Classical unities

1. The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots.
2. The unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place.
3. The unity of time: the action in a play should take place over no more than 24 hours.

Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude … As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.

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The classical unities or three unities are rules for drama

Drama

Drama is the specific Mode of fiction Mimesis in performance. The term comes from a Ancient Greek word meaning "Action " , which is derived from "to do" ....
 derived from a passage in Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
's Poetics. In their neoclassical

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to quite distinct Cultural movement in the Decorative art and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture ....
 form they are as follows:

1. The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots.
2. The unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place.
3. The unity of time: the action in a play should take place over no more than 24 hours.

Aristotle's unities

Aristotle dealt with the unity of action in some detail, under the general subject of "definition of tragedy", where he wrote:

Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude … As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.

His only reference to the time in the fictive world is in a distinction between the epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation....
 and tragic

Tragedy

Tragedy is a form of The arts based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific Poetic tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western culture....
 forms:

Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse

Verse (poetry)

A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition, e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza....
 of characters of a higher type. They differ, in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of metre, and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no limits of time.

Unlike his prescriptive attitude regarding the plot (unity of action), Aristotle here merely remarks on the typical duration of a tragedy's action, and does not suggest any kind of imperative that it always ought to be so. He was writing after the golden age of Greek drama, and many Greek

Ancient Greece

The term Ancient Greece refers to the period of History of Greece lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman Republic conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth ....
 playwrights wrote plays that do not fit within these conventions.

Even more tellingly, Aristotle does not mention the neoclassical unity of place at all. So Aristotle suggested only one unity -- that of action -- but the prevalent interpretation of his Poetics during the Middle Ages already inclined toward interpreting his comment on time as another "unity".

European literature

Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
 critics of the 16th century, from Lodovico Castelvetro

Lodovico Castelvetro

Lodovico Castelvetro was an important figure in the development of neo-classicism, especially in drama. It was his reading of Aristotle that led to a widespread adoption of a tight version of the Three Unities, as a dramatic standard....
 onwards, and then 17th century French

French literature of the 17th century

French literature of the 17th century—the so-called Grand Si?cle—spans the reigns of Henry IV of France, the Regency of Marie de Medici, Louis XIII of France, the Regency of Anne of Austria and the reign of Louis XIV of France....
 critics, proponents of the neoclassical

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to quite distinct Cultural movement in the Decorative art and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture ....
 movement, both expanded Aristotle's descriptions. The result was to make them into hard-and-fast rules or prescriptions for how any play must be structured. French drama of the 17th century, particularly that of Molière

Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, also known by his stage name Moli?re, was a French playwright and actor who is considered one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature....
 and Racine

Jean Racine

Jean Racine was a France dramatist, one of the "big three" of 17th century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition....
 was highly regular; whereas the English

England

native_name =|conventional_long_name = England|common_name = England|image_flag = Flag of England.svg|image_coat = England COA.svg|symbol_type = Royal Coat of Arms...
 dramatists writing for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage were largely unaware of these strictures.

By the later 17th century, however, English dramatists (under the influence of French criticism picked up by those in exile during the English Interregnum

English Interregnum

The English Interregnum was the period of parliamentary and military rule under the Commonwealth of England after the English Civil War. It began with the regicide of Charles I of England in January 1649, and ended with the English Restoration of Charles II of England in 1660....
) did begin to assess their own plays according to these rules. Thus, John Dryden

John Dryden

John Dryden was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of English Restoration to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden....
, among many others, compares the "irregular" Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English people poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist....
 with the "regular" Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson

Benjamin Jonson was an England English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satire plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist , and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his Lyric poetry poems....
 in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie

Essay of Dramatick Poesie

Essay of Dramatick Poesie by John Dryden was published in 1668. It was probably written during the Bubonic plague year of 1666. Dryden takes up the subject that Philip Sidney had set forth in his Defence of Poesie and attempts to justify drama as a legitimate art form....
 (1668), and makes use of the unity of time in this passage criticizing Shakespeare's history plays:

… if you consider the Historical Playes of Shakespeare, they are rather so many Chronicles of Kings, or the business many times of thirty or forty years, crampt into a representation of two hours and a half, which is not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and receive her Images not onely much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life: this instead of making a Play delightful, renders it ridiculous.

Ultimately, however, Dryden declared Shakespeare "incomparable" because of his disregard for convention:

… in most of the irregular Playes of Shakespeare or Fletcher (for Ben Johnson's are for the most part regular) there is a more masculine fancy and greater spirit in all the writing, then there is in any of the French.

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope is generally regarded as the greatest England poet of the eighteenth century, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer....
 criticizes the violation of the unities in his Dunciad. In the 1728 version of the poem, the goddess Dulness notes that "Time himself stands still at her command,/ Realms shift their place, and Ocean turns to land" (Dunciad 1728, i, 69–70). Additionally, he notes a violation of unity of action, as tragedy and comedy were mixed.

Even Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson was an English author. Beginning as a Grub Street journalist, he made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer....
 was not free of applying the unities to drama when judging it in his Prefaces to Shakespeare. However, Johnson was well aware that Aristotle had only recommended the unity of action, and knew that rules must serve drama, not vice versa:

Whether Shakespeare knew the unities, and rejected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to decide, and useless to inquire. We may reasonably suppose, that, when he rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars and critics, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice, which he might have begun by chance. As nothing is essential to the fable, but unity of action, and as the unities of time and place arise evidently from false assumptions, and, by circumscribing the extent of the drama, lessen its variety, I cannot think it much to be lamented, that they were not known by him, or not observed: Nor, if such another poet could arise, should I very vehemently reproach him, that his first act passed at Venice, and his next in Cyprus. Such violations of rules merely positive, become the comprehensive genius of Shakespeare…

The classical unities were influential in dramatic criticism until Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a France poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romanticism movement in France....
's Hernani

Hernani (drama)

------Hernani is a drama by the French romantic author Victor Hugo.The play opened in Paris on February 25, 1830. Today, the drama is more remembered for the demonstrations which accompanied the premiere, and for being the inspiration of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Ernani, than it is for its own merits....
 (1844); one of the things that made that play controversial at its debut was its violation of these rules of classicism

Classicism

File:Nicolas Poussin 055.jpgClassicism, in the The Arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seeks to emulate....
.

See also

• History of theater
• Theatre technique
  Theatre technique
  
  Theatre techniques are procedures that facilitate a successful presentation of a play. They also include any practices that advance and enhance the understanding the audience brings to the action and the acting by the cast...
  
• Theatrical constraints
  Theatrical constraints
  
  Theatrical constraints are various rules, either of taste or of law, that govern the production, staging, and content of Play s in the theater. Whether imposed externally, by virtue of monopoly franchises or censorship laws, or whether imposed voluntarily by actors, theatre directors, or theatrical producers, these restraints have taxed the...
  

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