Classical Unities, also known as the three unities or Aristotelian unities, are considered the rules for drama which have been derived from 'Aristotle's Poetics'.
He proposed that:
- " The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots.
- The unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place.
- The unity of time: the action in a play should take place over no more than 24 hours. "
He dealt with the unity of action the detail under the general subject of 'definition of tragedy'.
- He wrote:
"Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude… As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole"
He only made a small reference to time which was in a distinction between the epic and tragic forms.
- He wrote:
"Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ, in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of metre, and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no limits of time."
No comments:
Post a Comment