3.4 The peripety (about-turn)
The dramatic form of the “reversal of fortune” or the “turning of the tables” was a clearly defined and recognized part of the Greek theatre and was often associated with the “anagnorisis” or recognition. These forms apparently had their origin out of the ritual celebrating the death and resurrection of the season of “mellow fruitfulness.”
The “peripeteia” was originally a change from sorrow to joy in the rebirth of the powers of nature, a change from despair to elation. Later it acquired a special association with a sudden decline from prosperity into adversity … a fall from the pinnacle of happiness to the depth of misery. In the Middle Ages, this was considered to be the very essence and heart of tragedy.
Today a sudden change from gloom to exhilaration or the other way around, can be a popular and effective incident, irresistibly dramatic – an abrupt reversal of inward soul-state or of outward fortune. In some plays one scene may stand out markedly vivid and may contain a peripety.
In reality many people encounter such physical peripeties, like hearing about one’s terminal illness from a doctor or crises in court cases, or moral peripety - the sudden evaporation of some dream or hope, or the crumbling of some illusion, an about-turn from “All’s right with the world,” to being crushed and desperate, like in the third act of “Othello”.
The most striking peripety in Ibsen, is Stockmann’s fall from “jubilant self-confidence to defiant impotence” in the third act of “An Enemy of the People”. In judicial peripeties some crushing cross-examinations occur, in which it is possible to combine the tension of the detective story with psychological issues, as is evident in Henry Arthur Jones’ “Mrs. Dane’s Defence”.
A famous romantic peripety occurs in “H.M.S. Pinafore”, where it was discovered that Captain Corcoran and Ralph Rackstraw have been changed at birth. Ralph instantly becomes captain of the ship, while the captain declines into an able-bodied seaman.