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In the classic play the so-called dramatic unities of time, place, and action were strictly observed. Time and place must remain the same; the play could represent a period of only a few hours, and whatever action was introduced must take place at the spot where the play began.

It is the more surprising therefore to find that in the treatment of the unity of God Bahya is more elaborate, and offers a greater variety of arguments for unity as such. Moreover, as has already been said before, he takes greater care than anyone before him to guard against the identification of God's unity with any of the unities, theoretical or actual, in our experience.

Even in books I like a confined locality, and so do the critics when they talk of the unities. Nothing is so tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot-wheels of a hero, to go to sleep at Vienna, and awaken at Madrid; it produces a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit.

Surely, my prince, not even a dramatic writer, who has the least desire to preserve the three terrible unities of Aristotle, durst venture to load the interval between one act and another with such a variety of action, or to presume upon such a facility of belief in his audience." "What!

Byron's other Venetian Drama, the Two Foscari, composed at Ravenna, between the 11th of June and the 10th of July, 1821, and published in the following December, is another record of the same failure and the same mortification, due to the same causes. In this play, as Jeffrey points out, the preservation of the unities had a still more disastrous effect.

I could wish there were a treaty made between the French and English theatres, in which both parties should make considerable concessions. The English ought to give up their notorious violations of all the unities; and all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses, which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage.

Like all parts of human life, in and of themselves they are always fragmentary: springing from what precedes them, they have no beginning proper; causing and flowing into others, they have no ending, in effect; and as the dramatic in actual life is never framed with reference to the unities, so results are constantly being produced and worked out by accidents, and the prominent events often contribute nothing to any supposed final catastrophe.

Then he had entered gaily the door of the glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of unities and uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in every direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and sequences that could not be proved.

Hitherto, we have pretty well preserved inviolate the three grand unities time, place, circumstance; and even now we do not sin against the first and chiefest, however we may seem so to sin; for, had it suited my purpose to have begun with the beginning, and to have placed the present revelations foremost, the strictest stickler for the unities would have only had to praise my orthodox adherence to them.

He was now soliloquising somewhat like this: "None of the Eighteen are bidding; that is not satisfactory; I must change that the dramatic unities require it; they must buy the sack they tried to steal; they must pay a heavy price, too some of them are rich.