CHAPTER II – DRAMATIC UNITY
Few sayings have been the occasion of such bitter and long-continued controversy as Aristotle’s remarks on the unity of the drama. For this reason, and because they furnish a convenient point of departure, it may be well to quote his own words:
“Tragedy is an imitation of an action, that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude... A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or in the regular course of events, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to the type here described.” [Aristotle, Poetics, VII.]
“Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life, which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action... As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one, when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.” [Aristotle, Poetics, VIII.]
“Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type... They differ, again, in length: for Tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has n limits of time.” [Aristotle, Poetics, V.]
The first two passages quoted, emphasizing the need for what is technically known as “unity of action,” will be seen to have permanent and essential validity. The last passage is evidently a passing generalization made from the usage of Aristotle’s contemporaries. It was, however, taken up by the French of the early sixteenth century and, under the title “unity of time,” exalted to the position of a chief canon in dramatic art. A third requirement, that of “unity of place,” though not even suggested by Aristotle, was taken for granted, partly as a corollary of the unity of time, partly in imitation of Greek and Senecan usage. These three canons, supported by the authority of the French Academy, and, after some resistance, accepted and defended by Corneille, determined the form of French drama until the beginning of this century, when Victor Hugo, in Hernani, broke bounds, and the “Romantic” reaction became powerful. In Germany the drama for a time slavishly followed French models, but the break with the unities came somewhat earlier than in France, and may be taken as dating from Lessing’s notes on dramatic writing, published between 1767 and 1769. In England the period of great drama fell so much earlier than in France or in Germany, that it escaped almost altogether the tyranny of “classic” tradition. To Shakespeare, Aristotle can have been little more than a name, and though Seneca’s tragedies were translated in his lifetime, their influence was only one of the factors which determined the form of the national drama. [1]
[1 For the blending of the Senecan and the national tradition, cf. R. Fischer, Zur Kunstentwicklung der Englischen Tragödie.]
Yet, relatively small as was their influence in our own literature, the “unities” have been too important elsewhere to be passed over in a discussion of the drama. Moreover, the very absurdities into which they led their adherents are instructive as to the true basis of dramatic theory. Nothing, for example, could be more suggestive than the treatise in which Corneille [1] defends The Three Unities, of Action, of Time, and of Place. A few extracts will indicate his position.
[1 P. Corneille, Discours III, Des Trois Unités.]
“The rule regarding the unity of time is based upon this remark of Aristotle, ‘that the tragedy ought to confine the duration of its action within one revolution of the sun, or to try to exceed this but slightly.’ [1] These words have given occasion to this famous controversy, whether they ought to be understood to mean a natural day of twenty-four or an artificial day of twelve... For my part, I find that there are subjects which it is so inconvenient to reduce within so brief a time, that not only would I grant them the entire twenty-four hours, but I would even avail myself of license allowed by the philosopher to exceed this number a little, and would without scruple extend it to thirty.”
[1 Note Corneille’s mistranslation of Aristotle, which really begs the whole question. Compare Butcher’s translation, quoted above.]
In support of the rule he argues thus:
“The dramatic poem is an imitation, or, better, a portrait of the actions of men; and there is no doubt that portraits are the more excellent in proportion as they the more closely resemble their original. The representation [of a drama on stage] lasts two hours, and the verisimilitude would be perfect if the action which it presented did not demand more for its actual occurrence. Let us not, then, fix upon either twelve hours or twenty-four, but let us compress the action of the poem into as brief a space as we possibly can, in order that its representation have the greater verisimilitude and be the more perfect.”
As to unity of place, he admits that the rule is not found either in Horace or in Aristotle, but he nevertheless holds it binding, and characterizes as “un peu licencieuse” the interpretation of it which would allow a single drama to represent such places as a man could go to and return from in a day. He goes on:
“I could wish, in order not to offend the spectator in any way, that what we represent before him in two hours could actually take place in two hours, and that what we make him see, on a stage that is immovable, could confine itself to one room, or one hall, according to choice; but often this is so inconvenient, not to say impossible, that it is necessary, for place as for time, to admit some enlargement of the limits.”
He concludes that in cases of absolute necessity it is sufficient that the action be confined within the walls of a single city. At the close of his treatise, however, the common sense of the practical playwright overcomes for a moment the conventionality never quite genuine of the Academician, and asserts itself in the impatient remark:
“It is easy for the theorists to be rigid; but if they were to give to the public six or a dozen poems of this sort, they would perhaps widen their rules even more than I have done, when they had seen by experience what restraint their precision causes, and how many beautiful things it banishes from our stage.”
Evidently the trouble here arises from a misuse of the word “imitation,” and a misconception of what “truth to nature” really is. Art does not copy nature, it follows and interprets it, and Corneille’s first proposition, about which he says “there is no doubt” – namely, that the more closely the stage presentation copies the actual events the more perfect is the drama – this proposition is false and subversive of good art; if he had followed it consistently, he would not have been the great artist he was.
On the other hand, the practice of “following these rules at a distance” has something to be said for it. Shakespeare’s dramas would have been better if they had not taken quite so much license. The structure of Lear is marred by the too frequent changes of scene, not because these destroy the illusion, but because every such change demands a fresh adjustment of the reader’s mind to the new conditions, and such use of his energies is waste of his energies unless there is some compensating gain. In Antony and Cleopatra we have an illustration of the way in which bad artistic form may almost nullify the effectiveness of the artist’s real perceptions; for the noble scenes scattered through the play do not wholly atone for the sprawling, helter-skelter character of the treatment.
In modern plays the elaborateness of the scenery has taken the place of the “classic” tradition as a check on frequent changes of scene, and, except in plays that are chiefly spectacular, the tendency is to cut down scene-shifting, especially within the act. The greater emphasis, too, on the inner rather than the outer aspects of the dramatic situation [1] may have had something to do with the simplification of setting and compactness of treatment that marks the work of at least some groups of modern dramatists. It may be noted in the plays of the young German writers, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Fulda; it is yet more striking in the dramas of Ibsen, some of which preserve the same scene throughout, while two, Ghosts and John Gabriel Borkman, observe the unity of time in almost Corneille’s strictest interpretation. The same is true of Sudermann Die Heimath, [2] and it is interesting to note that these two plays, which have roused more than common interest on the stage as well as among the reading public, show such conformity to the standards of a past age. But it is also significant that all three of these plays resemble the Greek drama in presenting to us the culminating point of an action that has been going on for years; the plays themselves include little more than would be found in the last act of a Shakespearean drama, and their likeness to the classic form may be taken as a natural result of this essential similarity of theme.
[1 Cf. for an expansion of this, the comparison between Shakespeare and Browning, pp. 129-133.]
[2 Acted by Duse and by Bernhardt under the title Magda.]
The gain in these cases, however, is not due, as Corneille would have said, to the greater accuracy with which the facts can be copied, but to the greater economy of attention made possible by concentration in the treatment and by elimination of distracting features. Ibsen’s Ghosts, which presents the occurrences of a single day in Mrs. Alving’s drawing-room, is not, because of this, a whit more “true” than Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose action covers at least months and ranges between England and Scotland. Except when they are of importance for other reasons than those Corneille gives, the unities of time and of place may be set aside as non-essential. The dramatist cannot copy his subject, – he ought not to do so, and the extent to which he copies its outer setting cannot be rigidly prescribed to him. Since he must often make us feel, by means of a few phrases, a soul’s long-drawn agonies, why may he not also make us feel, by means of a two hours’ play, a soul’s life-history? Surely, if he can, he may.
But if these requirements concerning time and place were conventional rules imposed upon drama from without, that concerning action is a vitally grounded law, growing out of the very nature of the art-form; and it is characteristic of the directness and truth of Aristotle’s thought that he is not content with a casual mention of this point, as in the matter of the time-limit, but pauses to emphasize and elaborate his idea, – reverts to it now and again to add some further comment from another point of view.
What he means by unity of action he makes very clear. It is organic unity, he explains, not formal or verbal, that he wants, and this is not necessarily attained by making the actions all centre about one man. He hits the point exactly when he says that it is the action chosen, which must be a whole. It must, that is, be such an action as can be adequately set forth, with its “beginning, middle, and end,” during the two hours allotted to the poet, and by the means at his command. This effectually cuts him off from treating certain themes. National issues, for instance, cannot be handled by him, except as they touch upon individual human lives. They may, indeed, have a certain large unity, they are as truly controlled by laws, and as open to philosophic treatment as is the life of a single man, but the drama cannot handle them. Gibbon’s Decline and Fah of the Roman Empire may, by a figure of speech, be called a magnificent drama. It has, on a gigantic scale, complete and organic unity; it has, in the true sense, a beginning, a middle, and an end. It does for the Roman Empire what Shakespeare does for Macbeth – portrays a process of disintegration and ruin, and traces it to its source in contravention of the laws of human life and intercourse. But Gibbon’s subject-matter is outside the dramatist’s realm. He may touch upon it, as Shakespeare does in Julius Caesar, but the centre of interest will be not the state, but the man, as here it is Brutus. Where this is not the case, as in several of Shakespeare’s historical plays, Henry VIII, or Henry V, or King John, the play is in so far imperfect. That even Shakespeare erred thus often is not surprising. Such plays appealed to the patriotism of his audience and ministered to their inherent Teutonic love of incident and spectacle; they were to those times what the plays based on Napoleon’s life have within recent years been to ours. But such productions are not good dramatic art. The play must have, not merely a running story that can be told, but a centre, and a determined line of development. Shelley expressed this when he wrote, in his preface to The Cenci, “Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions, and opinions, acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one tremendous end, would be as light to make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart.” It is this “conspiring to one tremendous end” that is the test of the plot and of the characters.
But it is a test that cannot be applied by rule of thumb. Aristotle, indeed, speaks, in his cool, definite way, of “the structural union of the parts being such that if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.” [1] Such a test can well be applied to the dramas of Sophocles: try to “cut” the Antigone or the Oedipus, either by reducing the number of characters or by removing incidents; it is like hewing away a limb from a living creature. But, with modern plays, it is another matter. It is true the French of the sixteenth century, following a perverted classic tradition, attempted to attain this same kind of unity: their plays have few under-plots, the number of characters is kept as low as possible. But to the Teutonic mind, these productions lack the power that comes of unified complexity, while they have not, on the other hand, the lyric intensity and vitality of the Greek drama. Schopenhauer puts this feeling perhaps over-vigorously, as is his way, but effectively, when he says that the French tragedies “in general observe this [unity] so strictly that the course of the drama is like a geometrical line without breadth. There it is always a case of ‘Only get on! Pensez à votre affaire!’”
[1 Poetics, VIII.]
In the modern French drama, however, as in all English, we have to face the question of episode and subordinate characters – problems which virtually did not exist for Aristotle, since the severely narrow limits of tragedy did not admit of any episode in our sense of the word, and minor characters scarcely appeared. Shakespeare’s dramas, on the contrary, abound in episodes that have little apparent connection with the main plot, many of which could be cut out without “disjointing” or “disturbing” the structure of the play. In actual stage presentation some of these actually are left out, and, unless we sit book in hand, we are not likely to notice the omissions. This is less true of the tragedies, however, and in the greatest of these we shall usually find that many of these seemingly trifling incidents are set there with a purpose, and make toward the main end. “Almost too copiously and with apparent carelessness, the great artist fastens his golden ornaments in all parts of his piece; but he who goes to unclasp them finds them grown iron-fast into the texture of the whole.” [1]
[1 Freytag, Technik des Dramas, p. 45.]
That a given scene may be omitted without leaving the story of the action incomplete is, of course, no indication that such a scene is superfluous, or runs counter to true unity. Many scenes are needed to give shading to character, to supply contrast, or background. Here, again, nothing can be decided by rule, and even about the greatest of the plays we find that opinion differs. The underplot in Lear is, according to one critic, a blemish, since it is “connected but loosely with the main action,” and “retards the movement and needlessly renders the whole more bitter.” Others [1] regard this same underplot as a source of strength, since it furnishes a reflection of the main action and thus heightens the total effect, as the subordinate theme in a symphony may be a reflection or variant of the principal theme, or as the subordinate lines of a picture may follow the lead of the main color masses. It matters less which judgment we finally adopt than the manner in which we arrive at the judgment. The only tribunal of appeal is taste, but it should be taste that has been trained by long and thoughtful familiarity with the best art.
[1 Vide Ulrici: Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art, I, 437 ff.; Brandes: William Shakespeare, II, 135.]
