Aristotle's Poetics

I recently finsihed Aristotle's Poetics. If you have a good understanding of Roman culture, you can probably ignore the preambles, index notes, footnotes, and pretty much anything except the actual text, which is only about 50 pages. Otherwise, you have a lot of reading ahead of you. Aristotle's text has more or less been THE basis for dramatic writing since it was first written, but he references a lot of plays, songs, and mediums that simply aren't thought of today. Without that background material somewhere in your brain, you're not going to get much out of it. If you do have that, though, what you read is a clear, albeit dry, treatise on writing drama, maybe the clearest you'll ever see.