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Victorian house or a fantastic heath, for example, and a banker or a faerie
walks onto the stage. The actions of the characters form incidents—coher-
ent units of action—that further begin to constrain what may follow. As
incident follows upon incident, and patterns of cause and effect begin to be
perceived, rough notions of the shape of the whole action begin to emerge;
that is, people in the audience begin to have expectations about what is to
come in terms of the overall plot. Where is the play going, and what is it
essentially “about”?
In Aristotelean terms, the
potential
of a play, as it progresses over time,
is formulated by the playwright into a set of
possibilities
. The number of
new possibilities introduced falls off radically as the play progresses. Every
moment of the enactment affects those possibilities, eliminating some and
making some more
probable
than others. When we learn, for instance, that
Hamlet's father was murdered, it becomes probable that Hamlet will try to
discover the identity of the murderer. Later in the play, it becomes probable
that, once he has found the villain out, Hamlet will seek revenge. But will
he succeed? At each stage of the plot, the audience can perceive more than
one line of probability (that is, more than one probable course of events),
creating engagement and varying degrees of suspense in the audience. At
the climax of a play, all of the competing lines of probability are eliminated
except one, and that one is the fi nal outcome. At the climactic moment of
Hamlet
, the only remaining probability is that he will die, and Fortinbras
will restore order to the kingdom. In this moment—the moment when
probability becomes necessity—the whole action of the play is complete.
Thus, over time, dramatic potential is formulated into possibility, probabil-
ity, and necessity.
3
This process can be visualized (highly schematically) as the “fl ying
wedge” in Figure 3.1. How this pattern is accomplished in a play depends,
in the main, upon the playwright's selection and arrangement of incidents
and how they are causally linked. Reading the diagram from left to right
shows the progression of material causality, by the way, and reading it from
right to left shows formal causality at work, where the necessary end of a
whole action functions as a kind of magnet, drawing the structure of the
action toward itself.
3. In the context of drama and as used in this topic, the terms
possibility
,
probability
, and
neces-
sity
have specifi c meanings that differ substantially from mathematical or scientifi c usage.
Readers who wish to investigate the dramatic connotations further should review the
Poetics
,
1451a-b.
