Character in tragedy

In respect of character, Aristotle gives four requirements. First and most important: the character must be good. A speech or action that manifests any kind of moral purpose is expressive of character; the character will be good if the purpose manifested is good. This applies even to women and slaves, though a woman is perhaps inferior and a slave simply lower. Second: character must be appropriate. Courage and cleverness are good, but courage of the kind appropriate to a man is not appropriate to a woman — the character must fit the type of person being portrayed.

Third: the character must be like reality — resembling actual human nature, not an idealised abstraction. Fourth: character must be consistent. Even where a poet imitates an inconsistent person, the inconsistency itself should be consistently maintained throughout. As in plot construction, so in character portraiture: what follows must be the necessary or probable result of what precedes. A character should not say or do something unless it is what that kind of person, in that kind of situation, would say or do.

The principle connects to construction. The denouement should arise from the plot itself and not depend on divine intervention — the deus ex machina that lowers a god to resolve an otherwise irresolvable situation is a failure of dramatic construction. It may be used for events outside the play — for what happened before or after the represented action — but not for the action itself. Within the action, everything must follow from necessity and probability.

Aristotle closes by noting that Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, while Euripides drew them as they are. Both are forms of tragic imitation — both show people in action — but the aspiration to the higher type is both more difficult and more characteristic of the best tragedy.