An important difference between regular and irregular genres emerged from the beginning within the space of the box stage. The former (comedy, tragedy) maintained the dominance of the word in the conventional acting space (as in Serlia's concept from 1545: a square with streets in perspective for comedy or a temple-palace complex for tragedy). The place for the staging of regular genres on the l’italienne stage was “transparent”: the play was presented separately and the decoration existed separately. In turn, the irregular genres (referred to as “intermediate,” which over time became increasingly significant—such as opera, drama, tragicomedy, or melodrama) treated visual perception as being on an equal footing, or even as having the highest priority.

For those irregular genres, the box stage was an ideal machine for conjuring up an illusory, visual world. The image, the visual presentation, the repraesentatio, turned out to be more important than the earlier verbal conventions that safeguarded dignity and good taste, like the “owl curtain” in tragedy, always lowered for things and subjects that exceeded the necessary decency. The dominance of the stage image achieved its culmination in the era of romanticism, together with the use of ever-more-complicated machinery. This was also the point at which the irregular genres confirmed their preponderance, including a new one—romantic tragedy.

To the degree that dramatic events still arose in the baroque era independently of autonomous time and space (the human actor was subordinated to the illusion of the theatrical image), in the nineteenth century the event began to decidedly predominate over its own time and space (in practice this meant that the theatrical character was brought into the foreground and endowed with the autonomous function of shaping time and space).

Dobrochna Ratajczak wrote that: