ABSTRACT
Between the early 1620s and the 1640s, the general trend of French drama has been described, in broad terms, in this way: at first there was a steep rise in the popularity of tragicomedy at the expense of tragedy, followed by a conscious movement of restraint leading to the establishment of the new regular ‘classical’ tragedy as the dominant genre. The initial decline of tragedy, though certain, cannot be dated and documented with precision. So, later, did the French ‘classical’ tragedy which the seventeenth century eventually evolved. The unity of time has a merely mechanical importance as one of the factors in a general drive towards psychological concentration. Ogier’s conviction that the Variety of the events’ was what constituted a play’s attraction was allied in his mind with another conviction that the events should be represented and not simply narrated and led him to condemn the longwinded choruses and messenger speeches of Greek drama.
