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Plot
Structure Drama pdf
Aristotle's dramatic arc
Freytag's pyramid
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The German critic Gustav Freytag, in Technigue of the
Drama (1863), introduced an analysis of plot that is known as
Freytag's Pyramid. He described the typical plot of a five-act play
as a pyramidal shape, consisting of a rising action, climax, and
falling action. Although the total pattern that Freytag described
applies only to a limited number of plays, various of his terms are
frequently echoed by critics of prose fiction as well as drama. As
applied to Hamlet, for example, the rising action (a section that
Aristotle had called the complication) begins, after the opening
scene and exposition, with the ghost's telling Hamlet that he has
been murdered by his brother Claudius; it continues with the
developing conflict between Hamlet and Claudius, in which Hamlet,
despite setbacks, succeeds in controlling the course of events. The
rising action reaches the climax of the hero's fortunes with his
proof of the King's guilt by the device of the play within a play
(III.ii.). Then comes the crisis, the reversal or "turning point" of
the fortunes of the protagonist, in his failure to kill the King
while he is at prayer. This inaugurates the falling action; from now
on the antagonist, Claudius, largely controls the course of events,
until the catastrophe, or outcome, which is decided by the death of
the hero, as well as of Claudius, the Queen, and Laertes.
"Catastrophe" is usually applied to tragedy only; a more general
term for this precipitating final scene, which is applied to both
comedy and tragedy, is the denouement (French for "unknotting"): the
action or intrigue ends in success or failure for the protagonist,
the conflicts are settled, the mystery is solved, or the
misunderstanding cleared away. A frequently used alternative term
for the outcome of a plot is the resolution. In many plots the
denouement involves a reversal, or in Aristotle's Greek term,
peripety, in the protagonist's fortunes, whether to the
protagonist's failure or destruction, as in tragedy, or success, as
in comic plots. The reversal frequently depends on a discovery (in
Aristotle's term, anagnorisis). This is the recognition by the
protagonist of something of great importance hitherto unknown to him
or to her: Cesario reveals to the Duke at the end of Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night that he is really Viola; the fact of Iago's lying
treachery dawns upon Othello; Fielding's Joseph Andrews, in his
comic novel by that name (1742), discovers on the evidence of a
birthmark-"as fine a strawberry as ever grew in a garden"-that he is
in reality the son of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.
(source: Abrams – Glossary of Lit Terms) |
update:
15.10.2008
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