5 - Aristotle’s Poetics and ancient dramatic theory

Summary

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was the greatest polymath of antiquity, whose aim was to create a systematic science of everything. He wrote about social policy, personal morality, logic and cosmology, but is perhaps most impressive in the field of biology. For two millennia, no one would improve upon his applied research into the different forms of animal life. Amidst this huge intellectual output, we find at the end of his Collected Works a set of condensed lecture notes on poetry. Little read in antiquity, these notes would exercise a huge influence upon the Renaissance, and on later generations of playwrights. Known as the Poetics, the notes attempt to do two things: firstly, they compare tragedy to epic in order to argue that tragedy is the highest form of literary art, and secondly, they offer a guide to a would-be writer in how to write the best possible tragedy. Aristotle regards tragedy as a biological 'organism' (Poetics xxiii.1), and the way to study an organism is to see how its different bodily parts interrelate.

In recent years, film theorists have continued to study and admire the Poetics, because of the emphasis which Aristotle gives to narrative, described as the invisible 'soul' of the organism (vi.14). A Hollywood story analyst in 2002 published Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization as a guide for aspirant writers. Theorists of performance, however, have wanted to assert that 'liveness' differentiates theatre from cinema, and have often baulked at Aristotle's uncompromising view that the power of tragedy is the same with or without performance and the actors (vi.19).