Dramatic unity

“ Among these traditions were the disregard for unity, partly of action, but especially of time and place; the mingling of comedy with even the intensest scenes of tragedy; the nearly complete lack of stage scenery, with a resultant willingness in the audience to make the largest possible imaginative assumptions; the presence of certain stock figures, such as the clown; and the presentation of women's parts by men and boys. The plays, therefore, must be reckoned with in dramatic history. ”

“ Unity of action is, then, of first importance in story.
There is, however, another kind of unity which has not been enough considered,—what may, perhaps, be called artistic unity. Why is it that a play which begins seriously and for most of its course so develops, only to end farcically, or which begins lightly only to become tragic, leaves us dissatisfied? Because the audience finds it difficult to readjust its mood as swiftly as does the author. The Climbers33 and The Girl With the Green Eyes34 of Clyde Fitch are examples in point. ”

“ It is just this increase to the strength and stability of individual character and aims in their relation to action which opens the way to dramatic poetry. To return, however, to the epic, we repeat that it is the above-mentioned unity of feeling and action which it demands, that unity between the self-fulfilled object of the personal life and the external accident and event; a unity which, as observed, is only present without blemish as it first appears in the earliest periods of the national life or the national poetry. ”

“ But, although the other excellences of the drama besides this dramatic probability, as unity of interest, with distinctness and subordination of the characters, and appropriateness of style, are all, so far as they tend to increase the inward excitement, means towards accomplishing the chief end, that of producing and supporting this willing illusion,—yet they do not on that account cease to be ends themselves; and we must remember that, as such, they carry their own justification with them, as long as they do not contravene or interrupt the total illusion. ”

“ The repetition of dramatic forms in the Globe plays shows that there is a structural foundation for the concept of multiple unity, that unity can be found not in compression of action but in its extension. ”

“ In a drama, however, the harmony of the whole results from its component contraries being co-ordinated in the unity of action, while, in universal Reason, it is from unity that the struggle of contraries arises. ”

“ And whether we gaze at the actors on the stage or at the figures in the metope, whether we study a lyric or listen to a dialogue, we are in communion with the same genius, the same legend. The thing which moves and delights us is a unity. ”

“ The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other, the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. ”

“ This is the social significance which differentiates modern dramatic art from art for art's sake. It is the dynamite which undermines superstition, shakes the social pillars, and prepares men and women for the reconstruction. ”

“ Any strong attempt to subvert these laws is dangerous not only to that tissue of convention called society but also to the development of the human race. And here we find our dramatists forced—first by the spirit of the times, which gives them their theme, and second by the nature of the dramatic art, which demands a special treatment of that theme—to hold a brief for certain men and women who have shuffled off the coil of those very social laws that man has devised, with his best wisdom, for the preservation of his race. ”

“ It is to this essential unity of the race that the dramatist owes much of his power; for let him but strike the common strings of grief and love, and the crowd at once show by their words, their gestures, their looks, and often by their tears, their earnest sympathy. ”

“ Neither one nor the other should ever forget that the one and only fundamental unity in drama, past, present and to come, is unity of idea, and the unity of action which gathers about that idea as surely as iron filings around the magnetized center. The unities of time and place are conditional upon the kind of drama aimed at, and the temporal and physical characteristic of the theater ”

“ The pathetic interest of the drama deepens with every new expression, but at least you can learn from it that your parents in the nineteenth century were not to blame for losing the sense of unity in art. As early as the fourteenth century, signs of unsteadiness appeared, and, before the eighteenth century, unity became only a reminiscence. ”

“ This setting of nature does not bear to social activities the relation that the scenery of a theatrical performance bears to a dramatic representation; it enters into the very make-up of the social happenings that form history. ”

“ For the proper development of these effects, a crowd must be assembled; those ideas and feelings which would pass languidly from one man to another, traverse the serried ranks of a multitude with the rapidity of lightning; and it is only when large masses of men are collected together that we observe the action of that moral electricity which the dramatic poet calls into such powerful operation. ”

“ The two great artificial conceptions of the elaborate “Unities” drama, with Acts and Scenes taking the place of the choric divisions, and of the still more artificial “Heroic Poem,” with its Fable, its Epic Unity, its Machines, and so forth, acquire in theory—if luckily, as, for instance, in England, by no means in practice—greater and greater dignity. It becomes a sort of truism that the drama is the most beautiful and ingenious, the heroic poem the noblest, thing on which the human mind can exercise itself. ”

“ Every element must be in unison, then, in the perfect play. The poetic play must be rendered every artificial aid available to delineate, identify and appeal to poetic feeling. The same is true of romantic, realistic, idealistic, or any other specific type. Each play, for that matter, has its own peculiar exigencies that call for unity auxiliaries for the sake of harmony. The character must have his consistent traits, condition must have its appropriate environment, situations may be heightened by setting, deeds are strengthened by atmosphere—just as the effect is enhanced by harmony. ”

“ The facts of art are diverse, but the essence of artistic effect is unity. Monarchy, Anarchy, and Republicanism may contend for the government of nations; but a theatre should be in the power of a cultured despot. There may be division of labour, but there must be no division of mind. ”

“ For the whole system of your drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion. For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes and their effects ”

“ 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 ”

“ However, it is to the dramatic artist only that ability is given to breathe nobility into the whole and to charge the singleness of effect with a vitality which marks a milestone in countless lives.
In this chapter we have found that the essence of drama is conflict— a clash of wills and its outcome; that the dramatic consists in those flashes which reveal life at its significant, crucial moments ”

“ Of course it would be impossible to base a play upon the thesis that, in a given conflict between the individual and society, society was indisputably right and the individual indubitably wrong; because the essential element of struggle would be absent. Our modern dramatists, therefore, have been forced to deal with exceptional outcasts of society,—outcasts with whom the audience might justly sympathise in their conflict with convention. ”

“ In such a case what room could there be for that contrast and collision which the very plot of a drama requires?—They have their weaknesses, errors, and even crimes, but the manners are always elevated above reality, and every person is invested with as high a portion of dignity as was compatible with his part in the action. But this is not all. The ideality of the representation chiefly consisted in the elevation of every thing in it to a higher sphere. ”

“ Thus separated from one another, how can they succeed in coming into connection, unless a profound and general analogy already exists between them? Evidently those heroes, who do nothing for the public but speak and feel in their presence, will be understood and received by them only so far as they coincide with them in their mode of conceiving, feeling, and speaking; and dramatic effect can result only from their aptitude to unite in the same impressions. ”

“ For there is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual. ”

“ Yet, as in the artistic drama there must be a beginning and an end, although the action can only be ideally severed from what has preceded and what is to follow in actual life, so a limited space in the collective history of a people may be legitimately set apart for concentrated study. But as in the case of the drama, such a period should possess a certain unity and intensity of moral interest. ”

“ The dramatic unities, three principles governing the structure of drama and supposedly derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, are a subject of perennial interest. They are known as the unities of time, place, and action, respectively, and require that “the action of a play should be represented as occurring in one place, within one day, and with nothing irrelevant to the plot.” ”

“ We see how quickly the arbitrary distinction between the species of poetry vanishes before common sense and taste. No less easily one might demolish the alleged rule of the two unities. We say two and not three unities, because unity of plot or of ensemble, the only true and well-founded one, was long ago removed from the sphere of discussion. ”

“ To split community feeling by acrimonious discussion was contrary to the basic idea and function of the Celebration, which are to help unite all classes and all beliefs in a great coöperative movement for civic expression through dramatic art. ”

“ For our present object, the justification, namely, of the grand division which we lay down in the history of art, and according to which we conceive ourselves equally warranted in establishing the same division in dramatic literature, it might be sufficient merely to have stated this contrast between the ancient, or classical, and the romantic. ”

“ It exhibits always a conflict between the individual revolutionist and the communal conservatives, and expresses the growing tendency of these opposing forces to adjust themselves to equilibrium.
Thus considered, the modern social drama is seen to be inherently and necessarily the product and the expression of the nineteenth century. Through no other type of drama could the present age reveal itself so fully; for the relation between the one and the many, in politics, in religion, in the daily round of life itself, has been, and still remains, the most important topic of our times. ”

“ Differing in this respect from other arts, in addition to the absolute rules imposed upon it, as on all others, by the unchangeable nature of man, dramatic art has relative rules which flow from the changeful state of society. ”

“ The Modern Drama, as all modern literature, mirrors the complex struggle of life,—the struggle which, whatever its individual or topical expression, ever has its roots in the depth of human nature and social environment, and hence is, to that extent, universal. Such literature, such drama, is at once the reflex and the inspiration of mankind in its eternal seeking for things higher and better. ”

“ His plays move us strangely in the performance, they grip at the outset and firmly hold us to the relentless end, because his dramaturgic skill is exerted upon themes essentially dramatic in that they deal with this stark exhibition of the human will and with the bitter struggle that must ensue when the human will is in revolt against the course of nature or against the social bond. ”

“ Classic, Spanish, and French drama.
It is the unity of the action which constitutes the good play, and it may be obtained by different methods. A dramatist may obtain unity by means of the passion or by the working out of a single situation. Of the great Greek dramatists I cannot speak with expert authority, but as far as they are visible in translations as in a glass darkly, they appear to have achieved unity in this way to the full. ”