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All arts—including epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, and music—are modes of imitation known as mimesis. They differ from one another in three ways: their means, their objects, and their manner of copying life. Flute playing uses rhythm and harmony alone, whereas spoken verse relies on unadorned speech. Drama combines all these elements into a unified rhythmic whole.
Representations in art depict human characters either above, below, or equal to average human morality. Tragedy elevates its subjects, rendering people as noble and superior to reality. Comedy lowers its subjects, focusing on foolish, flawed, or degraded figures. Homer presents men as better than they are, while Cleophon depicts them as ordinary.
Artists choose between telling a story through a narrator or presenting characters who act out every scene directly. A poet can alternate between third-person narration and direct speech, as Homer does, or maintain a single voice throughout. Dramatic performance presents the figures as living beings performing the actions before an audience.
Poetry arises from two deep human instincts: the innate drive to imitate from childhood and the natural delight taken in observing representations. Even unpleasant subjects like corpse anatomy or grotesque beasts provide intellectual satisfaction when viewed as accurate copies. History shows poetry splitting naturally into noble hymns and satirical lampoons based on the temperament of individual creators.
Comedy represents human defects that are ridiculous without causing actual pain, bodily harm, or destruction. Epic poetry resembles tragedy in depicting noble actions through elevated speech, but it uses a single unbroken meter and lacks time limits. Tragedy attempts to confine its timeline to a single revolution of the sun, whereas epic narrative spans unrestricted temporal horizons.
Tragedy is the imitation of a serious, complete action of significant magnitude, expressed in embellished language and enacted by characters rather than narrated. Through the arousal of pity and fear, it accomplishes the catharsis of such emotional states. Plot forms the vital soul of tragedy, followed in importance by character, thought, diction, song, and visual spectacle.
Whole artistic structures must possess magnitude and orderly arrangement to appear beautiful to human perception. A plot cannot be infinitely small, nor can it expand beyond what memory can encompass in a single view. The natural limit of a dramatic action allows a logical transition from bad fortune to good, or from good to bad.
A plot does not achieve organic unity simply by focusing on every event in one person's life. Homer avoided detailing every incident that befell Odysseus, selecting only those events that form a single, bound dramatic arc. Removing or shifting any single episode in a unified plot must disrupt and destroy the structural integrity of the entire work.
The poet deals with what might happen according to necessity or probability, whereas the historian records what actually occurred. Poetry carries greater philosophical weight than history because it reveals general human truths rather than isolated historical particulars. Agathon proved that dramatic plots can succeed entirely with invented names and situations, provided the events follow logical cause and effect.
Simple plots feature continuous action where the change of fortune occurs without sudden reversal or dramatic discovery. Complex plots force the turn of fortune through peripeteia, anagnorisis, or both combined. Every structural shift must emerge naturally from the preceding events through strict causal probability or absolute necessity.
Peripeteia occurs when an action produces the exact opposite of its intended effect, as when a messenger tries to relieve Oedipus of fear but reveals his true origin instead. Anagnorisis is the shift from ignorance to knowledge, bringing about love or hate between characters marked for good or bad fortune. The third element of plot, suffering, involves destructive or painful actions such as deaths on stage, agonies, and woundings.
The quantitative sections that partition a tragedy consist of distinct spoken and musical parts. The prologue precedes the entry of the chorus, while episodes sit between complete choral songs. The exode forms the final section of the play, following which the chorus performs no further songs.
Perfect tragic plots should depict a virtuous person suffering misfortune not through depravity, but through hamartia, a fatal mistake of judgment. Total villains falling from prosperity to adversity satisfy moral justice but fail to evoke genuine pity or tragic fear. Sophocles' Oedipus and Euripides' Medea exemplify this principle by showing noble figures brought low by tragic errors.
Pity and fear should arise from the inner structure of the plot rather than external spectacle on stage. The most tragic situations involve violence between family members or close allies, such as Orestes plotting against his mother Clytemnestra. The peak of dramatic craft occurs when a character comes close to killing a family member in ignorance and discovers the relationship just in time.
Characterization requires four essential qualities: moral goodness, gender-appropriate traits, believable realism, and logical consistency. If a character is unpredictable, that character must be consistently unpredictable throughout the work. Resolution of the drama must spring from the character's choices and plot logic, never from a divine machine like the deus ex machina.
Recognition by physical marks, scars, or tokens represents the least artistic method of revelation. Discoveries invented on the spot by the playwright rank only slightly higher in dramatic value. The superior form of recognition arises directly from the actions themselves, as when Oedipus pieces together his identity through logical inference from past events.
Authors should visualize the dramatic action as vividly as if standing directly before the living performers. Outlining the general framework of the play before introducing specific names prevents structural drift and maintains focus. In Iphigenia in Tauris, the central framework consists of a sister saved from sacrifice who recognizes her brother before an impending execution.
Complication encompasses every event from the backstory up to the crucial turning point where fortune shifts. Unraveling, or denouement, extends from that pivot point to the final conclusion of the performance. Tragedy branches into four distinct species: complex drama, tragedy of suffering, tragedy of character, and simple spectacle.
Thought includes every effect produced through speech, such as proving a point, refuting an argument, or stirring emotions like anger and pity. Diction concerns the physical delivery and grammatical modes of expression, including commands, prayers, statements, and threats. Understanding rhetoric belongs properly to the study of artful speech, while dramatic composition focuses on emotional impact.
Diction divides into primary linguistic elements: letter, syllable, conjunction, noun, verb, inflection, and complete phrase. A letter is an indivisible sound capable of combining with other sounds to form intelligible speech. A noun or verb forms a meaningful composite sound without internal temporal indicators or separate meaningful sub-parts.
Words are either standard, foreign, metaphorical, ornamental, newly coined, extended, truncated, or altered. Metaphor transfers a name belonging to something else by genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or proportional analogy. Proportional metaphor operates when four terms share relationships, such as equating an old man's walking stick to the evening of life.
Diction achieves excellence by remaining clear without sinking into low or vulgar phrasing. Using only common words creates clear speech that lacks dignity, while overusing obscure metaphors results in riddles or jargon. A master writer uses rare and modified words to elevate prose, while excelling at metaphor, which cannot be learned from others.
Narrative poetry should be constructed like a tragedy around a single, complete, and whole action with a beginning, middle, and end. Epic verse must avoid resembling standard historical chronicles, which record all events occurring within a single time period regardless of connection. Homer demonstrated supreme craft by selecting a single phase of the Trojan War rather than trying to recount the entire conflict.
Epic shares structural species with tragedy but differs in length, meter, and capacity to portray simultaneous actions. The heroic hexameter serves as the most dignified and stately meter suited for expansive narrative verse. Epic poets can depict marvelous or improbable incidents more easily than dramatists because the audience does not see the actors physically performing them.
A foundational guide to dramatic theory, plot structure, character development, and the emotional power of tragic poetry.