The plays of William Shakespeare are all divided into five acts, as are the plays of all Elizabethan playwrights. However, it was not the playwrights themselves who developed this convention. Rather, it was critics and scholars who later imposed that structure upon the plays. One such scholar was the German writer Gustav Freytag, who argued that nearly all plays could fit into a five-act structure. These were the five acts he theorized:
- The Exposition
- The Rising Action
- The Climax
- The Falling Action
- The Resolution
When Gustav Freytag developed this theory, he was referring to the works of the great European playwrights of the past centuries and not the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, and yet, his formula actually works quite well to describe the Phillies game that took place in the evening of July 26, 2021.