Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE THEORY OF DRAMA (the system of aristotle)

In the realm of productive sciences, Aristotle wrote two works: the Rhetoric and the Poetics, designed to assist barristers and playwrights in their respective tasks. The Rhetoric has interested modern philosophers chiefly on account of the detailed and sensitive examination, in the second book, of the human emotions on which the orator has to play. The Poetics, throughout history, has interested a much wider audience. Only its first book survives, a treatment of epic and tragic poetry. The second book, on comedy, is lost. Umberto Eco, in The Name of the Rose, wove a dramatic fiction around its imagined survival and then destruction in a medieval abbey.  The surviving first book deals principally with the nature of tragic drama. Six things, Aristotle says, are necessary for a tragedy: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and melody. The elements appear to be listed in order of importance. The melodies sung by the choruses in a Greek drama, and the setting of the stage by the director, are, he says, no more than pleasurable accessories: what is really great in tragedy can be appreciated by listening to an unadorned reading of the text no less than by watching the play on the stage. Thought and diction are more important: it is the thoughts expressed by the characters that arouse emotion in the hearer, and if they are to do so successfully they must be presented convincingly by the actors. But it is character and plot which really bring out the genius of a tragic poet.