Far from censuring Shakespeare for failing to observe the classical unities of action, place, and time, Johnson ridiculed the classical unities and praised Shakespeare for recognizing, for example, that if we can imagine being in Athens for the first act, we can surely imagine being in Rome for the second (see "Preface to Shakespeare," from Samuel Johnson's Collected Poetry and Prose).

The style and dramaturgy are of course Senecan, laden with sententious utterances like the one just quoted, composed of long speeches, observing the decorums of the classical unities and the reporting of offstage violence through the dialogue.