there be any fallacy,
it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy
for a moment; but we rather lament the possibility than suppose the
presence of misery, as a mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers
that death may take it from her. The delight of tragedy proceeds from
our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real,
they would please no more.

Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for
realities, but because they bring realities to mind. When the
imagination is recreated by a painted landscape, the trees are not
supposed capable to give us shade, or the fountains coolness; but we
consider how we should be pleased with such fountains playing beside us,
and such woods waving over us. We are agitated in reading the history of
Henry the fifth, yet no man takes his book for the field of Agincourt. A
dramatick exhibition is a book recited with concomitants that increase
or diminish its effect. Familiar comedy is often more powerful on the
theatre, than in the page; imperial tragedy is always less. The humour
of Petruchio may be heightened by grimace; but what voice or what
gesture can hope to add dignity or force to the soliloquy of Cato?

A play read, affects the mind like a play acted. It is, therefore,
evident, that the action is not supposed to be real; and it follows,
that between the acts a longer or shorter time may be allowed to pass,
and that no more account of space or duration is to be taken by the
auditor of a drama, than by the reader of a narrative, before whom may
pass in an hour the life of a hero, or the revolutions of an empire.

Whether Shakespeare knew the unities, and rejected them by design, or
deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to
decide, and useless to inquire. We may reasonably suppose, that, when he
rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars
and criticks, and that he, at last, deliberately persisted in a
practice, which he might have begun by chance. As nothing is essential
to the fable but unity of action, and as the unities of time and place
arise evidently from false assumptions, and, by circumscribing the
extent of the drama, lessen its variety, I cannot think it much to be
lamented, that they were not known by him, or not observed: nor, if such
another poet could arise, should I very vehemently reproach him, that
his first act passed at Venice, and