Editing Classical unities (section)

===England===
The Classical Unities seem to have had less impact in England. It had adherents in [[Ben Jonson]] and [[John Dryden]]. Examples of plays that followed the theory include: Thomas Otway's ''[[Venice Preserv'd]]'' (1682), [[Joseph Addison|Joseph Addison's]] ''[[Cato, a Tragedy|Cato]],'' and [[Samuel Johnson|Samuel Johnson's]] ''[[Irene (play)|Irene]]'' (1749). Shakespeare's ''[[The Tempest]]'' (1610) takes place almost entirely on an island, during the course of four hours, and with one major action — that of Prospero reclaiming his role as the Duke of Milan. It is suggested that Prospero's way of regularly checking the time of day during the play might be satirizing the concept of the unities. In ''[[An Apology for Poetry]]'' (1595), [[Philip Sidney]] advocates for the unities, and complains that English plays are ignoring them. In Shakespeare's ''[[The Winter's Tale]]'' the chorus notes that the story makes a jump of 16 years:
{{poemquote|Impute it not a crime
To me or my swift passage, that I slide
O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap<ref>Shakespeare, William. ''The Winter's Tale.'' First Folio. Act IV, scene i, line 3-6.</ref>}}
[[John Dryden]] discusses the unity of time in this passage criticizing [[Shakespearean histories|Shakespeare's history plays]]:
<blockquote>... they are rather so many Chronicles of Kings, or the business many times of thirty or forty years, crampt into a representation of two hours and a half, which is not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and receive her Images not onely much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life: this instead of making a Play delightful, renders it ridiculous.<ref>Dryden, ''An Essay of Dramatick Poesie'' (1668), para. 56.</ref></blockquote>
Samuel Johnson in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare in 1773 rejects the previous dogma of the classical unities and argues that drama should be faithful to life:
{{Blockquote
|The unities of time and place are not essential to a just drama, and that though they may sometimes conduce to pleasure, they are always to be sacrificed to the nobler beauties of variety and instruction; and that a play written with nice observation of the critical rules is to be contemplated as an elaborate curiosity, as the product of superfluous and ostentatious art, by which is shown rather what is possible than what is necessary.<ref>Greene, Donald (1989), ''Samuel Johnson: Updated Edition,'' Boston: Twayne Publishers, {{ISBN|08057-6962-5}}</ref>}}
After Johnson's critique interest seemed to turn away from the theory.<ref>Shakespeare, William. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Vaughn, Alden T. editors. ''The Tempest.'' The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. 1999. p. 14-18 {{ISBN|9781903436-08-0}}</ref><ref>Friedland , Louis Sigmund. ''The Dramatic Unities in England''. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan., 1911), pp. 56-89</ref>

John Pitcher, in the [[Arden Shakespeare]] Third Series edition of ''[[The Winter's Tale]]'' (2010), suggests that Shakespeare was familiar with the unities due to an English translation of ''Poetics'' that became popular around 1608.<ref>Shakespeare, William. Pitcher, John. editor. ''[[The Winter's Tale]]'' Third Series (2010). The Arden Shakespeare. {{ISBN|9781903436356}}</ref>