  However, it would be a mistake to infer from such comments that Herder does not think that there are underlying commonalities in the arts and tastes of different times and places, or that people living in one time and culture cannot learn to appreciate deeply the art of another time and culture. On the contrary, the argument of the essay on Shakespeare is that the best art of different times and places—for example, the theater of Sophocles and that of Shakespeare—must differ superficially precisely because at the deepest level they are committed to the same principle—the truthful imitation of nature—but have different natures to imitate. Thus he writes that the unities of time, place, and action were not artificial for the Greeks at all, although it would be for moderns (“Shakespeare,” p. 163). Further, it is precisely because the Greek “view of the world, their customs, the state of the republics, the tradition of the heroic age, religion, even music, expression, and the degrees of illusion changed” (“Shakespeare,” p. 164), that the drama of Shakespeare was bound to be different than that of Sophocles. It was bound to be different because while all these things changed, Shakespeare was committed to the same underlying principle of truthfully representing his own world that his drama, unlike that of the misguided French classicists, had to look and sound different. If Shakespeare’s “world did not offer such simplicity of history, traditions, domestic, political, and religious conditions, then of course it will not display it” in his work either. Instead, he will create his “drama out of [his world’s] own history, the spirit of its age, customs, views, language, national attitudes, traditions, and pastimes” (“Shakespeare,” p. 167). But in doing so, Shakespeare was in fact doing the same thing as Sophocles: