It is not to be wondered at that the Italian scholars of the Renascence followed the precept of Horace and the practise of Seneca. They were far more at home in Latin than they were in Greek; and they could hardly help reading into the literature of Athens what they were already familiar with in the authors of Rome. To them Seneca was as imposing as Sophocles, and Horace was almost as weighty as Aristotle. So it is that Scaliger and Minturno prescribe five acts, and that Castelvetro (always more practical in his point of view) points out that poets seem to have found the five-act form most suitable. When an Italian scholar-poet turned from criticism to creation, the tragedies he conscientiously composed obeyed all the rules, and his dramatic poems were as academic as those of Seneca, in that they were intended not for production by professional actors in a regular theater before spectators who had paid their way in, but only for an occasional performance by the author himself assisted by a few of his friends before a little group of cultivated admirers of antiquity, contemptuous of the real public. These soulless dramatic poems, devised for declamation by amateurs before a gathering of dilettants, are now perceived to be merely literary curiosities, having little connection with the real drama made for the regular theater and its myriad-minded body of playgoers. Just as the Italian dramatic poems were imitations of Seneca, so the French dramatic poems, composed a little later, were imitations of these Italians, and also of Seneca, more or less indirectly. They were the imitations of an imitation, aping the outward form of the drama, but empty of all genuine dramatic spirit, artificial in passion and high-flown in rhetoric. And there are early English attempts at this same sort of academic tragedy, more imitative still, since we can see in them the commingled influence of the French and of the Italians immediately, and also of the remoter Seneca, whom they revered as the exemplar of true tragedy. Such a play is 'Gorboduc,' belauded by the scholarly Sidney--and even on one occasion acted, by main strength. In all of these imitations, English and French and Italian, we find the stately chorus abounding in lofty rhetoric; and we find also, and always, the division into five acts. But in the folk-theater, which the scholar-poets scorned, and out of which the living drama was to be developed, there is no trace of any division into acts. In the mysteries and the miracle-plays, and in the chronicle-plays which grew out of them, there are numberless episodes, each complete in itself, and never combined artificially into acts. The composer of any one of these folk-dramas conceived his story as a continuous narrative shown in action; and he gave no thought to the number of divisions, of episodes, of separate scenes, or of acts that it might seem to have. III