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Page 7
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 him; he knows with certainty that he has
not changed his place; and he knows that place cannot change itself;
that what was a house cannot become a plain; that what was Thebes
can never be Persepolis.
Such is the triumphant language with which a critick exults over the
misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance
or reply. It is time therefore to tell him, by the authority
of Shakespeare, that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle,
a position, which, while his breath is forming it into words,
his understanding pronounces to be false. It is false, that any
representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable
in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was
ever credited.
The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first
hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the
play opens the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and
believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt,
and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he
that imagines this, may imagine more. He that can take the stage
at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies, may take it in half
an hour for the promontory of Actium. Delusion, if delusion be
admitted, has no certain limitation; if the spectator can be once
persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Caesar, that
a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the
bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of
reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may
despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no
reason why a mind thus wandering in extasy should count the clock,
or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the
brains that can make the stage a field.
The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses,
and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only
a stage, and that the players are only players. They come to hear
a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant
modulation. The lines relate to some action, and an action must
be in some place; but the different actions that compleat a story
may be in places very remote from each other; and where is the
absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens, and
then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens,
but a modern theatre?
By supposition, as place is introduced, time may be extended; the
time required by the fable elapses for the most part between the
acts; for, of so much of the action as is represented, the real and
poetical duration is the same. If, in the first act, preparations
for war against Mithridates are represented to be made in Rome,
the event of the war may, without absurdity, be represented, in the
catastrophe, as happening in Pontus; we know that there is neither
war, nor preparation for war; we know that we are neither in Rome
nor Pontus; that neither Mithridates nor Lucullus are before us.
The drama exhibits successive imitations of successive actions, and
why may not the second imitation represent an action that happened
years after the first; if it be so connected with it, that nothing
but time can be supposed to intervene? Time is, of all modes of
existence, most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years
is as easily conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we
easily contract the time of real actions, and therefore willingly
permit it to be contracted when we only see their imitation.
It will be asked, how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It
is credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited,
whenever it moves, as a just picture of a real original; as
representing to the auditor what he would himself feel, if he were
to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done.
The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before
us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves
may be exposed. If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the
players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment; but we
rather lament the possibility than suppose the presence of misery,
as a mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers that death
may take it from her. The delight of tragedy proceeds from our
consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real,
they would please no more.
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