iformity of
setting, their endless duologues, their immense harangues, their
spectral confidants, their strict exclusion of all visible action, give
one at first the same sort of impression as a pretentious
pseudo-classical summer-house appearing suddenly at the end of a vista,
after one has been rambling through an open forest. 'La scene est a
Buthrote, ville d'Epire, dans une salle du palais de Pyrrhus'--could
anything be more discouraging than such an announcement? Here is nothing
for the imagination to feed on, nothing to raise expectation, no
wondrous vision of 'blasted heaths,' or the 'seaboard of Bohemia'; here
is only a hypothetical drawing-room conjured out of the void for five
acts, simply in order that the persons of the drama may have a place to
meet in and make their speeches. The 'three unities' and the rest of the
'rules' are a burden which the English reader finds himself quite
unaccustomed to carry; he grows impatient of them; and, if he is a
critic, he points out the futility and the unreasonableness of those
antiquated conventions. Even Mr. Bailey, who, curiously enough, believes
that Racine 'stumbled, as it were, half by accident into great
advantages' by using them, speaks of the 'discredit' into which 'the
once famous unities' have now fallen, and declares that 'the unities of
time and place are of no importance in themselves.' So far as critics
are concerned this may be true; but critics are apt to forget that plays
can exist somewhere else than in books, and a very small acquaintance
with contemporary drama is enough to show that, upon the stage at any
rate, the unities, so far from having fallen into discredit, are now in
effect triumphant. For what is the principle which underlies and
justifies the unities of time and place? Surely it is not, as Mr. Bailey
would have us believe, that of the 'unity of action or interest,' for it
is clear that every good drama, whatever its plan of construction, must
possess a single dominating interest, and that it may happen--as in
_Antony and Cleopatra_, for instance--that the very essence of this
interest lies in the accumulation of an immense variety of local
activities and the representation of long epochs of time. The true
justification for the unities of time and place is to be found in the
conception of drama as the history of a spiritual crisis--the vision,
thrown up, as it were, by a bull's-eye lantern, of the final
catastrophic phases of a long series