Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/320

300 both Italian literature and Italian criticism were in high esteem. The superiority of the Aminta and the Pastor Fido was ascribed to their adoption, just as Sidney found a proof of the barbarity of English plays in their neglect, and Jonson followed suit even in the face of Shakespeare's achievement. The universal learned tradition of the Renaissance identified dramatic "art" with obedience to the principles extracted from Aristotle by the critics, of whom none stood in higher esteem at this time than Scaliger and Heinsius. Mairet was invited by the Comte de Cramail and the Cardinal de la Vallette to write a "correct" pastoral on Italian lines, and the outcome was Silvanire, the recast of a play in blank verse written by d'Urfé at the request of Marie de Médicis. Silvanire was published in elaborate form, with the famous critical preface, but the play was a failure and the question was not decided. François Ogier had, in 1628, attacked the doctrine vigorously in a preface to Tyr et Sidon, a long and irregular play by Jean de Schelandre; and in the years which immediately followed much was written for and against, the opponents having by no means the worst of the argument. There was, in fact, no inner justification for the Unities in either the pastoral or the tragi-comedy. The interest of the latter consists in variety of incident, and the happy emergence of the lovers from a series of trials and mishaps which could only with the utmost improbability be packed into the course of a single day. The dramatic crisis of the pastoral is too slight to make the question of time one