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...