Unity of Action

 Unity of Action in drama, the three principles derived by French classicists from Aristotle’s Poetics; they require a play to have a single action represented as occurring in a single place and within the course of a day. These principles were called, respectively, unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time. These three unities were redefined in 1570 by the Italian humanist Lodovico Castelvetro in his interpretation of Aristotle, and they are usually referred to as “Aristotelian rules” for dramatic structure. Actually, Aristotle’s observations on tragedy are descriptive rather than prescriptive, and he emphasizes only one unity, that of plot, or action.

In the French classical tragedy, the unities were adhered to literally and became the source of endless critical polemics. Disputes arose over such problems as whether a single day meant 12 or 24 hours and whether a single place meant one room or one city. Some believed that the action represented in the play should occupy no more time than that required for the play’s performance—about two hours. In spite of such severe restrictions, the great 17th-century French dramatists Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, confining the crises of their characters’ lives to a single setting and a brief span of hours, produced a unique form of tragedy that derives its austere power from its singleness of concentration. The prestige of the unities continued to dominate French drama until the Romantic era, when it was destroyed, in an evening of catcalls and violence, with the opening of Victor Hugo’s Romantic tragedy Hernani (1830).

Classical Greek and Latin dramas were strict in form. The concept of the three unities, in relation to classical drama, derives from Aristotle’s Poetics but is not directly formulated by the Greek philosopher. He merely states that a tragedy should have unity of action. The Poetics was unknown in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.

During the Renaissance a Latin translation is published in Italy, after which there is much discussion of classical literary principles. However it is not until 1570, in a book by Lodovico Castelvetro, that the concept of three unities evolves:

Unity of Action: It is the unity of action which makes the plot intelligible, coherent, and individual. The events and incidents are connected with each other logically and inevitably on the principle of probability; they move towards a common goal, the Catastrophe, aimed at by the dramatist. The plot must have “a beginning, a middle and an end” Dr. Jonson in his Preface to Shakespeare rejected the “three unities”. However in England, the unities of time and place are optional device for the playwrights. An example of modern plays composed strictly according to the unities is TennesseWilliams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

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