Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations

Do not buy the Kindle edition of this book. It is so full of errors that you cannot read it. Someone obviously scanned it with text recognition software and did not even glance at the result before publishing it, because just about every sentence contains non-words, B's substituted for S's, line breaks that make no sense, and random punctuation. I found this out after the seven day return period, unfortunately. Don't buy this.

As much as this book is nice to have and may be useful, the information is already online as a free book. The other thing you must know about the content is that most of the book is made up of references to classical plays. So unless you know your thearrical drama, plays, and other Greek, Roman, Chinese, ect.. Theatre, then you're better off using something more relevant. This does not have movie or television references. Be aware.

A last resort. If you have no other options, this is readable. It appears to be a mix of translation and optical character recognition (OCR). Some short passages/phrases are beyond readable. The main text of the 36 situations is coherent. The added text is often uncorrected OCR. The index appears as disconnected columns. A human would not have let this go by. For a few dollars, an English version (Polti) is worth it.

The person who created this electronic version of "THE THIRTY-SIX Dramatic Situations", made a very poor job of it.There are lots of spelling mistakes, probably the result of Optical Character Recognition software errors that have gone uncorrected, and they didn't bother to create a "CONTENTS", which for a reference-type book, is an essential addition.Not worth 99 cents!

I do not look at these dramatic situations a being plots as they are listed I see them as conflicts and the list really helps and how it is used and the examples given are great and give me an awesome list of conflicts and great examples of how to use them well and with practice rising above the examples will happen after time and practice.Great list of conflicts and examples to go with.

Not completely what I was expecting but it will do.

This book might satisfy some very serious student doing some sort of graduate research.It is not for the average reader or student.Its layout is poor and often confusing.Information is there if you work hard to find and understand it.Not a good buy for the buck, unless you have some very special need.The thing lost in translation from French was readability.

This is a suggested read for those wanting to become writers of novels. I was told ahead of time, it is a very slow and kinda boring read. Haven't finished yet so can't tell you whether i benefitted from it or not.

Polti suggests that there are 36 different plots in world literature. An assertion first made by Count Carlo Gozzi, an Italian Playwright, who wrote Turandot – later turned into an opera by Puccini. George Polti claims to have rediscovered these 36 dramatic situations. In his introduction he writes, “Now, to this declared fact that there are no more than thirty-six dramatic situations, is attached a singular corollary, the discovery that there are in life but thirty-six emotions.” This bold assertion is left hanging.Others on the .com site have suggested that you'll need a good reason to read this work, and I agree with them. I happened to need it for research purposes. The copy I received was cheaply priced, but not well produced, appearing to be an indifferent photocopy of the original publication.There were even a few words missing in my copy, which I was able to fill in by looking at Amazon's 'look inside' function.That said, I find this book's bold idea to be intriguing. It attempts to list 36 dramatic situations, such as the 27th: 'Discovery of the dishonor of a loved one'. These situations are further split into sub-situations such as 'Discovery of a mother's shame', or 'Discovery that one's wife has formerly been a prostitute'. Examples are then provided of where these situations appear in opera, theatre or novels. As the book was published in 1917, my main difficulty was that many of the examples it refers to are unfamiliar to me.So a bold idea, poorly produced, and with dated examples -- but intriguing nevertheless.

The worst

Reads like a text book. Translation could have been better. Over priced too. Unless you are a serious script writer, go with caution.

Manual ligero, práctico y exhaustivo que establece las bases de todas las líneas argumentales que existen y a partir de las cuales se puede trabajar.