Balderdash from a splendid fellow and a great poet

Voltaire writes amazing nonsense on the three unities, opera, and prose tragedy in his introduction to his play, Oedipe.

There's actually precious little room for action in three hours and a single space no bigger than a stage.

What you get instead is remarkably talky drama, beautiful but austere and spare.

Excellent, yes.

But not the only excellence.

The English Elizabethans whom Voltaire calls barbarians, Shakespeare by name, refute this narrow aesthetic, utterly.

In other prefatory material for the same play he wrote,

[L]e but de l’histoire était de conserver à la postérité la mémoire du petit nombre de grands hommes qui lui devait servir d’exemple. 

So Plutarch's Lives is the best history of the ancient world?

Anyway, that explains what he thinks he's doing with his Henriade.

But he is very interesting on the differences in language that explain the need for rhyme in French verse and its superfluity in Italian and English.