reign tales and plays, any thing
that could furnish incidents and a plot, were blindly pressed into the
service.

Whatever discredit may attach to the foregoing extracts on the score
of prejudice or passion, nothing of the sort can hold in the case of
Sir Philip Sidney, whose _Defence of Poesy_, though not printed till
1595, must have been written before 1586, in which year the author
died. "Our tragedies and comedies," says he, "are not without cause
cried out against, observing rules neither of honest civility nor
skilful poetry. You shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the
other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he
comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale
will not be conceived. Now you 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 a shipwreck in the same place; 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? Now, of time they are
much more liberal; for ordinary it is, that two young princes fall in
love; after many traverses she is delivered of a fair boy; he is lost,
groweth a man, falleth in love, and all this in two hours' space:
which how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath
taught, and all ancient examples justified. But, besides these gross
absurdities, all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right
comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so
carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders, to play a
part in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion."

From all which it is evident enough that very little if any heed was
then paid to dramatic propriety and decorum. It was not _merely_ that
the unities of place and time were set at nought, but that events and
persons were thrown together without _any_ order or law; unconnected
with each other save to the senses, while at the same time according
to sense they were far asunder. It is also manifest that the
principles of the Gothic Drama in respect of general structure and
composition, in disregard of the minor unities, and in the free
blending and interchange of the c