Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

POETICS

Definition of Tragedy: "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude." An imitation "not of men, but of action and of life." An imitation "in the form of action, not of narrative."

Purpose of Tragedy: "through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions." Catharsis.

Plot: "the arrangement of incidents"; Simple or Complicated:

A complicated plot must have Reversal of Fortune (Peripeteia), where a "turn of action produces the opposite of the effect intended," and Recognition (Anagnorisis), where a character experiences a "change from ignorance to knowledge."

A plot must have "a beginning, middle, and end."

Character: Character and thought determine the "qualities of actions" and are the "natural causes from which actions spring." A tragic hero should be neither totally good nor totally evil, but "a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty" (The Tragic Flaw, or Hamartia).

"The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad."

Satiety (Koros)—Overweening pride (Hubris)—Destruction (Ate). Antidote to Hubris: Sophrosyne

Unities

Action: "an imitation of action must represent one action, a complete whole. . . . Unity of plot does not . . . consist in the unity of the hero. . . . Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst [in which] acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. . . . A well constructed plot should . . . be single, rather than double as some maintain."

Time: "Tragedy endeavours to keep as far as possible within a single circuit of the sun, or something near that."

Place:

Deus ex Machina: "It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must be brought about by the plot itself, and not by Machinery—as in the Medea."