Poetics (Penguin Classics S.)

Aristotle’s starting-point in chapter 14 is the relationship between characters. The tragic effect is enhanced when people inflict harm on those ‘closely connected with them’. This rather clumsy expression (which we met also in chapter 11, in connection with recognition) is an attempt to render the Greek word philos, conventionally translated as ‘f

Hamartia, then, includes errors made in ignorance or through mis-judgement; but it will also include moral errors of a kind which do not imply wickedness. Aristotle’s attempt to prescribe the best kind of tragic plot is therefore not as narrowly prescriptive as it may seem at first sight. His procedure is negative. He excludes various kinds of plot

So the ideal tragic plot cannot be constructed around an exceptionally virtuous person or a wicked person; it must therefore be based on someone between these two – broadly speaking virtuous, but not outstandingly so. Because their virtue is not outstanding, we do not find their downfall morally repellent; because their downfall is undeserved, we c

There is therefore a close parallel between reversal and recognition: both reveal that the situation in which a character has been acting was misinterpreted. Reversal reveals that, because things are not what they seemed, the outcome of a person’s actions will be other than what had been expected

The point is that this change affects the good or bad fortune of the person involved: Oedipus learns that he has killed his father and married his mother, and this recognition is the final blow that shatters his world.

The real question Aristotle wants to raise is more interesting: what is the correct magnitude of a tragic plot? In practice, the time available for a performance is a key determining factor, but this is a contingent fact about the organization of a particular theatrical event, and throws no light on the art of poetry as such. In principle, the uppe

After defining completeness, Aristotle moves on to magnitude. In one sense it is trivial to say that a tragic plot must have magnitude: a plot of zero extent would not be a plot at all, since it would contain no events.

So Aristotle’s first argument for the primacy of plot is as follows: tragedy aims to excite fear and pity; these emotions are responses to success and failure; success and failure depend on action; hence action is the most essential thing in tragedy; therefore plot is the most important element.

Another way of putting this, which Aristotle discusses in chapter 9, is to say that poetry ‘tends to express universal (51b6f.).