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6. Tragedy is a representation of an action of a superior kind—grand, and complete in itself—presented in embellished language, in distinct forms in different parts, performed by actors rather than told by a narrator, effecting, through pity and fear, the purification* of such emotions. |
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By ‘embellished language’ I mean language with rhythm and melody. When I say ‘in distinct forms in different parts’ I mean that some parts are in unaccompanied verse while others have melody as an extra. |
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Since the representation is performed by actors, a necessary part of tragedy must be the presentation on stage of the performance. In addition there is music-making and there is style, for these are the media of their representation. By ‘style’ I mean simply the composition of the verse; the meaning of ‘music-making’ is obvious to everyone.* |
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Now tragedy is the repesentation of action, and action involves agents who will necessarily have certain qualities of both character and intellect. It is because of the qualities of the agents that we classify their actions, and it is because of their actions that they succeed or fail in life. It is the story of the action that is the representation. By the ‘story’ I mean the plot of the events. ‘Moral character’ is what makes us evaluate agents in particular ways, while ‘ideas’ are what is expressed in the speeches used to prove a case or enunciate a truth. |
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Hence, tragedy as a whole necessarily has six elements on the basis of which it is evaluated, namely, the story, the moral element, the style, the ideas, the staging, and the music. Two of these elements concern the means, one concerns the mode, and three concern the objects of the mimesis; and there is nothing else besides. Not a few tragedians can be said to have made use of these items, since every drama alike involves staging, a moral element, and a story, plus style and music and intellectual content. |
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The most important element is the construction of the plot. Tragedy is a representation not of persons but of action and life, and happiness and unhappiness consist in action. The point is action, not character: it is their moral status that gives people the character they have, but it is their actions that make them happy or unhappy. So it is not in order to portray moral character that the actors perform; rather, they include character for the sake of action. The events, the story, are the point of tragedy, and that is the most important thing of all. |
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Again, there could not be a tragedy without action, but there could be one without moral character—indeed, the tragedies of most modern poets completely lack the moral element, and in general there are many such poets. Compare, in painting, the relationship between Zeuxis and Polygnotus: Polygnotus is a good portrayer of character, while Zeuxis’ painting is totally lacking in it.* Further, if someone sets out a series of speeches expressive of moral character, polished in style and rich in ideas, it will not achieve the effect of tragedy. A tragedy deficient in these elements, provided that it has a story and a structured plot, will do so much more effectively. Moreover, the most important devices that tragedy uses to affect the emotions are parts of the story—namely, reversals and discoveries. One other indication is that novice poets can master style and moral character before they can compose plots—the same goes for almost all the early poets. |
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So the story is the foundation and as it were the soul of tragedy, while moral character is secondary. (The like holds in painting: if someone were to apply the most beautiful colours to a surface at random, he would give less pleasure than if he had sketched a portrait in black and white.) Tragedy is representation of action, and it is chiefly for the sake of action that it represents people in action. |
1450b |
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Third come the ideas, that is, the power of expressing what is involved in or appropriate to a situation—something that, in prose, is the function of the arts of statesmanship and rhetoric. Earlier poets made people speak like statesmen; contemporary poets make them speak like orators. Moral character is what reveals the nature of people’s fundamental options; that is why there is no such thing in speeches in which the speaker reveals no choice or rejection. Intelligence, on the other hand, is expressed in what people say to show that something is or is not a fact, or to support some universal proposition. |
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The fourth element is style. By ‘style’, as I said, is meant the expression of thought in words, an effect that can be produced either in prose or in verse. |
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Of the remaining elements, music is the most important source of pleasure. Staging can be emotionally attractive, but is not a matter of art and is not integral to poetry. The power of tragedy can be exercised without actors and without a performance. Staging belongs more to the scene-painter’s art than to that of the poets. |
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7. Given these definitions, let us next discuss the proper construction of the plot, since this is the first and most important element in tragedy. |
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We have laid it down that tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and entire and on an appropriate scale. (A thing may be a whole and yet be wanting in scale.) A whole is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is an item that does not itself follow necessarily upon something else, but which has some second item following necessarily upon it. Conversely, an end is an item that naturally follows, either necessarily or commonly, upon something else, but has nothing following it. A middle is an item that both follows upon a preceding item and has another item following upon itself. Stories that are well constructed should not begin at some arbitrary point but should conform to the stated pattern. |
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Moreover, any beautiful object, whether a living organism or any other thing made up of parts, must have those parts not only in proper order but also on an appropriate scale. Beauty consists in scale as well as order, which is why there could not be a beautiful organism that was either minuscule or gigantic. In the first case, a glimpse that is so brief as to be close to vanishing-point cannot be distinct. In the second case—say, of an animal a thousand miles long—the impossibility of taking all in at a single glance means that unity and wholeness is lost to the viewer. So, just as physical bodies and living organisms need to be on an appropriate scale that allows them to be taken in by the eye, likewise stories should have an appropriate length, which is such as to enable them to be held in memory. |
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A limit of length determined by the rules of competitions and the capacity of audiences does not feature in the art of poetry. If you had to arrange a competition for a hundred tragedies you would time them by water-clocks. (On one occasion this is actually said to have taken place.)* The limit that is set by the nature of the subject is this: the longer the story, the grander the scale, provided it remains comprehensible as a whole. To give a general formula: an adequate limit of length is a size that permits a transformation from adversity to prosperity, or from prosperity to adversity, in a probable or necessary sequence of events. |
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8. A story that is built around a single person is not, as some people think, thereby unified. An infinity of things happen to a single individual, not all of which constitute a unity; likewise, a single person performs many actions which do not add up to make a single action. So all those poets who compose a Heracleid or a Thesiad have clearly got things wrong, assuming that just because Heracles was one person his story too is sure to have a unity. Homer, here as elsewhere surpassing all others, grasped this point firmly, whether by art or instinct. When he composed the Odyssey he did not include just everything that happened to Odysseus, such as getting wounded on Parnassus, or pretending to be mad to avoid conscription, for these events had no necessary or probable connection with each other. Instead he constructed the Odyssey, and the Iliad too, around a single action of the kind we have been discussing. |
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In other representative arts a single representation has a single object. In just the same way a story, since it is the representation of an action, should concern an action that is single and entire, with its several incidents so structured that the displacement or removal of any one of them would disturb and dislocate the whole. If the presence or absence of something makes no discernible difference, then it is no part of the whole. |
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9. From what has been said it is clear that the poet’s job is not relating what actually happened, but rather the kind of thing that would happen—that is to say, what is possible in terms of probability and necessity. The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of using verse or prose: you might put the works of Herodotus into verse and it would be a history in verse no less than in prose. The difference is that the one relates what actually happened, and the other the kinds of events that would happen. |
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For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history; poetry utters universal truths, history particular statements. The universal truths concern what befits a person of a certain kind to say or do in accordance with probability and necessity—and that is the aim of poetry, even if it makes use of proper names.* A particular statement tells us what (for example) Alcibiades* did or what happened to him. In the case of comedy this is already manifest: the poets make up the story on the basis of probability and then attach names to the characters at random; they do not write about particular individuals as the lampoonists used to do. In the case of tragedy they retain the traditional names. The reason for this is that what is possible is credible. If something has not happened we are inclined to disbelieve that it is possible; but it is obvious that what has happened is possible, since if it were not it would never have happened. Nevertheless, even among tragedies there are some where only one or two of the names are familiar, while the rest are made up; and there are some plays without a single familiar name, for instance Agathon’s Antheus.* In that play both the events and the names are inventions, but it gives no less pleasure on that account. So there is no need to adhere at all costs to the traditional stories of tragedy. Indeed, it would be absurd to try, since even what is familiar is familiar only to a few, and yet it gives pleasure to everyone. |
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It is clear from all this that the poet must be a maker of stories rather than verses, in so far as it is representation that makes him a poet, and representation is of actions. Even if it turns out that he is writing about historical events he is no less a poet for that, since nothing prevents such events being the kind of thing that would happen. It is in that respect that he deals with them as a poet. |
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Of defective stories* and actions, the worst are those that are episodic. I call a story episodic when the sequence of episodes is neither necessary nor probable. Bad poets compose stories of this kind of their own accord, but even good ones do so under pressure from the actors. Writing pieces for competitions, they drag out the story and are often forced to distort the sequence of events. |
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Tragedy is an imitation not just of a complete action, but of events that evoke pity and fear.* These effects occur above all when things come about unexpectedly but at the same time consequentially. This will produce greater astonishment than if they come about spontaneously or by chance—for even chance events are found more astonishing when they seemed to have happened for a purpose. Think of the time in Argos when Mitys’ murderer was killed by Mitys’ statue falling onto him as he was looking up at it! Such things are not thought to occur randomly. So inevitably, stories of this kind will be better. |
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10. Stories can be classified as simple or complex, since the actions of which they are the representations are similarly classified in the first instance. I call an action simple if it is, in the sense defined, continuous and unitary, and in which the change of fortune takes place without reversal or discovery; I call it complex if the change of fortune involves a reversal or a discovery or both.* These should grow naturally out of the plot of the story, so that they come about, with necessity or probability, from the preceding events. There is a great difference between something happening after certain events and happening because of those events. |
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11. Reversal is a change of direction in the course of events, as already stated, taking place, as we insist, in accord with probability or necessity. For instance, in Oedipus a messenger comes to bring Oedipus good news and rid him of his fears about his mother; but by revealing his true identity he produces the opposite effect.* Again, in the Lynceus the hero is being led off to death, with Danaus* behind him as executioner, yet the upshot of events earlier in the story is that Danaus dies and the hero survives. |
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Discovery, as the term implies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either love or hate, on the part of those destined for good or bad fortune. Discovery takes its finest form when it coincides with reversal, as in the Oedipus. There are, of course, other kinds of discovery, for what has been described can occur in reference to inanimate and chance objects; and there is also such a thing as discovering whether someone has or has not done something. But the one that has most to do with the story and most to do with the action is the one described. Reversal and discovery together will evoke either pity or fear—just the kind of actions of which, according to our basic principle, tragedy offers an imitation—and will serve to bring about the happy or unhappy ending. |
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Since detection is something that takes place between people, it may be either the detection of one person by another (whose own identity is clear) or mutual recognition between a pair (for example, Iphigeneia was recognized by Orestes when she sent the letter, but something different was needed for her to recognize Orestes).* |
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These, then, are two components of the story: reversal and discovery; a third component is suffering, which is an action involving pain or destruction, such as murders on stage, extreme agony, woundings, and so on. The other two elements have already been explained. |
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12. The parts of tragedy that should be considered as its formal elements were mentioned earlier. In sequential terms the separate sections into which it is divided are the following: prologue, episode, finale, and chorus parts (sung either on entry or while stationary). These items are common to all plays; some have in addition arias and dirges. |
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A prologue is everything in a tragedy that precedes the opening chorus; an episode is whatever comes between two complete choral songs; and the finale is everything that comes after the final chorus. Of the choral part, the opening chorus is the first complete utterance of the chorus; while a stationary ode is a choral song without anapaests or trochees. A dirge is a lament shared between the chorus and the actors. |
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We have already mentioned the parts of tragedy that should be regarded as its formal elements; the ones just mentioned are the separate sections in sequential terms. |
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