| 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) |
