Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/319

Rh later plays, though enumerated in histories, are never read. He did not die till 1686.

Of the plays mentioned, those important for the history of the drama are Sylvie, Silvanire, and Sophonisbe. The first is a pastoral tragi-comedy of unusual interest, both of story and character; and the style, though full of affectations,—there is a dagger here too, "qui va rougir de ton ingratitude,"—and, as in all Mairet's work, unequal, is vigorous and poetic. It is the story of a prince wooing a shepherdess, of the scruples of her father and match-making eagerness of her mother, and of the magic employed by the king to punish the lovers and prevent the marriage. The wooing scenes are natural and affecting; and in those between the parents there is just a touch of the homely realism and humour with which the English and Dutch dramatists invest such scenes, but which was alien to the polite spirit that was more and more to dominate French drama. The play, in short, has all the story interest of tragi-comedy, with scenes that border on pure tragedy on the one hand and on comedy on the other. Silvanire is much more conventional, and, in consequence, uninteresting. Its importance centres in the introduction on the Unities.

The Unities of Place and Time as well as of Subject, imported from Italy in the sixteenth century by critics and academic dramatists, were unknown to the popular and living drama. They revived about this time as a subject of critical discussion in literary and polite circles where