SOURCE: "The Tensions of Classicism in the French Theatre of the Seventeenth Century," in The Classical Temper in Western Europe, edited by John Hardy and Andrew McCredie, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1983, pp. 47–61.

In the essay that follows, Forsyth describes the principles of classical doctrine and how these rules were upheld by seventeenth-century French dramatists.

There is a common belief in English-speaking countries that French classicism was essentially preoccupied with matters of artistic form, which it sought to regulate by means of rules derived from the Ancients, who were seen as having attained the ultimate in the search for beauty and the portrayal of human nature. This view is summed up, with a characteristic touch of irony, by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism (11. 713–18):

 The Rules, a Nation born to serve, obeys,
And Boileau still in Right of Horace sways.
But we, brave Britons, Foreign Laws despis'd,
And...