How does Samuel Johnson defend Shakespeare on the charge of violating the ‘three unities’?

How does Samuel Johnson defend Shakespeare on the charge of violating the ‘three unities’?

The neo-classical critics raised the question of unites concerning the free dramatic expression of the Elizabethans, particularly Shakespeare. Since the critics of the age showed allegiance to the rules of the classical writers and critics like Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle and Horace, they put their late writers in the classical mould of (of standard) writing. Whoever fitted nice, passed for valid and if otherwise invalid. Shakespeare with all his natural capabilities was brought to the scale of judgment. Here Johnson in his “Preface to Shakespeare” comes to defend him and shows the inanity of observing the unites of place and time but action.

Among the unites, Johnson found only the unity of action justified by reason since it is needed to present the plot as an inseparable whole. But he founds the grounds for the unites of time and place to be wholly misleading.

He first echoes the objection raiser, “The necessity of observing the unites of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The unities hold it impossible, that an action of months and years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours. Fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality. From the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction of place. The spectator who knows that he saw the first act at Alexandra, cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome, at a distance to which not the dragons of Medea could, in so short a time, have transported him. He knows with certainty that he has not changed his place, and he knows that place cannot change itself.”..............................................

TO GET COMPLETE STUDY MATERIAL JOIN NSOU ENGLISH COACHING

SHARE

Milan Tomic

Hi. I’m Designer of Blog Magic. I’m CEO/Founder of ThemeXpose. I’m Creative Art Director, Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, Industrial Designer, Web Developer, Business Enthusiast, StartUp Enthusiast, Speaker, Writer and Photographer. Inspired to make things looks better.

• 
• 
• 
• 
•