There has been no clearer statement of this element inherent in all plots, than that made by Aristotle in his famous twenty-century old dissection of tragedy; he says: 

“Tragedy is an imitation of an action, that is complete and whole, and of a certain magnitude (not trivial). . . .  A whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end.  A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.  An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity or in the regular course of events, but has nothing to follow it.  A middle is that which naturally follows something as some other thing follows it.  A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to the type here described.” [1]

[1] Aristotle, Poetics VII.

Let us state the first part of the doctrine in this way: 

1.  The Beginning Must State the Premises of the Problem Clearly and Simply

Although life knows neither a beginning nor an end—­not your life nor mine, but the stream of unseparate events that make up existence—­a work of art, like the playlet, must have both.  The beginning of any event in real life may lie far back in history; its immediate beginnings, however, start out closely together and distinctly in related causes and become more indistinctly related the farther back they go.  Just where you should consider the event that is the crisis of your playlet has its beginning, depends upon how you want to tell it—­in other words, it depends upon you.  No one can think for you, but there are one or two observations upon the nature of plot-beginnings that may be suggestive.

In the first place, no matter how carefully the dramatic material has been severed from connection with other events, it cannot be considered entirely independent.  By the very nature of things, it must have its roots in the past from which it springs, and these roots—­the foundations upon which the playlet rises—­must be presented to the audience at the very beginning.

If you were introducing a friend of yours and his sister and brother to your family, who had never met them before, you would tell which one was your particular friend, what his sister’s name was, and his brother’s name, too, and their relationship to your friend.  And, if the visit were unexpected, you would—­naturally and unconsciously—­determine how they happened to come and how long you might have the pleasure of entertaining them; in fact, you would fix every fact that would give your family a clear understanding of the event of their presence.  In other words, you would very informally and delicately establish their status, by outlining their relations to you and to each other, so that your family might have a clear understanding of the situation they were asked to face.