ABSTRACT
There is a great a nity between the chapters of a novel and the acts of a play – they are so many pauses in the narration, which should always be determined by similar pauses in the story they relate or represent. I do not, indeed, think it necessary, as some great critics, and particularly the French, pretend, that the whole story of a play should be con ned, with respect to the possibility of its happening, to the exact space and time of the representation; at the same time I confess, that the liberties which the immortal Shakespear o en takes, of crowding years into minutes, and hurrying us from one country to another, are equally unnatural and disgusting.23
