In his Poetics Aristotle sets down rough principles in regard to unity of action and time. He remarks that the plot of tragedy concerns, in a real sense, a single action, and that it “tries especially to be bound by one circuit of the sun or to vary little from this.” He doesn’t explicitly mention any stricture in regard to unity of place, though the stricture on time might be taken to imply one. In the neoclassical movement of the 16th and 17th centuries, in the drama of Molière and Racine, Aristotle’s rough principles of dramatic unity calcified into hard-and-fast rules. But even taking Aristotle’s remarks about dramatic unity of place and time as principles, not rules, is there any reason for the dramatist to be bound by them?

I worried especially about the unity of place as I composed my play, The Actor, which depicts the life of the young Karol Wojtyła from the years 1939 to 1942. There is a certain unity of place in the play in that all the scenes take place in Nazi-occupied Kraków, but the scenes themselves move from the university to the Wojtyła apartment to a quarry to a cemetery, etc. At very least I had made the jobs of a future director and set designer more challenging. But I took consolation from Tom Stoppard’s approach in the text of The Coast of Utopia, which effortlessly moves through the months and years and from setting to setting as though it were a screenplay.

In an essay included in his 1923 volumes, Fancies versus Fads, G.K. Chesterton offered an intriguing defense of the principles of dramatic unity. “Wherever [dramatic unity] can be satisfied, something not superficial but rather subconscious is satisfied. Something revisits us that is the strange soul of single places; the shadow of haunting gods or of household gods.”

A single setting and a single action bound more or less “by one circuit of the sun.” Artists have always recognized the freedom that is unleashed by placing limits upon their creativity; the principles of dramatic unity are the “frame” around the action of a plot. The effect of such limitation is, as Chesterton observes, uncanny: something strange and haunting is set free when the action of a play or other story is thus constrained.

“We might say,” concludes Chesterton, “that superior literature is centripetal, while inferior literature is centrifugal.”