The same period which had produced Plato, one of the great masters of criticism, witnessed the arrival of another outstanding genius in the person of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), a pupil of the former philosopher, whose work he was to develop on lines of his own thereby bringing to light in connection with art leading principles of great and permanent value. Aristotle‘s Poetics is the first important document in the history of Western criticism. It was written around 330 B.C. although written in the distant past its themes and discussions are of timeless value and fundamental to the aesthetic and literary criticism. The text of the
Poetics as such remains fragmentary and incomplete. Its twenty-six short chapters are not always coherent. However, the Poetics is undeniably a seminal work, in literary criticism.
Every tragedy, according to Aristotle, contains six parts which determine its quality. They are: Spectacle,
Melody, Diction, Character, Thought, and Plot. The most important of these six is the plot. To us who are
accustomed to regard drama as a means of character revelation this view of Aristotle must appear strange.
The Elizabethan drama, for instance, is primarily a drama of character, and in the play of other periods also
men and women act and behave according to their character. What is true of drama is true of fiction also. In
the novels of Fielding, Jane Austen, Thackeray, etc. the story is rooted in human psychology, so that if their
characters have different natures, the story would also change.
Aristotle argues that, among the six formative elements, the plot is the most important element. He writes in
The Poetics. The plot is the underlying principle of tragedy‘. By plot Aristotle means the arrangement of
incidents. Incidents mean action, and tragedy is an imitation of actions, both internal and external. That is to
say that it also imitates the mental processes of the dramatic personae. In answering a question once he said
that a tragedy could be written without a character but not without a plot. Though his overstatement on plot,
he accepts that without action there cannot be a tragedy. The plot contains a beginning, a middle and an end,
where the beginning is what is ―not posterior to another thing,‖ while the middle needs to have something
happened before, and something to happen after it, but after the end ―there is nothing else.
The characters serve to advance the action of the story, not vice versa. The ends we pursue in life, our
happiness and our misery, all take the form of action. Tragedy is written not merely to imitate man but to
imitate man in action. That is, according to Aristotle, happiness consists in a certain kind of activity rather
than in a certain quality of character. As David Daiches says: ‗the way in which the action works itself out,
the whole casual chain which leads to the final outcome.‘ Diction and Thought are also less significant than
plot: a series of well-written speeches has nothing like the force of a well-structured tragedy. Lastly,
Aristotle notes that forming a solid plot is far more difficult than creating good characters or diction.
Having asserted that the plot is the most important of the six parts of tragedy, he ranks the remainder as
follows, from most important to least: Character, Thought, Diction, Melody, and Spectacle. Character
reveals the individual motivations of the characters in the play, what they want or don’t want, and how they
react to certain situations, and this is more important to Aristotle than thought, which deals on a more
universal level with reasoning and general truths. Diction, Melody/ Songs and Spectacle are all pleasurable
accessories, but the melody is more important in tragedy than spectacle.
Plot, according to Aristotle, is not a mere arrangement of events; it is the way in which the action proceeds
at each point. Plot is something fuller and subtler than the story or myth on which it is based. It is the way in
which the action works itself out, the whole casual chain which leads to the final outcome. Character is a
causal element in the plot. Hence, it is of secondary importance according to Aristotle. ―Tragedy does not
only reveal character; it offers to our view a complex web made by actions and interactions of different
characters. Hamlet is not a series of soliloquies revealing character. It is a development of action along a
certain line ending in a catastrophe.