Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Dramatic Unities of Shakespeare, 1849: In a Letter Addressed to the Editor of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
I do not conceive it to have been the poet's desire to impress the spectator or the reader of his works with a rigid belief in the extremes of either series of his dates; to insinuate that the accelerating gave the only true, or the protractive the altogether false idea of the time of his action. On the contrary, I maintain that, by means of this double series of dates, - of his two clocks (according to the happy illustration of Chris topher N orth), - he meant to produce an illusory effect on the mind (such as people actually experience in the theatre), disabling it from ascertaining the genuine du ration of the action, and only permitting it to form, out of the elements of both series, such a dim, hazy, and indistinct conception as may, nay must, arise from the involution of measures of time so artfully intermingled.
The obvious intent Of this illusory process is to lead the imagination to conceive, that within the compass of a narrow but uninterrupted watch, it may have wit nessed an entire transaction, more or less extended, from beginning to end - the present and the past, through out all the intermediate gradations ofold Father Time with his pentarchy of tenses in some such way as the observer beholds in 'a painted landscape the whole Space enclosed within the visible horizon, with all its hills and valleys, woods and rivers, from the foreground close at hand, to the dim spire or the shadowy mountain, distant many, many miles, although every point of the plane, upright surface before us is equally distant from the observer's eye.
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