In Our Time - Aristotle's Poetics

Episode Date: January 27, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Aristotle's Poetics. The Poetics is, as far as we know, the first ever work of literary theory. Written in the 4th century BC, it is the work of a scholar who was also a biologist, and treats literary works with the detached analytical eye of a scientist. Aristotle examines drama and epic poetry, and how they achieve their effects; he analyses tragedy and the ways in which it plays on our emotions. Many of the ideas he articulates, such as catharsis, have remained in our critical vocabulary ever since. The book also contains an impassioned defence of poetry, which had been attacked by other thinkers, including Aristotle's own teacher Plato.Translated by medieval Arab scholars, the Poetics was rediscovered in Europe during the Renaissance and became a playwriting manual for many dramatists of the era. Today it remains a standard text for would-be Hollywood screenwriters.With:Angie HobbsAssociate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of WarwickNick LoweReader in Classical Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonStephen HalliwellProfessor of Greek at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher and biologist Aristotle wrote a book about plays and how to construct them.

He set down on paper his opinion of the works of Sophocles and Euripides and gave some hints on how to write a successful tragedy Aristotle's book is called The Poetics and as far as we know, it's the earliest surviving work of literary criticism and the most influential. The work contains ideas that resonated down the centuries. It was translated by Arab scholars and provided Renaissance playwrights with a rule book for writing great drama

and even today, it uses a manual on Hollywood screenwriting courses. With me to discuss Aristotle's Poetics, Arangi Hobbes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy, at the University of Warwick, Nick Lowe, reader in classical literature at Royal Holloway University of London, and Stephen Halliwell,

Professor of Greek at the University of St. Andrews. Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Macedonia. Could you give a brief thumbnail sketch of his life for us? Yes, he had a very dramatic life. His father was a physician at the court of the kings of Macedonia and was a friend of the grandfather of the future. Alexander the Great, who's going to figure in a moment, When he was 17, Aristotle went to Athens to study with Plato

and studied with him for 20 years. Then in 347, he seems to have felt it prudent to go into exile for about eight years, probably prompted by a wave of anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens, possibly also piqued that he didn't get the headship of the Academy after Plato's death. So he spends eight years travelling around the eastern Aegean and living on Lesbos. He marries money in London. the Eastern Aegean, and he conducts a lot of researchers into the natural sciences. He also, in this time, has a period of being tutor to the young Alexander the Great,

and that would be fascinating to have been a fly on the wall there. Then he comes back to Athens. It isn't such a short period, is it? It's estimated between two and five years. Yes, exactly, yes, indeed. And he comes back to Athens when he thinks it's safer. He sets up his own sort of teaching, we say school, that's a bit too formal, but he teaches in a gymnasium called the Lyceum. He writes prodigiously, and researchers prodigiously,

he writes about 150 books on everything from metaphysics to political theory, to aesthetic theory, to meteorology. Again, and in 322, there's another wave of anti-Macedonian feeling following Alexander's death. And again, he thinks he should go into exile. He goes to the island of Ubeir, and he dies shortly after that. So all this is fitted into 62. turbulent years. You managed to fit it into my 62

extremely lucid men. Second, sorry. That was terrific. Right. Why did he want to write a book about the construction of literary art? Well, we have to remember just how important literature and poetry was in the culture of ancient Greece.

You have rhapsodes going around, reciting poetry in public, reciting Homer. You have the dramatic competitions that the religious festivals. It's an enormous part of the culture. And the Greeks... So the playwriting Olympics, then you? Absolutely.

And literally that. No, literally. And the Greeks didn't just think that poetry was a source of pleasure and entertainment that, of course, it was for them. But they also thought it was a source of moral and practical instruction. Homer is looked to as a sort of fount of all wisdom. All wisdom, including

the way you should behave, as well as the wisdom in battle and your history and so on. Absolutely, absolutely. And Aristotle agrees that poetry can be a great moral educator. In fact, he says he thinks it's a better moral educator than history because poetry deals with the universal, whereas history just deals with the particular. Now, in all this, he's a key word in ancient Greek, the calon,

which means the aesthetically beautiful, something that pleases our senses, but it also means what's morally honorable and praiseworthy. So it's natural in the Greek language to think, that we can gain moral instruction from contemplating and perhaps creating poetic works. Now Aristotle wants, I would say, and my colleagues here may disagree with me,

I think he wants to help poets write better poetry. There's a debate about that. I think he certainly wants to help us appreciate poetry better. And indeed, he wants us to help us increase the pleasure that we get from poetry. Thank you, Niclo. Can you describe the poetics? How long is it? What form does it?

Jake? It's quite a short treatise by Aristotelian standards. It's only about 50 pages or so. And conventionally divided into 26 chapters of which the first three and a bit are a general theory of literature. And then quite rapidly it moves on to treating tragedy at some length as a case study in some of the general ideas. And really up until the 22nd chapter or so is primarily concerned with tragedy. And then there's four chapters at the end which deal briskly but very interestingly with epic and with the relationship between these two forms. And the treatises in a rather drafty kind of state.

It looks as though it wasn't really ever finished off. And although it's closed at the end, there are tantalising signs both in the text and outside it that there may have been a second book which might have gone on to talk about comedy and related forms. Can you go back to those first three chapters for a moment or to Nick and give us some of his generalisations or the gist of his generalisation? Well, one of the things he's trying to do in the opening chapters

is to propose what is essentially a kind of constructor kit for theories of particular art forms out of which you can then build a theory of tragedy or epic or indeed any other art form. It doesn't even have to be a literary art form. And the central idea that defines all art forms is that they're forms of what he calls by the Greek word mimesis, which is sometimes more appropriately translated imitation, sometimes representation.

What all art forms are doing is that they're creating images of things and they differ from one another in three ways, which are usually translated as something like medium mode and object. The object is what it's a representation of. The medium is what it constructs its image out of. So in painting, to use one of Aristotle's own examples, its colours and shapes. And the mode, which is really particularly applicable to literary forms, is a way for him to distinguish between dramatic and narrative modes, because he wants to talk especially about tragedy and epic, which were kind of the film and the novel of the day, really.

It might be worth introducing here that he was not primarily, but as a sort of, also a biologist and a great classifier. Indeed, about half of Aristotle's works are biological writings and those years that Angie was talking about on Lesbos were extremely important. Aristotle really was obsessed with

trying to use the relationship between part and whole in living organisms to think about things that we would perhaps see as less subject to the same kind of scientific inquiry.

dissecting frogs? He's a great dissector. I think one of the great differences between Aristotle and his master Plato is that Plato I think would rather lie in the bath and think about geometry. He's a mathematician by nature. Whereas Aristotle, I think from his earliest childhood, partly perhaps because of his medical background or his family's medical background, is extremely interested in rolling up his trousers and getting his knees dirty, dissecting cuttlefish is really what he'd like to be doing with his leisure time. You mentioned Plato, let's come to Plato. Angie Hobbes pointed out that he spent 20 years with Plato at the Academy. So can you take us into the relationship between those two? Well, Plato is the single most important influence on Aristotle's thought. And Plato himself, as I'm sure we'll come on to, had very strong views which Aristotle is fighting against in the poetics and elsewhere on the role of poetry in society.

What Plato and Aristotle both ultimately saw as the goal of philosophy was to explain not just individual features of human culture and life, but actually to explain the nature of reality. Can you contextualise it a little bit for us all? Plato had an academy, had a famous inscription above the door of the academy. People flowed in, we know about his dialogues, the Socratic dimension and so on. Can you just give us a little more flesh on that? Well, one of the big differences between the surviving works,

Plato and Aristotle is that Plato wrote these highly literary dialogues for public consumption and there what has come down to us as a representation of his thought. The works of Aristotle are very different. Their private drafts which were not put into public circulation. The history of their survival is a slightly mysterious one but certainly in antiquity it was believed that the poetics had literally sat in a hole in the ground for 200 years. And so what we have from Aristotle is not the works he published in his lifetime. He did write Plato-style dialogues. They were very much admired in antiquity. But the moment in the first century BC that works like the poetics became edited and available to a wider readership, they displaced the works he published

in his lifetime from the canon. Stephen Halliwell, Nick has touched on the difference in opinion between Plato and Aristotle about the attitude to poetry, the place of poetry. Can you go into it in more detail, please? Yes, well, there's a standard textbook account, if you like, of Plato's relationship to poetry, and it tells us that Plato was hostile to poetry, an enemy of poetry, that he wanted to banish poetry

from the ideal society, especially in the Republic. This, it seems to me, is at best a half-truth. It's no more than half of a much bigger, more complex picture. One has to start, I think, by recognising that Plato was obsessed with poetry throughout his life and there's barely a surviving Platonic dialogue that doesn't use poetry one way or another. Several of them discuss poetry directly and even when they're not doing that, the characters, above all Socrates, who's the main character, and most of them tend to turn to poetry for ideas which they can pick up and discuss.

They quote poetry regularly. So there's this lifelong obsession with poetry on Plato's part, the creator of these dialogues, And I would say that his position towards poetry fundamentally is a strange ambivalence. It's a combination of attraction and resistance. That, it seems to me, is the key to Plato's view of poetry, not outright enmity. And there's a wonderful passage in the last book of the Republic, which sums this up, where Socrates personifies poetry as a beautiful woman, which is very easy to do in classical Greek because the two main nouns for poetry are feminine in gender.

He talks about poetry as this beautiful woman who's haunted his life, with whom he used to be in love, from whom he's tried to separate himself, but whom, ideally, he would like to have back, if only he didn't think she was harmful to him. So you see there, wrapped up in that wonderful erotic image in Book 10 of the Republic, this idea of attraction and resistance. And that, I think, is Plato revealing his own soul, if you like, at that moment.

Fine, but can you tell us the objections in the part in which there were objections of Plato's objections to poetry? Yes. Because the poetic is in some sense a response to it, So I want the listeners to know when he objected to poetry, what he objected to. Right. I would prefer to ask what the questions are on the challenges that he puts to poetry. They're objections of a kind.

He's concerned, let's say, about three main things. Firstly, what poetry does to your soul when you're experiencing, how it actually affects your mind. And he's concerned particularly with the way it activates the imagination, allows you to picture different lives from the one you're actually leading. Also how it arouses very intense emotions and how it can bypass rationality. So it's this kind of mind-changing effect, if you like.

That's one of his big concerns. You can say that's an objection. It is an objection, but it's also it's a challenge and a question. Secondly, he's very concerned about what sort of images of the world poetry gives. And I think Angie mentioned earlier that for the Greeks traditionally, poetry is a vehicle of expression and representation of cultural values and beliefs. So Plato wants to challenge us to think what kind of beliefs, what kind of images of the world is poetry putting across.

And thirdly, he's very concerned about the credentials of poets themselves. Who are these people? What's so wonderful about this figure, Homer, that means that we should even shape our lives according to him? Because in the Republic, Socrates refers to people who say, you should lead your life according to Homer, as though he were a kind of Bible, if you like, in a guide to life. What's so special about Homer?

What are his credentials? Right? So there's the mind-changing power of poetry. the credentials of poets, and then in between this bigger question of belief and world views, if you like. I'm just sort of prodding away, because you're gloss on it, I'm sure, is the latest scholarship.

It's very, very... It's very... You are the latest scholarship, so... So there we are. But there's a general view, and you have not... You've not resisted this view, that there was a feeling... Plato considered poetry to be dangerous.

It took you in the wrong direction. And Aristotle's poetic was, in some way, an answer to that. Absolutely. Could you develop that a little? Yes, on the side of the poetics itself, do you mean? On the side of the poetics itself? We back to Aristotle. Yes, the first thing to say here is really something very remarkable, which is that Plato is not even mentioned in the poetics.

So nowhere in the poetics does Aristotle actually take him on directly. And this is very often overlooked, actually. You know, there's this kind of silent assumption that the whole of the poetics is arguing with Plato. Well, it is in a sense, but it's arguing with him in this remarkable way by never mentioning him. And I think that points as to something absolutely fundamental, which is that what Aristotle is doing is not, as it were, picking a quarrel with Plato.

He's showing him a radical alternative. And he's showing his students already. Remember Aristotle's a teacher. He probably shared some students even in his earlier life with Plato. He's showing them a different way of thinking about poetry. Angie Hobbes, the book employs many terms which are still used today, and they've been mentioned one or two have been mentioned by Nick. Let's take mimisies.

Yes. Well, big debate, whether it's imitation or representation. I'm afraid I don't particularly care. On balance, I slightly prefer imitation in this context. Aristotle thinks that humans are born naturally imitative. That's how we start to imbibe our culture and how we repeat the actions that will become our character as we develop them and understand them.

So he thinks, and we know this from his work, the politics, he thinks that it's absolutely crucial that we're surrounded by the right kind of cultural role models. Now, in that he agrees with Plato. He also thinks that we take enormous pleasure from imitation, both in imitating or representing ourselves and in witnessing the imitations created by others. He thinks that this is because we have a fundamental desire to know and understand.

He thinks there's just intrinsic pleasure in looking at a picture of Pericles or whoever and being able to recognize, say, oh, that's Pericles. So it's all connected with the driving force of all his thought, which is our intrinsic desire for knowledge. Nick Lowe, a large proportion of this work is concerned with tragedy, the poetics. How did Aristotle define it? Well, in his own terms, he defines it using that constructed kit I was referring to earlier in terms of medium-moded objects.

So its media are music and movement and language above all. Its mode is dramatic because it doesn't have a normal. narrating voice. It's not like epic. It doesn't have a storytelling voice. Everyone in the performance is actually being characters in the story. And it's, which one haven't we had? Object. Its object is a serious and complete action. And this is one of the most loaded parts of the definition, which he unpacks at great length. And most of the following 18 chapters or so is really exploring the implications of these three elements. of the definition, plus a fourth which he cheats and bolts on at this point,

which is to say that it also is an art form which specifically targets a particular band of the emotional spectrum. The two emotions that tragedy is trying to excite in its audience are the emotions which are traditionally translated as something like pity and fear. Let's just keep going at the, in one sense, let's keep in mind that he's a biologist, he's treating it, is dissecting it as he was dissect a frog, isn't it? Yes, that's what he's doing.

He said these are organisms which are susceptible to the same sort of analysis I am bringing to bear on my dissections in ponds and wherever I'm doing. Exactly. Aristotle's great obsession in dissection is with the relationship between form and function, how the parts contribute to the organisms function as a whole. And what he's trying to do in the poetics is to demonstrate that you can use a very analogous kind of thinking to take apart something as seemingly intangible and sacred and beyond analysis as art itself and the way that it speaks to our souls and our human nature. Stephen Halliwell, another word that introduced by Aristotle

and used certainly massively in the last century is catharsis. Can you tell us what he meant by the term and words are allowed to change their meaning, how it's changed its meaning? Yes. Well, I can try to answer the first question, although I'm sure you're already aware that the reason why catharsis is such an enigma is that having used it in the definition, the last clause of the definition of tragedy, he then never explains it at all in the society. But that's what you're for.

Yes, absolutely. That's why you've come along to tell us all. As he wrote it, he was imagining this programme probably. It's a very intriguing. Let's not be trivial. It is important that you're not. No, you guys, is supposed to interpret this up. Here you go, catharsis.

Yes, well, what he says in the definition gives us a big clue itself. He says, by arousing pity and fear, it brings about the catharsis of such emotions, so i.e. of pity and fear themselves. So it's a process that is actually arousing intense emotion and thereby doing something to our emotional capacities. And this is actually part of a response to Plato, which you were asking about earlier,

because obviously, as I mentioned, one of Plato's concerns is precisely poetry's power to arouse these intense emotions. In the Republic, for example, Socrates says even philosophers, when they go to tragedies, surrender to the emotion, their souls are flooded, with the emotion, and that's partly why it's dangerous. Aristotle is saying clearly that by arousing these emotions, tragedy is somehow doing something beneficial to us.

And when he does use the term catharsis again in another work in the politics, the last book of his treatise on politics, where he's principally concerned with musical catharsis, it's clear that somehow the experience of intense emotion allows you to work through something and bring your soul back to a more normal and healthy state. I mean, in a nutshell, my view of catharsis is that it's ethically and psychologically beneficial because it takes you through a process of intense experience

that then somehow rebalances your emotional capacities. It's totally fascinating because it actually, our instinct response to it, our experience response to it, and we're looking for proofs, and he is a man of proofs, isn't it? Yes, Andrew, you want to come in. Well, yes, I mean, as Stephen was suggesting, it's really important to emphasise that Aristotle isn't talking about the complete purgation of pity and fear, of getting rid of them completely. He wouldn't want that. In the ethics,

pity and fear are important human emotions. They perform crucial human functions. We need them for survival and for social harmony with our neighbours. But what he says in the ethics is we, and he lists pity and fear in this number of emotions which he says, the crucial thing is to feel them in the right way, at the right time, to the right extent. in relation to the right objects. So as Stephen was suggesting, it's not that we cleanse ourselves completely of pity and fear. That would not be a human or useful thing to do.

We want to restore them to the right balance, the right equilibrium. We want the mean amount of pity and fear, the appropriate amount. Does he think that in each one of us is a knowledge of the right balance? It's a good phrase, but what does that mean? to individuals watching this stuff? Well, I'm about to Nick and Stephen here, but I mean, I don't think he thinks that each sort of individual non-philosophic citizen

is going to have worked through a sort of a proper knowledge. I don't think he thinks they need to. I think the point is that the experience of watching Oedipus Tyrannos is going to restore this equilibrium to purge the excess of pity and fear. That's what we want to get rid of the excess. and that will happen to us if the play is well constructed, whether we know about it or not. Angie said, Nick, that she bowed to you, so here you go.

Well, the passage in the politics refers specifically to people who are suffering from emotional disorders and actually needs to have a kind of excess drawn off them. But the Greek word catharsis is a nice polyvalent word, which I think Aristotle quite enjoys the ability of to mean a number of different things. It can mean cleansing, purification. It's a word that's used in religious context. It's a word that's also a purely practical term, meaning cleaning. And I think he probably hasn't entirely made up his mind in the poetics,

where, of course, this word appears only once, whether it's a drawing off of excess or whether it's a kind of training of the emotions to be applied to appropriate objects. As Andrew was saying, Aristotle is very big in his ethics and his rhetoric on emotional intelligence, on using the emotions in a way that links them to the rational side of us. Do you have anything about it? Well, I agree with that. I mean, did you want to go back to the modern use as well?

Because I wanted to connect it to something Angie said, or do you want to hold back on that at the moment? No, you might as well do it because then Angie wants to come and I want to ask you something else. So why don't you do that? Get that over with and we move on, right. There is a very nice little point here as well. I mean, Angie's absolutely right, I think, that catharsis can't mean simply purging yourself, simply getting rid of these emotions. And yet that actually is what most people have thought

for the last 150 years. And they think it in part because of an article written by a German scholar who became the uncle by marriage of Sigmund Freud. Jacob Bernice, he was the uncle of Marta Bernice, Freud's wife. And catharsis is a term used in early psychoanalysis. It was used by Breuer and then it was used by Freud himself, although he stopped using it early on.

And in psychoanalysis, it is to do with, as it were, getting rid of something traumatic. You bring back memories of early traumatic events. You get this emotional charge associated with it, and you cleanse the whole lot out. And in part, Freud may have got this from his by then dead uncle by marriage. But that can't really be what Aristotle thought, for the fundamental reason that Andy mentioned,

which is that emotions are part of what make us human for Aristotle, and we use them all the time in responding to things in the world. And also, and this is part of his answer to Plato, emotions for Aristotle are not irrational things. they can be aligned with our judgments. He says in the rhetoric that emotions are all those feelings which affect our judgments of things. So all the time you've got emotion and judgment going on

in the way you react to the world. Angie, when you finish your thing, Bob, can you talk about reversal and recognition? I will, I will. For a larger fee. Yes, Stephen, yeah, to go back to what we were saying earlier about the difference between Plato and Aristotle in their response to our...

in general and tragedy in particular, I think catharsis is the key here, because they both agree that watching a great tragedy like Etypus Taranus will incite certain potentially dangerous emotions in us. And Plato thinks that's where we stay. That's the emotional state we're kind of stuck in with all these roused up emotions in this turbulent state and emotions which might be better off withering and dying on the vine have been all kind of stirred up in us. Aristotle thinks there's the potential for this further state of catharsis if the play is well constructed, whereby we can then move on from this incited state to this restored equilibrium. And I think so catharsis, that's why we really need to get it right,

because that is the key difference to me between Plato and Aristotle. Can we go to other notions in his definitions of tragedy? And the words that I've got in front of me are reversal and recognition. Well, absolutely, yeah. So these are key elements of the tragic plot, and they are the key means by which pity and fear are aroused. So recognition is when you move from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. You discover who your father was. Exactly. And Aristotle is particularly keen on the Oedipus, Tyrannos. So yes, if you're Oedipus, you discover that the old man you killed was actually your father, and the older woman you married is an...

in fact, your mother. And that's the recognition. Why is that important for him, though? Why is that, how does he relate that to the fact that he thinks strategy is the highest form? Because he thinks that pity and fear are going to be most incited through realizing this terrible mistake you've made. He didn't mean to make such an appalling mistake. And it's a mistake about his relatives and that you can't get a closer relation to that. You then get this change of fortune. He was king of Thebes and all sorts of awful things happen. And, you know, his mother-stroke wife commits suicide. He blinds himself.

He goes off into exile. He's no longer King of Thebes. But that change of fortune on its own is not in itself the reversal. It's part of the reversal. But the reversal, we've talked of the recognition. The reversal is when the, it's a kind of overturning of expectations. both Oedipus's expectations and the audiences. You know, the messenger comes in to relay the news to Oedipus,

and he thinks he's going to cheer Oedipus up. He has no idea, the messenger has no idea of the full import of what he's about to say. Can you just tell us to remind listeners of them? Nick, you take over from here. Well, one of the things that's important to Aristotle about both these elements is that they happen suddenly. But we want to know the messengers double. Well, Aristotle uses this very example.

There's a moment in Sophocles, Edipus, when the messenger has been summoned to fill in the last piece of the jigsaw of Edipus's backstory, which Edipus thinks is going to prove once and for all that he could not possibly be the murderer of the previous King Lyos, who is being sought and who the oracle has told them to expel from Thebes. And instead, what happens if that last piece of the jigsaw turns out to be the piece of evidence, that not only is Oedipus the murder of Lyus, but actually he was Lyus's son. So that's the... It's the moment where we have both reversal and recognition at the same exact moment. The penny drops and it destroys what it lands on.

I think it's important to add here as well that Aristotle doesn't like reversal and recognition just as it were for shock value, you know, because they give you a good theatrical frisson. In fact, he's rather opposed to certain things. He makes this clear in the poetics, which simply has... have a kind of superficial effect of frisson. Why reversal and recognition are so important is that they show the limits of human agency. And right at the heart of the poetics

is a theory of human agents moving through the world, which is part of Aristotle's own view of human action. And part of the experience, actually. Yes. Human agents moving through the world intentionally trying to bring about certain ends, achieve certain goals and so forth. And reversal in recognition belonged to a kind of of plot which shows you the limits of human

agency, the limits of human self-knowledge, really, because if you don't even know your own parentage and if you don't as it were know the most important things you've actually done, then everything is reversible if you like. Which is also why tragedy, you know, is a potential threat to Aristotle's own philosophy, just as

it was a kind of threat to Plato's. And one thing he's doing in the Poetics is try to show how you can have tragedy without ceasing to be an Aristotelian. But one of the things that's important to Aristotle is how audiences respond and one of the things he enjoys about reversal and recognition, one of the reasons why quite polemically he argues that plot is more important

than character in the art of tragedy as a whole is that the audience is forced to think. There's a beautiful chapter on recognition where he lists five different kinds of recognition and ranks them in order of artisticness, primarily in terms of how hard they make the audience work, how much they make the audience think about putting the pieces of the gigaigms. saw together. That's very important for Aristotle.

I think his obsession with Edipus is only partly to do with the qualities of the play itself, which was a flop in its original production bisonically and standards, although it's beginning to become a classic in the fourth century. It's a play about being the smartest man in history and finding

that that's a very dangerous thing to be, which is essentially the story of Aristotle's own life. One, well, a big, deep breath from you, Steve, I think that's another program coming up, but we've got to drive on on this one. Angie, I know you're going to say something. Please do, but we've talked, Aristotle was a big reader of plays, a great go-to-plays, I read from what you three have told me,

and he particularly, there was two or three playwrights and particularly admired. Could you briefly just put him in context of the theatre of the time, and then we can move on? Yes, he particularly admires Sophocles, and he thinks that Sophocles portrays characters as better than they are in real life, and with the potential to elevate us. So yes, that's why the Oedipus Tyrannus,

he again and again sort of picks it out as a supremely good example of a well-constructed plot. Tragedy shows us how noble we can be, comedy how low we can be. Exactly. But to go back to, and this fits in with what Stephen was just saying about you shouldn't just have shock value, that the reversal and recognition shouldn't just be a matter of shock. He's very against just bringing in a Deiasex matter. and just having something out of nowhere.

And what he admire, in all the playwrights he admires like Sophocles, though these events appear kind of shocking and surprising to Edipus and the audience when they happen, when you then reflect on them in the larger context of the whole structure of the plot, you can see that they make sense. There is a causal chain which is going to lead up to them. Had everybody known, had the audience and Edipus been in on all the knowledge, they would have seen the inevitability of all this. And that's, so he wants to combine this sort of value of surprise

with the fact that you're, partly what you're surprised at is the recognition that actually this was always going to happen. There's a kind of logic to it, one might say, and as well as being a great biologist, Aristotle is a great logician. You know, he wants drama to be, in a sense, dramatized logic, among other things. Aristotene logic is the basis of formal logic, and propositional logic even to this day. It's one of the reasons why he feels the plot is actually one of the aspects of tragedy

that tells us really deep things about our own humanness. Logic is for Aristotle absolutely key to everything that philosophy does. Andrew? Yes, I mean, again, as we were seeing from the biological studies and everything, the parts must fit together to form a whole, with a beginning, a middle and an end, which you can take in all at once. We haven't even talked about, the industry. Well, indeed, but that's why he loves people like Sophocles,

and that's why he rather criticises playwrights who are very famous in their own day, like Agathaon, who in fact appears as a character in Plato's symposium. Aristotle says, well, the trouble with Agarfon is, or one of the many troubles, is that when he's meant to have a choral ode, the choral ode doesn't sort of fit organically into the play as a whole. He just puts a kind of indication in the text

that the producer of the play can just shove in any. song that he feels like on the day and there is no organic unity there. Steve, we're going to have to drive now because we've promised the listeners that we'll talk about the influence of this and we've got two and a half thousand years to do in fact. It isn't as bad as it sounds but still

the book began life as lecture notes briefly how did it survive the first few hundred years? Well, for the first few hundred years it's simply part of this archive or repository of all Aristotle's lecture notes and I think Nick touched much earlier on the fact that it looks as though most people didn't have

access to the book for quite a long time. And indeed, there's hardly anyone in antiquity who seems really to be reading the poetics and referring to it. There's nowhere in ancient texts where anyone is, you know, fully engaging with it, but it remains part of this repository of this great thinkers. So when did Aristotle emerge? Was it with the Arab

translations? Well, in the Western tradition... It was a Latin, wasn't it, first of all? That's right, yes. Actually, Syriac very fast. Into Syriac and then into Arabic from the Syriac version and then it became the subject of a very interesting commentary by the great medieval Spanish Muslim scholar Verroes

who had no idea what a tragedy was, but nevertheless wrote a comedy on the poetics where he tried to make sense of it on its own philosophical terms. And that gets into Latin in the 13th century and has some readership in Europe. But really the moment when Aristotle emerges to full, view and really takes hold isn't until about 1500. First Latin translation is published in 1498, verse Greek text 10 years later. And almost immediately it becomes a subject of intense

interpretation, commentary writing, debate, recreation, particularly through the 16th century, where a whole wave of Italian humanist commentators remake the poetics as part of a larger project of trying to create a classical literature in the vernacular languages. It is miraculous, isn't it, really? Just to pause from one second, that 2,000 years later, these lecture notes come to one of the most brilliant groupings of civilisation, one can say. There are many brilliant, all right, but this was one of them,

and they take it up, and then they push it through the next five foot. We're still living under the... Where you go, Angelo? Can you tell us about Castelvetro? A little bit, but not nearly as much. much as Stephen. I mean, I wanted to pick up on on what you want to pick up on, Stephen can tell us about Gastelvetra. Yes, there was a certain sort of formulizing quality in the Italian scholars

and commentators, which Stephen will which sort of, rather I think, falsify Aristotle's poetics, but Stephen will know more about that. I particularly wanted to mention Sir Philip Sidney here, whose apology for poetry, sometimes known as the defence of poetry,

fabulous work. And lots and lots of references to Aristotle, to the Greek, he's clearly read the Greek, and really imbibed it and understood it. And of course, that work, the apology for poetry goes on and influences Shelley's defence of poetry. So a lot of our kind of later kind of critique of poetry and tragedy comes to us via Shelley, via Sir Philip Sidney, and Aristotle's right in the mix as one of the key influences there. Sydney is also interesting because he's writing probably in the 1580s,

if I remember rightly, it's published 1595. He's read all, or he's read several of the 16th century Italians that Nick mentioned, whether he'd read Castel Vetter, I'm not sure, but there's this extraordinary 16th century wave of reinterpretation of the poetics, and Castel Vettero is part of that. He publishes this great sprawling work in 1570, in which, incidentally, he's not just trying to

tell the world what Aristotle thought. He's arguing with and through Aristotle, and that's to some extent what they all This is where the unit is. Castlettre, in a way, in a way, casts a spell of many European dramatists for hundreds of years. Absolutely. The French drama are seen us. And they do what he says Aristotle said they should do. Can we talk about the unitism in that respect? This is certainly the first text in which the three so-called canonical unities emerge. They're not in Aristotle. Aristotle has unity of action or unity of plot. Castelvetre sort of keeps that, although actually he waters it down.

what he hammers away at is unity of time and going with it unity of place. And that's because Castelvetro has this really rather weird reductionist view of drama as a popular art form which is from the masses who don't really know any better. And therefore what you see on stage must correspond to the events themselves. They must take the same length of time as the events themselves, which seems to us a preposterous view, but this is what Castelvetro argued. There must be a match between the medium and the dramatic content. So he builds this into this idea of the unities of time, place, and also action.

As I say, he actually dilutes that. And then the French picked that up in the 70s. There's more than anything the French in the following century, who endlessly argue about this and debate it, including their major playwrights, Racine, Kornay writes a whole series of treatises on this. But by saying the French, we are also talking about what was the great, we acknowledge in the 17th century, as a great powerful civilisation, the French, so it's not just the French.

No, no, absolutely, yes, yes. They didn't rate us at a bad time. And then it gets to England from there as well, and Dryden, you know, picks up all the French debates. You want to say so. Yes, well, I mean, I think where this notion of these rather rigid unities does so much damage to Aristotle's text, is that if we take Aristotle's analogies between a work of art

and a living organism seriously, and he makes that analogy himself a number of times in the poetics, then it seems clear to me that he sees a work of art as a sort of a living, growing thing. not something which can simply be codified in very rigid rules. And yes, he says, you know, if you look at the great Greek dramas, you can see that, you know, quite often the action takes place in a single day, in a single place. But he doesn't say, you know, you have to write like this.

And I think it's an enormous disservice to sort of ossify the poetics. But at the same time, it's a text which lends itself to creative reinterpretation. I want to bring it up to that because we, The strange business of Hollywood screenwriters going on courses today where they're told about... Well, the poetics has always been a seminal text in creative writing, right, since the birth of that industry in the late Victorian era, it's been one of these texts which writers have always found useful.

And it doesn't, I think, matter very much to them whether they're getting at the true Aristotle. And one of the things that's been particularly interesting since the rebirth of screenwriting theory in the 1970s is the way Aristotle has been increasingly engaged with and is now a taught text. I think he's one of really the only texts from the ancient world, along with Xenophon-Dressage,

that is still a manual in its subject. And things like the Hollywood three-act structure, which, whether or not you're aware of it, underpins every single Hollywood film we've seen since 1980, is often, to us, perhaps rather merituritiously, accredited in terms of Aristotle's beginning and middle and end of a plot and it's always been seen by writers. Yes, well, it's one of the things that screenwriters like about the poetics

is that it addresses the creator as well as the critic. It doesn't see any separation between those roles. Well, I'm really sorry, but we have to come to an end. There you go. Angie Hobbes, Stephen Halliwell, Nicola, thank you very much indeed. Next week we'll be talking about the Butler Banachburn, 1314, Robert de Bruce, and Edward the second and thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud,

where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.