is controverted, and its effects deplored, by Dr. J.
Warton, in a note to Malone's Shakespeare, i. p. 71.—Ed.
[9] Dr. Drake conceives that Dr. Wolcot was indebted to the above noble
passage for the prima stamina of the following stanza:
Thus, while I wond'ring pause o'er Shakespeare's page
I mark, in visions of delight, the sage
High o'er the wrecks of man who stands sublime,
A column in the melancholy waste,
(Its cities humbled, and its glories past,)
Majestic 'mid the solitude of time.—Ed.
[10] The poets and painters before and of Shakespeare's time were all guilty of the same fault. The former "combined the Gothic mythology of fairies" with the fables and traditions of Greek and Roman lore; while the latter dressed out the heroes of antiquity in the arms and costume of their own day. The grand front of Rouen cathedral affords ample and curious illustration of what we state. Mr. Steevens, in his Shakespeare, adds, "that in Arthur Hall's version of the fourth Iliad, Juno says to Jupiter: