[1][2] Trissino's play Sofonisba followed classical Greek style by adhering to the unities, by omitting the usual act division, and even introducing a chorus.
However, according to The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, the imitation of classical forms and modes had a deadening effect on Italian drama, which became "rhetorical and inert".
Dramatist Pierre Corneille became an ardent supporter of them, and in his plays from Le Cid (1636) to Suréna (1674) he attempted to keep within the limits of time and place.
The fact that Corneille, Racine, Molière, Addison, Congreve, and Maffei have all observed the laws of the stage, that ought to be enough to restrain any one who should entertain the idea of violating them.
Victor Hugo, in the preface to his play, Cromwell, criticizes the unities, saying in part, Distinguished contemporaries, foreigners and Frenchmen, have already attacked, both in theory and in practice, that fundamental law of the pseudo-Aristotelian code.
Examples of plays that followed the theory include: Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1682), Joseph Addison's Cato, and Samuel Johnson's Irene (1749).
Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610) takes place almost entirely on an island, during the course of four hours, and with one major action — that of Prospero reclaiming his role as the Duke of Milan.
In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale the chorus notes that the story makes a jump of 16 years: Impute it not a crime To me or my swift passage, that I slide O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untried Of that wide gap[10] 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.
[11]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: The unities of time and place are not essential to a just drama, and that though they may sometimes conduce to pleasure, they are always to be sacrificed to the nobler beauties of variety and instruction; and that a play written with nice observation of the critical rules is to be contemplated as an elaborate curiosity, as the product of superfluous and ostentatious art, by which is shown rather what is possible than what is necessary.
Further, so far as its length is concerned tragedy tries as hard as it can to exist during a single daylight period, or to vary but little, while the epic is not limited in its time and so differs in that respect.