unities of time, place, and action

So my latest foray into poetic thought and advice comes from Dryden and Corneille and Locke.

Honestly, I don't really know what I got out of it. It was a lot of reading for a week filled with fatigue and antibiotics. But I did learn about the unities of time, place and action, which could be explained as follows:

1. TIME: the action of a play should not depict more than a 24-hour period.
2. PLACE: the action of a play should depict a single geographical location (or the span of geography that the characters could realistically traverse while following the unity of time).
3. ACTION: the action should be continuous, utilizing cause and effect and eliminating (or nearly eliminating tangents).

It's 24 in a nutshell! :)

The other thing that struck me in the reading was Locke's discussion of the arbitrariness of language. I think I agree. I mean, I'm not sure there's anything inherently A-P-P-L-E about an apple, but I think once you start second-guessing language, you get into slippery territory. The thing I did like about his argument is his ideas about communication. Essentially (if I'm understanding it correctly), I'm trying to create in your mind the exact image in my mind through this faulted system of language. I like the idea, particularly that we create a shared space for understanding one another.

I guess, as a religious sort, I can't really agree with the empirical model as the ONLY model though. I believe in inspiration and the like, and through Locke's perspective, everything is learned through experience and there are no innate values, just like there are no innate language values.

I don't know what I'm saying anymore. But I think this shall have to suffice. For now.