ime for, is the transformation of the dead material of the subject into
the living action of a drama.

Unity of action.

What is it, then, that makes an action _dramatic_, and without which no
action, whatever may be its nature--serious or ludicrous, stately or
trivial, impetuous as a flame of fire, or light as a western breeze--can
be so described? The answer to this question can only suggest itself
from an attempt to ascertain the laws which determine the nature of all
actions corresponding to this description. The first of the laws in
question is in so far the most noteworthy among them that it has been
the most amply discussed and the most pertinaciously misunderstood. This
is the law which requires that a dramatic action should be _one_--that
it should possess _unity_. What in the subject of a drama is merely an
approximate or supposititious, must in its action be an actual unity;
and it is indeed this requirement which constitutes the most arduous
part of the task of transforming subject into action. There is of course
no actual unity in any group of events in human life which we may choose
to call by a single collective name--a war, a revolution, a conspiracy,
an intrigue, an imbroglio. The events of real life, the facts of
history, even the imitative incidents of narrative fiction, are like the
waves of a ceaseless flood; that which binds a group or body of them
into a single action is the bond of the dramatic idea; and this it is
incumbent upon the dramatist to supply. Within the limits of a dramatic
action all its parts should (as in real life or in history they so
persistently refuse to do) flow into its current like tributaries to a
single stream; or, to vary the figure, everything in a drama should form
a link in a single chain of cause and effect. This law is incumbent upon
every kind of drama--alike upon the tragedy which sets itself to solve
one of the problems of a life, and upon the farce which sums up the
follies of an afternoon.

Such is not, however, the case with certain more or less arbitrary rules
which have at different times been set up for this or that kind of
drama. The supposed necessity that an action should consist of _one
event_ is an erroneous interpretation of the law that it should be, as
an action, _one_. For an event is but an element in an action, though it
may be an element of decisive moment. The assassination of Caesar is not
the action of a _Caesar_ tragedy; the loss of hi