Giraldi Cintio was a dramatist as well as a critic and knew the difficulty of strict adherence to the unities. He at first defends his slight trespassing of the single day unity24 and cites Greek and Latin precedent. Going back to the phrase of Aristotle, he declares himself willing to expand the words, - a little more - into two days.25 Later Giraldi seems to have repented his latitude, and he becomes a conformist in practice as well as in theory. In the dramatist's examination of his play H eracleis occurs a statement that may be construed as the first mention of the unity of place. Giraldi shows that the time must be lengthened because of la lontananza dei luoghi an argument we will meet again. Evidently he regards the unity of place not as a law, but as a mere help to the representa tion, not at all necessary for verisimilitude27 - though the dis tance between places leads directly to the doctrine of the verisimilar. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.