Critics of his day were accused by William Shakespeare of implausibility because he did not respect the three-unit rule. The rule of three units required that a work should be carried out in the same place, in a limited space of time, a maximum of one day, and with a single fundamental action.
Although Italian humanists believed that they found these rules in Aristotle's Poetics, the truth is that Aristotle speaks only of unity of action in an extensive way and refers briefly to unity of time, saying that there is no reason to put temporal limits on comedies, but for tragedies, it is convenient that their duration approaches "one solar cycle", that is, one day.
However, contrary to the opinions of the Italian Preceptists and the French classicists, Shakespeare plays his works in different places and in very long periods of time: the action jumps from one place and from one moment to another, as acts happen, and even within the acts themselves.
In Antonio and Cleopatra, the plot begins in Alexandria, but immediately moves to Rome, to return to Alexandria one scene later and jump to Messina, Rome, Alexandria again, a Roman camp, a galley at sea, a plain in Syria, Rome, Alexandria, Athens, Accio and, finally, in the last scene of the fifth act, again Alexandria. Nothing to envy a Hollywood blockbuster like Mankiewicz's Cleopatra.
All these changes seemed implausible to those who defended the rule of the three units:
“If the viewer realizes that the first act takes place in Alexandria, he will not be able to believe that the second one will take place in Rome, since he knows with certainty that he has not changed places and that this place cannot have changed by itself; that what was a house cannot become a meadow, and that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis ”.
Samuel Johnson gave a response that has become famous to supporters of plausibility and the Three Units Rule: Spectators never lose their minds and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is just a stage and that the actors are only actors ... Why is it absurd to admit that a space can be first Athens and then Sicily if you have always been aware that it is neither Sicily nor Athens but a modern theater? In real life, we know that we cannot move from one country to another just by opening and closing a curtain, but we also know that the theatre or the movie theatre are precisely the places where those things are possible. The public understood this before the experts, including the public of Italian and French classical works, since he always knew not only that the amusing story he was seeing did not take place in a sick person's house, but also that that imaginary patient was not even an imaginary patient, but Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, nicknamed Molière, protagonist and author of the play.
Shakespeare himself, in the prologue to Henry V , admits that any play is at its very essence implausible:
“But all of you, noble spectators, forgive the flameless genius who has dared to bring these unworthy tablados such a great subject. Can this cockerel circus contain the vast fields of France? Or could we in this wooden O only bring in the helmets that scared heaven in Agincourt? ”
Fortunately, this essential implausibility can be forgotten if the public does their part and agrees to play the game that is proposed:
“Supply my insufficiency with your thoughts. Multiply one man by a thousand and create an imaginary army. When we talk to you about horses, think that you see them treading the softness of the ground with their magnificent hooves, because it is your imagination that must dress the kings today, transport them from here to there, ride over the ages, pile up the events in an hour of many years ”.
Cinema does not demand as much of the spectator's imagination as theatre does, and Shakespeare would have had no need to write Henry V's prologue if he had shot a film, in which he could have shown thousands of men an entire army of extras. , the din caused by the hooves of hundreds of galloping horses and kings dressed as such in throne rooms identical to those trod by the kings of England.
Cinema can show almost everything, but, paradoxically, that makes the spectator, accustomed to not having to use just his imagination, more demanding than the theatre when he notices any small detail that does not coincide with his idea of how that's it in the real world.
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