In view of the foregoing it is not surprising that Aristotle does mention the unity of time, though only incidentally. His exact language is: “Tragedy and epic differ, again, in their length: for tragedy endeavors, so far as possible, to keep within a single circuit of the sun (περίοδος ἡλίου), or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the epic action has no limits of time.”[328] “Endeavors” (πειρᾶται) was mistranslated as doit by some French writers. Aristotle rather commends the unity of time as a rough generalization which works out well in practice than enjoins it as an invariable rule. Actually the restriction was further reduced, in most cases, to the hours of daylight, and Dacier even maintained that περίοδος ἡλίου means no more than twelve hours. But Aristophanes’ Plutus and Terence’s Self-Tormentor (see [pp. 253], above) furnish clear examples of dramatic action beginning in the late afternoon of one day and not concluding until the next day.
It remains to consider some of the expedients which the poets found useful in solving the difficulties (both of time and place) caused by local conditions. In the first place the practice of writing a series of three plays on the same general subject (see [p. 198], above) often enabled the playwright to distribute his incidents in different places and time-spheres without loss of verisimilitude, for a whole trilogy was no longer than the average modern play, and each tragedy would thus correspond to a single act and, since the chorus was withdrawn at the close of each play in the trilogy and its place taken by another entirely different, changes of time and place between plays were absolutely without restriction. Thus Scythia of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound becomes Caucasus in the second piece in the trilogy, the Prometheus Unbound; in the former was shown the binding of the Titan and in the latter his release, and he is said to have been bound for 30,000 years. All but two days of this time elapses between plays! In Aeschylus’ Orestean trilogy the scene of the Agamemnon and Libation-Bearers is laid in Argos; that of the Eumenides in Delphi and Athens. Several years are supposed to pass by in the two interims.
But even Aeschylus did not always employ the trilogic form, and Sophocles and Euripides rarely did. When, therefore, the three or four plays in each series were severally devoted to utterly unrelated material, it sometimes became necessary to bring almost as many events within the scope of one play as would otherwise be dealt with in a whole trilogy. Inasmuch as a large fraction of these events could not possibly be conceived of as taking place in the same locality or within the same day, it was imperative either to exclude them or to include them in some indirect fashion. Now two striking peculiarities of Euripidean technique were admirably adapted to help solve these difficulties. His prologues regularly take the form of a monologue, which, with scant regard for dramatic illusion, rehearses the story of the myth up to the point where the play begins. Again, Euripides’ dramas frequently terminate with the epiphany of a deity. This device was the accustomed recourse of unskilful playwrights, when their plots had become complicated beyond the possibility of disentanglement by natural means, in order that a god’s fiat might resolve all difficulties. It has often been charged that this was also Euripides’ motive, but most unjustly (see [pp. 293 ff.], below). He rather “wished, by the help of a divine foreknowledge, to put before the spectators such future events or unknown circumstances as should settle their minds, satisfy all curiosity, and connect the subject of the piece with subsequent events or even with the times of living men.”[329] Thus in Euripides’ Andromache the complications of the plot are entirely solved before Thetis’ appearance at vs. 1231, and she merely gives directions for Neoptolemus’ burial and prophesies the future of Peleus, Andromache, and Molossus, and of the latter’s posterity. When these two pieces of technique were combined in the same play, the prologue, the body of the tragedy, and the epilogue sometimes corresponded roughly to the successive dramas of a whole trilogy. This appears most clearly in the case of Euripides’ Electra and Aeschylus’ Orestean trilogy. The opening monologue of the former (vss. 1-53) passes in rapid review the Greek expedition against Troy, the murder of Agamemnon, and the present fate of his children. With the exception of the last item, which is brought out in the second play of the Oresteia, these are the matters contained in the prologue, which naturally is comparatively short, and in the action of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The body of the Electra corresponds to the second tragedy in the trilogy, the Libation-Bearers. At the Electra’s conclusion (vs. 1238) Castor as deus ex machina forecasts among other things the acquittal of Orestes at Athens, which is the theme of Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Whatever other explanations, therefore, may be advanced for Euripides’ prologues and epilogues (see [pp. 294 f.] and [299 f.], below) this consideration must also be allowed a certain weight, viz., that they permitted him to bring events of the most diverse nature within the scope of his piece without violating the unities of time and place.
A fourth device looking to the same ends consisted in setting conversations at times and places which would naturally be different. Even such a master of dramatic technique as Sophocles represented Orestes as communicating to his fellow-conspirators the result of his inquiry at Delphi only after they had reached Argos (Electra, vss. 32 ff.), and as waiting to formulate a definite plan of action until they were in the most unfavorable place in all the world for such a purpose—before Clytemnestra’s palace (vss. 15 ff.). The latter incongruity does not occur in Euripides’ version of the same story because the scene of his Electra is laid, not in the city of Argos, but before Electra’s hut in the country. The device under consideration was conveniently supplemented by the convention that if two or more characters enter the stage together no conversation is thought of as passing between them until they have come within the hearing of the audience (see [p. 310], below). It will be seen that the passage just cited from Sophocles’ Electra conforms to this rule. Another instance occurs in Euripides’ Madness of Heracles, vss. 822 ff. Iris appears above Heracles’ palace with Madness, whom she orders to incite the hero to the murder of his children. Madness protests but is overborne and forced to perform her bidding. Though Iris and Madness must have come a considerable distance together, all discourse between them is apparently postponed until they reach their destination. Furthermore, these instructions would naturally have been given to Madness elsewhere and somewhat earlier. In that case the audience must have lost an effective scene. The device discussed in this paragraph enabled the poet to circumvent the unities and place the scene before his audience; and the convention which I have mentioned preserved it for them in its entirety.
We have seen that the unities of time and place are largely due to the striving for illusion in a theater comparatively bare of scenery and of facilities for scene-shifting. Conversely, their observance in the modern theater with its ample scenic provision would naturally militate against the scenic extravagance and actualism of which the present-day theatocracy is so enamored. Thus it would seem that the much-abused unities are not without a meaning and truly artistic tendency even today, for some of the most significant influences in contemporaneous staging are directed against excesses along these lines. Even a modern producer, Henry W. Savage, included the following in his advice to a young playwright: “Do not distribute your scenes so widely that you have one on an island, another at Herald Square, and a third at Chicago. Make the action of your play take place all in one day, if possible”[330]—in other words the unity of time expressly and an approximation to the unity of place. Ibsen surely retained no theatrical conventions merely because they were old; yet he usually observed the unities. A recent critic has written: “Though the unities of time and place were long ago exploded as binding principles—indeed, they never had any authority in English drama—yet it is true that a broken-backed action, whether in time or space, ought, so far as possible, to be avoided. An action with a gap of twenty years in it may be all very well in melodrama and romance, but scarcely in higher and more serious types of drama.”[331]
The unity of action is the only one that is universal, since it alone springs from the inmost nature of the drama. Yet even here local conditions make themselves felt. The modern playwright, free (if he pleases and has a producer complaisant enough) to change the scene ten times within a single act and with superior facilities for motivating entrances and exits, delights in shifting different sets of characters back and forth and thus secures an alternation of light and shade, an intermingling of comedy and tragedy quite beyond the ancient dramatist’s reach. The preceding discussion has shown the immobility of the ancient theater in these respects and, consequently, one reason why the Greeks ruthlessly excluded everything that was not strictly germane to their action (see also [p. 201], above).
This unity, it is needless to say, plays an important part in Aristotle’s Poetics. He recognized that “plot is the first essential and soul of tragedy and that character comes second.”[332] The most lengthy statement runs as follows: “Let us now discuss the proper construction of the plot, as that is both the first and the most important thing in tragedy. We have laid it down that tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete and whole, having a certain magnitude, for there is also a whole that is wanting in magnitude. Now a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else and after which something else naturally is or comes to be; an end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing either as its necessary or usual consequent, and has nothing else after it; and a middle is that which is both itself after one thing and has some other thing after it. Accordingly, well-constructed plots must neither begin nor end at haphazard points, but must conform to the types just mentioned.”[333] These principles were excellently restated by Lowell:
In a play we not only expect a succession of scenes, but that each scene should lead by a logic more or less stringent, if not to the next, at any rate to something that is to follow, and that all should contribute their fraction of impulse towards the inevitable catastrophe. That is to say, the structure should be organic, with a necessary and harmonious connection and relation of parts, and not merely mechanical with an arbitrary or haphazard joining of one part to another. It is in the former sense alone that any production can be called a work of art.[334]
Though it is now admitted on all sides that the unity of action is the sine qua non of dramatic composition, many fail to realize the meaning and extent of its limitation. Aristotle indicated a mistaken notion current in his day, and likewise in ours, in the following words: “The unity of a plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinite multitude of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity, and so, too, there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action. Hence, the error, as it appears, of all the poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or similar poems. They suppose that, because Heracles was one man, the story also of Heracles must be one story.”[335] Freytag discussed the matter with keen discrimination and exemplified it by showing how Shakespeare remodeled the more or less chaotic story of Romeo and Juliet’s love into a unified plot whose incidents follow one another almost as inexorably as Fate. The passage is unfortunately too long for quotation here, but is highly instructive.[336]
The same reasoning reveals the shortcoming in Professor Lounsbury’s contention: “What, indeed, is the objection to this mixture of the serious and the comic in the same play? By it is certainly represented, as it is not in pure comedy or pure tragedy, the life we actually live and the mingled elements that compose it.... As there was no question that sadness and mirth were constantly intermixed in real life, it was impossible to maintain that the illegitimacy of this form of dramatic composition was due to its improbability.”[337] The word “pure” gives away the whole case. Aristotle would have to grant that Shakespeare’s plays are admirable, even sublime; but he could hardly admit that they were “pure” tragedies or “pure” comedies, however legitimate in other respects. They fall short in the quality which Mr. Albert H. Brown placed in the forefront of his definition: “A great drama is a clearly focused picture of human conditions.”