It will bring Romeo face to face with the apothecary, Macbeth with the witches, Hamlet with the grave-diggers.

Sometimes it may, without discord, as in the scene between King Lear and his jester, mingle its shrill voice with the most sublime, the most dismal, the dreamiest music of the soul.
That is what Shakespeare alone among all has succeeded in doing, in a fashion of his own, which it would be no less fruitless than impossible to imitate--Shakespeare, the god of the stage, in whom, as in a trinity, the three characteristic geniuses of our stage, Corneille, Moliere, Beaumarchais, seem united.
We see how quickly the arbitrary distinction between the species of poetry vanishes before common sense and taste.

No less easily one might demolish the alleged rule of the two unities.

We say _two_ and not _three_ unities, because unity of plot or of _ensemble_, the only true and well founded one, was long ago removed from the sphere of discussion.
Distinguished contemporaries, foreigners and Frenchmen, have already attacked, both in theory and in practice that fundamental law of the pseudo-Aristotelian code.

Indeed, the combat was not likely to be a long one.