An analysis of the three unities in willam shakespeare use of time ,place and action
Answers
It’s been years since I read Johnson, but the three unities are not actually his invention, but rather they were invented by European critics who believed that they were interpreting Aristotle better than he was able to express himself. Confused? Don’t worry, it can all be straightened out.
Aristotle wrote a book called the Poetics. It discussed, for the most part, Greek tragedy. By looking at how the writers had built their tragedies, Aristotle derived some guidelines for how such writing might best be done. One of his key guidelines was that each story should encompass a “single” action, that is, that a tragedy should concern one main hero whose unintentional error led to a horrific outcome. He thought that the tragedy should have what today we would call a single plot-line, and that adding other materials, sub-plots and so on, would dilute the effect on the audience of witnessing the tragedy. Aristotle thought that the best tragedies aroused both pity and fear in the audience, as they saw the working out of the hero’s fate.
Later critics took Aristotle’s idea (a single concentrated plot) and turned it into the three unities, that is, a tragedy should take place in one location, it should occur in a continuous stretch of time, and should present a single “action” – or, as I said, a unified plot. Now, much could be said about all these things, but it’s important to note that there is not a huge amount of support in Aristotle for these precise rules in this restrictive form. The critics were making their own interpretation of Aristotle, and claiming it as a set of hard and fast rules. But if you read the Poetics with even slight attention, it will be clear that Aristotle was conducting an empirical study, and not, as the later critics intrepreted, laying down absolute rules.
In any event the important thing here is not finding a set of three labels, but rather, finding out whatJohnson does with these supposed unities. To find that out, you need to read the Preface to Shakespeare.