Page:An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.djvu/156

136 songs it approached the modern opera. Among the 'dramatis personae' there were only ten human beings against twelve gods and goddesses. The opening scene showed a huge mountain, pierced by a grotto, through which appeared the sea; Melpomene entered on one side, and the Sun on the other, in a 'char tout lumineux,' drawn by four horses.

62. 9. There is no passage in Ben Jonson's works in which he directly censures Shakspere for the non-observance of the unities of Time and Place. Dryden can only refer to the Prologue to Every Man in his Humour. This prologue first appeared in 1616, and its intended application to Shakspere may well have been traditionally known in the theatrical world fifty years later. In it Jonson, among the 'ill customs of the age ' which he will not imitate, enumerates— To make a child now swaddled to proceed Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed, Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars, And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars. He rather prays you will be pleased to see One such to-day, as other plays should be; Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas, Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please,' etc. Other dramatists may have been included in the censure; but it seems clear that Shakspere was principally intended, the three parts of whose Henry VI extend over the events of nearly fifty years, including the whole of 'York and Lancaster's long jars,' whose Perdita is born and grows up to be a woman between the first and fifth acts, and who makes the Chorus in Winter's Tale say—the play having begun in Sicily — 'imagine me, Gentle spectators, that I now may be In fair Bohemia.'

64. 19. A servant in Sir Samuel Tuke's Adventures of Five Hours, who is described by the author as 'a great coward, and a pleasant droll.' Philipin is, I suppose, a character in the French play alluded to. (Malone.)