That the sonnet with its artificial and arbitrary scheme of intricately interlaced rimes should be intercalated into dramatic dialog may seem to modern readers a strange suggestion. Yet Lope was here only recommending a practise inherited from the medieval mysteries wherein various fixt forms of verse were frequently employed. Their stanzaic rigidity did not prevent the deviser of a French passion-play from utilizing the triolet, the ballade, and even the long-sustained and stately chant-royal; and the playwright availed himself of their aid not only in passages of lyrical emotion but also in the swift give and take of the intenser dramatic moments of the action. This tradition of the religious pieces was taken over by the founders of the secular drama in most of the modern languages,--in English as well as in French and in Spanish. Corneille's first play 'Mélite' was composed especially to bring in a sonnet; and even as late as the 'Cid' Corneille cast his lyrical monologs into stanzas, for which he was censured by the Abbé d' Aubignac and by Voltaire; and Brunetière (in his annotated edition of Corneille's more important plays) likens the lyrical soliloquy of Rodrigue at the end of the first act to the bravura solo of a tenor, coming down to the footlights with his hand on his heart (p. 69). Shakspere used the looser Elizabethan sonnet for the prolog to 'Romeo and Juliet' spoken by Chorus; and Ben Jonson employs it for the Prolog for the Court of his 'Staple of News.' The incongruity of the fixt form is least obvious when the sonnet is thus kept outside the play itself and when it is utilized only in the address to the audience before the action begins. But Shakspere did not hesitate to employ this fixt form inside the play; in 'Love's Labor's Lost' (act iii, scene 2) and also in 'All's Well that ends Well' (act iii, scene 4) he casts a letter into fourteen lines, with three riming quatrains and a terminal couplet. And again in 'Romeo and Juliet' where hero and heroine meet and fall in love at first sight, the lyrical significance of this meeting is suggested by the employment of the fourteener, Romeo speaking the first quatrain, Juliet the second, while the third quatrain and the final couplet are shared between them, each taking in turn a line or two. M. Rostand prefixes a sonnet to every act of his 'Chantecler,' utilizing them for a poetical description of the successive sets in which the action of his lyrical play is supposed to take place.