a critic, he points out the futility and the unreasonableness of those antiquated conventions.  Even Mr. Bailey, who, curiously enough, believes that Racine ’stumbled, as it were, half by accident into great advantages’ by using them, speaks of the ‘discredit’ into which ’the once famous unities’ have now fallen, and declares that ’the unities of time and place are of no importance in themselves.’  So far as critics are concerned this may be true; but critics are apt to forget that plays can exist somewhere else than in books, and a very small acquaintance with contemporary drama is enough to show that, upon the stage at any rate, the unities, so far from having fallen into discredit, are now in effect triumphant.  For what is the principle which underlies and justifies the unities of time and place?  Surely it is not, as Mr. Bailey would have us believe, that of the ‘unity of action or interest,’ for it is clear that every good drama, whatever its plan of construction, must possess a single dominating interest, and that it may happen—­as in Antony and Cleopatra, for instance—­that the very essence of this interest lies in the accumulation of an immense variety of local activities and the representation of long epochs of time.  The true justification for the unities of time and place is to be found in the conception of drama as the history of a spiritual crisis—­the vision, thrown up, as it were, by a bull’s-eye lantern, of the final catastrophic phases of a long series of events.  Very different were the views of the Elizabethan tragedians, who aimed at representing not only the catastrophe, but the whole development of circumstances of which it was the effect; they traced, with elaborate and abounding detail, the rise, the growth, the decline, and the ruin of great causes and great persons; and the result was a series of masterpieces unparalleled in the literature of the world.  But, for good or evil, these methods have become obsolete, and to-day our drama seems to be developing along totally different lines.  It is playing the part, more and more consistently, of the bull’s-eye lantern; it is concerned with the crisis, and nothing but the crisis; and, in proportion as its field is narrowed and its vision intensified, the unities of time and place come more and more completely into play.  Thus, from the point of view of form, it is true to say that it has been the drama of Racine rather than that of Shakespeare that has survived.  Plays of the type of Macbeth have been superseded by plays of the type of Britannicus. Britannicus, no less than Macbeth, is the tragedy of a criminal; but it shows us, instead of the gradual history of the temptation and the fall, followed by the fatal march of consequences, nothing but the precise psychological moment in which the first irrevocable step is taken, and the criminal is made.  The method of Macbeth has been, as it were, absorbed by that of the modern novel; the method of Britannicus still rules