Talk:Classical unities

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I am afraid, it is not so that Aristotle advocated all three of the Unities. In the 7th and 8th Book of his "Poetics", it was only the Unity of Action, he refers to, but does not mention the Unity of Place. As to Time, all he hints at is that Action should not last longer than one revolution of the sun, in other words that there should be a time limit, as far as the "attention span" of the audience - in modern parlance - is concerned. Action was the main point rather than Time, and there should only be the main Action, and no sub-plots.

It was only in his Commentary on Aristotle in the 16th century that L. Castelvetro demanded that French Neo-Classical drama should adhere to all three Unities. It was from this time that they were being encouraged for a time to adhere to all three Unities - until dramatists found their way round the constraints. --Dieter Simon 22:41 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Sorry, confusion I was logged out before signing out Dieter Simon

You are quite right. I thought that my first version of the article had stated that the unities were derived from Aristotle, rather than stated by him. Reading Poetics, you can pretty easily see how the unity of time was suggested. The Unity of Place is more or less a French development. However, the article's historical discussion has to be tempered by the usefulness of explaining to users the "three unities" and including the non-Aristotelian one, which was also derived from Aristotle, albeit in a roundabout way. Geogre 16:34, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] A lot of work to do

Combining the two texts may be the easier task. It will be more difficult to get rid of redirects and in particular double redirects. However, to be able to do so we have to decide first what the title of this page is going to be. So far, the following suggestions have been made (currently all redirects):


But not, surprisingly, The Three Unities or The three Unities. By the way, can anyone comment on the capitalisation in this title? <KF> 22:12, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

As author of Classical unities and a lot of the redirects, I obviously favor my own kin. I have never in my life heard of "the law of the three unities." Before I wrote the article, I went searching for an extant discussion. If I, as an experienced Wikipedian, couldn't find any older material, it's pretty likely that whatever title it hid under was less than helpful. People frequently allude to "the unities" and the "Classical unities" (with capitalization variants) in scholarship, and the "three unities" is also frequently used. If we were going to be correct, we'd call them Neo-Classical Unities because, as stated above, the Classical world hadn't heard of them. However, that's not what they're called, and it's not up to us to reform the world and answer questions both. Geogre 16:37, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

I moved the article to classical unities as this seems to be the most common form. Gdr 15:54, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Missing material

The article is missing some crucial links in the historical chain from Aristotle to the Augustans.

The most significant Italian Renaissance commentaries on Aristotle were:

  • Francesco Robortelli (1548),
  • Piero Vettori
  • Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d'Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (1570)

The crucial French neoclassical texts appear to be:

Gdr 16:10, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

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