It has often been maintained that the abrupt endings of so many modern plays is due to the fact that we possess a drop curtain which can be brought down upon the action with a bang, and that the quieter endings of, for example, Elizabethan plays arise from their being written for curtainless theaters. I do not entirely disapprove of this suggestion, but wish to point out that the difference originates, at least in part, also in a difference in taste at different times and among different peoples. It is true that the Greeks probably had no drop curtain and that their dramas usually end upon a note of calm. But the same kind of close is normal in other fields of their literature, where the presence or absence of a curtain did not enter into consideration. For example, there is a distinct tendency for modern orators to close speeches with a peroration which is intended to sweep auditors off their feet. Not so in Greek oratory. “Wherever pity, terror, anger, or any passionate feeling is uttered or invited, this tumult is resolved in a final calm; and where such tumult has place in the peroration, it subsides before the last sentences of all.”[319] The same situation obtains likewise in the case of the Greek epic as in Homer’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. The unities, sir, are a completeness—a kind of a universal dovetailedness with regard to place and time—a sort of a general oneness, if I may be allowed to use so strong an expression. I take those to be the dramatic unities, so far as I have been enabled to bestow attention upon them, and I have read much upon the subject, and thought much.—CHARLES DICKENS. CHAPTER VI THE INFLUENCE OF PHYSICAL CONDITIONS (_CONTINUED_): THE UNITIES[320] The dramatic unities, three principles governing the structure of drama and supposedly derived from Aristotle’s _Poetics_, are a subject of perennial interest. They are known as the unities of time, place, and action, respectively, and require that “the action of a play should be represented as occurring in one place, within one day, and with nothing irrelevant to the plot.” The essential facts concerning them were recognized at least as long ago as the publication of Lessing’s _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ (1767). But so deep-rooted is the popular impression that the Greeks formulated these rules arbitrarily and observed them slavishly that no attempt to state the true situation can be superfluous. The current doctrine is based on the fact that the classic dramatists in France and Italy blindly obeyed the rules as a heritage of the past, without regard to the demands of the theater at their own disposal; and, consequently, the inference has been easily and naturally drawn that the ancient practice was equally irrational.