The question is, what deviations—to what extent—does the particular Art need? And why? The talked Attic Unity of Time instructs us. But Sophocles and Shakspeare must have one view of the Stage, in essence. You must sit out your three or four hours. You must listen and see with expectation _intended_, like a bow drawn. To which intent Action and Passion must press on. TALBOYS. Compare, sir, the One Day of Othello to the Sixteen Years of Hermione! There, intensest Passion sustained; here, the unrolling of a romantic adventure. Each true to the temper imposed on the hearing spectator. NORTH. Good. The Novel is not a Transcript—the Play is not a Transcript. Ask not for a Transcript, for not one of those who could give it you, will. A _conditioned imitation we desire_ and demand—and we have it in Othello. TALBOYS. And put up we must with Two Times—one for your sympathy with his tempest of heart—one for the verisimilitude of the transaction. NORTH. Think on the facility with which, in the Novel, Iago could have strewn an atom of arsenic a day on Othello’s platter, to use him to the taste; and how, in the Play, this representation is impossible. Then, the original remaining the same, each manner of portraiture _leaves it_, and each, after _its own Laws_. TALBOYS. Did not Shakspeare know as much about the Time which he was himself making _as we do_, as much and more? NORTH. I doubt it. I see no necessity for believing it. We judge him as we judge ourselves. He came to his Art as it was, and created—improving it—from that point. An Art grows in all its constituents. The management of the Time is a constituent in the Art of “feigned history,” as Poetry is called by Lord Bacon. But I contend that on our Stage, to which Shakspeare came, the management of Time was in utter neglect—an undreamed entity; and I claim for the first foundation of any Canon respective to this matter, acute sifting of all Plays _previous_. TALBOYS. Not so very many— NORTH.