1
In every tragedy there is a complication and a denouement.The Greek says simply tying and loosing. Complication and denouement seem clumsy equivalents, yet they are the words we use in dramatic criticism. The incidents outside the plot and some of those in it usually form the complication, the rest is the denouement.
2
I mean this, that the complication is the part from the beginning up to the point which immediately precedes the occurrence of a change from bad to good fortune or from good fortune to bad; the denouement is from the beginning of the change down to the end.
3
For instance, in the Lynceus of Theodectes the complication is the preceding events, and the seizure of the boy, and then their own seizure; and the denouement is from the capital charge to the end.The boy must be Abas, and they are presumably Danaus and perhaps his other daughters. Aristotle seems to regard the arrest of Danaus not as part of the λύσις, but as the end of the δέσις.
4
Tragedies should properly be classed as the same or different mainly in virtue of the plot, that is to say those that have the same entanglement and denouement. Many who entangle well are bad at the denouement. Both should always be mastered.
4
There are four varieties of tragedy—the same as the number given for the elementsApparently the reference here is to the four elements into which in the course of chapters 10-15. Plot has been analysed, Reversal, Discovery, Calamity, and Character. But the symmetry is spoilt by the fact that his first species, the complex play, corresponds to the first two of these four elements, viz. to Reversal and Discovery. Thus his fourth species is left in the air and he hurriedly introduces Spectacle as the fourth corresponding element. Other explanations seem even sillier than this.—
5
first the complex kind, which all turns on reversal and discovery;
6
the calamity play like the stories of Ajax and Ixion;
