1) the arrangement of events
A person goes to the theater. Whether they go singly or with others, they find themselves in a space with hundreds of other people who have all assembled to participate in a ritual of self-forgetfulness. During the hour or two that will follow, they will shed the concerns of their daily lives and assume, through a process generating empathy, the electrifying dilemmas of the characters assembled before them on a stage, or within a choral circle, or in front of an ancient skene . Whatever the performance space, Aristotle assumes that there is only one designated area before the spectator that is reserved for the performers and the spectacle they will create. What is enacted in that empowered area is a sequence of events that will follow, one event after another. The first and most essential task of the dramatist is to determine how those events will be sequenced.
Aristotle provides us with some principles in the Poetics that are intended to govern the arrangement of the events in a manner that is most artful and emotionally satisfying. The first of these is based on his notion of wholeness. According to him, a drama should recreate one and only one action, toward which everything in the drama must militate.
With this in mind, it follows that any event that does not contribute to the overriding action of the drama should be ruthlessly excluded from the drama, and, furthermore, that if any event that is essential to the action is missing or out of place, it will sabotage the effectiveness of the whole, destroying its sense of completeness.
Aristotle looks upon the development and resolution of a drama as if it were a living organism. Once the seeds of the drama are planted in the exposition, it should appear to grow toward its conclusion on its own with a kind of inevitability that he refers to as "necessity" or "probability." If this process is artfully completed and it appear as if the drama develops on its own, the hand of the playwright should not be visible.
