On Writing: The Shaping of Charles Dickens
The Perfect Five Act Structure of 'Great Expectations'
Why is Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’ one of the most read novels ever? And also, perhaps the most adapted by screen and TV?
The simple answer is that Dickens was a genius and a great storyteller. The less simple answer is that he knew, consciously or unconsciously, how to structure a story.
The five-act structure is a dramatic conceit that goes back thousands of years.
Towards the end of the first century BC, the Roman lyric poet Horace stated: ‘Let no play be either shorter or longer than five acts.’
This paradigm was later adopted by Seneca, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
There is nothing particularly mysterious about the five-act structure.
All it does is elaborate the long second act into three parts.
In this model, however, there are three key stages lodged within the second act.
I will designate these three stages ‘Act 2/5’, ‘Act 3/5’ and ‘Act 4/5’.
(In the five-act structure, the first and last act are the same as in the three-act structure.)
There are a number of ways of delineating these three key stages.
The scholar T. W. Baldwin[AM1] , in his study Shakespeare’s Five-Act Structure (1947), and Gustav Freytag (of ‘Freytag’s pyramid’) both have definitions, but to me the most useful is that of Christopher Booker, author of The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004).
Booker identifies the first of these key stages lodged within the long second act as the dream stage of the narrative, the second as the frustration stage and the third as the nightmare stage.
During the dream stage, things go more or less according to plan for the hero.
Romeo and Juliet marry in secret.
Dorothy optimistically heads off to Oz on the Yellow Brick Road, having acquired her lovable companions.
Michael Corleone successfully protects his father against assassins.
Bridget Jones starts an affair with Daniel Cleaver and believes she has found love.
Philip Pirrip sets off to London to become a gentleman.
Macbeth becomes king.
In other words – the first sub-goal on the way to the overarching goal is achieved.
But then things start to go wrong.
The dream stage is immediately followed by the frustration stage (Act 3/5).
Here, it dawns on the protagonist that things are definitely going to get trickier before their final goal, the overarching goal (established by the end of Act One), can be achieved.
Estella proves elusive; Daniel Cleaver is untrustworthy; other gangs conspire to kill the Godfather.
The forces of antagonism gather – Malcolm, Macduff and Banquo, who are set in their role as antagonists to Macbeth by the murder of the king, defect and leave the court.
Juliet discovers she must be married to Paris; Romeo is banished for killing Tybalt; the Wicked Witch lets loose her first assaults on Dorothy.
The frustration stage straddles the mid-point.
On the other side of the mid-point, things continue to go wrong – only they get worse.
Events darken to the extent that the frustration stage mutates into the nightmare stage.
This is Act 4/5.
Macbeth murders Lady Macduff and her children, and is abandoned by all his former allies.
Juliet fakes death.
Pip learns, to his horror, that Estella is marrying Bentley Drummle and that the police are closing in on Magwitch, who will be hanged if he is caught.
The plot speeds up, trial heaping on trial.
The nightmare stage concludes with the crisis (which is the same as the crisis in the three-act drama), also known as the worst point or the ‘darkest moment before the dawn’.
And then we are back to what we originally identified as the third act of the three-act structure: Act 5/5, the climax or obligatory act, comprising the final battle and the resolution.
So how does this work in ‘Great Expectations’?
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