The criticks hold it impossible, that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings while armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they saw courting his mistress, shall lament the untimely fall of his son.

The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality.
From the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction of place.

The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at _Alexandria_, cannot suppose that he sees the next at _Rome_, at a distance to which not the dragons of _Medea_ could, in so short a time, have transported him; he knows with certainty that he has not changed his place, and he knows that place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a plain; that what was _Thebes_ can never be _Persepolis_.
Such is the triumphant language with which a critick exults over the misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance or reply.

It is time therefore to tell him by the authority of _Shakespeare_, that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle, a position, which, while his breath is forming it into words, his understanding pronounces to be false.

It is false, that any representation is mistake for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited.
The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at _Alexandria_, and the next at _Rome_, supposes, that when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at _Alexandria_, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to _Egypt_, and that he lives in the days of _Antony_ and _Cleopatra_.