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Shakespeare for Bobeche?--And do not imagine that, if the plot is well
adjusted, the multitude of characters set in motion will cause fatigue
to the spectator or confusion in the drama. Shakespeare, abounding in
petty details, is at the same time, and for that very reason, imposing
by the grandeur of the _ensemble._ It is the oak which casts a most
extensive shadow with its myriads of slender leaves.

Let us hope that people in France will ere long become accustomed to
devote a whole evening to a single play. In England and Germany there
are plays that last six hours. The Greeks, about whom we hear so much,
the Greeks--and after the fashion of Scuderi we will cite at
this point the classicist Dacier, in the seventh chapter of his
_Poetics_--the Greeks sometimes went so far as to have twelve or
sixteen plays acted in a single day. Among a people who are fond of
spectacles the attention is more lively than is commonly believed
The _Mariage de Figaro_, the connecting link of Beaumarchais's
great trilogy, occupies the whole evening, and who was ever bored or
fatigued by it Beaumarchais was worthy to venture on the first step
toward that goal of modern art at which it will be impossible to
arrive in two hours, that profound, insatiable interest which results
from a vast, lifelike and multiform plot. "But," someone will say,
"this performance, consisting of a single play, would be monotonous,
would seem terribly long"--Not so. On the contrary it would lose
its present monotony and tediousness. For what is done now? The
spectator's entertainment is divided into two or three sharply defined
parts. At first he is given two hours of serious enjoyment, then one
hour of hilarious enjoyment, these, with the hour of entr' actes,
which we do not include in the enjoyment make four hours What would
the romantic drama do? It would mingle and blend artistically these
two kinds of enjoyment. It would lead the audience constantly from
sobriety to laughter, from mirthful excitement to heart breaking
emotion, "from grave to gay, from pleasant to severe." For, as we have
already proved, the drama is the grotesque in conjunction with the
sublime, the soul within the body, it is tragedy beneath comedy. Do
you not see that, by affording you repose from one impression by means
of another, by sharpening the tragic upon the comic, the merry upon
the terrible, and at need calling in the charms of the opera,
these performances, while presenting but