Aristotle and Dryden's viewsbe on Three Dramatic Unities
Aristotle’s Poetics
ARISTOTLE AND DRYDEN'S VIEWS ON THREE UNITIES
Department of English (M.K.B.U.)
Parmar Dipali K.
Roll No: 30
M.A. Sem. 1
Batch: 2015-’17
Email Id: dipaliparmar247@gmail.com
- Dryden's views on the three dramatic unities
Supporting the
ancients, Crites reminds that all the rules of drama were discovered by the
ancients. The English have added nothing of their own in Aristotle's Poetics
and Horace's Ars Poetica. The three dramatic unities—Unity of time, Unity of
Place, and Unity of Action—are the special gifts of the ancients. The French
call them the three unities.
1. The Unity
of Time:
The unity of time they comprehend
in twenty-four hours, the compass of a natural day, or as near as it can be
contrived; and the reason of it is obvious to everyone,--that the time of the
feigned action, or fable of the play, should be proportioned as near as can be
to the duration of that time in which it is represented. Since therefore, all
plays are acted on the theatre in the space of time much within the compass of
twenty four hours, that play is to be thought the nearest imitation of nature,
whose plot or action is confined within that time; and by the same rule which
concludes this general proportion of time, it follows, that all the parts of it
are (as near as may be) to be equally subdivided; namely, that one act take up,
not the supposed time of half a day, which is out of proportion to the artist;
since the other four are then to be straightened within the compass of the
renaming half: for it is unnatural that one act, which being spoken or written
is no longer than the rest, should be supposed longer by the audience; it is
therefore the poet's duty, to take care that no act should be imagined to
exceed the time in which it is represented on the stage; and that the intervals
and inequalities of time be supposed to fall out between the acts.
He gives example of Ancients saying
that………..
"This rule of time, how well it has been observed by the ancients, most of their plays will witness; you see them in their tragedies, (wherein to follow this rule, is certainly most difficult) from the very beginning of their plays, falling close into principal object of it, leaving the former part to be delivered by narration : so that they set the audience, as it were, at the past where the race is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal, and just upon you."
2.The Unity of Place:
"For the second
unity, which is that of Place, the ancients meant by it, that the scene ought
to be continued through the play, in the same place where it was laid in the
beginning: for the stage on which it is represented being but one and the same
place, it is unnatural to conceive it many, and those far distant from one
another. I will not deny but, by the variation of painted scenes, the fancy,
which in these cases will contribute to its own deceit, may sometimes imagine
it several places, with some appearance of probability; yet it still carries
the greater likelihood of truth, if those place supposed so near each other, as
in the same town or city; which may all be comprehended under the larger
denomination of one place; for a greater distance will bear no proportion to
the shortness of time which is allotted, in the acting, to pass from one of
them to another; for the observation of this, next to the ancients, the French
are to be most commended. They tie themselves so strictly to the unity of
place, that you never see in any of their plays, a scene changed in the middle
of an act: if the act begins in a garden, a street, or chamber, 'tis ended in
the same place; and that you may know it to be the same, the stage is so
supplied with persons, that it is never empty all the time : he who enters
second, has business with him who was on before; and before the second quits
the stage, a third appears who has business with him. This Camille calls la
liaison des scenes, the continuity or joining of the scenes; and 'tis a good
mark of a well-contrived play, when all the persons are known to each other,
and every one of them has some affairs with all the rest."
3. The Unity
of Action:
"As for the third
unity, which is that of Action, the ancients meant no other by it than what the
logicians do by their "finis, "the end or scope of any action; that
which is the first in intention, and last in execution : now the poet is to aim
at one great and complete action, to the carrying on of which all things in
this play, even the very obstacles, are to be subservient; and the reason of
this is as evident as any of the former. For two actions, equally labored and
driven on by the writer, would destroy the unity of the poem; it would be no
longer one play, but two : not but that there may be many actions in a play, as
Ben Jonson has observed in his "Discoveries; "Taut they must be all
subservient to the great one, which our language happily expresses in the name
of" under-plots": such as in Terence's "Eunuch "is the
difference and reconcilement of Thais and Phaedria, which is not the chief
business of the play, but promotes the marriage of Chaerea the Chermes's
sister, Princia; intended by the poet. There ought to be but one action, says
Corneille, that is, one complete action, which leaves the mind of the audience
in a full repose; but this cannot be brought to pass but by many other
imperfect actions, which conduce to it, and hold the audience in a delightful
suspense of what will be.
- Aristotle’s Three Unities
1. The unity of time: the action in a play should
not exceed the single revolution of the sun.
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 action: a play should have one
single plot or action to sustain the interest of the spectators and it can also
lead him to proper purgation.
These three principles are called unities, and the three
unities were unity of time, place and action. Let us understand them.
1. Unity of Time:
As for the length of
the play, Aristotle refers to the magnitude called for, a grandness indeed, but
one which can be easily seen in its entirety – in the aspect of length, than,
one that can easily be remembered. The ideal time which the fable of a tragedy
encompasses is “one period of the sun, or admits but a small variation from
this period.”
The Unity of Time
limits the supposed action to the duration, roughly, of a single day. Aristotle
meant that the length of time represented in the play should be ideally
speaking the actual time passing during its presentation. We should keep in our
minds that it is a suggestion i.e. to be tried “as far as possible”; there is
nothing that can be called a rule.
2. Unity of Place:
According to the Unity
of Place, the setting of the play should have one place. Aristotle never
mentioned the Unity of Place at all. The doctrine of the three unities, which
has figured so much in literary criticism since the Renaissance, cannot be laid
to his account. He is not the author of it; it was foisted on him by the
Renaissance critics of Italy and France.
3. Unity of action:
The combination of
incidents which are the action of the play, should be one – one story told,
which is not to say it has to be about only one person, since characters are
not in the center of the tragedy, but the action itself is. He is against the
plurality of action because it weakens the tragic effect. Number of incidents
should be connected to each other in such a way that they must be conducive to
one effect.
The Unity of Action
limits the supposed action to a single set of incidents which are related as
cause and effect, "having a beginning, middle, and an end." No scene
is to be included that does not advance the plot directly. No subplots, no
characters who do not advance the action. This unity of action evidently
contains a beginning, a middle and an end, where the beginning is what is “not
posterior to another thing,” while the middle needs to have something happened
before, and something to happen after it, but after the end “there is nothing
else.”
The chain of events has
to be of such nature as “might have happened,” either being possible in the
sense of probability or necessary because of what forewent. Anything absurd can
only exist outside of the drama, what is included in it must be believable,
which is something achieved not by probability alone, “It is, moreover, evident
from what has been said that it is not the function of the poet to relate what
has happened but what may happen- what is possible according to the law of
probability or necessity.”(Poetics in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Adams.
P. 54) Aristotle even recommends things impossible but probable, before those
possible but improbable. What takes place should have nothing irrational about
it, but if this is unavoidable, such events should have taken place outside of
the drama enacted.
Examples:
1. As per Aristotelian rules we can find three
unities in Oedipus. In this ……
- The entire dramatic action takes place in a 24 hour
period. (Unity of Time)
- The entire play takes place at the entrance to Oedipus’
mansion. (Unity of Place)
- The entire dramatic action is Oedipus’ dilemma- there are
no subplots or minor character developments/ distractions. (Unity of Action)
2. If we talk
about the play Othello by Shakespeare, we see…..
- The Unity of Action is maintained but ….
- We begin with Athens, and with a few hours we transported
to Cyprus. (Unity of Place is not maintained)
- Within thirty-six hours after arrival in Cyprus, Desdemona
is smothered. Many things imply the logical estimation of long time. (Unity of
Time is not maintained)
Conclusion:
If these rules (to omit
many other drawn from the precepts and practice of the ancients) we should
judge our modern plays, 'tis probable that few of them would endure the trial:
that which should be the business of a day, takes up in some of them an age;
instead of one action, they are the epitomes of a man's life; and for one spot
of ground; which the stage should represent, we are sometimes in more countries
than the map can show us.
Reference
http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com>2010/12
Word to word Copied from - http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-are-drydens-views-on-three.html?m=1
ReplyDelete