Aristotle didn't know anything about theatre | Steve Waters | Stage | guardian.co.

uk

7/20/12 11:20 PM

Sign into the Guardian using your Facebook account

Printing sponsored by:

Aristotle didn't know anything about

theatre
Why do playwrights still adhere to the philosopher's over-simplistic
view of drama? It's a Greek tragedy

Alan Cummings as Dionysus in The Bacchae by Euripides. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

I have a problem with Aristotle. Not the Aristotle who pondered being, politics, or
ethics, but the Aristotle who, in the wake of Greek tragedy, tried to nail what made
those great plays so great. His Poetics is a fragment of preserved lecture notes, part of
a wider riposte to Plato's attack on the poets (perhaps it should be pinged over to
Jeremy Hunt pretty damn quick). But it's less the real-life Greek I'm bothered about;
it's what we continue to make of him.
Poetics doesn't occupy a crowded field. Writing about playwriting, as I have just done
for my new book The Secret Life of Plays, can be a lonely experience, if you're after
wisdom from fellow writers. There are a handful of accounts you can trust, most
recently David Edgar's indispensable How Plays Work. But Poetics remains first and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/oct/04/aristotle-poetics-theatre-sophocles-euripides/print

Page 1 of 3

Aristotle didn't know anything about theatre | Steve Waters | Stage | guardian.co.uk

7/20/12 11:20 PM

foremost. Aristotle begins neutrally enough, pledging to analyse "the art of poetic
composition in general and its various species", but with item three on his agenda
("how plots should be constructed if the composition is to be an artistic success"), his
task begins to become prescriptive. As he proceeds, Aristotle warms to his role as lay
adviser, offering famous observations such as "Tragedy cannot exist without a plot but
it can without characters" (really?), or "Among simple plots and actions the episodic is
the worst" (possibly, but ...). At one point, he even offers tips about apt subjects for
plays that always make the heart sink.
Such advice has proved irresistible to subsequent writers on playwriting. Indeed, if you
want a view other than mine on Aristotle, try enthusiastic disciple Michael Tierno's
bluntly titled Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the
Greatest Mind in Western Civilization, which suggests Poetics might do for Hollywood
what Sun Tzu's The Art of War does for the Pentagon. What playwright Timberlake
Wertenbaker has wonderfully called "Aristotalitarianism" is ubiquitous, from the bossy
neo-classicism of Ben Jonson or Dryden or Corneille, with their distaste for the unruly
pleasures of Shakespeare, to contemporary avatars in tub-thumbing toolkits such as
Robert McKee's Story, which claims: "In the 23 centuries since Aristotle wrote Poetics,
the 'secrets' of story have been as public as the library down the street," which rather
raises the question as to the necessity of his own mighty book. Wherever plot is
deemed to trump all other aspects of playwriting, Aristotle's ghost is hovering nearby.
Yet Poetics' fatal flaw (to borrow an Aristotelian term) is that it's an outsider's view of
writing. All too often Aristotle's inventory of conventions is mimicked, as if plays were
no more than the sum of their parts, and the author a phrenologist detecting a
criminal from the shape of their skull. Generations of playwrights and critics have
rummaged through Poetics' checklist of elements hoping to find a readymade
framework for their plays or analyses. It's very tempting. Technical terms, especially
Greek ones, sound very authoritative: take some dianoia, add in a little sophrosyne,
sprinkle over it a smidgeon of anagnorisis, work the whole lot into a lovely peripeteia,
and wait for the inevitable katharsis.
If I might add my own hubris to that list, another shortcoming of Aristotle's account of
playwriting lies in his focus on Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. It's a very good play, no
question, but this poster-boy of formal perfection has too often served as a cudgel to
beat into shape all sorts of equally good, but formally eccentric works. How would
Aristotle's toolkit of the unities of place, of time, of action have served him had he
considered the unruly danger of Euripides' The Bacchae or the trilogy of The Oresteia,
let alone the madcap playfulness of any play by Aristophanes? But then the fact that it
stakes everything on one exemplary text perhaps explains the seductive reductiveness
of the Poetics.
Philosophers tend to make dogmatic critics, dismembering plays to illustrate their
concepts, paring back the biodiversity of actual plays to create a monoculture of wellbehaved exemplars. Nevertheless, however much we might crave papyrus records of
Aeschylus taking part in a post-show discussion, or a series of unpublished essays by
Euripides entitled "Writing in Tavernas", Aristotle's end-of-term report still too often
sets the standard. I'm happy to take my hat off to the great Greek, but we need to
thumb our noses at his disciples. Playwriting's too rich and strange for their tidy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/oct/04/aristotle-poetics-theatre-sophocles-euripides/print

Page 2 of 3

Aristotle didn't know anything about theatre | Steve Waters | Stage | guardian.co.uk

7/20/12 11:20 PM

minds.
Previous

Blog home

Next

2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/oct/04/aristotle-poetics-theatre-sophocles-euripides/print

Page 3 of 3