Plays of three acts we owe to Virues' pen, Which ne'er had crawled but on all fours till then; An action suited to that helpless age, The infancy of wit, the childhood of the stage. Such plays not twelve years old did I complete, Four sheets to every play, an act on every sheet. And Ticknor also employs the rimed couplet for his translation of a longer passage: The Captain Verues, a famous wit, Cast dramas in three acts, by happy hit; For, till his time, upon all fours they crept, Like helpless babes that never yet had stept. Such plays I wrote, eleven and twelve years old; Four acts--each measured to a sheet's just fold-- Filled out four sheets; while still, between, Three _entremeses_ short filled up the scene. But Camille de Senne and Guillot de Saxe in the preface of their study of the 'Star of Seville' (Paris, 1913, p. 44, note) assert that the three-act form had established itself in the Spanish theater half a century anterior to Verues. And Lessing in his 'Hamburg Dramaturgy' (Dec. 4th, 1767) had pointed out the discrepancy between Lope's assigning the credit of this change to Verues and Calderon's claim, (in the preface to his comedies), that he was the first to make this reduction. If Lope had been familiar with Aristotle he might have justified the three-act form as simply the carrying out the Greek critic's principle that a play must have an action with a beginning, a middle and an end. As Attic tragedies were acted without any intermission they had only a single prolonged act,--altho a trilogy was a story shown in three acts. Yet the traditional five-act form of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is indirectly derived from the Athenian drama, wherein the number of choral passages came in time to be limited to four, separating five passages in dialog, which when the lyric interludes were omitted, stood forth as five separate acts. Horace, probably following the precepts of the Alexandrian critics, prescribes five acts (see Weil's 'Etudes sur le Drame Antique,' p. 325). The MSS. of Latin comedy show no division into acts (see Fairclough's edition of Terence's 'Andria,' pp. lii, liii,). It may be noted that as soon as the five-act form was disestablished the tendency of the leading modern dramatists has been to adopt the logical three-act form. Most of Ibsen's social dramas are in three acts, just as Lope's are.