What are THREE UNITIES Presented by Aristotle?

Unities presented by Aristotle

Greek and Latin drama were strict in form. The stage represented a single place throughout the action; the plot recounted the events of a single day; and there was very little irrelevant by-play as the action developed. Aristotle described the drama of an earlier age in his important work On the Art of Poetry; those who followed his precepts called this disciplined structure the three "unities": unity of place, unity of time and unity of action. According to him in order to achieve the perfect results of tragedy dramatists need skills not only in staging a story; that is presenting people with moral and intellectual qualities but also in psychology. The character of his persons must react upon the incidents of his story. Thus psychology must be subordinate to his main object, the staging of a story. What Aristotle has under his microscope is his four square logic, and his dictum is true to the facts of experience, for audience derive true pleasure and thrill only from the close-knit tragedy, an organic whole.

THE THREE UNITIES

Italian critics of the sixteenth century deduced from Aristotle’s Poetics their famous doctrine of the Three Unities, which demanded from dramatists a crippling ingenuity.

“Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude.”

The Unity of time demands that the period of time imagined to elapse in the play should correspond with the time taken in production. What Aristotle says is that Greek dramatists endeavoured ‘ to keep as far as possible within a single circuit of the sun or something near that..’

The Unity of place limits it to one general locality that is there must be in a play no change of scene.

The Unity of action limits it to a single set of incidents which are related as cause and effect, according to him:

"It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end."

These are the qualities that give us the genuine tragic thrill.

Aristotle explains further how to apply this rule of Unity of Action in the construction of a play. The incidents which are the component parts of the story must be as essential to the whole as are parts of a living organism, so that no part can be removed or altered without destroying or altering the whole.

“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.”

This helps us to understand what Aristotle means when he says that all forms of art are ‘modes of imitation’. The artist holds a mirror up to nature but it is not an ordinary mirror. Neither does it exactly reproduce nor does it distort the objects which confront it; it transforms a blur into a picture, which presents confused and unintelligible facts of life. In order to make his story a coherent whole, he must not cut a slice at random from real life, he must selects his incidents to illustrate his own conception. Ibsen, speaking of Ghosts says:

“My object was to make the reader feel that he was going through a piece of real experience.”

Concerning the unity of time, Aristotle noted that all the plays since Aeschylus, except two, did illustrate such unity, but he did not lay down such a precept as obligatory. Perhaps tacitly he assumed that the observance of the unity of place would be the practice of good playwrights, since the chorus was present during the whole performance, and it would indeed be awkward always to devise an excuse for moving fifteen persons about from place to place.

Thus Aristotle’s imaginative ‘imitation’ presents to us the governing principles of human life as he describes them , he give us in Aristotle’s language, not ‘the particular’ but ‘the universal’. He once said during his lecture:

“The values of a universal is that it reveals casual connextion.”

It is the selection that gives to art its own reality, and that is why Aristotle says that poetic drama is something more philosophic or scientific than an accurate calendar of events. It reveals the permanent and universal characteristics of human nature. In short it tells us more about life.

Aristotle’s ‘universal principles deduced by Neo-classical Renaissance critics;

The "Rules"

Neo-classical Renaissance critics codified Aristotle's discussion, claiming that all plays should follow these three precepts:

Place. The setting of the play should be one location: in comedy often a street, in Oedipus Rex the steps before the palace.

Time. The action of the play should represent the passage of no more than one day. Previous events leading up to the present situation were recounted on stage, as Prospero tells Miranda of the events which led to their abandonment on the island.

Action. No action or scene in the play was to be a digression; all were to contribute directly in some way to the plot.

Compare this structure with the episodic, wide-ranging plots of romantic comedy like Shakespeare's Winter’s Tale.

The classical unities or three unities are rules for drama derived from a passage in Aristotle'sPoetics. In their neoclassical form they are as follows:

1. The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots.

2. 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.

3. The unity of time: the action in a play should take place over no more than 24 hours.

Aristotle dealt with the unity of action in some detail, under the general subject of "definition of tragedy", where he wrote:

Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude (Aristotle's Poetics, XVII.) … 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.(Aristotle's Poetics, XVIII.)

His only reference to the time in the fictive world is in a distinction between the epic and tragic forms:

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.(Aristotle's Poetics, V.)

Unlike his prescriptive attitude regarding the plot (unity of action), Aristotle here merely remarks on the typical duration of a tragedy's action, and does not suggest any kind of imperative that it always ought to be so. He was writing after the golden age of Greek drama, and many Greek playwrights wrote plays that do not fit within these conventions.

Even more tellingly, Aristotle does not mention the neoclassical unity of place at all. So Aristotle suggested only one unity -- that of action -- but the prevalent interpretation of his Poetics during the Middle Ages already inclined toward interpreting his comment on time as another "unity".

Criticism:

Any discussion of Aristotle's Unities of Time, Place and Action must start from the acknowledgement that his Poetics from which we receive his ideas about the drama deals only with tragedy: we do not know whether he recommended the same canon of rules for comedy, or indeed for history plays, of which he would certainly have known at least one, namely The Persians by Aeschylus. I shall also be proposing that, as a man of his times, his concepts arose from, and pertained to, the Greek drama of the 5th-4th centuries BC, and accordingly they do not represent necessary and universally applicable rules. I shall argue moreover that the plays with which Aristotle was familiar, and on which he based his views, were themselves products of the performance conditions that prevailed in his era. His Unities, in short, are the unacknowledged children of ancient Greek economics and theatrical technology.