Concerning character
there are four points to aim at. The first and most important is that the character should be good.
The play will show character if, as we said above, Footnote 1See Aristot. Poet. 6.24. either the dialogue or the actions reveal some choice; and the character will be good, if the choice is good.
But this is relative to each class of people. Even a woman is good
and so is a slave, although it may be said that a woman is an inferior thing and a slave beneath consideration.
The second point is that the characters should be appropriate. A character may be manly, but it is not appropriate for a woman to be manly or clever.
Thirdly, it should be like.
Footnote 2The meaning probably is like the traditional person,
e.g. Achilles must not be soft nor Odysseus stupid. Cf. Horace Ars Poet. 120 famam sequere.
This is different from making the character good and from making it appropriate in the sense of the word as used above.
Fourthly, it should be consistent. Even if the original be inconsistent and offers such a character to the poet for representation, still he must be consistently inconsistent.
An example of unnecessary badness of character is Menelaos in the Orestes Footnote 3Aristotle has a personal distaste for this character on the ground that Euripides made him a creature meaner than the plot demands. ;
of character that is unfitting and inappropriate the lament of Odysseus in the Scylla Footnote 4A dithyramb by Timotheus. Cf. Aristot. Poet. 26.3. and Melanippe’s speech Footnote 5A fragment survives (Eur. Fr. 484 (Nauck)). Euripides seems to have given her a knowledge of science and philosophy inappropriate to a woman. ;
of inconsistent character Iphigeneia in Aulis, for the suppliant Iphigeneia is not at all like her later character.
In character-drawing just as much as in the arrangement of the incidents one should always seek what is inevitable or probable, so as to make it inevitable or probable that such and such a person should say or do such and such; and inevitable or probable that one thing should follow another.
Clearly therefore the denouement
Footnote 6Or unravelling.
of each play should also be the result of the plot itself and not produced mechanically as in the Medea and the incident of the embarkation in the Iliad. Footnote 7Hom. Il. 2.155-181, where it is only the arbitrary (i.e., uncaused) intervention of Athene which stays the flight of the Greeks. In the Medea the heroine, having killed her rival and her children, is spirited away in the chariot ot the Sun, a result not caused
by what has gone before.
The god in the car
Footnote 8The μηχανή or car
was a sort of crane with a pulley attached, which was fixed at the top of the back-scene in the left corner of the stage. By it a god or hero could be lowered or raised or exhibited motionless in mid-air. Weak dramatists thus introduced a car to cut the knot
by declaring the denouement instead of unravelling the plot by the logic of cause and effect. It was presumably on such a car
that Medea was borne away. should only be used to explain what lies outside the play, either what happened earlier and is therefore beyond human knowledge, or what happens later and needs to be foretold in a proclamation. For we ascribe to the gods the power of seeing everything.
There must, however, be nothing inexplicable in the incidents, or, if there is, it must lie outside the tragedy. There is an example in Sophocles’ Oedipus. Footnote 9i.e., Oedipus had killed Laius in a wayside quarrel, not knowing who he was. When his subjects at Thebes crave his help to remove the curse which is blighting their crops, he pledges himself to discover the murderer of Laius. It may seem odd that he should not know enough about the details of the murder to connect it in his mind with his own murderous quarrel. But that was long ago, and neither an audience nor a novel-reader is critical about incidents which occur long before the point at which the story begins. See chapter Aristot. Poet. 24.20.
Since tragedy is a representation of men better than ourselves we must copy the good portrait-painters who, while rendering the distinctive form and making a likeness, yet paint people better than they are. It is the same with the poet. When representing people who are hot-tempered or lazy, or have other such traits of character, he should make them such, yet men of worth [an example of hardness] Footnote 10Apparently a note on Achilles which has been copied by mistake into the text. ; take the way in which Agathon and Homer portray Achilles.
Keep, then, a careful eye on these rules and also on the appeal to the eye Footnote 11i.e., stage-craft rather than staging. which is necessarily bound up with the poet’s business; for that offers many opportunities of going wrong. But this subject has been adequately discussed in the published treatises. Footnote 12As distinct from the body of esoteric
doctrine circulated by oral teaching among Aristotle’s pupils.