SOURCE: "The Relation of Character and Plot," in Aristotle's Poetics, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967, pp. 68-81.

[In the following essay, written in 1956, House maintains that Aristotle's views regarding the importance of plot in tragedy actually reveal his "attempt to guarantee the individuality of character."]

This brings us to the famous argument by which Aristotle says that "plot" is more important than "character"; it is stated in the second half of ch. vi (pp. 36-9) and has produced a great deal of discussion. It is absurd in any language (quite apart from questions of translation) to bandy about complicated terms like "character", "plot" and "action" as if they were "fixities and definites". In this particular discussion much avoidable trouble has been caused by the assumption that the meanings of the terms "character" and "action" are self-evident, and that there is some kind of elementary opposition between them.

The essential clues to the proper interpretation of this latter half of ch. vi are present in the language that Aristotle uses in the chapter itself; but they can be understood more clearly by reference to what he says in the Nicomachean Ethics. And this is one of the passages which, as I said before, does presuppose some knowledge of the Ethics and the terminology used there.

The point to get hold of first is this: although Aristotle in the Poetics uses expressions which present the matter as if there were a sharp antithesis between "character" and "plot", or "character" and "action", this antithesis is not present in his whole theory, in which character and action were not opposed to each other, but inseparable. There is an interesting discussion of this in Butcher. He presents the matter as a question.

"If character and action were so intimately related in Aristotle's general theory of behaviour, why did he, in the Poetics, so emphatically present character as if it were in some kind of antithesis to plot? Why did he present his case in an exaggerated way?" (Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 4th edn. 1907, esp. pp. 344-5.)

Much of what Butcher has to say on this point is very relevant. He quotes the most extreme statement of Aristotle's position, the statement which is given in Bywater's translation, ch. vi (p. 37) as:

A tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without Character.… [50 a 23-5])

Butcher's footnote to this passage bears out much that I have been saying in these lectures and have now to say; it contains germinal ideas of which much more could have been made in his main argument:

In the popular antithesis of the two terms "character" has not its full dramatic value, and instead of signifying "characters producing an action", it stands for an abstract impression of character left on our minds by the reading of a play. Similarly "plot" is regarded as the "story" in a play, viewed in abstraction from the special nature of the persons; and, in particular, denotes a complication exciting wonder or suspense—an idea, however, which is not necessarily present in the word [muthos].

What follows is a very much simplified statement of arguments in the Nicomachean Ethics, especially Books I and II.

Aristotle says first that we are not good or bad in character by nature. This is in contrast to certain physical capacities which we do have by nature. The physical senses of seeing and hearing, for instance, are in us by nature. We had the sense of sight before we even saw; the sense of hearing before we even heard: we did not acquire these senses by acts of seeing and hearing. In so far as we have by nature a capacity for action it is physical action, which is ethically neutral or indifferent, and therefore does not involve character at all.

But the virtues (and the vices) are acquired only in so far as we have acted well or badly. We learn to become good or bad by acting well or ill just as a builder learns to build by building. By repeated acts of a certain kind we acquire a habit or bent… of character. In this way qualities of character are legacies of past acts.

Historically in each individual, character is thus formed by action, is dependent on action for its very being, and has its qualities in virtue of the quality of the actions from which it is derived. In real life, quite apart from drama, character is subordinate to action because it is a product of action.

Secondly, he says that we are not good or bad merely in respect of knowing what is good or bad. Here Aristotle is partly answering the intellectualist ethics of the Platonic Socrates, so often expressed in the epigram "Virtue is Knowledge". Against this Aristotle insists (1) that the guiding principle of ethics is not the Absolute Good but a practical good, attainable as the end for man: and this end he ultimately identifies with happiness; (2) that in all ethical situations there is an element of desire which is the stimulus to decision, and the determinant of direction.

This inclusion of the element of desire is also part of Aristotle's revision of Plato's ethics. Its importance in Aristotle's scheme is that it is the "end" which we desire. We have a desire or wish to bring about a certain state of affairs, and it is this desire for the "end" which distinguishes human ethical action from the undirected play of circumstance. Action which is ethical is a movement towards an end.¹ The "character" which, as I have said, a man acquires by acting is formed by the kind of "ends" which he habitually proposes to himself as desirable. In so far as this is so, character is only a tendency, and it does not become fully "actual" unless a particular end is desired and the "movement" is thus set on foot towards it.

At this point in the argument Aristotle attempted to assimilate his ethical terminology to his metaphysical terminology, where the distinction between "potentiality" and "actuality" is a fundamental one. The processes by which he did this are technical and difficult to state clearly; and they hardly concern us, even if I were competent to expound them.

I must state the matter in an over-simplified way: "character", in that it is a bent, a tendency, a legacy of past acts, is not fully "actualised" or "realised". It is only fully realised when it is "in act", as it is not, for instance, when we are asleep.

Thus, from the point of view of drama, "character" in its full and proper sense occurs only in action. The mere presentation or description of certain "qualities" of character is the presentation of something less than the fullness of character.

Thus in Aristotle's ethics, with or without reference to the drama, character may be looked upon as the arbitrarily stabilised meeting-point of two series of actions; the antecedent series which has gone to its formation, and the consequent series in which it will be actualised in future. Character in itself is not fully "real" until it is "in act", or "in action".

I might make this clearer by a comparison; but it is not to be taken as an exact analogy, for it is not. Suppose you have a training-film of athletics, and stop it in the middle so that you have a "still" of a runner in his stride; the "still" will show you certain qualities of him as a runner—his build, his muscular development, his position, his way of holding himself, his style so far as that can be seen without movement. But it will not tell you whether he has a weak heart or poor staying-power; or how fast he runs or whether he is likely to win against such-and-such an opponent under such-and-such conditions: it will not even tell you much about his style as a whole. Movement is necessary for that.

In a broad way Aristotle's view of "character" in literature may be thought of as such a "still".

And indeed the comparison with athletes is one of Aristotle's own comparisons. In the Nicomachean Ethics, I, 8, 1099^a3, he says (in Sir David Ross's translation, Oxford, 1925):

And as in the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned but those who compete (for it is some of these that are victorious), so those who act win, and rightly win, the noble and good things in life.

To Aristotle even happiness itself, which, when properly understood, is the ultimate end of man, is not a state but a form of activity. In the Nicomachean Ethics I, 8, 1098^b 22, happiness is defined as "a sort of good life and good action". And Aristotle (b 30 ff.) goes on:

With those who identify happiness with virtue or some one virtue our account is in harmony; for to virtue belongs virtuous activity. But it makes, perhaps, no small difference whether we place the chief good in possession or in use, in state of mind or in activity. For the state of mind may exist without producing any good result, as in a man who is asleep or in some other way quite inactive, but the activity cannot; for one who has the activity will of necessity be acting, and acting well.

You see how this elaborates the position which is very shortly stated in Poetics, ch. vi (p. 37):

All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse.

It is saying something more than that we can only "know" the "characters" in a drama through what they say and do: it is saying that they only exist as characters in what they say and do. It is a truth of major importance for dramatic criticism. They exist only in their dramatic context and by their dramatic function. Much recent criticism of the drama—especially of Shakespearean drama—has been recovering this side of Aristotle's doctrine. The swing away from Bradley in Shakespearean criticism has been a swing away from the tendency to make back-inferences from the text to determine a supposed full and stable view of the "character's character", and then to project this inferred (and artificially rounded and complete) "character" back into disputable areas of the play as an instrument of interpretation. The protest against such methods can call on Aristotle for support. It has been a swing towards emphasis on plot, on the whole dramatic design and composition.

With pupils beginning the serious criticism of dramatic poetry, I find the mistake of method often takes even more extreme forms. "Characters" like Oedipus and Samson are spoken of as if they have a firm, known "character" from legend or history; and Sophocles and Milton are virtually judged according to how nearly they get them "right". Or, commoner still, the character of Oedipus in the Colonus play is judged by the character of Oedipus as he appears in King Oedipus; or Sophocles is blamed for treating Creon differently in two different plays. But, as these two plays were not parts of a trilogy, Sophocles has absolute freedom to create and use what "characters" he likes. We must now return to, and examine, Aristotle's most extreme and most epigrammatic statement of his position. "A tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without character."

Note that in Aristotle's Greek, as in English, there is an ambiguity in the use of the word for "character". I have just illustrated this in English by using the phrase "the character's character". The word is used either for "the dramatic personage" or "the ethical nature", which may be of a dramatic personage, or of a person in real life. So also Aristotle uses his word [ethos] sometimes for the dramatic presentation of ēthos, sometimes for ēethos or character in its ethical sense whether in a play or not. This famous epigram does not of course mean that there may be a tragedy without characters, that is, without dramatic personages; it means that there may be a tragedy without dramatic personages who exhibit what Aristotle specifically calls "character" in the ethical sense. He then proceeds, in ch. vi (pp. 38-9), to describe very shortly what he means by "character" in this sense:

Character in a play is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents, i.e. the sort of thing they seek or avoid, where that is not obvious—hence there is no room for Character in a speech on a purely indifferent subject.

Even taking Bywater's translation at its face value this is a rather ambiguous sentence (there are in fact problems about the correct reading of the Greek text).

In any case, it is evident that by "tragedies without character" Aristotle means plays in which personages go through a change of fortune (probably a change from happiness to misery, rather than the opposite) in which they suffer and act, but act without showing why, without adequately revealing the habit, bent and tendency of their characters, and without showing their characters in act, without showing their minds working upon the means to the actualisation of their desires. A tragedy of circumstance and event of this kind is probably capable of rousing the emotions of the audience; by self-projection into the cipher on the stage some kind of pity may be felt, and external circumstances alone may cause a kind of fear. This such plays are at least better than plays deficient in action; where there is nothing but a set of speeches describing static qualities. Aristotle says beginners can do this, "can write descriptive monologues, but fail to show action and interaction, and make their personages speak like rhetoricians".

The important positive doctrine is that "character in the play is what reveals the moral purpose in the personages". Now the word (and the related words) translated here "moral purpose" is the term for the actualising process by which we decide on an action as a means to achieve an end: hat we desire; this is sometimes translated "choice", and the verb of it "choose".

To explain this I quote from a paper by Mr. Colin Hardie, to whose knowledge and advice these lectures in general owe more than I can say. There is nothing unfamiliar to readers of Aristotle in what he writes, but it summarises the point clearly and suitably for our purpose:

An action is an activity designed to bring about an "end" and it has in it both an element of trained desire and an intellectual element. We have a desire or wish for a certain state of affairs. From this we argue back by a chain of means, until we arrive at something we see to be in our power here and now. We will the end and perceive the present state of affairs, and to link these two by a chain of means is the work of deliberation. This may be impossible, but if we think it is possible to achieve the end, we choose … to do this act for the sake of the result it will bring about. The word [proairesis], usually translated "choice", is not choice between alternative ends nor choice between alternative means to one end, but simply the act of will which starts a bodily movement to put the chain of means in motion, and causes a change designed to produce the end. Now the nature of the end aimed at reveals and determines our character …; if we actualise a tendency in ourselves to obtain this or that end, we are good if the end is what the good man aims at. This is not to say that the end justifies the means. On the contrary, a good act must be done as the good man does it.… If we desire what is good in itself, we may still make a mistake in calculating the means, either through ignorance of a fact or facts or through ignorance of what will bring about what (of the general rules governing conduct and of the probable or necessary consequences of any step). This calculation is the intellectual element …, is scientific and can be discussed. Thus any action involves both "character" and "thought".…

The distinction between "character" and "thought", as made in ch. vi of the Poetics, is thus much plainer. So far as thought is an element in the speeches of individual personages in the play relative to their particular circumstances and decisions, it covers this area of deliberation or calculation—"all they say when proving or disproving some particular point" (ch. vi, p. 39). As character is shown in the choice of ends (we can be said to "choose" both the end and the means to it), so thought is the deliberation about means to the end.

Aristotle means the "element of thought" to be partly this internal deliberative casuistry of the individual;² but it need not, of course, always be internal to any one personage in the play; others may take part in the deliberation and have an influence on the decision. But "thought" in this sense is deliberation about action, whether internal or not—"whatever can be said or whatever is appropriate to the occasion" (p. 38). Here Aristotle is presupposing some knowledge of the Rhetoric, especially perhaps of Book II, chs. xxi and xxii. His mention of Rhetoric and Politics here in the context is partly a cross-reference to the earlier work. He is there speaking of the kind of arguments to be used "on such subjects as moral action is concerned with, and such things as are to be chosen or avoided with a view to action".

Discourse of this kind is said to belong in part to the art of Politics; because deliberation about "whatever is appropriate to the occasion" in any moral situation will almost certainly have to take into account social factors—something beyond the individual; for the occasion is an occasion in society, and the deliberation is about "whatever is appropriate" to it. In the more special sense, of course, it becomes "political" in typical tragedies as Aristotle knew them (and as Shakespeare wrote them) because the personages are of high position, with political influence and power, and the fate, good or ill, of many others depends on their personal decisions.

I should like to say in passing that it was one of the unfortunate consequences of the individualistic "character" criticism of the last century, that this political or social element in great tragedy was overlooked or underestimated. And I have found that even now beginners tend to underestimate it. I ask you to reflect how much there is, even in the few plays of our syllabus alone, of this deliberation about what "is to be chosen or avoided with a view to action" in a wide social and political context. In the Oedipus at Colonus, in the relations of Oedipus to Theseus, to Creon and, above all, to Polynices, how much depends on their views of him as a political asset, and on his views of them in their estimation and treatment of him from their own points of view! In Samson the matter is made almost diagrammatically clear. Samson's dialogues, especially with Manoa and Dalila, are set pieces of deliberation on what particular things to "avoid" if the half-apprehended destiny of saviour of Israel is to be fulfilled, in some future course of action not yet determined or foreseen. Manoa and Dalila present each a different possible solution of Samson's political relation to the Philistines; and by different processes of argument, both are rejected and "avoided". Equally, Lear, Polyeucte, Andromaque, All for Love cannot be understood without taking into account the political element.

Next, thought is said to be shown alternatively in "enunciating some universal proposition". I fear that Bywater's verbal insensitivity has here once more done Aristotle a bad service. "Enunciating" is such a desperately awful word, a deathly word! The word means to show, to set something out so that it can be seen. The whole phrase here means, as a metaphor in literary criticism, something like "expressing some general matter", some general reflection on life or some general maxim of conduct—such as "treat your enemies as though they would become friends". Cf. Rhetoric, II. xxi on maxims …, as distinct from the particular deliberation about means to ends in the action. And this phrase covers generalised comment upon the action or growing out of it. It covers such things as the chorus in King Oedipus:

All the generations of mortal man add up to
  nothing!
Show me the man whose happiness was
  anything more than illusion
Followed by disillusion.
Here is the instance, here is Oedipus, here is
  the reason
Why I will call no mortal creature happy.
(E. F. Watling, Theban Plays, 1947, p. 63.)

The chorus, indeed, shows the very process of thought moving from the particular to the general.

It covers such things as Macbeth's speech:

She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a
 word.—
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
(V, v, 17-23.)

Another point to consider is this: Aristotle treats this element of "thought" very shortly and very drily; and it is not perhaps evident on the face of the treatise, how much he intends to include within it. He presents it first as a form of reasoning about means to ends; but this reasoning takes into account "whatever can be said, whatever is appropriate to the occasion". It is therefore reasoning about the emotional factors too; the speeches, the discourse, include everything relevant. It is only necessary to pick up his cross-reference to the Rhetoric and glance at the Rhetoric in even a superficial way, to see his awareness of the fact that deliberation of this kind, and persuasion (whether it is self-persuasion or the persuasion of others) involves opinion and feeling (taking all affections and hatreds into account); the emotional side of human nature provides the stuff on which the mind works.³ Aristotle's sense of Tragedy as an artistic whole, his sense of the total design, of the end, his sense that ultimately Tragedy deals with the great theme of "success or failure in their lives" (p. 36), does lead him to treat some of the subordinate points cursorily. Especially on the emotional side, he is so much concerned with the major emotions of the whole design and of the end, that the emotional element in the intermediate stages seems to be pushed rather out of sight, or at least not treated in proper proportion. But still his theory includes and allows for it at the vital points: (1) in the element of "desire" for the end, which is the mainspring, the sustaining force of the action; (2) in that all through, in the detail of the episodes, thought is working upon material charged with emotion.

I used just now the word "casuistry". In Protestant countries it is liable to carry derogatory implications, about deceit and shuffling and putting cushions under the elbows of sinners, and so on. But it is in fact that part of ethics, or of moral theology, which discusses not the general rules of conduct but the application of general rules to particular cases and the conflict of rules. And I used the word in the context of a character in a play deliberating upon the particular means to the achievement of the end he desires. This particularity is most important; and to show how, I call your attention to a sentence at the beginning of ch. vii of Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics:

Among statements about conduct those which are general apply more widely, but those which are particular are more genuine⁴…, since conduct has to do with individual cases, and our statements must harmonize with the facts in these cases.

Aristotle's whole treatment of ethics is concrete, definite and practical; and therefore he has very little respect for judgments about actions which take no account of the circumstances.⁵ With a man in real life, you might be able to say that as the result of the accumulated experience of his past actions he had a bent or tendency towards actions of one kind or another: but you would not be able to make any very useful ethical judgment on his conduct till the particular facts and circumstances were known. So too, within a play, "character" means very little indeed until the particular facts and circumstances have been laid down through which the character declares itself. These facts and circumstances are the Plot.

All through the Ethics Aristotle is implicitly protesting against the Platonic tendency to generalise ethical judgments, to establish sweeping theories of value. And in the Poetics his doctrine of the pre-eminence of "plot" and "action" over "character" bears all in the same direction. It is a monstrously paradoxical fate that he should have been misunderstood as slighting and minimising the individuality of character, which it is supposed to have been the great glory of later drama (especially English Elizabethan drama) to portray. His theory provides most explicitly for its portrayal. Indeed, his theory of the importance of plot is best understood as an attempt to guarantee the individuality of character. This is in complete harmony with the particularity of method which he proposes as necessary for the poet in ch. xvii. I touched on this for a different purpose in an earlier lecture, but now we are in a better position to understand its full implications.

The poet, Aristotle says (pp. 60-1), should remember:

1. To put the actual scenes as far as possible before his eyes. In this way seeing everything with the vividness of an eye-witness, as it were, he will devise what is appropriate, and be least likely to overlook incongruities.
2. As far as may be, too, the poet should even act his story with the very gestures of his personages … he who feels the emotions to be described will be the most convincing.

This is not the language of a theorist of generality. It is most necessary to emphasise this concern of Aristotle's with particularity and individuality, to which his whole theory of action leads up, because he is so often represented, or misrepresented, as the advocate of a generalised form of drama, and of a generalised or "typical" handling of character. The source of this in the Renaissance critics is rather Horace than Aristotle.

In more modern interpreters the explanation is quite plain—that more attention is given to what Aristotle says about the difference between poetry and history than to what he says about the relation between the particular and the general within poetry itself

In the comparison between poetry and history he says that poetry is more closely related to the universal than history, because of the arbitrary succession of historical events in time, in which the links between event and event cannot be easily seen to follow laws of probability or necessity. He never anywhere says that poetry does not deal with individuals and particulars at all, but that it does deal with individuals and particulars so related to each other that they reveal these laws of action and connection. There is nothing at all in his theory which precludes the subtlest development of character and motive, or the maximum, most concrete, poetic realisation of dramatic fact.

Notes

¹ See R. P. Hardie, "The Poetics of Aristotle", Mind, IV (N.S. 1895), 350-64.

²Hamlet and Macbeth are plays in which this side of it takes a very large part, in which soliloquy on questions of means to ends is a major part of the play's doings.

³ And still more, of course, that kind of "thought" which expresses the general matter is thought upon the emotional content of the play.

⁴ Grant translates "more real": what about "bear more the stamp of truth"?

⁵ [Cf. II, 9, 1109 b 23: Such [deviations from the mean] depend on particular facts, and the decision rests with perception.…