interspace. Another fact deserves attention here, namely, that regularly
on the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of
three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in
the course of one day. Now you may conceive a tragedy of Shakspeare's as
a trilogy connected in one single representation. Divide Lear into three
parts, and each would be a play with the ancients; or take the three
AEschylean dramas of Agamemnon, and divide them into, or call them, as
many acts, and they together would be one play. The first act would
comprise the usurpation of AEgisthus, and the murder of Agamemnon; the
second, the revenge of Orestes, and the murder of his mother; and the
third, the penance and absolution of Orestes;--occupying a period of
twenty-two years.

The stage in Shakspeare's time was a naked room with a blanket for a
curtain; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity, which
has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in
nature itself, the unity of feeling, is every where and at all times
observed by Shakspeare in his plays. Read 'Romeo and Juliet';--all is
youth and spring;--youth with its follies, its virtues, its
precipitancies;--spring with its odours, its flowers, and its
transiency; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through,
and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and the Montagues, are not
common old men; they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the
effect of spring; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden
marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth;--whilst in
Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale,
all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the
freshness of spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last
breeze of the Italian evening. This unity of feeling and character
pervades every drama of Shakspeare.