Responding to Samuel Johnson: Shakespeare and Aristotle's Unities

Samuel Johnson claiming Shakespeare didn't use Aristotle's unities of time and place leaves out, I believe, two important exceptions that have another significant distinction.  They are Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, both of the plays that prominently feature magic--not just prophecy or descriptions of magical or supernatural events, but magic of physical transformation.  In Midsummer Night's Dream it's Bottom the Weaver getting an ass's head, in The Tempest it's a storm.  

The Aristotelian meeting the magical in these plays seems easy to me to overlook, though, partly because, among classical philosophers who wrote about poetry, Aristotle may be among the more conducive to the material, the mundane, the non-ethereal.  Plato may have been anti-poetry but he still saw it as ex nihilo.  Horace may have dismissed the outlandish in poetry but he wrote his own that could be said to undercut his position.  Aristotle so systematized, structured and segmented that his discourse might seem closed off against unexpected storms, let alone a misplaced donkey head.  

One possibility that comes to mind is that, here and elsewhere, Shakespeare drew creative energy from being at odds with his influencers--not necessarily in Oedipal grappling like Harold Bloom talked about (though maybe--I say that and am not grappling with him, with Bloom, I hope), but relating to them at a slant, like Emily Dickinson talked about.  So, the narrative poem about Romeus and Juliet became the play, the story of Amlothi became the play of Hamlet, and that of King Lear became what it became.

Also, this possibility:  that place (like the woods outside of Thebes, like the island away from Milan) held a kind of magic for the man who could not get away from his life as the Shakespeare we know, back to his roots in Stratford.  Not until that life ended, perhsp with the help of Aristotle as well as Shakespeare.