Moli¨res plays strictly observe all three unities: there is one central action, taking place in a single location, and the time of the performance...

It's
difficult to address this question without beginning with Samuel Johnson's
Preface to Shakespeare, in which he tackles this very issue. In the
eighteenth century, in which Johnson was writing, there was an emphasis on Classical forms, such
as Aristotle's unities of place, time, and action. Theses unities, which Moli¨re adhered to,
dictated that a play take place in one place, avoid subplots, and be restrained to a 24-hour
periodor as in Moli¨re's case, real time. Shakespeare, as the question notes, ignored these
rules.

An advantage of observing the unities is that they impose a form or
grid on a play that forces a playwright to stay focused. As with writing a sonnet of 14 lines, a
rigid form keeps a playwright's writing concise and on track. It ensures a play is easy to
follow. Its compression can also heighten the emotional impact of a story.

Shakespeare's ignoring of the unities, however, gave him an enormous amount of freedom
to move his plays from place to place, such as from Rome to Egypt, introduce subplots to
provideor illuminate a main plot point, or cover months or years of time. This freedom allowed
for a vast amount of richness and creativity to enter his plays. And as Johnson notes, audiences
realize they are watching a work ofand are able to adjust themselves to the world a play
presents. They are not concerned about rigidfor

The
reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they
are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed.

Further,
Johnson believed Shakespeare's characters were so realistic that that feature of his drama
imposed its own unity.

A drawback to the unities is that they can become a
strait jacket in the hands of a lesser playwright than Moli¨re, imposing artificiality on a
play or forcing characters to have experiences that don't properly fit real time or one
location. You don't, for example, want too much reporting of events that happened in other
places, as that can make a play static and dull. Moliere is a great playwright, but he does not
have the stature of Shakespeare, and that is in part because his plays are constrained in what
they can do.

A drawback to freedom is the concept of "so much rope that
you hang yourself." Shakespeare could carry off his complicated plots because of his
consistent characters, but even he sometimes could fall too heavily into comic subplots that
threatened to turn too much attention from the main story. In a lesser playwright, the lack
rules could result in a confusing mess of a drama.