Pierre Corneille, the author of _Le Cid_, _Horace_, _Cinna_, _Polyeucte_, and other plays of greater and less note, flourished about the middle of the seventeenth century (the time of our English Civil Wars and Commonwealth), and was followed by Racine, the author of _Phèdre_, _Esther_, and _Athalie_, and the contemporary of our poet Dryden. When it is said that these two dramatists possess in full the French characteristics, it is meant that they show all the French virtues of elegance, good sense, and polish of style, and all the French defects of servility to rule, coldness, and consequent monotony. There can be nothing more unlike than the typical drama of Corneille and the typical drama of Shakespeare. The Frenchman deliberately adopts the so-called “Aristotelian” and “classical,” but really Senecan and pedantic, rule of the unities, of time, of place, and of action; that is to say, his plays contain the development of but one action, which proceeds in the same place and within a time equal to that of the representation itself. To these conventions, which can have no natural or divine right to call themselves “laws,” Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists are strangers. A Shakespearean play—described as “romantic” in antithesis to “classical”—carries us from place to place, from year to year, and embraces, if it so chooses, a number of loosely related actions and episodes. Its unity is the unity of a whole story, not of a situation or climax. Corneille, to use his own words, had an aversion to putting Paris, Rome, and Constantinople on the same stage. The result is that there is often no background of place or time at all. This was but one difference. Again, Shakespeare’s tragedies are performed, if he thinks fit, with all their slayings, suicides, and mutilations full in the face of the audience. In the French theatre, as in the Greek, these actions are regularly perpetrated out of sight and are merely reported upon the stage.