ABSTRACT
The similarity between the English and the Spanish theatre resides not only in the audacious neglect of the unities of time and place. Romantic drama, by contrast, should be conceived as a vast painting in which, besides the figure and movement in richer groups, the characters' surroundings are portrayed too, not only the immediate surroundings, but also a commanding view into the distance. Shakespeare is drama; and drama, which blends in a single breath the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the farcical, tragedy and comedy, drama is the mode appropriate to the third period of poetry, to contemporary literature. The characters, speaking or acting, are not the only ones to impress the action on the spectator's mind. The place where a particular calamity has occurred becomes a terrible witness that cannot be dissociated from it; and the absence of this kind of silent character would, in drama, detract from the greatest scenes in history.
