It is objected, that by this change of scenes the passions are
interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event, being
not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants, at
last, the power to move, which constitutes the perfection of dramatick
poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is received as true even
by those who, in daily experience, feel it to be false. The interchanges
of mingled scenes seldom fail to produce the intended vicissitudes of
passion. Fiction cannot move so much, but that the attention may be
easily transferred; and though it must be allowed that pleasing
melancholy may be sometimes interrupted by unwelcome levity, yet let it
be considered, likewise, that melancholy is often not pleasing, and that
the disturbance of one man may be the relief of another; that different
auditors have different habitudes; and that, upon the whole, all
pleasure consists in variety.
The players, who, in their edition, divided our author's works into
comedies, histories and tragedies, seem not to have distinguished the
three kinds by any very exact or definite ideas.
An action which ended happily to the principal persons, however serious
or distressful through its intermediate incidents, in their opinion,
constituted a comedy. This idea of a comedy continued long amongst us;
and plays were written, which, by changing the catastrophe, were
tragedies to-day, and comedies to-morrow[7].
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