The Works of Richard Hurd

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DISSERTATION ON THE PROVINCES OF THE DRAMA. ., DISSERTATION II. ON THE PROVINCES OF THE DRAMA. IN the former Essay, I gave an idea, or slight sketch, of Universal Poetry. In this, I attempt to deduce the laws of one of its kinds, the Dramatic, under all its forms. And I engage in this task, the rather,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DISSERTATION ON THE PROVINCES OF THE DRAMA. ., DISSERTATION II. ON THE PROVINCES OF THE DRAMA. IN the former Essay, I gave an idea, or slight sketch, of Universal Poetry. In this, I attempt to deduce the laws of one of its kinds, the Dramatic, under all its forms. And I engage in this task, the rather, because, though much has been said on the subject of the drama, writers seem not to have taken sufficient pains to distinguish, with exactness, its several species. I deduce the laws of this poem, as I did those of poetry at large, from the consideration, of its end: not the general end of poetry, whitfh alone was proper to be considered in the former case, but the proximate end ofthis kind. For from these ends, in subordi-'' nation to that, which governs the genus, or whicih all poetry, as such, designs and prosecutes, are the peculiar rules and maxims of each species to be derived. The Purpose Of The Drama is, universally, to represent human life in the way of action But as such representation is made for separate and distinct Ends, it is, further, distinguished into different species, which we know by the names of Tragedy, Comedy, and Farce. By Tragedy, then, I mean that species of dramatic representation, whose end is ef to excite the passions of Pity and Terror, and perhaps some others, nearly allied to them: ' By Comedy that, which proposetfr, for the ends of its representation, the sensation of pleasure arising from a view of the truth of Characters, more especially their specific differences By Farce I understand, that species of the drama, whose sole dim and tendency is to excite Laughter. The idea of these three species being then proposed, let us now see, what conclusions may be drawn from it. And chiefly in respect of T...