action. "A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end" (1450b27). He split the play into two acts: complication and denouement. He mainly used Sophocles to make his argument about the proper dramatic structure of a play.

Two types of scenes are of special interest: the reversal, which throws the action in a new direction, and the recognition, meaning the protagonist has an important revelation. Reversals should happen as a necessary and probable cause of what happened before, which implies