_scène à faire_ of French dramatic critics; and the third wind all up. He formulated the great secret of the playwright’s craft, which is that the audience must always know what is going to happen, but never exactly how it is going to be brought about. They must never be left in a puzzling doubt as to the meaning of what is going on, and yet must always be kept in a pleasing uncertainty as to what is about to happen next. This supposed a very real unity of action, compatible with plot and underplot, but not with two independent plots. For the unities of time and place he cared as much, and as little, as our own Elizabethans. [SN: _The conditions of the work._] Not even Lope’s fertility and activity could have been equal to the production of two thousand two hundred plays, of which all, or even a majority, were executed in conformity with his own standard. Such a piece of construction as the _Dama Melindrosa_ cannot have been one of the five plays written in fifteen days. There is a great deal in Lope’s literary baggage which is mere scribbling, meant to please an audience for an afternoon. Though the Spaniards loved the theatre much, they were not numerous enough in the towns to supply many audiences, and they clamoured for new things. To meet this demand, every Spanish dramatist who wished to stand well with the managers was compelled to produce a great deal of what may be called journalism for the theatre, the mere rapid throwing together of acceptable matter, which might be love-adventures or the news of the day, historical stories or religious legend, in stock forms. The stage was not only all the literature of the mass of the people, but all the newspapers, and all the “music-hall” side of their amusements too. In all cases the comedy was accompanied by interludes of the nature of music-hall “turns,” _loas_, _pasos_, or _entremeses_--brief scenes of a comic kind, songs, and, above all, dances. The _patio_ or court--that is, the pit--filled by the poorest, most numerous, and most formidable part of the audience, who stood, and who were addressed in compliment as the Senate or the musketeers, and were known in actors’ slang as the _chusma_--_i.e._, the galley-slaves--would not endure to be deprived of their dances. So the most truly famous comedy would hardly have escaped the cucumbers with which the “grave Senate” expressed its disapproval, if it had been presented without “crutches” in the form of the dance, the song, or the farcical interlude. Thus it inevitably followed that the playwright was often called upon to supply what was in fact padding to fill up the intervals between the popular shows. And this Lope supplied, besides writing the _entremeses_, _mojigangas_, _saynetes_--all forms of brief farce. Such work could not well be literary. His reputation, and indeed the reputation of the Spanish drama, has suffered because matter of this kind was not allowed to die with the day for which it was written. During his later