摘要：William Shakespeare is generally credited with inventing thestandard five-act play, which has served as a mainstay for dramatistsfor five centuries and continues to do so in ours. Evidently, however,the five-act tradition does not begin with Shakespeare: it dates at leastfrom early Roman drama. Thomas W. Baldwin found that the five actswere oft used in Roman theatre and searched critical history to discoverterms that describe that tradition.1 He traced the matter as far back asHorace who, in the Ars Poetica (Epistula ad Pisones), urged the use ofexactly five acts for a drama.
