Three Unities

Three Unities

Definition: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, critics of the drama in Italy and France added to Aristotle's unity of action, which he describes in his Poetics, two other unities, to constitute one of the rules of drama known as "the three unities." On the assumption that verisimilitude the achievement of an illusion of reality in the audience of a stage play requires that the action represented by a play approximate the actual conditions of the staging of the play, they imposed the requirement of the "unity of place" (that the action represented be limited to a single location) and the requirement of the "unity of time" (that the time represented be limited to the two or three hours it takes to act the play, or at most to a single day of either twelve or twenty-four hours). In large part because of the potent example of Shakespeare, many of whose plays represent frequent changes of place and the passage of many years, the unities of place and time never dominated English neoclassicism as they did criticism in Italy and France. A final blow was the famous attack against them, and against the principle of dramatic verisimilitude on which they were based, in Samuel Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare" (1765). Since then in England, the unities of place and time (as distinguished from the unity of action) have been regarded as entirely optional devices, available to the playwright to achieve special effects of dramatic concentration.