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When the Poetics was rediscovered and interpreted by Italian scholars in the sixteenth century, it was used as a rule book for tragedy. This and other misinterpretations resurrected tragedy in an altered form. This new neoclassical form required the three unities of time, place, and action that limited tragedies to taking place in a single day, in one location, and with a single climactic plot, although such restrictions were not required in ancient Greece. Neoclassical tragedy introduced the idea of verisimilitude, the appearance of truthnot realism, but an idealized truth. To reconcile Christianity with classicism, playwrights were expected to use their tragedies to teach moral lessons. In Elizabethan England, people understood the universe as having parallel systems of order: the cosmic order involving the sun, the planets, and natural phenomena ruled by God; a political order ruled by the monarch functioning metaphorically as a god figure, meting out justice and keeping order over a social order from nobility to commoner; a family order ruled by the household patriarch; and a personal order with our physical and emotional well-being ruled by the mind. Elizabethan tragedy, therefore often traced the effects of disruption in the political and familial order. In the eighteenth century in Europe, a rising middle class and democratic revolutions brought on social, political, and economic changes. As a result, serious drama began to concern itself with the lives of the new bourgeoisie, and so vicars and merchantspeople from the ordinary walks of lifebecame the subjects of serious drama.
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