Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/329

Rh The brilliant success of Le Cid evoked the fierce jealousy of Corneille's fellow-dramatists, and led to a pamphlet warfare in which Mairet and Georges de Scudéry (1601-1667)—the brother of Madeleine and a prolific writer of high-flown tragi-comedies—took the lead. There were the usual accusations of plagiarism—all the dramatists of the day were in greater or less measure indebted to the Spanish playwrights—but the important question raised was that of the Unities. Corneille had in fact evolved the type of tragedy for which a close approximation to the unities of time and place—in the skilful hands of Racine their complete acceptance—had internal justification. He had adhered, at the expense of some improbability, to the twenty-four hours (Rodrigue's defeat of the Moors occurs in the night between the first and second days), but he had not maintained a pedantic fixity of scene. Scudéry,