atick exhibition is a
book recited with concomitants that increase or diminish its effect.
Familiar comedy is often more powerful in the theatre, than on 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 enquire. 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 his next in Cyprus. Such violations of rules merely positive
become the comprehensive genius of Shakespeare, and such censures are
suitable to the minute and slender criticism of Voltaire:

Non usque adeo permiscuit imis
Longus summa dies, ut non, si voce Metelli
Serventur leges, malint a Caesare tolli.

Yet when I speak thus slightly of dramatick rules, I cannot but recollect
how much wit and learning may be produced against me; before such
authorities I am afraid to stand, not that I think the present question
one of those that are to be decided by mere authority, but because it is
to be suspected that these precepts have not been so easily received but
for better reasons than I have yet been able to find. The result of my
enquiries, in which it would be ludicrous to boast of impartiality, is
that the unities of time and place are not essential to a just drama, that
though