In every tragedy there is a complication and a denouement. Footnote 1The Greek says simply tying
and loosing.
Complication and denouement seem clumsy equivalents, yet they are the words we use in dramatic criticism. The incidents outside the plot and some of those in it usually form the complication, the rest is the denouement.
I mean this, that the complication is the part from the beginning up to the point which immediately precedes the occurrence of a change from bad to good fortune or from good fortune to bad; the denouement is from the beginning of the change down to the end.
For instance, in the Lynceus of Theodectes the complication is the preceding events, and the seizure of the boy, and then their own seizure; and the denouement is from the capital charge to the end. Footnote 2The boy must be Abas, and they
are presumably Danaus and perhaps his other daughters. Aristotle seems to regard the arrest of Danaus not as part of the λύσις, but as the end of the δέσις.
Tragedies should properly be classed as the same or different mainly in virtue of the plot, that is to say those that have the same entanglement and denouement. Many who entangle well are bad at the denouement. Both should always be mastered.
There are four varieties of tragedy—the same as the number given for the elements
Footnote 3Apparently the reference here is to the four elements into which in the course of chapters 10-15. Plot has been analysed, Reversal,
Discovery,
Calamity,
and Character.
But the symmetry is spoilt by the fact that his first species, the complex play,
corresponds to the first two of these four elements, viz. to Reversal
and Discovery.
Thus his fourth species is left in the air and he hurriedly introduces Spectacle
as the fourth corresponding element. Other explanations seem even sillier than this. —
first the complex kind, which all turns on reversal and discovery;
the calamity play
like the stories of Ajax and Ixion;
the character play
like the Phthian Women Footnote 4By Sophocles. and the Peleus Footnote 5Both Sophocles and Euripides wrote a Peleus. .
The fourth element is spectacle, like the Phorcides Footnote 6The text is obscure, and our ignorance of the play or rhapsody adds to the darkness, but the reference may be to the ruse, common in detective stories, of misleading the audience by false clues in order to make the final revelation more effective. and Prometheus, and all scenes laid in Hades.
One should ideally try to include all these elements or, failing that, the most important and as many as possible, especially since it is the modern fashion to carp at poets, and, because there have been good poets in each style, to demand that a single author should surpass the peculiar merits of each.
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One must remember, as we have often said, not to make a tragedy an epic structure:
by epic I mean made up of many stories—suppose, for instance, one were to dramatize the IIiad as a whole.
The length of the IIiad allows to the parts their proper size, but in plays the result is full of disappointment.
And the proof is that all who have dramatized the Sack of Troy as a whole, and not, like Euripides, piecemeal, or the Niobe story as a whole and not like Aeschylus, either fail or fare badly in competition. Indeed even Agathon failed in this point alone.
In reversals,
however, and in simple
stories Footnote 7i.e., those that have no Discovery
or Reversal.
See chapter 10. too,they admirably achieve their end, which is a tragic effect that also satisfies your feelings.
This is achieved when the wise man, who is, however, unscrupulous, is deceived—like Sisyphus—and the man who is brave but wicked is worsted.
And this, as Agathon says, is a likely result, since it is likely that many quite unlikely things should happen.
The chorus too must be regarded as one of the actors. It must be part of the whole and share in the action, not as in Euripides but as in Sophocles.
In the others the choral odes have no more to do with the plot than with any other tragedy. And so they sing interludes, a practice begun by Agathon. And yet to sing interludes is quite as bad as transferring a whole speech or scene from one play to another.