h due reverence to that learning which I must oppose,
adventure to try how I can defend him.

His histories, being neither tragedies nor comedies, are not subject to
any of their laws; nothing more is necessary to all the praise which they
expect, than that the changes of action be so prepared as to be
understood, that the incidents be various and affecting, and the
characters consistent, natural, and distinct. No other unity is intended,
and therefore none is to be sought.

In his other works he has well enough preserved the unity of action. He
has not, indeed, an intrigue regularly perplexed and regularly unravelled;
he does not endeavour to hide his design only to discover it, for this is
seldom the order of real events, and Shakespeare is the poet of nature:
but his plan has commonly what Aristotle requires, a beginning, a middle,
and an end; one event is concatenated with another, and the conclusion
follows by easy consequence. There are perhaps some incidents that might
be spared, as in other poets there is much talk that only fills up time
upon the stage; but the general system makes gradual advances, and the end
of the play is the end of expectation.

To the unities of time and place he has shewn no regard; and perhaps a
nearer view of the principles on which they stand will diminish their
value, and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the time of
Corneille, they have very generally received, by discovering that they
have given more trouble to the poet, than pleasure to the auditor.

The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the
supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The criticks hold it
impossible that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to
pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in
the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings, while
armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and returns,
or till he whom they saw courting his mistress, shall lament the untimely
fall of his son. The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction
loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality.

From the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction of
place. The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at Alexandria,
cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome, at a distance to which not
the dragons of Medea could, in so short a time, have transported hi