In his analysis of dramatic art, Dr. Johnson has given his views on all debatable points such as the dramatic unities, dramatic pleasure, and the tragicomedies.
→ First of all he says that drama must be "a faithful mirror of manners and of life. It should present human sentiments in human language. The story of drama must be true of life, but it must not be the story of one man or a few men, but of a wide section of humanity. Shakespeare's plays are great because each play is a miniature picture of any one aspect of the whole of humanity.
→ So far as Dramatic unities are concerned, Dr. Johnson approved of only one unity – the unity of Action. This is necessary to make the plot complete and one whole. There would be utter chaos if there were many actions leading to different ends. In a good play all the actions should join together and lead to one desired end. So far as the unities of Time and Place are concerned, he finds them unnecessary and highly undesirable.
The stage in a play is an imaginary platform. It is neither a real Rome nor a real Alexandria, and therefore the shifting of scenes from one place to another is also an imaginative process. So is the case with the passage of time. The audience imaginatively travels from place to place, and passes days and years through the same process of imagination. After all, a play is not a literal picture but an imaginative recreation of life. In the same way he defends tragicomedy. Life itself is a mingling of tragic and comic occurrences. Moreover, tragic and comic scenes throw each other into greater relief by contrast. Therefore there is nothing unnatural or inartistic in a tragicomedy.
