How does Samuel Johnson defend Shakespeare
on the charge of violating the ‘three unities’?
Answer: The neo-classical
critics raised the question of unites concerning the free dramatic expression
of the Elizabethans, particularly Shakespeare. Since the critics of the age
showed allegiance to the rules of the classical writers and critics like
Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle and Horace, they put their late writers in the
classical mould of (of standard) writing. Whoever fitted nice, passed for valid
and if otherwise invalid. Shakespeare with all his natural capabilities was
brought to the scale of judgment. Here Johnson in his “Preface to Shakespeare”
comes to defend him and shows the inanity of observing the unites of place and
time but action.
Among the unites,
Johnson found only the unity of action justified by reason since it is needed
to present the plot as an inseparable whole. But he founds the grounds for the
unites of time and place to be wholly misleading.
