00021— Evaluate Sidney’s views on the three Dramatic Unities.

                                   Sydney               

[see 00006--The Structure of the Plot—Aristotle]

Sidney was a strong advocate of the THREE DRAMATIC UNITIES OF TIME, PLACE AND ACTION.  These three unities must be observed if a play is believed to be a true copy of life.  Sidney regretted that, none of the English plays except “Gorboduck” to some extent observed the three dramatic unities.

1)      The Unity of Time: requires that the plot or action of a play should not exceed the limit of one natural day of twenty-four hours.  If the action exceeds this limit, the play would appear to be highly unnatural.  But English dramatists have most hideously violated this unity.  The events extend for a long time period are packed in two hours space.  Nothing could be more absurd than this.

2)      The Unity of Place: requires that the action of the play should not shift frequently from one distant place top another.  The English dramatists violated the unity of place equally grossly.  “You shall have Asia of the one side, and Africa of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived.”  Also the same stage has to be taken for a garden, a graveyard, a place or an island where there is a shipwreck, or a battlefield.  This is straining the imagination of the spectator to the breaking point.  This should be equally  avoided.

3)      The Unity of Action: requires that there should be no admixture of the comic and tragic scenes in the most unnatural way.  A comedy should be a comedy, and a tragedy should be a tragedy from the beginning to the end.  The tragic and comic scenes and situations should not be mixed up.  The king and clown should not be mixed up on the stage.  It is on this ground that Sidney harshly condemns the vogue of tragi-comedies coming up in English drama.