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[1456a]
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The fourth element is spectacle, like the
Phorcides1 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. 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" stories2 too,
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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. The other factors
have been already discussed. It remains to speak of "Diction" and "Thought."
All that concerns Thought may be
left to the treatise on Rhetoric, for the subject is more proper to that
inquiry.3
Under the head of Thought come all the
effects to be produced by the language. Some of these are proof and refutation,
1 The 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.
2 i.e., those that have no "Discovery" or "Reversal." See chapter 10.
3 "Thought"—no English word exactly corresponds with διάνοια—is all that which is expressed or effected by the words (cf. Aristot. Poet. 6.22, 23, and 25). Thus the student is rightly referred to the Art of Rhetoric, where he learns "what to say in every case." Aristotle adds that the rules there given for the use of ideas will guide him also in the use of incidents, since the same effect may be produced either by talk or by "situation."
Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 23, translated by W.H. Fyfe. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1932.
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