What is 'Freytag's pyramid' in Freytag's own book (MacEwan translation), and where does the popular five-box diagram depart from the text?
In MacEwan's translation Freytag describes the drama as having a 'pyramidal structure' of five parts (introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, catastrophe) joined by three 'crises' (exciting force, tragic force, force of the last suspense). He places the climax at the middle point where the two halves of the play meet, not near the end; he says only the first crisis is necessary to every play and the other two are 'good but not indispensable'; and he allows a 'double apex' when the climax is tied to a tragic force. The book is a study of stage drama (Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe), so applying the five boxes to any story is an extension the text does not make. A common secondary description (Wikipedia) says Freytag 'didn't actively argue for conflict'; the translated text says the essential nature of the drama is 'conflict and suspense', so that secondary claim is not supported by the pinned primary text.
Structured fields
{
"citations": [
{
"url": "https://archive.org/download/freytagstechniqu00freyuoft/freytagstechniqu00freyuoft_djvu.txt",
"note": "archive.org freytagstechniqu00freyuoft_djvu.txt (MacEwan 1894 translation, OCR)"
},
{
"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freytag%27s_pyramid",
"note": "archive.org freytagstechniqu00freyuoft_djvu.txt (MacEwan 1894 translation, OCR)"
}
]
}Evidence claims
- [sourced_fact] In MacEwan's translation Freytag describes the drama as having a 'pyramidal structure' of five parts (introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, catastrophe) joined by three 'crises' (exciting force, tragic force, force of the last suspense). He places the climax at the middle point where the two halves of the play meet, not near the end; he says only the first crisis is necessary to every play and the other two are 'good but not indispensable'; and he allows a 'double apex' when the climax is tied to a tragic force. The book is a study of stage drama (Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe), so applying the five boxes to any story is an extension the text does not make. A common secondary description (Wikipedia) says Freytag 'didn't actively argue for conflict'; the translated text says the essential nature of the drama is 'conflict and suspense', so that secondary claim is not supported by the pinned primary text. · locator: archive.org freytagstechniqu00freyuoft_djvu.txt (MacEwan 1894 translation, OCR) source
Rights
| component | license | hosting | redistribution | modification | training | Evidence and notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| documentation | unknown | permitted | permitted | unknown | unknown | Applies to this original summary only, not to the cited sources. |