ABSTRACT
The Poetics Aristotle is urging the prime importance of Plot among the constituent parts of tragedy, and one of his arguments is that, in Bywater’s words, ‘the most powerful elements of attraction in Tragedy, the Peripeties and Discoveries, are parts of the Plot’. Aristotle’s notion of anagnorisis is narrower than the one implied here, being restricted to those tragedies with ‘complex plots’: author have seen that he regarded The Trojan Women as being free from it. Andromache going into exile, Strindberg’s Adolph to the asylum, countless others to death, Lance-Bombardier Evans to prison, Stanley in Pinter’s The Birthday Party into Monty’s care — these have the moment of anagnorisis not to be recovered from. Whether death or not, it is an image of what death, to a man aware, must be like.
