English plays are ignoring them. In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale the chorus notes that the story makes a jump of 16 years: John Dryden discusses the unity of time in this passage criticizing Shakespeare's history plays: ... they are rather so many Chronicles of Kings, or the business many times of thirty or forty years, crampt into a representation of two hours and a half, which is not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and receive her Images not onely much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life: this instead of making a Play delightful, renders it ridiculous. Samuel Johnson in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare in 1773 rejects the previous dogma of the classical unities and argues that drama should be faithful to life: After Johnson's critique interest seemed to turn away from the theory. John Pitcher, in the Arden Shakespeare Third Series edition of The Winter's Tale (2010), suggests that Shakespeare was familiar with the unities due to an English translation of Poetics that became popular around 1608. Excerpts of Aristotle's Poetics Aristotle's Poetics may not have been available to Trissino when he formulated the unities, and the term "Aristotelian unities" is considered a misnomer, but in spite of this, Aristotle's name became attached to the theory from the beginning. As translations became available, theorists have looked to the Poetics retrospectively for support of the concept. In these passages from the Poetics, Aristotle considers action: Tragedy, then is a process of imitating an action which has serious implications, is complete, and possesses magnitude. … A poetic imitation, then, ought to be unified in the same way as a single imitation in any other mimetic field, by having a single object: since the plot is an imitation of an action, the latter ought to be both unified and complete, and the component events ought to be so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place, or removed, the whole is loosened up and dislocated; for an element whose addition or subtraction makes no perceptible extra difference is not really a part of the whole. Aristotle considers length or time in a distinction between the epic and tragedy: Well then, epic poetry followed in the wake of tragedy up to