ne day's time, though the days represented might not be sequential. As for the content of each act, the first act would be used to "set the case" (Lope 66) or set up situation, the second act would actually get to the events that Act I prepared for, and the third act would be a mechanism of the unity of action, ideally resolving the conflict "in such wise that until the middle of the third act one may hardly guess the outcome" (66).
Along the way, Lope takes the view that comedy and tragedy can be mixed in plays: Such variety is a part of nature, he says, and it is variety that plays well or as he says, "causes much delight" (65). Cervantes, meanwhile, argues (62) for verisimilitude and the classical unity of time, in particular deploring crowd-pleasing liberties with historical (and biblical or mythical) fact. According to Clark, Spanish artists and critics as a group defended Lope's over Cervantes' views.
In the background of the Spanish theatre's departure from classical criticism is the fact that even classical theorists were not uniform in their views. Horace, a first-century B.C. Roman, declared plays a product more of message than of pleasure, noting that poets (= playwrights) give either profit or delight (Horace 29). Although Horace can be seen as Aristotelian in the sense of favoring unity, completeness of action, and the like, in his injunctions against purple passages (24) and crudities and for linguistic subtlety and skill (25), he emphasizes style and diction more than truth of action. The message of a play, indeed, is paramount for Horace, who says its subject is best taken from Socrates (29), although the treatment of subject should be as pleasing as possible. In the Poetics, meanwhile, Aristotle's focus had been above all on aesthetic pleasure, with learning per se a consequence rather than aim of dramatic representation (Aristotle 35).
It was in the Renaissance that Aristotelian descriptions of effective drama...