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Aristotle on Dramatic Musical Composition: The Real Role of Literature, Catharsis, Music and Dance in the POETICS

2nd edition, 2 volumes, 2018 (hereafter ADMC).

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Errata (by page number)
Reviews of ADMC
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Errata for the 2nd edition

For some of the first copies printed, although a few of the recognized typos may exist in current copies:

On the back cover, tragoidos should be tragōidia.

p. 92: Insert "rendered"in front of "the sense (or perception) of dance and melody,"

p. 114: "Mathieson" should be "Mathiesen."

p. 128: footnote 187: "Phaedrus" in all places in this note should be "Phaedo."

p. 150: "Licyminus" should be "Licymnius."

p. 181: "Option 1: Delight in representation and delight in learning; or,"
should read
"Option 1: Representation and delight in learning; or,"

p. 196: Augustine (and others) chanced on Ambrose reading silently rather than a colleague chanced upon Augustine reading silently (cf. Book 6, chapter 3 of Augustine's Confessions).

p. 297: "3.13387b31-32" should be "3.1338b31-32"

p. 307: mimeistha should be mimeisthai

pp. 447, 449, 497, 501, 507, and 635: tragoidos should be tragōidia.

p. 592: Delete extra y in line 3.

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Reviews of ADMC

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Book Review of Aristotle on Dramatic Musical Composition. By Gregory Scott. New York: ExistencePS Press, 2018.

(The following paragraphs are excerpted from the Spring 2019 Book Review of Aristotle on Dramatic Musical Composition: The Real Role of Literature, Catharsis, Music and Dance in the POETICS in the journal Ancient Philosophy.)

"...Already noted and intimately braided into Scott's arguments are some of the smaller points—his reading requires more pointed and exacting use of rhuthmos, harmonia, and mousikē than most translators and scholars practice. The transliteration of these Greek terms presents us with words that, through the lexical fallacy known as faux ami, mislead our understanding of the actualities to which Plato and Aristotle are referring. In English these terms point out differing aspects of the arts of the muses (in the most general Greek sense of the last term—covering all of the fine arts), usually taken as metonymic or abstractions, and that despite the fact that—in the case of the middle term—any such modern sense would hang from a particular unknown to Greek practice of the day. Scott twines his arguments through numerous texts and historical musico-dramatic and philological studies to produce the conviction that the more usual senses of these terms in Plato and Aristotle is likely to be the concrete and particular—song (harmonia) and dance (rhuthmos) themselves rather than elements that can be abstracted from them; they are the names 'for the entire “order of voice” and entire “order of (body) movement”'... His arguments for these more exacting translations of key terms (including also lexis and melos) proceed through convincing articulations of the issues at stake in a variety of Platonic and Aristotelian texts, taking up various and sundry wars of athetization of several words and phrases, and are fascinating reading on their own account for the light they cast on how the texts work given his more particular readings. They make great sense of the passages he discusses, producing considerable insight into what Plato and Aristotle might well be getting at in them, dissolving quite a number of philosophical inconcinnities (p. 249)
...
Thus the catharsis clause neither belongs to the definition of poiêtikês autês nor presumes a pathological audience... (p. 251)
...
Scott's book is, I think, more important than Else's* (whose problems he [Scott] answers much more neatly), which was perhaps the magnum opus of the last century. Scott has set his reading—in greater and lesser ways—against most explications of this text since Avicenna, as he shows. Ordinarily this would make one suspicious, and I admit I myself was so, but the braiding of his arguments through the texts and what is known of the history of Greek drama, and taking account, of the many previous arguments, as well as recent criticisms of his own position, makes a work of exceptional argumentative strength and historical insight. Further, it is historically plausible that once the Arabic commentators took Peri poiētikēs to be about literary theory, 'it was very difficult to break the ensuing tradition by re-examining the ancient commentators—simply because there were none' ([p.] 527), to say nothing of several intervening cultures having no sense of dramatic performance at all. Everyone claiming to be interested in what Aristotle was really up to in that book [the Poetics] needs to read this one of Scott's (p. 252). "
*Gerald Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument, 1957.
—Gene Fendt, Albertus Magnus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Kearney (Ancient Philosophy, Volume 39, Issue 1, Spring 2019, Pages 248-252; DOI: 10.5840/ancientphil201939117)

Comments by Antonio Attisani on Aristotle on Dramatic Musical Composition

(The following is excerpted from Attisani's “Rifare il principio: Il sentiero neodrammatico”, in Il Pensiero: rivista di filosofia, Volume LVIII, 2019/1. 17-41.)

Donini's and Scott's interpretations, as surprising as they are persuasive in their main aspects, are also an indispensable prerequisite for understanding in reference to theatre not only where we come from but, above all, where we are probably going (p. 22)...

Scott...for decades has been engaged in the singular undertaking of re-reading this text and presenting an analysis aimed at challenging its critical assessment. His [2nd edition, 2018, of] Aristotle on Dramatic Musical Composition: The Real Role of Literature, Catharsis, Music and Dance in the POETICS (the title itself is revealing) marks...a journey begun with the PhD of 1992... Time is lending support to Scott, as his interpretation is increasingly being understood and favourably received... Scott is the first to thoroughly counter more than two thousand years of Aristotelian hermeneutics. He does this by re-analysing, step by step and comprehensively, a vast literature and gallery of authors hitherto considered indisputable points of reference, thus...affirming the entirely new interpretation (p. 29)...

Referring...to the end of Chapter VI of Scott's text, it is sufficient to repeat that understanding tragedy not as a type of literature but rather as musical drama shifts the centre of gravity of the Poetics towards realised theatre, which comprises acting, music and dance. This implies that the current idea of the Poetics as repressing enacted theatre vanishes like snow in the sun (p. 31)...

On issues of this magnitude, a game is being played at the highest level, because, although Scott's reading is supported by a growing number of affirmations worldwide, most of the specialists, with Stephen Halliwell in the lead, insist on repeating the old, misleading interpretations (p. 33)

[GS: With gratitude to George Ulrich for the translation]

See Previous Testimonials for testimonials for the publications from Cambridge and Oxford University Presses that form the basis of ADMC.

Related publications in chronological order

This list does not attempt to cover the vast literature on the Dramatics aka Poetics. Rather it only notes the works that take a new approach to understanding Aristotle's treatise, whether concerning (i) catharsis as the (wrongly interpolated) goal of tragedy or (ii) the nature of tragedy as mere literature versus tragedy as a fully performed art requiring music, dance and spectacle in addition to speech.

Smerdel, Anton. Aristotelova Katarsa (Skopje: Južna Srbija) 1937.

Petruševski, M. D. “La Définition de la Tragédie Chez Aristote et la Catharsis,” L'Annuaire de la Faculté de Philosophie de l'Université de Skopje, 1 (Skopje, Macedonia) 1948.

Petruševski, M. D. “Pathēmatōn Katharsin ou bien Pragmatōn Systasin?,” Ziva antika/Antiquite vivante (Skopje: Societe d'etudes classiques Ziva Antika) 1954.

Freire, António. “A Catarse Tragica em Aristoteles,” Euphrosyne, 3 (Lisbon, Portugal: Universidade de Lisboa/ Centro de Estudos Clássicos) 1969.

Brunius, Teddy. “Catharsis,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 4 vols., ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons) 1973.

Gutas, Dimitri. “On Translating Averroes' Commentaries,” Review of Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics by Charles E. Butterworth; Aristotle Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 110, No. 1 (Jan - Mar, 1990) 92-101; Stable URL - http://www.jstor.org/stable/603913
[This publication deserves emphasis here because it is apparently the first in history to state explicitly that the definition of tragedy in the Dramatics aka Poetics Chapter 6 involves performance (on stage). The previous publications noted above focussed on catharsis in the definition but accepted that Aristotle was dealing in the book with literary theory and with tragedy as a “mere” literary art.]

Scott, Gregory. Unearthing Aristotle's Dramatics: Why There is No Theory of Literature in the Poetics (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto; supervisor Francis Sparshott) 1992.

Scott, Gregory. "The Poetics of Performance: The Necessity of Performance, Spectacle, Music, and Dance in Aristotelian Tragedy," Performance and Authenticity in the Arts (Cambridge Series on Philosophy and the Arts) eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1999. 15-48. (This is revised and included in ADMC Chapter 2.)

Scott, Gregory. "Purging the Poetics," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 25, 2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 233-264. (This is reprinted in ADMC as Chapter 5.)

Veloso, Cláudio William. "Aristotle's Poetics without Katharsis, Fear, or Pity," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 33, 2007 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 255-84.

Sifakis, G.M. “The Misunderstanding of Opsis in Aristotle's Poetics,” in Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre, edited by George W.M. Harrison and Vayos Liapis (Leiden & Boston: Brill) 2013.

Scott, Gregory. Aristotle's Favorite Tragedy: Oedipus or Cresphontes? (New York: CreateSpace/Amazon) 2016; 2nd edition (New York: ExistencePS Press) 2018.

Rashed, Marwan. "Katharsis versus mimèsis: simulation des émotions et définition aristotélicienne de la tragédie," Littérature, Vol. 182, No. 2, 2016. 60-77.

Veloso, Cláudio William. Pourquoi la Poétique d'Aristote? DIAGOGE (Paris: Vrin) 2018.

Scott, Gregory. A Primer on Aristotle's Dramatics (also known as the Poetics) (New York: ExistencePS Press) February 2019.

Scott, Gregory. Book Review of Pourquoi La Poétique d'Aristote?: Diagogè, by Claudio William Veloso, in Ancient Philosophy, Volume 39, Issue 2, Fall 2019: 498-505.

Scott, Gregory. Aristotle DRAMATICS: also known as POETICS—Translation and Commentary (New York: ExistencePS Press) June 2020.

Scott, Gregory. Book Review of The Poetics in its Aristotelian Context, eds. Malcolm Heath, Pierre Destrée, and Dana Munteanu (2020), in Ancient Philosophy 42, Issue 2, Fall 2022: 573-584. For the 2nd half, that is downloadable, but potentially misleading if the 1st half has not been read, see: 2nd Half of Book Review

Replies, Reviews and Comments on Related Publications (in chronological order)

(Unless noted, comments are by G. Scott)

March 2019: Comments on Malcolm Heath's Penguin edition of Aristotle's Poetics.
     As explained in part in ADMC, Malcolm Heath (aka AnonymousC or AnonC), Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Leeds (U.K.), was the blind reviewer who dissuaded Cambridge University Press and its editor, Michael Sharp, in 2014 from publishing Aristotle on Dramatic Musical Composition (ADMC), defending to the end the traditional view that the Dramatics aka Poetics was about tragedy as literature or poetry. Leaving aside the ethics of blind reviewing, we should not be surprised with his (lack of) recommendation, given that his translation and commentary of the Poetics from Penguin in 1996 discusses Aristotle's theory in terms only of "poems," "poetry," and "poets" (instead of dramatic "musical" composition and dramatists or composers). As Heath emphasizes "A tragedy is a poem, not a performance" (p. xix), whereas ADMC demonstrates that tragedy for Aristotle is both a script (in verse) and a "musical" performance. Interestingly, as of January 2019, three years after the publication of ADMC by CreateSpace/Amazon, the Amazon website selling Heath's book has a boldfaced addition above the book description: "Essential reading for all students of Greek theatre and literature, and equally stimulating for anyone interested in literature." The future will tell how readers reconcile Heath's focus on "poems" with his (and Penguin's) emphasis now on "Greek theatre," when there is not one poem to be found in Aristotle's work and when the website is still selling Heath's version from 1996.
     On the crucial issue of catharsis: Heath translates the infamous passage in the definition of tragedy “effecting through pity and fear the purification (katharsis) of such emotions” (p. xxxvii). Yet he then never considers why pure pity and pure fear would be good for Aristotle and how pure pity would allow pure fear to be held at the same time (or vice-versa). Moreover, he adds (correctly) that for the Stagirite emotions are not bad, but, again, without addressing why pure pity and pure fear are good, says the solution cannot be that the (two) emotions are completely purged (as if katharsis now means “purgation,” which is not at issue). Rather, they are moderated (p. xxxix), exactly the solution that Averroes took in the second-ever commentary 1000 years ago, which is at least in line with the Stagirite's ethical theory. However, not only is it impossible that katharsis means “moderation” but “moderation” (meson or metrion) and not katharsis should therefore be in the definition, given Aristotle's strictures on definition in treatises like the Posterior Analytics and in the biological works.
     Yet this is not the worst. Subsequently, Heath, for the reasons that follow, adds to the dilemmas rather than solving any when he states that his view “runs counter to the widespread assumption that the reference to katharsis in the definition of tragedy in chapter 6 is meant to state the 'final cause' of tragedy—that is, the end or purpose... [and] On the interpretation that I have outlined, then, katharsis is not the function of tragedy, but a beneficial effect which tragedy has on some members of the audience [my italics]... The characteristic pleasure of tragedy is therefore not to be identified with the pleasures of text and performance, with the cognitive pleasure, or with the 'pleasurable relief' of katharsis” (pp. xli-xlii).
     Heath has emphasized how paradoxical it would be that pity and fear could be pleasurable (pp. xlii-xliii), given that they are painful emotions for the Northern Greek, and he now even admits while concluding this whole discussion that “it would perhaps be surprising if Aristotle had found a compelling solution” (p. xliii) to the dilemmas of the definition. In other words, the Northern Greek wrote the words without understanding his own theory! Moreover, instead of following his own strictures of definition, in which the elements are necessary and in which all the important elements are to be given, Aristotle for Heath adds a superficial effect that only applies to part of the audience (the more pathological ones, as Heath has explained)!
     So much for the translation and commentary that is one of the bestselling ones in the last 20 years (ranked #1 in “Aesthetics” and #8 in “Philosophy Aesthetics” according to Amazon on 8/10/19). We can only imagine how incompetent some modern readers must think Aristotle was.

July 2019: Comments on Loren D. Marsh, “The Plot Within: MEGETHOS and MĒKOS in Aristotle's POETICS,” American Journal of Philology 136 (2015)  577-606.
     Marsh offers fascinating insights into the notion of “size,” which plays a significant role in Aristotle's theory of plot in tragedy and of epic, whether concerning the number of lines in a script or the plot per se. However, Marsh does not realize the true nature of tragedy for Aristotle, taking it as so many others wrongly have (to be mere literature), and thus he continues to distort the theory of the Northern Greek. For instance, the plot for tragedy is given by the action on the stage, including (but not only limited to) the speech. In epic, the number of lines has much more significance because in Plato's and Aristotle's time it was usually performed musically by a rhapsode, and the plot was conveyed completely through the song/words, gestures, and imagination of the audience. The gestures were presumably happening typically at the same time as the song/words. In tragedy, the acting and choral elements could extend the plot and the whole work significantly (because plot is only one of the six necessary elements of tragedy for Aristotle, as detailed in Dramatics 6). Marsh's insights as already given would be much more grounded, and potentially very valuable, were they applied primarily to epic, an area that has hardly been explored rigorously for the Dramatics.
    Analogously, we would not say that the size of an opera is (only) the size of the sung libretto. The size is also determined by the spoken lines or recitative, acting and action that occurs. Moreover, leaving aside the issue of size, the acting can utterly change the surface meaning of the words. See, for instance, Franco Zeffirelli's film version of Romeo and Juliet. In the scene in which Mercutio dies, he adds a bit of levity to his first lines, immediately after he is stabbed, convincing the Montagues that he was barely touched by Tybalt's sword when Romeo attempted to intervene. The whole scene becomes heartbreakingly comic because Romeo and his friends then consider the subsequent lines to be in jest, even when Mercutio pleads for a surgeon.
    Similarly for Greek tragedy, especially for the kind defined in Dramatics 6: The choral episodes and other action increase the size of any part of the play directly connected with the script. We only need one example to prove this, recounted in Aristophanes's Frogs. In the competition against Aeschylus in Hades, Euripides notes how his predecessor's tragedies were sometimes almost half over (with the choral singing and dancing having started it) before the first line of (spoken) dialogue enters. Partly for some comic relief, I reproduce a translation by George Theodoridis of the relevant dialogue (available at: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Frogs.php):
-------------
Euripides ...I shall expose my opponent. He's an imposter, a pretentious crook! A rip off merchant! Let me tell you how he ripped off his poor audience. An audience which, I might add he took over from his own colleague, another idiot, Phrinychus [sic], who had them all well trained and prepared for him: trained to be nothing but morons! 907
And so, Aeschylus would begin with some single character, standing alone on the stage—say an Achilles or a Niobe, wrap them up from top to toe so that we see nothing of their face (what a low device for a tragedy!) nor hear anything of their voice; not even as much as a little peep!
Dionysus Quite right, not even a peep from them!
Euripides And then his chorus will let loose four long chains of interminable songs, one after another, on and on without even the slightest break, while all the others stood there interminably mute!
Dionysus Ahhhh, silence! How I enjoyed those moments! Better than all the idle chatter that fills our stage these days! 916
Euripides That's because you were an idiot! Interminably dumb!
Dionysus In sad agreement
Mmmm, most probably! But, why would he do that? All those songs, all that muteness?
Euripides Why? Because he's a rip off merchant, I tell you, that's why! A pure crook! He just wanted his audience to sit there quietly and wait and wait and wait till his dear Niobe would utter a little syllable, any syllable! And in the meantime, of course, the tragedy would drag on and on!
Aeschylus is getting impatient
Dionysus The sly rotter! He really had me hooked! To Aeschylus: Hey, you! What's up? What's with all the fidgeting and squirming?
Euripides Because I'm revealing his fraud... So! After he waffles on till the play is half over, he'd grunt out a dozen huge words, as huge as an ox, complete with crests and awesome eyebrows, horrible, dreadful things! Frightening things, which the audience had never seen before!
    [my bolding-italicization in the final paragraph]
-------------
Hence, if we, like Marsh, only count the lines of the dialogue to determine “size,” then even leaving aside any further choral action after Niobe's first words, we would estimate the size of Aeschylus's tragedy at one-half of what it really was!

July 2019: Forthcoming: Comments on Malcolm Heath, “Aristotle on the best kind of tragic plot: re-reading Poetics 13-14,” in R. Polansky and W. Wians (eds.), Reading Aristotle: Exposition and Argument, 334-351 (Leiden: Brill) 2017.
Prefatory Remarks: Heath tries to reconcile the contradiction between Chapter 13, in which Aristotle suggests that the finest type of play is like Oedipus, which of course ends very unhappily, and Chapter 14, in which Oedipus is explicitly the second-best type of “tragedy,” with the happily-ending ones like Cresphontes being the finest. Heath attempts to reconcile this matter without, e.g., even examining in any significant detail how the happily-ending serious dramas could have catharsis, pity and fear, which Heath has always accepted are legitimate in the definition of “tragedy” in Chapter 6.
(I put “tragedy” in quotation marks because no one has ever explained to the satisfaction of classicists in general whether tragōidia comes from “goat-song” or “song of the spelt (a type of beer, because tragos can also mean spelt)” or some other source and how it gets applied to the type of drama that Aristotle examines. I argue in ADMC that a better translation is “serious drama” because the Northern Greek says three times in the Dramatics that the tragōidia can go from fortune to misfortune or vice-versa. Furthermore, the best types of tragōidia in Chapter 14 are those like Cresphontes that end happily, which are ranked above the types like Oedipus that end horribly. Thus, tragedy in our sense, which was greatly influenced by J.C. Scaliger in the Renaissance, is an extremely misleading translation.)

July & December 2019: Comments on G.R.F. Ferrari, “Aristotle on Musical Catharsis and the Pleasure of a Good Story,” Phronesis 64 (2019)  117-171.
      Immediately after the publication of Ferrari's extremely lengthy article, Veloso composed a French 21-page rebuttal of the fine points. It appears in KENTRON 35, December 2019, 235-258, with availability for purchase after February 20, 2020. The digital version appears at https://journals.openedition.org/kentron

     An English translation is now available at this link:  Claudio Veloso's Response to Ferrari on Musical Catharsis

     Because of the length of my own significantly different comments, please click: Comments on Ferrari.

August 2019: Comments on Alberto Rigolio, “Aristotle's 'Poetics' in Syriac and Arabic translations: readings of tragedy,” in Khristianskii Vostok 6 (2013)  140-49.
     Rigolio recounts how only about 30 lines of the Syriac translation of the so-called Poetics survive, dealing with the definition of tragedy. The lines are from about the 9th century and they form the basis of the Arabic translation by Abū Biš Mattā ibn Yūnus (d. 940), which “survives almost entirely in the codex Parisinus Ar. 2346” (p. 140). In what I believe will become a seminal work, Rigolio reveals intentionally or unintentionally how Aristotle's dramatic theory (requiring at least performing actors, stage and speech) gets converted to mere literature at the beginning of modern treatments of the book that had no commentary in antiquity or Byzantine times. He analyzes the Syriac in detail to demonstrate how the Syriac translator's lack of understanding of Greek theater causes him to miss the importance of actors and performance (espec. pp. 141 & 145). Rigolio then explains how the subsequent translation into Arabic causes even greater distortion (pp. 142-4).
     Hopefully, in the future Rigolio will extend his examination to how the Syriac and Arabic translators construe the (Greek) passage that he translates “in a language enriched in a distinct way separately for (each) section (of the play), by (people) who act and not through narration...” (p. 141). As is perfectly clear in the sentences immediately after the definition, Aristotle says “enriched” means rhuthmos kai harmonia kai melos. Scholars have fretted over this passage for generations because of the redundancies if one tries to translate as something like “rhythm and harmony and melody,” or “rhythm and harmony, that is song.” I have shown (ADMC Ch 2) how the dilemmas simply dissipate if the passage means “dance and music, that is, music-dance (or choral composition),” and it would be fascinating to see how the Syriac and Arabic translators render it.

August 2019: Comments on William Marx, “Catharsis,” in Mathilde Bernard, Alexandre Gefen and Carole Talon-Hugon, eds., Arts et Émotions, Paris: Armand Colin, 2015, pp. 63-69 (version auteur).
Because of the length of the comments, please click: Comments on Marx.

August 2019: Comments on G.M. Sifakis, “The Misunderstanding of Opsis in Aristotle's Poetics.” Originally published in Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre, edited by George W.M. Harrison and Vayos Liapis, Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2013. These Comments apply to the “re-edition with some corrections and additions (mainly in the endnotes) of a paper published in G.W.M. Harrison V. & Liapis (eds.), Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre,...pp. 46-58,” which was downloaded from Academia.edu.
Because of the length of the comments, please click: Comments on Sifakis.

September 2019: Comments on Jose Angel Garcia Landa, “The Structure of the Fabula, 1: Aristotle's Poetics (Narrative Theory, 1),” Published online (2005) at: http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/publicaciones/narrativetheory/0.Introduction.htm and downloaded from Academia.edu, 8/30/19. Landa's Abstract: “'Narrative Theory' is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. The first section addresses the structure of the action or fabula, a mode of analysis that originates in Aristotle's Poetics, a seminal work in the theory of narrative.”
     Landa analyzes “tragedy” (and plot) as if “tragedy,” were a species of “narratology.” However, Landa ignores almost completely, if not completely, that Aristote differentiates “tragedy” from epic. According to Chapters 3, 6, 23 and 26, the latter is narrated (typically by a rhapsode with music and gestures) whereas the former is enacted on stage (with a chorus, etc.). Landa also ignores that plot itself is defined by Aristotle in Chapter 6 as the “structure of actions,” not the “structure of actions in words”
     Thus, without rigorous argument, Landa should not be assuming that the plot of tragedy (which could be done with mere acting or dance) is the same as the plot of epic, which is primarily through the words of the rhapsode narrating and the audience's imagination. If Aristotle were alive today he would point to story-ballets and silent film as art forms that can have plot with no words. Plot (muthos) is equivocal and we need to be aware of the context for its precise connotation.
     This is the kind of scholarship (no matter how interesting it may be in some ways) that has muddied the waters and that has been used to leverage Aristotle for various kinds of theory over centuries.

September 2019: Forthcoming: Comments on Ryan Drake, “Wonder, Nature, and the Ends of Tragedy,” in International Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 50, No. 1, Issue 197 (March 2010) 77-92.
Prefatory Remarks: In his abstract, Drake says:

A survey of commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics over the past century reflects a long-standing assumption that pleasure, rather than understanding, is to be seen as the real aim of tragedy, despite weak textual evidence to this end. This paper seeks to rehabilitate the role of understanding in tragedy's effect, as Aristotle sees it, to an equal status with that of its affective counterpart...I argue that the telos of tragedy in the Poetics is intended to accommodate both pleasure and incipient philosophical activity without necessarily privileging either (p. 77).

Drake often gives interesting and compelling insights on the relation of pleasure to understanding, and the article is well worth studying for that discussion, whether or not he is right on each and every of the dozens, if not hundreds, of points he makes. I only focus here on his emphasis of pleasure over understanding while he almost completely ignores what has been considered the “real aim of tragedy” for centuries, namely, catharsis. One would have expected him to say “pleasure, rather than catharsis, is...the real aim of tragedy” and to discuss the problems with why pleasure is therefore not the goal in the definition of tragedy, as Aristotle's theory of definition requires.

September 2019: Comments on on Shadi Bartsch, “Classical Poetics,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Roland Greene et al, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, 252-60.
     Bartsch gives an overview of poetry from archaic Greece to Neoplatonic times, finishing with Proclus in the 5th century CE. Her entry, with two distinct sections on Plato and Aristotle, reflects how the mangled view of Platonic and Aristotelian “poetics” has been perpetuated for 1000 years. Even though Bartsch perspicuously recognizes that Gorgias in the 5th century BCE is the first to say, in the Encomium to Helen, that “poetry is merely 'logos [speech] with meter'” (p. 253), Bartsch simply assumes that Plato and Aristotle follow suit. She in no way recognizes the relevant sense of the term poiēsis that Plato's character Diotima explains in the Symposium 205, as mousikē kai metra, which, given other Platonic texts, is best translated “music-dance and verse,” rather than “music and verse” or “the arts of the Muses and verse” (cf. ADMC pp. 26; 57; 64; 68; 80; 111; 115-7).
     Without understanding something so fundamental, it is not surprising that Bartsch continues the tradition of Plato and Aristotle following a sophist (Gorgias) instead of Plato's own Diotima, and it is unsurprising that Bartsch does not appreciate why, e.g., music and dance are important for each philosopher. Plato rails against those who stripped words from music (or vice-versa) in the context of the orchestral or theatrical arts, a lesson wholly lost on Bartsch (and all too many predecessors); cf. Laws II 669d-e; cf. ADMC pp. 119-20. Nor, then, can Bartsch explain (nor does she try to explain), e.g., why not one poem and not one lyrical poem exists in the so-called Poetics. Nor can he grasp that poiēsis is therefore a technical term for Aristotle in the treatise and not mere “poetry.” Aristotle subsumes the Diotiman sense but adds one final condition: Poiēsis is composition in music, dance, and verse with a plot, all of which explains why only three “dramatic” arts—tragedy, comedy, and epic—are covered in the book. Epic is explicitly said to be the forerunner of tragedy and Aristotle says in its definition in Chapter 23 that it should be composed on dramatic principles, even though it is performed with a solo rhapsode who gesticulates in an ordered (i.e., dance-like) way, rather than with a full chorus and with spectacle. Contrary to tragedy and comedy (or to dance qua story-ballets), all of which give plot through the actions on the stage, the rhapsode conveys the plot only through the song for Aristotle (cf. Dramatics 23-24 and 26 and ADMC pp. 6-7; 113; 115; 136; 140; 145; 160; espec. 164-7 and 206-8; 231; and 281). Had Aristotle been alive in 1930, he would surely have remarked on how plot could be given without words in early silent cinema.
     I offer no assessment on the other periods that Bartsch addresses. Hopefully, they are much sounder than her treatment of Plato and Aristotle, but I leave that evaluation to the specialists in those eras.

September 2019: GENERAL REMARK
These Comments cover publications that I missed in ADMC or that appeared after publication. However, it is tedious to continue remarking on those who have never recognized the Diotiman sense of poiēsis, even though the Symposium has been widely available since at least the Renaissance. Amazingly, that means all specialists of Platonic and Aristotelian aesthetics, including the femininist scholars who (one would think) would be enthusiastic about highlighting Diotima's importance. Because it would be impossible here to comment on each and every aspect of Aristotelian scholarship that relates to the Dramatics, in the future I only remark when someone truly advances our understanding of Aristotle's book concerning these principles of ADMC:

Aristotle follows Plato and Diotima on poiēsis being “music-dance and verse” rather than the sophist Gorgias's “poetry” (that is, language and verse). However, he treats poiēsis as a technical term for the Lyceum, adding a fourth (necessary and sufficient) condition, plot, all of which dissolves a host of heretofore unresolved dilemmas.
Rhuthmos kai harmonia always means “dance and music” rather than “rhythm and harmony” for Aristotle in the Dramatics and Politics VIII and likewise for Plato in Laws II, especially at 665a (except for one demonstrable change of meaning at 672 that for once is our “rhythm”).
Mousikē means “music-dance” at times for Plato and for Aristotle (as in Dramatics 26 and in Politics VIII 7) and melos at times is synonymous, as in Dramatics 6.
The various “musical” terms, like mimēsis, are equivocal, and we need to determine the precise sense in any given passage to grasp best the Northern Greek's intentions.
Tragōidia for both Plato and Aristotle is not “tragedy” in our sense because, e.g., Aristotle says three times in the Dramatics that the play can show protagonists going from misfortune to fortune. Rather, something like “serious drama” is a better translation. Moreover, the best serious dramas in Chapter 14 end happily and are ranked above the type like Oedipus that ends horribly.
Aristotle considers “tragedy” (used in a technical sense) in Chapter 6 to be a necessarily performed art with music, dance and spectacle, along with the language. It comes closest to our serious Broadway musical (rather than to our opera, because “music-dance” is ranked next to last in importance in the list of six necessary elements of Chapter 6 and opera would require that music be primary).
The Stagirite's book is about “musical” dramatic theory, not literature per se, and applying principles mechanically from one art form to another without sufficient justification not only ignores his adage from Chapter 25 that each art form has its own principles but can distort (and weaken) his aesthetic principles.
Neither catharsis, pity nor fear is legitimate in the definition of serious drama in Chapter 6; rather the goal of the musical and dramatic arts for Aristotle is (a proper) pleasure or “intellectual delight,” as given in Politics VIII and as explicitly said in Dramatics 23 in the definition of epic, where epic, like tragedy, gives its proper pleasure.
Although pity and fear may be inauthentic in Chapters 9 and 11 (because they actually distort the arguments there), they appear to be authentic in Chapter 13 and the first half of Chapter 14, where the Stagirite speaks of the pleasure through, not the catharsis of, pity and fear. However, the two emotions play absolutely no role in the latter half of Chapter 14, when the happily-ending plays like Cresphontes are ranked above Oedipus. More stunningly, and what is completely at odds with the traditional definition of "tragedy," Aristotle says that the plot with the virtuous person going from fortune to misfortune has neither pity nor fear because it is miaron (shocking or disgusting). All of this can be reconciled if the latter half of Chapter 14 was focussed on "tragedy" in general, whereas the type of "tragedy" discussed in Chapter 13, with Oedipus being finest, is one (or a mixture of two) of the four subtypes discussed in Chapter 18 and rarely ever emphasized by scholars.
If catharsis was explained in the Dramatics aka Poetics, as suggested by Politics VIII 7, rather than in a completely lost treatise with the same name, the explanation had to have been in the lost section on comedy, and it was primarily, if not exclusively, relevant to that art form rather than to tragōidia in Aristotle's mature work. The early dialogue On (Dramatic) Musical Composers aka On Poets, might have been different because it was greatly influenced by Plato, who himself considers catharsis very important and who applies it to various domains of philosophy.
With a handful of exceptions including M.P. Battin (1974-5) and Richard McKirihan (2010), most scholars since the Renaissance have ignored Aristotle's own theory of definition (as given at Posterior Analytics II 8-10 but more importantly at Posterior Analytics II 13.96b36-97b24; Physics II 9.200a14 and 200b6-8; Parts of Animals I 1-2; Metaphysics VII 12.1037b29-1038a36 and notably V 8.1017b17-2) despite the scholars expending much effort on understanding the definition of "tragedy." They examine, e.g., the Northern Greek's aesthetics, rhetoric, pyschology, ethics and metaphysics while leaving off the strictures of definition that he himself follows, all of which helps reveal that the catharsis-clause could not have been written by the Stagirite and must have been wrongfully interpolated by a later editor. Probably the editor thought that the doctrine in the early, Platonic-influenced and mostly lost On "Musical" Composers aka On Poets, which makes use of catharsis, was still held by Aristotle when he wrote the Dramatics.
The Dramatics, as one of the greatest scholars of ancient Greek philosophy of the 19th century, Eduard Zeller once wrote, “shows many greater or smaller gaps, as also interpolation...and inversions...which sufficiently prove that we only possess Aristotle's work in a mutilated and hopelessly corrupt condition” (from Costelloe, B.F.C. and J.H. Muirhead, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics: Being a Translation from Zeller's “Philosophy of the Greeks,” in Two Volumes, New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1962).

October 2019: Comments on Mark Griffith, “Music and Dance in Tragedy after the Fifth Century” in Vayos Liapis and Antonis K. Petrides, eds., Greek Tragedy After the Fifth Century: A Survey from ca. 400 BC to ca. AD 400, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 204-42.
Because of the length of the comments, please click: Comments on Griffith.

January 2020: Comments on A.P. David, “The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics” (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 2006.
     In a book that fascinatingly attempts to show the connection of ancient Greek performed poetry with dance (something that J.W. Fitton and T.B.L. Webster pursued admirably in the 1960's-1970's), helping show, for example, why meters have “feet,” David recognizes that choreia (“choral art” or “choristry”) is said by Plato (Laws II, 654b) to be “dance and song, taken as a whole” (p. 35). Indeed, the chorus sang and danced. No issue there.
     However, David hurts his worthwhile cause by going on to mangle 665a, in which Plato discusses children putting order into their voice and their wild jumps, and in which the Athenian repeats 654a, but with synonyms harmonia (for “song” or “music,” and not “harmony” in our sense, which the ancient Greeks did not have in music) and rhuthmos, which David explicitly recognizes later (p. 36) Plato has called at that passage “(the name of) the order of (physical) movement,” namely, ordering the wild jumps. Rhuthmos must mean dance here, and Plato immediately adds that the combination of the two is, again, choreia.
     Yet David tries to force through an interpretation in which harmonia means something like accent and rhuthmos something like stress. This would be analogous to saying that tempi and dynamic (or any other two narrowly scoped aspects of the aural arts) combine to make song when song is really words combined with music. Tempi and dynamics, although important, hardly make up song—what about pitch, melody, language, etc?
     The full arguments and evidence why harmonia and rhuthmos must mean “song (or music)” and “dance” (as the closest term to “ordered [body] movement”) is given in ADMC 1 (2018), pp. 28-105 and espec. pp. 42-54 & 60-1. Still, the more scholars try to grasp how dance fits into the performance arts of Greece, the better they will sometimes understand Greek aesthetics. Another case in point: Classicists like Armand D'Angour and Naomi Weiss are writing more and more about the markings on manuscripts showing how music fits to the script in, e.g., Euripidean tragedy. Yet at least some of them seem to be disproportionately baffled at why, e.g., a word like “jump” is found. It is not illogical to recognize this word is a reminder to a director of what the chorus might be doing at that moment, since there was no dance notation at the time.