which would be quite out of place.  On the other hand, in a drama of crisis they are not only useful but almost inevitable.  If a crisis is to be a real crisis it must not drag on indefinitely; it must not last for more than a few hours, or—­to put a rough limit—­for more than a single day; in fact, the unity of time must be preserved.  Again, if the action is to pass quickly, it must pass in one place, for there will be no time for the movement of the characters elsewhere; thus the unity of place becomes a necessity.  Finally, if the mind is to be concentrated to the full upon a particular crisis, it must not be distracted by side issues; the event, and nothing but the event, must be displayed; in other words, the dramatist will not succeed in his object unless he employs the unity of action.

Let us see how Racine carries out these principles by taking one of his most characteristic plays—­Berenice—­and comparing it with an equally characteristic work of Shakespeare’s—­Antony and Cleopatra.  The comparison is particularly interesting because the two dramas, while diametrically opposed in treatment, yet offer some curious parallels in the subjects with which they deal.  Both are concerned with a pair of lovers placed in the highest position of splendour and power; in both the tragedy comes about through a fatal discordance between the claims of love and of the world; in both the action passes in the age of Roman greatness, and vast imperial issues are intertwined with individual destinies.  Of Shakespeare’s drama it is hardly necessary to speak.  Nowhere else, perhaps, has that universal genius displayed more completely the extraordinary fertility of his mind.  The play is crammed full and running over with the multifarious activities of human existence.  ’What is there in the whole of life, in all the experience of the world,’ one is inclined to ask after a perusal of it, ’that is not to be found somewhere or other among these amazing pages?’ This tremendous effect has been produced, in the first place, by means of the immense variety of the characters; persons of every rank and every occupation—­generals and waiting-women, princesses and pirates, diplomatists and peasants, eunuchs and emperors—­all these we have, and a hundred more; and, of course, as the grand consummation of all, we have the dazzling complexity of Cleopatra.  But this mass of character could never have been presented to us without a corresponding variety of incident; and, indeed, the tragedy is packed with an endless succession of incidents—­battles, intrigues, marriages, divorces, treacheries, reconciliations, deaths.  The complicated action stretches over a long period of time and over a huge tract of space.  The scene constantly shifts from Alexandria to Rome, from Athens to Messina, from Pompey’s galley to the plains of Actium.  Some commentators have been puzzled by the multitude of these changes, and when, for a scene of a few moments, Shakespeare shows us a Roman army marching through Syria, they have been able to see in it nothing more than a wanton violation of the rule of the unity of place; they have not understood that it is precisely by such touches as these that Shakespeare has succeeded in bringing before our minds a sense of universal agitation and the enormous dissolution of empires.