France in the next (as in Henry V). It’s hardly an everyday, life-like
experience to see a single place (the stage) change from a palace to a
plain. On the other hand, if the stage represents the same room all the
way through the play, then the plot can be stretched to breaking point by
expecting all the significant events of the story to take place in the same
room. Are we really to believe (as in Racine’sPhèdre) that Phèdre and
Hippolyte just happen to reveal their respective secrets to their respective
companions and that Thésée calls down his terrible curse in exactly the
same location?
Equivalent points have been made about the unity of time: in a sense
it’s more verisimilar to perform a play in‘real time’–such that one hour
on stage represents one hour of action; but, then again, if one tries to
write about a significant dramatic event that takes place only in the time
allotted to the play, it can end up feeling artificially compressed and
hence not verisimilar at all. By convention, French tragedians in the
seventeenth century would write plays depicting no more than sunrise to
sunset. This drew criticism from both sides: if it’s necessary to make
theatrical time correspond to real time, then why can we stretch two
hours to become more like sixteen hours? Or, if we’re allowed to stretch
two hours to sixteen hours, then why can’t we stretch it to a week or, as
in Shakespeare’sA Winter’s Tale, sixteen years? As with the unity of place,
forcing all the action to take place in one day can also lead to very compressed
plots; hence, Lessing’s complaint that playwrights who claim to respect
the unity of time often do so by not letting their characters go to bed.
The debate about verisimilitude even crops up in unexpected and
apparently clear-cut cases. The (now practically obsolete) debate about
whether to use masks on stage featured arguments from verisimilitude on
either side. On the one hand, obviously, people in everyday life don’t
wear masks–so masks aren’t verisimilar. On the other hand, as Lessing
argued, masks have the advantage of hiding the accidental expressions of
the actors–tiredness, frustration, annoyance–expressions that the char-
acters they portray would not in fact exhibit in real life.^26 (If this seems
completely counterintuitive, then think of the potentially distracting
effect of having real children or real animals on stage, as opposed to
having dolls, which at least won’t get bored or start acting up.) All of
this goes to show that, even if Plato were right about the aim of theatre,
there’d be a lot more to say about how it should go about achieving that
aim. Of course, for Plato, the aim itself is a suspect one, and so how the
aim is achieved is of comparatively little importance.
Second, though, Plato’s account of theatrical imitation, taken as simple
verisimilitude, is a poor description of what plays, including those in
Plato’s time, are attempting. Theatre in Athens was part of an elaborate
religious festival originally associated with a festival of new wine (and the
30 From the World to the Stage