, if you please, the instruction, of the
spectator. The reason is that the one obeys only the laws that
are suited to it, while the other takes upon itself conditions
of existence which are absolutely foreign to its essence. One is
artistic, the other artificial.

People are beginning to understand in our day that exact localization
is one of the first elements of reality. The speaking or acting
characters are not the only ones who engrave on the minds of the
spectators a faithful representation of the facts. The place where
this or that catastrophe took place becomes a terrible and inseparable
witness thereof; and the absence of silent characters of this sort
would make the greatest scenes of history incomplete in the drama.
Would the poet dare to murder Rizzio elsewhere than in Mary Stuart's
chamber? to stab Henri IV elsewhere than in Rue de la Ferronerie, all
blocked with drays and carriages? to burn Jeanne d'Arc elsewhere than
in the Vieux-Marche? to despatch the Duc de Guise elsewhere than in
that chateau of Blois where his ambition roused a popular assemblage
to frenzy? to behead Charles I and Louis XVI elsewhere than in those
ill-omened localities whence Whitehall or the Tuileries may be seen,
as if their scaffolds were appurtenances of their palaces?

Unity of time rests on no firmer foundation than unity of place. A
plot forcibly confined within twenty-four hours is as absurd as one
confined within a peristyle. Every plot has its proper duration as
well as its appropriate place. Think of administering the same dose
of time to all events! of applying the same measure to everything! You
would laugh at a cobbler who should attempt to put the same shoe on
every foot. To cross unity of time and unity of place like the bars
of a cage, and pedantically to introduce therein, in the name of
Aristotle, all the deeds, all the nations, all the figures which
Providence sets before us in such vast numbers in real life,--to
proceed thus is to mutilate men and things, to cause history to
make wry faces. Let us say, rather, that everything will die in the
operation, and so the dogmatic mutilators reach their ordinary result:
what was alive in the chronicles is dead in tragedy. That is why the
cage of the unities often contains only a skeleton.

And then, if twenty-four hours can be comprised in two, it is a
logical consequence that four hours may contain forty-eight. Thus
Shakespeare's unity must be different from Corneille'