Analysis of The Essay of Dramatic Poesy part 9

-
Eugenius had been listening to the words of Crites with some impatience. Now he takes up the defence of the moderns. He says that the moderns are better then the ancients. He gives various reasons for this - (i) The moderns are better because they have all the experiences of the ancients. They not only have everything which the ancients had but have also added more features of their own. (ii) The ancients divided the plays by entrances and not by acts. It was first given by Horace. (iii) The ancients used hackneyed plots. There were some plots for one type of comedy and some for another. (iv) The ancients were very much concerned about the three unities. However they themselves did not follow all the unities properly. Only the unity of action was Aristotlean while the unities of time and place were French. The pre-occupation of the ancients with the three unities, cramped their plays. (v) The ancient plays were not only defective in technique but also in moral teaching. Their plays usually had unsound morals. Often wickedness was rewarded and virtue punished in their plays. There is no such defect in the modern plays. (vi) The modern dramatists are better then the ancients because they can turn their hands easily from tragedy to comedy while the ancient dramatists specialised in either one or the other. (vii) The ancients though better in depicting scenes of cruelty, lust, horror and revenge were not good in scenes of pathos. They failed to arouse compassion in the audience. The moderns depict love scenes much better than the ancients. (viii) Often the ancients were guilty of faulty diction, coinages and metaphors.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 24

-
Aristotle continues to give important points related to epic poetry. He says that just like tragedy, epic is also of various kinds such as simple, complex, that which depend upon character, and that which depends upon suffering. Other then this, the epic and tragedy are similar in the sense that both have the same constituent elements except for song and spectacle. There is also reversal, recognition, and suffering in the epic. The thought and diction of the tragedy must also be good. Homer had excelled in these two in his ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’. The ‘Iliad’ is a story of suffering and is simple in structure while the ‘Odyssey’ is complex in structure because it has scenes of recognition and is based on character. The epic differs form a tragedy in length and meter . The proper length of a literary genre should be such that it’s beginning and end could be viewed as a complete whole. The poets of the present should try to compose poems which are limited in size. The epic, according t...
Read more

Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 26

-
Aristotle in the final chapter of The Poetics has compared the epic form of poetry and tragedy. He analyses which is the greater between the two. If the greater form of art is that which is the less vulgar one and if the greater form of art pleases the specific kind of audience then the art which appeals to every one is the vulgar one. And in fact, the performers tend to bring various unnecessary movements on the stage as if they would not be identified if they do not perform such actions. Bad flute players twist and twirl, if they have to represent ‘the quoit-throw’, or hustle the Corpyhaeus when they perform the ‘Scylla’. Tragedy is said to have the same defects. It could be compared to what the older actors said of the later ones; for, Myniscus used to call Callipides, ‘the ape’, because he over acted. The same view was presented for Pindarus. Thus tragedy is related to the epic art just as the later actors are related to the older ones. Thus the epic poetry is the higher form of p...
Read more

Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 20

-
Language viewed as a whole consists of the following parts - letter, syllable, connecting word, noun, verb, inflection or case and phrase or sentence. A letter is an indivisible sound but not any sound without intelligence. It is true that animals also utter indivisible sound but that sound cannot be called letter. These indivisible sound can be vowel, semi vowel or mute. A vowel has an audible sound which does not need the contact of the two organs of speech to be produced. A semi vowel such as s or r has an audible which needs this contact. The audible sound produced by a semi vowel is because of this contact. A mute even with the aid of this contact is not able to produce an audible sound, it needs to be combined with letters that possess some sort of sound such as g and d. The letters have different types of sounds depending upon the shape of the mouth while they are spoken and also on the places from where they originate, as aspirated or not aspirated, as short or long, as acute,...
Read more