Talk:Classical unities

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)

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):


 * Law of the Three Unities
 * Theatre technique which also discusses the Unities
 * The classical unities
 * Classical unities
 * The unities
 * Unities

But not, surprisingly, The Three Unities or The three Unities. By the way, can anyone comment on the capitalisation in this title?  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)

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:
 * René Le Bossu, Discours du poème épique
 * François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre
 * Pierre Corneille, Discours du poème dramatique

Gdr 16:10, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Films / modern media
I thought it would be a good idea to include a section about the classical unities in modern media. I started with a short list of films that I think follow the classical guidelines. The section could be expanded to include TV, comics, games, etcetera. I tried to "be bold", so you may not agree with the examples I provided. If you have additional or better examples, please edit the list. Also, the introduction text of the section should be rewritten, but I would like to leave this to someone whose English is better than mine. Should you think that this new section does not belong in this article at all and choose to remove it, kindly explain your motivation on this page. Thanks in advance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gberk (talk • contribs) 12:41, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

"Revolution" vs. "rotation"
The current text says that one of the classical unities is unity of time, i.e. "the action in a play should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours." Later, the text says that Aristotle observed that tragedy endeavors "to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun". A revolution of the sun is one year, not one day. So should the first quotation be changed to say one year, or should the second one be changed to say "rotation of the sun" rather than "revolution of the sun"? Or, if they are both correct as-is, then I think a brief explanation should be inserted as to how the definition changed after Aristotle from one year to one day. I don't know Aristotle's original Greek text so I can't make the edit.Drochtegang (talk) 21:02, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Poetics vs Rhetoric
If the first modern formulation of the three dramatic unities was inspired by a reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric rather than his Poetics, as this article states, why do we have excerpts from the latter but not the former? 68.9.181.144 (talk) 19:57, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
 * The article does not say that anything was "inspired by a reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric", instead it says something a bit different. The article answers your question of why it has the excerpts in the passage that begins the section containing those excerpts.  The article says that Trissino worked from a poor translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric.  It would be interesting to see what that poor translation actually said that misled Trissino. GümsGrammatiçus (talk) 20:18, 4 December 2020 (UTC)