tragedy

/traj"i dee/, n., pl. tragedies.

1. a dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction.

2. the branch of the drama that is concerned with this form of composition.

3. the art and theory of writing and producing tragedies.

4. any literary composition, as a novel, dealing with a somber theme carried to a tragic conclusion.

5. the tragic element of drama, of literature generally, or of life.

6. a lamentable, dreadful, or fatal event or affair; calamity; disaster: the tragedy of war.

[1325-75; ME tragedie < ML tragedia, L tragoedia < Gk tragoidía, equiv. to trág(os) goat + oidé song (see ODE) + -ia -Y³; reason for name variously explained]

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Drama of a serious and dignified character that typically describes the development of a conflict between the protagonist and a superior force (such as destiny, circumstance, or society) and reaches a sorrowful or disastrous conclusion.

Tragedy of a high order has been created in three periods and locales, each with a characteristic emphasis and style: Attica, in Greece, in the 5th century BC; Elizabethan and Jacobean England (1558–1625); and 17th-century France. The idea of tragedy also found embodiment in other literary forms, especially the novel. See also comedy.

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▪ literature

Introduction

      branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual. By extension the term may be applied to other literary works, such as the novel.

      Although the word tragedy is often used loosely to describe any sort of disaster or misfortune, it more precisely refers to a work of art that probes with high seriousness questions concerning the role of man in the universe. The Greeks of Attica, the ancient state whose chief city was Athens, first used the word in the 5th century BC to describe a specific kind of play, which was presented at festivals (feast) in Greece. Sponsored by the local governments, these plays were attended by the entire community, a small admission fee being provided by the state for those who could not afford it themselves. The atmosphere surrounding the performances was more like that of a religious ceremony (Greek religion) than entertainment. There were altars to the gods, with priests in attendance, and the subjects of the tragedies were the misfortunes of the heroes of legend, religious myth, and history. Most of the material was derived from the works of Homer and was common knowledge in the Greek communities. So powerful were the achievements of the three greatest Greek dramatists—Aeschylus (525–456 BC), Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC), and Euripides (c. 480–406 BC)—that the word they first used for their plays survived and came to describe a literary genre that, in spite of many transformations and lapses, has proved its viability through 25 centuries.

      Historically, tragedy of a high order has been created in only four periods and locales: Attica, in Greece, in the 5th century BC; England in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, from 1558 to 1625; 17th-century France; and Europe and America during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Each period saw the development of a special orientation and emphasis, a characteristic style of theatre. In the modern period, roughly from the middle of the 19th century, the idea of tragedy found embodiment in the collateral form of the novel.

      This article focusses primarily on the development of tragedy as a literary genre. For information on the relationship of tragedy to other types of drama, see dramatic literature. The role of tragedy in the growth of theatre is discussed in theatre, Western.

Development

Origins in Greece

      The questions of how and why tragedy came into being and of the bearing of its origins on its development in subsequent ages and cultures have been investigated by historians, philologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists with results that are suggestive but conjectural. Even the etymology of the word tragedy is far from established. The most generally accepted source is the Greek tragōidia, or “goat-song,” from tragos (“goat”) and aeidein (“to sing”). The word could have referred either to the prize, a goat, that was awarded to the dramatists whose plays won the earliest competitions or to the dress (goat skins) of the performers, or to the goat that was sacrificed in the primitive rituals (ritual) from which tragedy developed.

      In these communal celebrations, a choric (chorus) dance may have been the first formal element and perhaps for centuries was the principal element. A speaker was later introduced into the ritual, in all likelihood as an extension of the role of the priest, and dialogue was established between him and the dancers, who became the chorus in the Athenian drama. Aeschylus is usually regarded as the one who, realizing the dramatic possibilities of the dialogue, first added a second speaker and thus invented the form of tragedy. That so sophisticated a form could have been fully developed by a single artist, however, is scarcely credible. Hundreds of early tragedies have been lost, including some by Aeschylus himself. Of some 90 plays attributed to him, only seven have survived.

      Four Dionysia (Great Dionysia), or feasts (Bacchanalia) of the Greek God Dionysus, were held annually in Athens. Since Dionysus once held place as the god of vegetation (agriculture, origins of) and the vine, and the goat was believed sacred to him, it has been conjectured that tragedy originated in fertility feasts to commemorate the harvest and the vintage and the associated ideas of the death and renewal of life. The purpose of such rituals is to exercise some influence over these vital forces. Whatever the original religious connections of tragedy may have been, two elements have never entirely been lost: (1) its high seriousness, befitting matters in which survival is at issue and (2) its involvement of the entire community in matters of ultimate and common concern. When either of these elements diminishes, when the form is overmixed with satiric, comic, or sentimental elements, or when the theatre of concern succumbs to the theatre of entertainment, then tragedy falls from its high estate and is on its way to becoming something else.

      As the Greeks developed it, the tragic form, more than any other, raised questions about man's existence. Why must man suffer? Why must man be forever torn between the seeming irreconcilables of good and evil, freedom and necessity, truth and deceit? Are the causes of his suffering outside himself, in blind chance, in the evil designs of others, in the malice of the gods? Are its causes within him, and does he bring suffering upon himself through arrogance, infatuation, or the tendency to overreach himself? Why is justice so elusive?

Aeschylus: the first great tragedian

      It is this last question (Greek mythology) that Aeschylus asks most insistently in his two most famous works, the Oresteia (a trilogy comprising Agamemnon, Choephoroi, and Eumenides) and Prometheus Bound (the first part of a trilogy of which the last two parts have been lost): is it right that Orestes, a young man in no way responsible for his situation, should be commanded by a god, in the name of justice, to avenge his father by murdering his mother? Is there no other way out of his dilemma than through the ancient code of blood revenge, which will only compound the dilemma? Again: was it right that in befriending mankind with the gifts of fire and the arts, Prometheus should offend the presiding god Zeus and himself be horribly punished? Aeschylus opened questions whose answers in the Homeric (Homer) stories had been taken for granted. In Homer, Orestes' patricide is regarded as an act of filial piety, and Prometheus' punishment is merely the inevitable consequence of defying the reigning deity. All of the materials of tragedy, all of its cruelty, loss, and suffering, are present in Homer and the ancient myths but are dealt with as absolutes—self-sufficient and without the questioning spirit that was necessary to raise them to the level of tragedy. It remained for Aeschylus and his fellow tragedians first to treat these “absolutes” critically and creatively in sustained dramatic form. They were true explorers of the human (humanism) spirit.

      In addition to their remarkable probing into the nature of existence, their achievements included a degree of psychological insight for which they are not generally given credit. Though such praise is usually reserved for Shakespeare and the moderns, the Athenian dramatists conveyed a vivid sense of the living reality of their characters' experience: of what it felt like to be caught, like Orestes, in desperately conflicting loyalties or to be subjected, like Prometheus, to prolonged and unjust punishment. The mood of the audience as it witnessed the acting out of these climactic experiences has been described as one of impassioned contemplation. From their myths and epics and from their history in the 6th century, the people of Athens learned that they could extend an empire and lay the foundations of a great culture. From their tragedies of the 5th century, they learned who they were, something of the possibilities and limitations of the spirit, and of what it meant, not merely what it felt like, to be alive in a world both beautiful and terrible.

      Aeschylus has been called the most theological of the Greek tragedians. His Prometheus has been compared to the Book of Job (Job, The Book of) of the Bible both in its structure (i.e., the immobilized heroic figure maintaining his cause in dialogues with visitors) and in its preoccupation with the problem of suffering at the hands of a seemingly unjust deity. Aeschylus tended to resolve the dramatic problem into some degree of harmony, as scattered evidence suggests he did in the last two parts of the Promethiad and as he certainly did in the conclusion of the Oresteia. This tendency would conceivably lead him out of the realm of tragedy and into religious assurance. But his harmonies are never complete. In his plays evil is inescapable, loss is irretrievable, suffering is inevitable. What the plays say positively is that man can learn through suffering. The chorus in Agamemnon, the first play of the Oresteia, says this twice. The capacity to learn through suffering is a distinguishing characteristic of the tragic hero, preeminently of the Greek tragic hero. He has not merely courage, tenacity, and endurance but also the ability to grow, by means of these qualities, into an understanding of himself, of his fellows, and of the conditions of existence. Suffering, says Aeschylus, need not be embittering but can be a source of knowledge. The moral force of his plays and those of his fellow tragedians can hardly be exaggerated. They were shaping agents in the Greek notion of education. It has been said that from Homer the Greeks learned how to be good Greeks; from the tragedies they learned an enlarged humanity. If it cannot be proved that Aeschylus “invented” tragedy, it is clear that he at least set its tone and established a model that is still operative. Even in the 20th century, the Oresteia has been acclaimed as the greatest spiritual work of man, and dramatists such as T.S. Eliot, in The Family Reunion (1939), and Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Flies (1943), found modern relevance in its archetypal characters, situations, and themes.

Sophocles: the purest artist

      Sophocles' life spanned almost the whole of the 5th century. He is said to have written his last play, Oedipus at Colonus, at the age of 90. Only seven of his plays, of some 125 attributed to him, survive. He won the prize in the tragic competitions 20 times and never placed lower than second.

      Sophocles has been called the great mediating figure between Aeschylus and Euripides. Of the three, it might be said that Aeschylus tended to resolve tragic tensions into higher truth, to look beyond, or above, tragedy; that Euripides' irony and bitterness led him the other way to fix on the disintegration of the individual; and that Sophocles, who is often called the “purest” artist of the three, was truest to the actual state of human experience. Unlike the others, Sophocles seems never to insinuate himself into his characters or situations, never to manipulate them into preconceived patterns. He sets them free on a course seemingly of their own choosing. He neither preaches nor rails. If life is hard and often destructive, the question Sophocles asks is not how did this come to be or why did such a misfortune have to happen but rather, given the circumstances, how must a man conduct himself, how should he act, what must he do?

      His greatest play, Oedipus the King, may serve as a model of his total dramatic achievement. Embodied in it, and suggested with extraordinary dramatic tact, are all the basic questions of tragedy, which are presented in such a way as almost to define the form itself. It is not surprising that Aristotle, a century later, analyzed it for his definition of tragedy in the Poetics. It is the nuclear Greek tragedy, setting the norm in a way that cannot be claimed for any other work, not even the Oresteia.

      In Oedipus, as in Sophocles' other plays, the chorus is much less prominent than in Aeschylus' works. The action is swifter and more highly articulated; the dialogue is sharper, more staccato, and bears more of the meaning of the play. Though much has been made of the influence of fate on the action of the play, later critics emphasize the freedom with which Oedipus acts throughout. Even before the action of the play begins, the oracle's prediction that Oedipus was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother had long since come true, though he did not realize it. Though he was fated, he was also free throughout the course of the play—free to make decision after decision, to carry out his freely purposed action to its completion. In him, Sophocles achieved one of the enduring definitions of the tragic hero—that of a man for whom the liberation of the self is a necessity. The action of the play, the purpose of which is to discover the murderer of Oedipus' father and thereby to free the city from its curse, leads inevitably to Oedipus' suffering—the loss of his wife, his kingdom, his sight. The messenger who reports Oedipus' self-blinding might well have summarized the play with “All ills that there are names for, all are here.” And the chorus' final summation deepens the note of despair: “Count no man happy,” they say in essence, “until he is dead.”

      But these were not Sophocles' ultimate verdicts. The action is so presented that the final impression is not of human helplessness at the hands of maligning gods nor of man as the pawn of fate. Steering his own course, with great courage, Oedipus has ferreted out the truth of his identity and administered his own punishment, and, in his suffering, learned a new humanity. The final impression of the Oedipus, far from being one of unmixed evil and nihilism, is of massive integrity, powerful will, and magnanimous acceptance of a horribly altered existence.

      Some 50 years later, Sophocles wrote a sequel to Oedipus the King. In Oedipus at Colonus, the old Oedipus, further schooled in suffering, is seen during his last day on earth. He is still the same Oedipus in many ways: hot-tempered, hating his enemies, contentious. Though he admits his “pollution” in the murder of his father and the marriage to his mother, he denies that he had sinned, since he had done both deeds unwittingly. Throughout the play, the theme of which has been described as the “heroization” of Oedipus, he grows steadily in nobility and awesomeness. Finally, sensing the approach of the end, he leaves the scene, to be elevated in death to a demigod, as the messenger describes the miraculous event. In such manner Sophocles leads his tragedy toward an ultimate assertion of values. His position has been described as “heroic humanism,” as making a statement of belief in the human capacity to transcend evils, within and without, by means of the human condition itself.

      Tragedy must maintain a balance between the higher optimisms of religion or philosophy, or any other beliefs that tend to explain away the enigmas and afflictions of existence, on the one hand, and the pessimism that would reject the whole human experiment as valueless and futile on the other. Thus the opposite of tragedy is not comedy but the literature of cynicism and despair, and the opposite of the tragic artist's stance, which is one of compassion and involvement, is that of the detached and cynical ironist (irony).

Euripides: the dark tragedian

      The tragedies of Euripides test the Sophoclean norm in this direction. His plays present in gruelling detail the wreck of human lives under the stresses that the gods often seem willfully to place upon them. Or, if the gods are not willfully involved through jealousy or spite, they sit idly by while man wrecks himself through passion or heedlessness. No Euripidean hero approaches Oedipus in stature. The margin of freedom is narrower, and the question of justice, so central and absolute an ideal for Aeschylus, becomes a subject for irony. In Hippolytus, for example, the goddess Aphrodite never thinks of justice as she takes revenge on the young Hippolytus for neglecting her worship; she acts solely out of personal spite. In Medea, Medea's revenge on Jason through the slaughter of their children is so hideously unjust as to mock the very question. In the Bacchae, when the frenzied Agave tears her son, Pentheus, to pieces and marches into town with his head on a pike, the god Dionysus, who had engineered the situation, says merely that Pentheus should not have scorned him. The Euripidean gods, in short, cannot be appealed to in the name of justice. Euripides' tendency toward moral neutrality, his cool tacking between sides (e.g., between Pentheus versus Dionysus and the bacchantes) leave the audience virtually unable to make a moral decision. In Aeschylus' Eumenides (the last play of the Oresteia), the morals of the gods improve. Athena (Oresteia) is there, on the stage, helping to solve the problem of justice. In Sophocles, while the gods are distant, their moral governance is not questioned. Oedipus ends as if with a mighty “So be it.” In Euripides, the gods are destructive, wreaking their capricious wills on defenseless man. Aristotle called Euripides the most tragic of the three dramatists; surely his depiction of the arena of human life is the grimmest.

      Many qualities, however, keep his tragedies from becoming literature of protest, of cynicism, or of despair. He reveals profound psychological insight, as in the delineation of such antipodal characters as Jason and Medea, or of the forces, often subconscious, at work in the group frenzy of the Bacchae. His Bacchic odes reveal remarkable lyric power. And he has a deep sense of human values, however external and self-conscious. Medea, even in the fury of her hatred for Jason and her lust for revenge, must steel herself to the murder of her children, realizing the evil of what she is about to do. In this realization, Euripides suggests a saving hope: here is a great nature gone wrong—but still a great nature.

Later Greek drama

      After Euripides, Greek drama reveals little that is significant to the history of tragedy. Performances were given during the remainder of the pre-Christian era in theatres throughout the Mediterranean world, but, with the decline of Athens as a city-state, the tradition of tragedy eroded. As external affairs deteriorated, the high idealism, the exalted sense of human capacities depicted in tragedy at its height yielded more and more to the complaints of the skeptics. The Euripidean assault on the gods ended in the debasement of the original lofty conceptions. A 20th-century British classical scholar, Gilbert Murray, used the phrase “the failure of nerve” to describe the late Greek world. It may, indeed, provide a clue to what happened. On the other hand, according to the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (Nietzsche, Friedrich), in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), a quite different influence may have spelled the end of Greek tragedy: the so-called Socratic optimism, the notion underlying the dialogues of Plato that man could “know himself” through the exercise of his reason in patient, careful dialectic—a notion that diverted questions of man's existence away from drama and into philosophy. In any case, the balance for tragedy was upset, and the theatre of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides gave way to what seems to have been a theatre of diatribe, spectacle, and entertainment.

The long hiatus

      The Roman (Latin literature) world failed to revive tragedy. Seneca (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus) (4 BC–AD 65) wrote at least eight tragedies (Senecan tragedy), mostly adaptations of Greek materials, such as the stories of Oedipus, Hippolytus, and Agamemnon, but with little of the Greek tragic feeling for character and theme. The emphasis is on sensation and rhetoric, tending toward melodrama and bombast. The plays are of interest in this context mainly as the not entirely healthy inspiration for the precursors of Elizabethan tragedy in England.

      The long hiatus in the history of tragedy between the Greeks and the Elizabethans has been variously explained. In the Golden Age (Augustan Age) of Roman literature, roughly from the birth of Virgil in 70 BC to the death of Ovid in AD 17, the Roman poets followed the example of Greek literature; although they produced great lyric and epic verse, their tragic drama lacked the probing freshness and directness fundamental to tragedy.

      With the collapse of the Roman world and the invasions of the barbarians came the beginnings of the long, slow development (Middle Ages) of the Christian Church. Churchmen and philosophers gradually forged a system, based on the Christian revelation, of the nature and destiny of man. The mass, with its daily reenactment of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, its music, and its dramatic structure, may have provided something comparable to tragic drama in the lives of the people.

      With the coming of the Renaissance, the visual arts more and more came to represent the afflictive aspects of life, and the word tragedy again came into currency. Chaucer (Chaucer, Geoffrey) (1340–1400) used the word in Troilus and Criseyde, and in The Canterbury Tales it is applied to a series of stories in the medieval style of de casibus virorum illustrium, meaning “the downfalls” (more or less inevitable) “of princes.” Chaucer used the word to signify little more than the turn of the wheel of fortune, against whose force no meaningful effort of man is possible. It remained for the Elizabethans to develop a theatre and a dramatic literature that reinstated the term on a level comparable to that of the Greeks.

Elizabethan (Elizabethan literature)

      The long beginning of the Elizabethan popular theatre, like that of the Greek theatre, lay in religious (mystery play) ceremonials (miracle play), probably in the drama in the liturgy (liturgical drama) of the two greatest events in the Christian year, Christmas and Easter. In the Early Church, exchanges between two groups of choristers, or between the choir and a solo voice, led to the idea of dialogue, just as it had in the development of Greek tragedy. The parts became increasingly elaborate, and costumes were introduced to individualize the characters. Dramatic gestures and actions were a natural development. More and more of the biblical stories were dramatized, much as the material of Homer was used by the Greek tragedians, although piously in this instance, with none of the tragic skepticism of the Greeks. In the course of generations, the popularity of the performances grew to such an extent that, to accommodate the crowds, they were moved, from inside the church to the porch, or square, in front of the church. The next step was the secularization of the management of the productions, as the towns and cities took them over. Day-long festivals were instituted, involving, as in the Greek theatre, the whole community. Cycles of plays were performed at York, Chester, and other English religious centres, depicting in sequences of short dramatic episodes the whole human story, from the Fall of Lucifer and the Creation to the Day of Doom. Each play was assigned to an appropriate trade guild (the story of Noah and the Ark, for example, went to the shipwrights), which took over complete responsibility for the production. Hundreds of actors and long preparation went into the festivals. These “miracle” and “mystery” plays, however crude they may now seem, dealt with the loftiest of subjects in simple but often powerful eloquence. Although the audience must have been a motley throng, it may well have been as involved and concerned as those of the Greek theatre.

      Once the drama became a part of the secular life of the communities, popular tastes affected its religious orientation. Comic scenes, like those involving Noah's nagging wife, a purely secular creation who does not appear in the Bible, became broader. The “tragic” scenes—anything involving the Devil or Doomsday—became more and more melodramatic. With the Renaissance came the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman cultures and the consequent development of a world view that led away from moral and spiritual absolutes and toward an increasingly skeptical individualism. The high poetic spirits of the mid-16th century began to turn the old medieval forms of the miracles and mysteries to new uses and to look to the ancient plays, particularly the lurid tragedies of Seneca, for their models. A bloody play, Gorboduc, by Thomas Sackville (Sackville, Thomas, 1st earl of Dorset) and Thomas Norton, first acted in 1561, is now known as the first formal tragedy in English, though it is far from fulfilling the high offices of the form in tone, characterization, and theme. Thomas Kyd's (Kyd, Thomas) Spanish Tragedie (c. 1589) continued the Senecan tradition of the “tragedy of blood (revenge tragedy)” with somewhat more sophistication than Gorboduc but even more bloodletting. Elizabethan tragedy never freed itself completely from certain melodramatic (melodrama) aspects of the influence of Seneca.

Marlowe and the first Christian tragedy

      The first tragedian worthy of the tradition of the Greeks was Christopher Marlowe (Marlowe, Christopher) (1564–93). Of Marlowe's tragedies, Tamburlaine (1587), Doctor Faustus (c. 1588), The Jew of Malta (1589), and Edward II (c. 1593), the first two are the most famous and most significant. In Tamburlaine, the material was highly melodramatic—Tamburlaine's popular image was that of the most ruthless and bloody of conquerors. In a verse prologue, when Marlowe invites the audience to “View but his [Tamburlaine's] picture in this tragic glass,” he had in mind little more, perhaps, than the trappings and tone of tragedy: “the stately tent of war,” which is to be his scene, and “the high astounding terms,” which will be his rhetoric. But he brought such imaginative vigour and sensitivity to bear that melodrama is transcended, in terms reminiscent of high tragedy. Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd of the 14th century, becomes the spokesman, curiously enough, for the new world of the Renaissance—iconoclastic, independent, stridently ambitious. Just as the Greek tragedians challenged tradition, Tamburlaine shouts defiance at all the norms, religious and moral, that Marlowe's generation inherited. But Tamburlaine, although he is an iconoclast, is also a poet. No one before him on the English stage had talked with such magnificent lyric power as he does, whether it be on the glories of conquest or on the beauties of Zenocrate, his beloved. When, still unconquered by any enemy, he sickens and dies, he leaves the feeling that something great, however ruthless, has gone. Here once again is the ambiguity that was so much a part of the Greek tragic imagination—the combination of awe, pity, and fear that Aristotle defined.

      In Doctor Faustus the sense of conflict between the tradition and the new Renaissance individualism is much greater. The claims of revealed Christianity are presented in the orthodox spirit of the morality and mystery plays, but Faustus' yearnings for power over space and time are also presented with a sympathy that cannot be denied. Here is modern man, tragic modern man, torn between the faith of tradition and faith in himself. Faustus takes the risk in the end and is bundled off to hell in true mystery-play fashion. But the final scene does not convey that justice has been done, even though Faustus admits that his fate is just. Rather, the scene suggests that the transcendent human individual has been caught in the consequences of a dilemma that he might have avoided but that no imaginative man could have avoided. The sense of the interplay of fate and freedom is not unlike that of Oedipus. The sense of tragic ambiguity is more poignant in Faustus than in Oedipus or Tamburlaine because Faustus is far more introspective than either of the other heroes. The conflict is inner; the battle is for Faustus' soul, a kind of conflict that neither the Greeks nor Tamburlaine had to contend with. For this reason, and not because it advocates Christian doctrine, the play has been called the first Christian tragedy.

Shakespearean tragedy (Shakespeare, William)

      Shakespeare was a long time coming to his tragic phase, the six or seven years that produced his five greatest tragedies, Hamlet (c. 1601), Othello (c. 1602), King Lear (c. 1605), Macbeth (c. 1605), and Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606). These were not the only plays written during those years. Troilus and Cressida may have come about the same time as Hamlet; All's Well That Ends Well, shortly after Othello; and Measure for Measure, shortly before King Lear. But the concentration of tragedies is sufficient to distinguish this period from that of the comedies and history plays before and of the so-called romances afterward. Although the tragic period cannot entirely be accounted for in terms of biography, social history, or current stage fashions, all of which have been adduced as causes, certain questions should be answered, at least tentatively: What is Shakespeare's major tragic theme and method? How do they relate to classical, medieval, and Renaissance traditions? In attempting to answer these questions, this proviso must be kept in mind: the degree to which he was consciously working in these traditions, consciously shaping his plays on early models, adapting Greek and Roman themes to his own purpose, or following the precepts of Aristotle must always remain conjectural. On the one hand, there is the comment by Ben Jonson (Jonson, Ben) that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek,” and Milton in “L'Allegro” speaks of him as “fancy's child” warbling “his native wood-notes wild,” as if he were unique, a sport of nature. On the other hand, Shakespeare knew Jonson (who knew a great deal of Latin and Greek) and is said to have acted in Jonson's Sejanus in 1603, a very classical play, published in 1605 with a learned essay on Aristotle as preface. It can be assumed that Shakespeare knew the tradition. Certainly the Elizabethan theatre could not have existed without the Greek and Roman prototype. For all of its mixed nature—with comic and melodramatic elements jostling the tragic—the Elizabethan theatre retained some of the high concern, the sense of involvement, and even the ceremonial atmosphere of the Greek theatre. When tragedies were performed, the stage was draped in black. Modern studies have shown that the Elizabethan theatre retained many ties with both the Middle Ages and the tradition of the Greeks.

From comedy to tragedy

      Shakespeare's earliest and most lighthearted plays reveal a sense of the individual, his innerness, his reality, his difference from every other individual, and, at times, his plight. Certain stock characters, to be sure, appear in the early comedies. Even Falstaff (Falstaff, Sir John), that triumphant individual, has a prototype in the braggadocio of Roman comedy, and even Falstaff has his tragic side. As Shakespeare's art developed, his concern for the plight or predicament or dilemma seems to have grown. His earliest history plays, for instance (Henry VI, Parts I, II, III), are little more than chronicles of the great pageant figures—kingship in all its colour and potency. Richard III, which follows them, focusses with an intensity traditionally reserved for the tragic hero on one man and on the sinister forces, within and without, that bring him to destruction. From kingship, that is, Shakespeare turned to the king, the symbolic individual, the focal man, to whom whole societies look for their values and meanings. Thus Richard III is almost wholly sinister, though there exists a fascination about him, an all but tragic ambiguity.

      Although Shakespeare's developing sense of the tragic cannot be summed up adequately in any formula, one might hazard the following: he progressed from the individual of the early comedies; to the burdened individual, such as, in Henry IV, Prince Hal, the future Henry V, who manipulates, rather than suffers, the tragic ambiguities of the world; and, finally, in the great tragedies, to (in one critic's phrase) the overburdened individual, Lear (King Lear) being generally regarded as the greatest example. In these last plays, man is at the limits of his sovereignty as a human being, where everything that he has lived by, stood for, or loved is put to the test. Like Prometheus on the crag, or Oedipus as he learns who he is, or Medea deserted by Jason, the Shakespearean tragic heroes are at the extremities of their natures. Hamlet and Macbeth are thrust to the very edge of sanity; Lear and, momentarily, Othello are thrust beyond it. In every case, as in the Greek plays, the destructive forces seem to combine inner inadequacies or evils, such as Lear's temper or Macbeth's ambition, with external pressures, such as Lear's “tiger daughters,” the witches in Macbeth, or Lady Macbeth's importunity. Once the destructive course is set going, these forces operate with the relentlessness the Greeks called Moira, or Fate.

Shakespeare's tragic art

      At the height of his powers, Shakespeare's tragic vision comprehended the totality of possibilities for good and evil as nearly as the human imagination ever has. His heroes are the vehicles of psychological, societal, and cosmic forces that tend to ennoble and glorify humanity or infect it and destroy it. The logic of tragedy that possessed him demanded an insistence upon the latter. Initially, his heroes make free choices and are free time after time to turn back, but they move toward their doom as relentlessly as did Oedipus. The total tragic statement, however, is not limited to the fate of the hero. He is but the centre of an action that takes place in a context involving many other characters, each contributing a point of view, a set of values or antivalues to the complex dialectic of the play. In Macbeth's demon-ridden Scotland, where weird things happen to men and horses turn cannibal, there is the virtuous Malcolm, and society survives. Hamlet had the trustworthy friend Horatio, and, for all the bloodletting, what was “rotten” was purged. In the tragedies, most notably Lear, the Aeschylean notion of “knowledge through suffering” is powerfully dramatized; it is most obvious in the hero, but it is also shared by the society of which he is the focal figure. The flaw in the hero may be a moral failing or, sometimes, an excess of virtue; the flaw in society may be the rottenness of the Danish court in Hamlet or the corruption of the Roman world in Antony and Cleopatra; the flaw or fault or dislocation may be in the very universe itself, as dramatized by Lear's raving at the heavens or the ghosts that walk the plays or the witches that prophesy. All these faults, Shakespeare seems to be saying, are inevitabilities of the human condition. But they do not spell rejection, nihilsm, or despair. The hero may die, but in the words of the novelist E.M. Forster to describe the redeeming power of tragedy, “he has given us life.”

      Such is the precarious balance a tragedian must maintain: the cold, clear vision that sees the evil but is not maddened by it, a sense of the good that is equally clear but refuses the blandishments of optimism or sentimentalism. Few have ever sustained the balance for long. Aeschylus tended to slide off to the right, Euripides to the left, and even Sophocles had his hero transfigured at Colonus. Marlowe's early death should perhaps spare him the criticism his first plays warrant. Shakespeare's last two tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, are close to the edge of a valueless void. The atmosphere of Macbeth is murky with evil; the action moves with almost melodramatic speed from horror to horror. The forces for good rally at last, but Macbeth himself steadily deteriorates into the most nihilistic of all Shakespeare's tragic heroes, saved in nothing except the sense of a great nature, like Medea, gone wrong. Antony, in its ambiguities and irony, has been considered close to the Euripidean line of bitterness and detachment. Shakespeare himself soon modulated into another mood in his last plays, Cymbeline (c. 1609), The Winter's Tale (c. 1610), and The Tempest (c. 1611). Each is based on a situation that could have been developed into major tragedy had Shakespeare followed out its logic as he had done with earlier plays. For whatever reason, however, he chose not to. The great tragic questions are not pressed. The Tempest, especially, for all Prospero's charm and magnanimity, gives a sense of brooding melancholy over the ineradicable evil in mankind, a patient but sad acquiescence. All of these plays end in varying degrees of harmony and reconciliation. Shakespeare willed it so.

Decline in 17th-century England

      From Shakespeare's tragedies to the closing of the theatres in England by the Puritans in 1642, the quality of tragedy is steadily worse, if the best of the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies are taken as a standard. Among the leading dramatists of the period—John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Cyril Tourneur, and John Ford—there were some excellent craftsmen and brilliant poets. Though each of them has a rightful place in the history of English drama, tragedy suffered a transmutation in their hands.

      The Jacobean dramatists—those who flourished in England during the reign of James I—failed to transcend the negative tendencies they inherited from Elizabethan tragedy: a sense of defeat, a mood of spiritual despair implicit in Marlowe's tragic thought; in the nihilistic broodings of some of Shakespeare's characters in their worst moods—Hamlet, Gloucester in Lear, Macbeth; in the metaphoric implication of the theme of insanity, of man pressed beyond the limit of endurance, that runs through many of these tragedies; most importantly, perhaps, in the moral confusion (“fair is foul and foul is fair”) that threatens to unbalance even the staunchest of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. This sinister tendency came to a climax about 1605 and was in part a consequence of the anxiety surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the accession of James I. Despite their negative tendencies, the Elizabethans, in general, had affirmed life and celebrated it; Shakespeare's moral balance, throughout even his darkest plays, remained firm. The Jacobeans, on the other hand, were possessed by death. They became superb analysts of moral confusion and of the darkened vision of humanity at cross purposes, preying upon itself; of lust, hate, and intrigue engulfing what is left of beauty, love, and integrity. There is little that is redemptive or that suggests, as had Aeschylus, that evil might be resolved by the enlightenment gained from suffering. As in the tragedies of Euripides, the protagonist's margin of freedom grows ever smaller. “You are the deed's creature,” cries a murderer to his unwitting lady accomplice in Middleton (Middleton, Thomas)'s Changeling (1622), and a prisoner of her deed she remains. Many of the plays maintained a pose of ironic, detached reportage, without the sense of sympathetic involvement that the greatest tragedians have conveyed from the beginning.

      Some of the qualities of the highest tragedians have been claimed for John Webster (Webster, John). One critic points to his search for a moral order as a link to Shakespeare and sees in his moral vision a basis for renewal. Webster's Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613) has been interpreted as a final triumph of life over death. Overwhelmed by final unleashed terror, the Duchess affirms the essential dignity of man. Despite such vestiges of greatness, however, the trend of tragedy was downward. High moral sensitivity and steady conviction are required to resist the temptation to resolve the intolerable tensions of tragedy into either the comfort of optimism (aesthetics) or the relaxed apathy of despair. Periods of the creation of high tragedy are therefore few and shortlived. The demands on artist and audience alike are very great. Forms wear out, and public taste seems destined to go through inevitable cycles of health and disease. What is to one generation powerful and persuasive rhetoric becomes bombast and bathos to the next. The inevitable materials of tragedy—violence, madness, hate, and lust—soon lose their symbolic role and become perverted to the uses of melodrama and sensationalism, mixed, for relief, with the broadest comedy or farce.

      These corruptions had gone too far when John Milton (Milton, John), 29 years after the closing of the theatres, attempted to bring back the true spirit and tone of tragedy, which he called “the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems.” His Samson Agonistes (1671), however, is magnificent “closet tragedy (closet drama)”—drama more suitable for reading than for popular performance. Modelled on the Prometheus, it recalls Aeschylus' tragedy both in its form, in which the immobilized hero receives a sequence of visitors, and in its theme, in which there is a resurgence of the hero's spirit under stress. With Restoration comedy in full swing, however, and with the “heroic play” (an overly moralized version of tragedy) about to reach its crowning achievement in John Dryden's All for Love only seven years later (published 1678), Samson Agonistes was an anachronism.

Neoclassical

Corneille and Racine

      Another attempt to bring back the ancient form had been going on for some time across the English Channel, in France. The French Classical (French literature) tragedy, whose monuments are Pierre Corneille (Corneille, Pierre)'s Cid (1637) and Jean Racine's (Racine, Jean) Bérénice (1670) and Phèdre (1677), made no attempt to be popular in the way of the Elizabethan theatre. The plays were written by and for intellectual aristocrats, who came together in an elite theatre, patronized by royalty and nobility. Gone were the bustle and pageantry of the Elizabethan tragedies, with their admixtures of whatever modes and moods the dramatists thought would work. The French playwrights submitted themselves to the severe discipline they derived from the Greek models and especially the “rules,” as they interpreted them, laid down by Aristotle. The unities of place, time, and action were strictly observed. One theme, the conflict between Passion and Reason, was uppermost. The path of Reason was the path of Duty and Obligation (noblesse oblige), and that path had been clearly plotted by moralists and philosophers, both ancient and modern. In this sense there was nothing exploratory in the French tragedy; existing moral and spiritual norms were insisted upon. The norms are never criticized or tested as Aeschylus challenged the Olympians or as Marlowe presented, with startling sympathy, the Renaissance overreacher. Corneille's Cid shows Duty triumphant over Passion, and, as a reward, hero and heroine are happily united. By the time of Phèdre, Corneille's proud affirmation of the power of the will and the reason over passion had given way to what Racine called “stately sorrow,” with which he asks the audience to contemplate Phèdre's heroic, but losing, moral struggle. Her passion for her stepson, Hippolyte, bears her down relentlessly. Her fine principles and heroic will are of no avail. Both she and Hippolyte are destroyed. The action is limited to one terrible day; there is no change of scene; there is neither comic digression nor relief—the focus on the process by which a great nature goes down is sharp and intense. Such is the power of Racine's poetry (it is untranslatable), his conception of character, and his penetrating analysis of it, that it suggests the presence of Sophoclean “heroic humanism.” In this sense it could be said that Racine tested the norms, that he uncovered a cruel injustice in the nature of a code that could destroy such a person as Phèdre. Once again, here is a world of tragic ambiguity, in which no precept or prescription can answer complicated human questions.

The English “heroic play”

      This ambiguity was all but eliminated in the “ heroic play” that vied with the comedy of the Restoration stage in England in the latter part of the 17th century. After the vicissitudes of the Civil War, the age was hungry for heroism. An English philosopher of the time, Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes, Thomas), defined the purpose of the type: “The work of an heroic poem is to raise admiration, principally for three virtues, valor, beauty, and love.” Moral concern, beginning with Aeschylus, has always been central in tragedy, but in the works of the great tragedians this concern was exploratory and inductive. The moral concern of the heroic play is the reverse. It is deductive and dogmatic. The first rule, writes Dryden (Dryden, John) (following the contemporary French critic, René Le Bossu) in his preface to his Troilus and Cressida (1679), is “to make the moral of the work; that is, to lay down to yourself what that precept of morality shall be, which you would insinuate into the people . . . .” In All for Love the moral is all too clear: Antony must choose between the path of honour and his illicit passion for Cleopatra. He chooses Cleopatra, and they are both destroyed. Only Dryden's poetry, with its air of emotional argumentation, manages to convey human complexities in spite of his moral bias and saves the play from artificiality—makes it, in fact, the finest near-tragic production of its age.

The eclipse of tragedy

      Although the annals of the drama from Dryden onward are filled with plays called tragedies by their authors, the form as it has been defined here went into an eclipse during the late 17th, the 18th, and the early 19th centuries. Reasons that have been suggested for the decline include the politics of the Restoration in England; the rise of science and, with it, the optimism of the Enlightenment throughout Europe; the developing middle class economy; the trend toward reassuring deism in theology; and, in literature, the rise of the novel and the vogue of satire. The genius of the age was discursive and rationalistic. In France and later in England, belief in Evil was reduced to the perception of evils, which were looked upon as institutional and therefore remediable. The nature of man was no longer the problem; rather, it was the better organization and management of men. The old haunting fear and mystery, the sense of ambiguity at the centre of man's nature and of dark forces working against him in the universe, were replaced by a new and confident dogma. Tragedy never lost its high prestige in the minds of the leading spirits. Theorizing upon it were men of letters as diverse as Dr. Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley, Percy Bysshe) and German philosophers from Gotthold Lessing in the 18th century to Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th. Revivals of Shakespeare's tragedies were often bowdlerized or altered, as in the happy ending for Lear in a production of 1681. Those who felt themselves called upon to write tragedies produced little but weak imitations. Shelley tried it once, in The Cenci (1819), but, as his wife wrote, “the bent of his mind went the other way”—which way may be seen in his Prometheus Unbound (1820), in which Zeus is overthrown and man enters upon a golden age, ruled by the power of love. Goethe (Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von) had the sense to stay away from tragedy: “The mere attempt to write tragedy,” he said, “might be my undoing.” He concluded his two-part Faust (1808, 1832) in the spirit of the 19th-century optimistic humanitarianism. It was not until the latter part of the 19th century, with the plays of a Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, a Russian, Anton Chekhov, a Swede, August Strindberg, and, later, an American, Eugene O'Neill, that something of the original vision returned to inspire the tragic theatre.

A new vehicle: the novel

      The theme and spirit of tragedy, meanwhile, found a new vehicle in the novel. This development is important, however far afield it may seem from the work of the formal dramatists. The English novelist Emily Brontë's (Brontë, Emily) Wuthering Heights (1847), in its grim Yorkshire setting, reflects the original concerns of tragedy: i.e., the terrifying divisions in nature and human nature, love that creates and destroys, character at once fierce and pitiable, destructive actions that are willed yet seemingly destined, as if by a malicious fate, yet the whole controlled by an imagination that learns as it goes. Another English novelist, Thomas Hardy (Hardy, Thomas), in the preface to his Woodlanders (1887), speaks of the rural setting of this and other of his novels as being comparable to the stark and simple setting of the Greek theatre, giving his novels something of that drama's intensity and sharpness of focus. His grimly pessimistic view of man's nature and destiny and of the futility of human striving, as reflected in his novels The Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), is barely redeemed for tragedy by his sense of the beauty of nature and of the beauty and dignity of human character and effort, however unavailing.

      The work of the Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad (Conrad, Joseph) (1857–1924) provides another kind of setting for novels used as vehicles of the tragic sense. Lord Jim (1900), originally conceived as a short story, grew to a full-length novel as Conrad found himself exploring in ever greater depth the perplexing, ambiguous problem of lost honour and guilt, expiation and heroism. Darkness and doubt brood over the tale, as they do over his long story “Heart of Darkness” (1899), in which Conrad's narrator, Marlow, again leads his listeners into the shadowy recesses of the human heart, with its forever unresolved and unpredictable capacities for good and evil.

Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor)'s tragic view

      In Russia, the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, particularly Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), revealed a world of paradox, alienation, and loss of identity, prophetic of the major tragic themes of the 20th century. More than any earlier novelist, Dostoyevsky appropriated to his fictions the realm of the subconscious and explored in depth its shocking antinomies and discontinuities. Sigmund Freud (Freud, Sigmund), the founder of psychoanalysis, frequently acknowledged his indebtedness to Dostoyevsky's psychological (psychological novel) insights. Dostoyevsky's protagonists are reminiscent of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, caught between the old world of orthodox belief and the new world of intense individualism, each with its insistent claims and justifications. The battleground is once more the soul of man, and the stakes are survival. Each of his major heroes—Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and the three Karamazovs—wins a victory, but it is in each case morally qualified, partial, or transient. The harmonious resolutions of the novels seem forced and are neither decisive of the action nor definitive of Dostoyevsky's total tragic view.

The American (American literature) tragic novel

      In America, Nathaniel Hawthorne's (Hawthorne, Nathaniel) novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville's (Melville, Herman) Moby Dick (1851) are surprisingly complete embodiments of the tragic form, written as they were at a time of booming American optimism, materialistic expansion, and sentimentalism in fiction—and no tragic theatre whatever. In The Scarlet Letter, a story of adultery set in colonial New England, the heroine's sense of sin is incomplete; her spirited individualism insists (as she tells her lover) that “what we did had a consecration of its own.” The resulting conflict in her heart and mind is never resolved, and, although it does not destroy her, she lives out her life in gray and tragic isolation. Melville said that he was encouraged by Hawthorne's exploration of “a certain tragic phase of humanity,” by his deep broodings and by the “blackness of darkness” in him, to proceed with similar explorations of his own in Moby Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne. Its protagonist, Captain Ahab, represents a return to what Melville called (defending Ahab's status as tragic hero) a “mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies,” whose “ponderous heart,” “globular brain,” and “nervous lofty language” prove that even an old Nantucket sea captain can take his place with kings and princes of the ancient drama. Shakespearean echoes abound in the novel; some of its chapters are written in dramatic form. Its theme and central figure, reminiscent of Job and Lear in their search for justice and of Oedipus in his search for the truth, all show what Melville might have been—a great tragic dramatist had there been a tragic theatre in America.

      Some American novelists of the 20th century carried on, however partially, the tragic tradition. Theodore Dreiser's (Dreiser, Theodore) American Tragedy (1925) is typical of the naturalistic novel, which is also represented by the work of Stephen Crane, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck. Though showing great sensitivity to environmental or sociological evils, such works fail to embody the high conception of character (as Melville describes it above) and are concerned mainly with externals, or reportage. The protagonists are generally “good” (or weak) and beaten down by society. The novels of Henry James (James, Henry), which span the period from 1876 to 1904, are concerned with what has been called the tragedy of manners. The society James projects is sophisticated, subtle, and sinister. The innocent and the good are destroyed, like Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902), who in the end “turns her face to the wall” and dies but in her death brings new vision and new values to those whose betrayals had driven her to her death.

      The trend in American fiction, as in the drama, continued in the 20th century, toward the pathos of the victim—the somehow inadequate, the sometimes insignificant figure destroyed by such vastly unequal forces that the struggle is scarcely significant. F. Scott Fitzgerald's (Fitzgerald, F. Scott) Gatsby in his novel The Great Gatsby (1925) is betrayed by his own meretricious dream, nurtured by a meretricious society. The hero of Ernest Hemingway's (Hemingway, Ernest) novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), disillusioned by war, makes a separate peace, deserts, and joins his beloved in neutral Switzerland. When she dies in childbirth, he sees it as still another example of how “they”—society, the politicians who run the war, or the mysterious forces destroying Catherine—get you in the end. The tone is lyric and pathetic rather than tragic (though Hemingway called the novel his Romeo and Juliet). Grief turns the hero away from, rather than toward, a deeper examination of life.

      Only the novels of William Faulkner (Faulkner, William), in their range and depth and in their powerful assault on the basic tragic themes, recall unmistakably the values of the tragic tradition. His “saga of the South,” as recounted in a series of novels (notably Sartoris, 1929; The Sound and the Fury, 1929; As I Lay Dying, 1930; Sanctuary, 1931; Light in August, 1932; Absalom, Absalom! 1936; Intruder in the Dust, 1948; Requiem for a Nun, 1951), incorporates some 300 years of Southern (Southern gothic) history from Indian days to the present. At first regarded as a mere exploiter of decadence, he can now be seen as gradually working beyond reportage and toward meaning. His sociology became more and more the “sin” of the South—the rape of the land, slavery, the catastrophe of the Civil War and its legacy of a cynical and devitalized materialism. Increasingly he saw the conflict as internal. The subject of art, Faulkner said in his 1949 Nobel Prize speech, is “the human heart in conflict with itself.” His insistence is on guilt as the evidence of man's fate, and on the possibility of expiation as the assertion of man's freedom. Compassion, endurance, and the capacity to learn are seen to be increasingly effective in his characters. In the veiled analogies to Christ as outcast and redeemer in Light in August and in the more explicit Christology of A Fable (1954), in the pastoral serenity following the anguish and horror in Light in August, and in the high comedy of the last scene of Intruder in the Dust, Faulkner puts into tragic fiction the belief he stated in his Nobel speech: “I decline to accept the end of man.”

Tragedy and modern drama

Tragic themes in Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov

      The movement toward naturalism in fiction in the latter decades of the 19th century did much to purge both the novel and the drama of the sentimentality and evasiveness that had so long emasculated them. In Norway Henrik Ibsen (Ibsen, Henrik) incorporated in his plays the smug and narrow ambitiousness of his society. The hypocrisy of overbearing men and women replace, in their fashion, the higher powers of the old tragedy. His major tragic theme is the futility, leading to catastrophe, of the idealist's effort to create a new and better social order. The “ problem play”—one devoted to a particular social issue—is saved in his hand from the flatness of a sociological treatise by a sense of doom, a pattern of retribution, reminiscent of the ancient Greeks. In Pillars of Society (1877), The Wild Duck (published 1884), Rosmersholm (published 1886), and The Master Builder (published 1892), for example, one sacrifice is expiated by another.

      In Sweden, August Strindberg (Strindberg, August), influenced by Ibsen, was a powerful force in the movement. The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (published 1888) recall Ibsen's attacks on religious, moral, and political orthodoxies. Strindberg's main concern, however, is with the destructive effects of sexual maladjustment and psychic imbalance. Not since Euripides' Medea or Racine's Phèdre had the tragic aspects of sex come under such powerful analysis. In this respect, his plays look forward to O'Neill's.

      Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton), the most prominent Russian dramatist of the period, wrote plays about the humdrum life of inconspicuous, sensitive people (Uncle Vanya, 1897; The Three Sisters, 1901; and The Cherry Orchard, 1904, are typical), whose lives fall prey to the hollowness and tedium of a disintegrating social order. They are a brood of lesser Hamlets without his compensating vision of a potential greatness. As in the plays of the Scandinavian dramatists, Chekhov's vision of this social evil is penetrating and acute, but the powerful, resistant counterthrust that makes for tragedy is lacking. It is a world of victims.

American tragic dramatists

      In little of the formal drama between the time of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov and the present are the full dimensions of tragedy presented. Some critics suggested that it was too late for tragedy, that modern man no longer valued himself highly enough, that too many sociological and ideological factors were working against the tragic temperament. The long and successful career of Eugene O'Neill (O'Neill, Eugene) may be a partial answer to this criticism. He has been called the first American to succeed in writing tragedy for the theatre, a fulfillment of his avowed purpose, for he had declared that in the tragic, alone, lay the meaning of life—and the hope. He sought in Freud's concept of the subconscious the equivalent of the Greek idea of fate and modelled his great trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), on Aeschylus' Oresteia. Although the hovering sense of an ancient evil is powerful, the psychological conditioning controls the characters too nakedly. They themselves declare forces that determine their behaviour, so that they seem almost to connive in their own manipulation. Desire Under the Elms (1924) presents a harsh analysis of decadence in the sexual and avaricious intrigues of a New England farmer's family, unrelieved by manifestations of the transcendent human spirit. The Great God Brown (1926) and Long Day's Journey into Night (1939–41; first performance, 1956) come closer to true tragedy. In the latter, the capacity for self-knowledge is demonstrated by each member of the wrangling Tyrone family (actually, O'Neill's own; the play is frankly autobiographical). The insistent theme of the “death wish” (another example of Freud's influence), however, indicates too radical a pessimism for tragedy; even the character of Edmund Tyrone, O'Neill's own counterpart, confesses that he has always been a little in love with death, and in another late play, The Iceman Cometh (1939), the death wish is more strongly expressed. Although he never succeeded in establishing a tragic theatre comparable to the great theatres of the past, O'Neill made a significant contribution in his sustained concentration on subjects at least worthy of such a theatre. He made possible the significant, if slighter, contributions of Arthur Miller (Miller, Arthur), whose Death of a Salesman (1949) and A View from the Bridge (1955) contain material of tragic potential that is not fully realized. Tennessee Williams' (Williams, Tennessee) Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is a sensitive study of the breakdown of a character under social and psychological stress. As with Miller's plays, however, it remains in the area of pathos rather than tragedy.

Other serious drama

      The 20th century has produced much serious and excellent drama, which, though not in the main line of the tragic tradition, deserves mention. In British theatre, George Bernard Shaw's (Shaw, George Bernard) Saint Joan (1923) and T.S. Eliot's (Eliot, T.S.) Murder in the Cathedral (1935) dramatized with great power both doubt and affirmation, the ambiguity of human motives, and the possibility of fruitless suffering that are true of the human condition as reflected by tragedy. During the Irish literary (Irish literary renaissance) revival, the work of J.M. Synge (Synge, John Millington) (Riders to the Sea, 1904) and Sean O'Casey (Shadow of a Gunman, 1923), like Faulkner's work, sought a tragic theme in the destiny of a whole people. The masterpiece of this movement, however, is not a tragedy but a comic inversion of the ancient tragedy of Oedipus—Synge's Playboy of the Western World (1907).

      The drama of social protest—exemplified in such works as the Russian Maksim Gorky's Lower Depths (1902), the German Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera (1928) and Mother Courage (1941), and the American Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty (1935)—shares the tragedians' concern for evils that frustrate or destroy human values. The evils, however, are largely external, identifiable, and, with certain recommended changes in the social order, remediable. The type shows how vulnerable tragedy is to dogma or programs of any sort. A British author, George Orwell (Orwell, George), suggested in Nineteen Eighty-four that tragedy would cease to exist under pure Marxist statism. Brecht's (Brecht, Bertolt) fine sense of irony and moral paradox redeem him from absolute dogmatism but give his work a hard satiric thrust that is inimical to tragedy. Traditional values and moral imperatives are all but neutralized in the existentialist (Existentialism) worlds of the dramas and novels of Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, Jean-Paul) and Albert Camus (Camus, Albert), two outstanding philosopher-dramatists of the post World War II era. In their works, the protagonist is called upon to forge his own values, if he can, in a world in which the disparity between the ideal (what man longs for) and the real (what he gets) is so great as to reduce the human condition to incoherence and absurdity. Plays that led to the coinage of the term the theatre of the absurd (Absurd, Theatre of the) are exemplified by Waiting for Godot (1952) and The Killer (1959), respectively by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett and the Romanian Eugène Ionesco, both of whom pursued their careers in Paris. Here, the theme of victimization is at its extreme, the despair and defeat almost absolute.

      A coherent and affirmative view of man, society, and the cosmos is vital to tragedy—however tentative the affirmation may be. Unresolved questions remain at the end of every tragedy. There is always an irrational factor, disturbing, foreboding, not to be resolved by the sometime consolations of philosophy and religion or by any science of the mind or body; there is irretrievable loss, usually though not necessarily symbolized by the death of the hero. In the course of the action, however, in the development of character, theme, and situation and in the conceptual suggestiveness of language, tragedy presents the positive terms in which these questions might be answered. The human qualities are manifest, however limited; man's freedom is real, however marginal. The forces that bear him down may be mysterious but actual—fate, the gods, chance, the power of his own or the race's past working through his soul. Though never mastered, they can be contended with, defied, and, at least in spirit, transcended. The process is cognitive; man can learn.

Absence of tragedy in Oriental drama

      In no way can the importance of a conceptual basis for tragedy be better illustrated than by a look at other drama-producing cultures with radically different ideas of the individual, his nature, and his destiny. While the cultures of India, China, and Japan have produced significant and highly artistic drama, there is little here to compare in magnitude, intensity, and freedom of form to the tragedies of the West.

      In Buddhist (Buddhism) teaching, the aim of the individual is to suppress and regulate all those questioning, recalcitrant, rebellious impulses that first impel the Western hero toward his tragic course. The goal of Nirvāṇa is the extinction of those impulses, the quieting of the passions, a kind of quietus in which worldly existence ceases. Western tragedy celebrates life, and the tragic hero clings to it: to him, it is never “sweet to die” for his country or for anything else, and the fascination for Western audiences is to follow the hero—as it were, from the inside—as he struggles to assert himself and his values against whatever would deny them. In Oriental drama, there is no such intense focus on the individual. In the Japanese Nō (Noh theatre) plays, for instance, the hero may be seen in moments of weariness and despair, of anger or confusion, but the mood is lyric, and the structure of the plays is ritualistic, with a great deal of choral intoning, dancing, and stylized action. Although a number of Nō plays can be produced together to fill a day's performance, the individual plays are very short, hardly the length of a Western one-act play. Nō plays affirm orthodoxy, rather than probing and questioning it, as Western tragedies do.

      The drama in India (Indian literature) has a long history, but there too the individual is subordinated to the mood of the idyll or romance or epic adventure. Perhaps one reason why the drama of India never developed the tragic orientation of the West is its removal from the people; it has never known the communal involvement of the Greek and Elizabethan theatres. Produced mainly for court audiences, an upper class elite, it never reflected the sufferings of common (or uncommon) humanity. Only recently has the drama in China (Chinese literature) embraced the vigour and realism of the common people, but the drama is in the service not of the individual but of a political ideology, which replaces the traditional themes of ancestor worship and filial piety. In all this, the mighty pageant figure—Oedipus, Prometheus, Lear, or Ahab standing for the individual as he alone sees and feels the workings of an unjust universe—is absent.

      An example from the Nō plays will illustrate these generalizations. In The Hoka Priests, by Zenchiku Ujinobu (1414–99), a son is confronted with Hamlet's problem—i.e., that of avenging the death of his father. He is uncertain how to proceed, since his father's murderer has many bold fellows to stand by him, while he is all alone. He persuades his brother, a priest, to help him, and disguising themselves as priests, they concoct a little plot to engage the murderer in religious conversation. There are a few words of lament—“Oh why,/ Why back to the bitter World/ Are we borne by our intent?”—and the Chorus sings lyrically about the uncertainties of life. The theme of the conversation is the unreality of the World and the reality of Thought. At an appropriate moment, the brothers cry, “Enough! Why longer hide our plot?” The murderer places his hat on the floor and exits. The brothers mime the killing of the murderer in a stylized attack upon the hat, while the Chorus describes and comments on the action: “So when the hour was come/ Did these two brothers/ By sudden resolution/ Destroy their father's foe./ For valour and piety are their names remembered/ Even in this aftertime” (translated by Arthur Waley, The Nō Plays of Japan, 1921).

      Thus the Nō avoids directly involving the audience in the emotions implicit in the events portrayed on the stage. It gives only a slight hint of the spiritual struggle in the heart of the protagonist—a struggle that is always speedily resolved in favour of traditional teaching. In play after play the action does not take place before our eyes but is reenacted by the ghost of one of the participants. Thus, the events presented are tinged with memory or longing—hardly the primary emotions that surge through and invigorate Western tragedy at its best.

Loss of viability in the West

      The absence, even in the West, of a great tragic theatre in the 20th century may be explained by the pantheon of panaceas to which modern man has subscribed. Politics, psychology, social sciences, physical sciences, nationalism, the occult—each offered a context in terms of which he might act out his destiny, were it not crowded out by the others. Modern man is not tested but harried and not by gods but, too often, by demons. In the dramas of Athens and England, tragedy was born of the impossibility of a clear-cut victory in man's struggle with powers greater than himself. In the modern drama, the struggle itself seems impossible.

      The would-be hero is saved from a meaningful death by being condemned to a meaningless life. This, too, however, has its tragic dimension, in its illustration of the power of evil to survive from millennium to millennium in the presence or the absence of the gods.

      Tragedy is a means of coming to terms with that evil. To assume that tragedy has lost viability is to forget that this viability was seriously questioned by the first Western philosopher to address himself to the problem. An account of the development of the theory of tragedy will reveal a resourcefulness in man's critical powers that can help to compensate, or occasionally even supersede, his lapsing creative powers.

Richard B. Sewall

Theory of tragedy (literary criticism)

Classical theories

      As the great period of Athenian drama drew to an end at the beginning of the 4th century BC, Athenian philosophers began to analyze its content and formulate its structure. In the thought of Plato (c. 427–347 BC), the history of the criticism of tragedy began with speculation on the role of censorship. To Plato (in the dialogue on the Laws) the state was the noblest work of art, a representation (mimēsis (mimesis)) of the fairest and best life. He feared the tragedians' command of the expressive resources of language, which might be used to the detriment of worthwhile institutions. He feared, too, the emotive effect of poetry, the Dionysian element that is at the very basis of tragedy. Therefore, he recommended that the tragedians submit their works to the rulers, for approval, without which they could not be performed. It is clear that tragedy, by nature exploratory, critical, independent, could not live under such a regimen.

      Plato is answered, in effect and perhaps intentionally, by Aristotle's (Aristotle) Poetics. Aristotle (384–322 BC) defends the purgative power of tragedy and, in direct contradiction to Plato, makes moral ambiguity the essence of tragedy. The tragic hero must be neither a villain nor a virtuous man but a “character between these two extremes, . . . a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty [ hamartia].” The effect on the audience will be similarly ambiguous. A perfect tragedy, he says, should imitate actions that excite “pity and fear.” He uses Sophocles' Oedipus the King as a paradigm. Near the beginning of the play, Oedipus asks how his stricken city (the counterpart of Plato's state) may cleanse itself, and the world he uses for the purifying action is a form of the word catharsis. The concept of catharsis provides Aristotle with his reconciliation with Plato, a means by which to satisfy the claims of both ethics and art. “Tragedy,” says Aristotle, “is an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude . . . through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.” Ambiguous means may be employed, Aristotle maintains in contrast to Plato, to a virtuous and purifying end.

      To establish the basis for a reconciliation between ethical and artistic demands, Aristotle insists that the principal element in the structure of tragedy is not character but plot. Since the erring protagonist is always in at least partial opposition to the state, the importance of tragedy lies not in him but in the enlightening event. “Most important of all,” Aristotle said, “is the structure of the incidents. For tragedy is an imitation not of men but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality . . . .” Aristotle considered the plot to be the soul of a tragedy, with character in second place. The goal of tragedy is not suffering but the knowledge that issues from it, as the denouement issues from a plot. The most powerful elements of emotional interest in tragedy, according to Aristotle, are reversal of intention or situation ( peripeteia) and recognition scenes (anagnōrisis (anagnorisis)), and each is most effective when it is coincident with the other. In Oedipus, for example, the messenger who brings Oedipus news of his real parentage, intending to allay his fears, brings about a sudden reversal of his fortune, from happiness to misery, by compelling him to recognize that his wife is also his mother.

      Later critics found justification for their own predilections in the authority of Greek drama and Aristotle. For example, the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC), in his Ars poetica (Art of Poetry), elaborated the Greek tradition of extensively narrating offstage events into a dictum on decorum forbidding events such as Medea's butchering of her boys from being performed on stage. And where Aristotle had discussed tragedy as a separate genre, superior to epic poetry, Horace discussed it as a genre with a separate style, again with considerations of decorum foremost. A theme for comedy may not be set forth in verses of tragedy; each style must keep to the place alloted it.

      On the basis of this kind of stylistic distinction, the Aeneid, the epic poem of Virgil, Horace's contemporary, is called a tragedy by the fictional Virgil in Dante's (Dante) Divine Comedy (Divine Comedy, The), on the grounds that the Aeneid treats only of lofty things. Dante (1265–1321) calls his own poem a comedy partly because he includes “low” subjects in it. He makes this distinction in his De vulgari eloquentia (1304–05; “Of Eloquence in the Vulgar”) in which he also declares the subjects fit for the high, tragic style to be salvation, love, and virtue. Despite the presence of these subjects in this poem, he calls it a comedy because his style of language is “careless and humble” and because it is in the vernacular tongue rather than Latin. Dante makes a further distinction:

Comedy . . . differs from tragedy in its subject matter, in this way, that tragedy in its beginning is admirable and quiet, in its ending or catastrophe fould and horrible . . . From this it is evident why the present work is called a comedy.

      Dante's emphasis on the outcome of the struggle rather than on the nature of the struggle is repeated by Chaucer (Chaucer, Geoffrey) and for the same reason: their belief in the providential nature of human destiny. Like Dante, he was under the influence of De consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy), the work of the 6th-century Roman philosopher Boethius (Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus) (c. 480–524) that he translated into English. Chaucer considered Fortune to be beyond the influence of the human will. In his Canterbury Tales, he introduces “The Monk's Tale” by defining tragedy as “a certeyn storie . . . / of him that stood in greet prosperitee,/ And is y-fallen out of heigh degree/ Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.” Again, he calls his Troilus and Criseyde a tragedy because, in the words of Troilus, “all that comth, comth by necessitee . . . / That forsight of divine purveyaunce/ Hath seyn alwey me to forgon Criseyde.”

Elizabethan approaches

      The critical tradition of separating the tragic and comic styles is continued by the Elizabethan English poet Sir Philip Sidney (Sidney, Sir Philip), whose Defence of Poesie (also published as An Apologie for Poetrie) has the distinction of containing the most extended statement on tragedy in the English Renaissance and the misfortune of having been written in the early 1580s (published 1595), before the first plays of Shakespeare, or even of Marlowe. Nevertheless, Sidney wrote eloquently of “high and excellent tragedy, that . . . with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration teacheth the uncertainty of this world and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded.”

      Since the word admiration here means awe, Sidney's “admiration and commiseration” are similar to Aristotle's “pity and fear.” He differs from Aristotle, however, in preferring epic to tragic poetry. The Renaissance was almost as concerned as Plato with the need to justify poetry on ethical grounds, and Sidney ranks epic higher than tragedy because it provides morally superior models of behaviour.

      Sidney goes further than mere agreement with Aristotle, however, in championing the unities of time and place. Aristotle had asserted the need for a unity of time: “Tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit.” Sidney, following the lead of a 16th-century Italian Neoclassicist, Ludovico Castelvetro (Castelvetro, Lodovico), added the unity of place: “the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day . . .” Sidney also seconds Horace's disapproval of the mingling of styles, which Sidney says produces a “mongrel tragicomedy.”

      Shakespeare's opinion of the relative merits of the genres is unknown, but his opinion of the problem itself may be surmised. In Hamlet he puts these words in the mouth of the foolish old pedant Polonius: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; scene individable, or poem unlimited . . .” (Act II, scene 2). As to the classical unities, Shakespeare adheres to them only twice and neither time in a tragedy, in The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest. And through the mouths of his characters, Shakespeare, like Aristotle, puts himself on both sides of the central question of tragic destiny—that of freedom and necessity. Aristotle says that a tragic destiny is precipitated by the hero's tragic fault, his “error or frailty” (hamartia), but Aristotle also calls this turn of events a change of “fortune.” Shakespeare's Cassius in Julius Caesar says, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves . . . ,” and in King Lear, Edmund ridicules a belief in fortune as the “foppery of the world.” But Hamlet, in a comment on the nature of hamartia, is a fatalist when he broods on the “mole of nature,” the “one defect” that some men are born with, “wherein they are not guilty,” and that brings them to disaster (Act I, scene 4). Similarly, Sophocles' Oedipus, though he says, “It was Apollo who brought my woes to pass,” immediately adds, “it was my hand that struck my eyes.” These ambiguities are a powerful source of the tragic emotion of Athenian and Elizabethan drama, unequalled by traditions that are more sure of themselves, such as French Neoclassicism, or less sure of themselves, such as 20th-century drama.

Neoclassical theory

      In the Neoclassical period Aristotle's reasonableness was replaced by rationality (Rationalism), and his moral ambiguity by the mechanics of “ poetic justice.” In the 17th century, under the guise of a strict adherence to Classical formulas, additional influences were brought to bear on the theory of tragedy. In France, the theological doctrine of Jansenism, which called for an extreme orthodoxy, exercised a strong influence. In England, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, with the reopening of the theatres, introduced a period of witty and lusty literature. In both nations, the influence of natural law—the idea that laws binding upon humanity are inferable from nature—increased, along with the influence of the exact sciences. Critics in both nations declared that Aristotle's “rules” were made to reduce nature into a method.

      In his 1679 preface to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Dryden says, “we lament not, but detest a wicked man, we are glad when we behold his crimes are punished, and that Poetical justice is done upon him.” Similar sentiments, calling for the punishment of crimes and the reward of virtue, were expressed in France. Catharsis had become vindication. Thomas Rymer (Rymer, Thomas), one of the most influential English critics of the time, in The Tragedies of The Last Age (1678), wrote that

besides the purging of the passions, something must stick by observing . . . that necessary relation and chain, whereby the causes and the effects, the vertues and rewards, the vices and their punishments are proportion'd and link'd together, how deep and dark soever are laid the Springs, and however intricate and involv'd are their operations.

      The effect was to rob tragedy of a great deal of its darkness and depth. The temper of the age demanded that mystery be brought to the surface and to the light, a process that had effects not merely different from but in part antipathetic to tragedy. Nicolas Boileau (Boileau, Nicolas), the chief spokesman of the French Neoclassical movement, in his discussion of pity and fear in Art Poétique (1674), qualified these terms with the adjectives “beguiling” and “pleasant” (pitié charmante, douce terreur), which radically changed their meaning. The purged spectator became a grateful patient.

      In his preface to Phèdre (1677), Racine (Racine, Jean) subscribed to the quid pro quo view of retribution.

I have written no play in which virtue has been more celebrated than in this one. The smallest faults are here severely punished; the mere idea of a crime is looked upon with as much horror as the crime itself.

      Of Phèdre herself, his greatest heroine, he says,

I have taken the trouble to make her a little less hateful than she is in the ancient versions of this tragedy, in which she herself resolves to accuse Hippolytus. I judged that that calumny had about it something too base and black to be put into the mouth of a Princess . . . This depravity seemed to me more appropriate to the character of a nurse, whose inclinations might be supposed to be more servile . . . .

      For Aristotle, pity and fear made a counterpoint typical of Classicism, each tempering the other to create a balance. For Racine, pity and fear each must be tempered in itself. In the marginalia to his fragmentary translation of Aristotle's Poetics, Racine wrote that in arousing the passions of pity and fear, tragedy

removes from them whatever they have of the excessive and the vicious and brings them back to a moderated condition and conformable to reason.

      Corneille (Corneille, Pierre) contradicted Aristotle outright. Discussing Le Cid he said, in A Discourse on Tragedy (1660),

Our pity ought to give us fear of falling into similar misfortune, and purge us of that excess of love which is the cause of their disaster . . . but I do not know that it gives us that, or purges us, and I am afraid that the reasoning of Aristotle on this point is but a pretty idea . . . it is not requisite that these two passions always serve together . . . it suffices . . . that one of the two bring about the purgation. . . .

      The accommodation of tragedy to Neoclassical ideas of order demanded a simplification of tragedy's complexities and ambiguities. The simplifying process was now inspired, however, by the fundamental tenet of all primitive scientific thought namely, that orderliness and naturalness are in a directly proportionate relationship. Racine declared the basis of the naturalistic effect in drama to be a strict adherence to the unities, which now seem the opposite of naturalistic. In his preface to Bérénice (1670), he asked what probability there could be when a multitude of things that would scarcely happen in several weeks are made to happen in a day. The illusion of probability, which is the Aristotelian criterion for the verisimilitude of a stage occurrence, is made to sound as if it were the result of a strict dramaturgical determinism, on the grounds that necessity is the truest path to freedom.

      Racine and Corneille both contradicted Dante and Chaucer on the indispensability of a catastrophic final scene. “Blood and deaths,” said Racine, are not necessary, for “it is enough that the action be grand, that the actors be heroic, that the passions be aroused” to produce “that stately sorrow that makes the whole pleasure of tragedy” (preface to Bérénice).

      Milton was artistically much more conservative. He prefaced his Samson Agonistes (1671) with a warning against the

error of intermixing Comic stuff with Tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons: which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people.

      He bypassed Shakespeare for the ancients and ranked Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as tragic poets unequalled yet by any others. Part of the rule, for Milton, was that which affirmed the unities. In his concurrence with the Classical idea of the purgative effect of pity and fear, Milton combined reactionary aesthetics with the scientific spirit of the recently formed Royal Society.

Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion [Aristotle on catharsis]: for so, in Physic things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours.

      Dryden spoke against a delimiting conception of either the genres or the unities. Speaking in the guise of Neander in Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (1668), he said that it was

to the honour of our nation, that we have invented, increased, and perfected a more pleasant way of writing for the stage, than was ever known to the ancients or moderns of any nation, which is tragi-comedy (tragicomedy).

      The French dramatists, he felt, through their observance of the unities of time and place, wrote plays characterized by a dearth of plot and narrowness of imagination. Racine's approach to the question of probability was turned completely around by Dryden, who asked:

How Many beautiful accidents might naturally happen in two or three days, which cannot arrive with any probability in the compass of twenty-four hours?

      The definitive critique of Neoclassical restrictions was not formulated, however, until the following century, when it was made by Samuel Johnson (Johnson, Samuel) and was, significantly, part of his 1765 preface to Shakespeare, the first major step in the long process of establishing Shakespeare as the preeminent tragic poet of post-Classical drama. On genre he wrote:

Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; . . . expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend . . . . That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.

      And on the unities:

The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. [But] the objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria . . . Surely he that imagines this may imagine more.

      Johnson's appeal to nature was the essence of subsequent Romantic criticism.

Romantic theories

      Lessing (Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim) was the first important Romantic critic (German literature). He stated one of Romanticism's (Romanticism) chief innovations in his Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69):

The names (domestic tragedy) of princes and heroes can lend pomp and majesty to a play, but they contribute nothing to our emotion. The misfortune of those whose circumstances most resemble our own, must naturally penetrate most deeply into our hearts, and if we pity kings, we pity them as human beings, not as kings.

      Within a generation, revolutions in Europe and America offered social expression of this literary precept, and a dramatic tradition dominant for 22 centuries was upturned. From the time of Aristotle, who thought that the tragic hero should be highly renowned and prosperous, the tragic hero had been an aristocrat, if not a man of royal blood. With the exception of their minor or peripheral characters, the tragic dramas of Athens, England, and France told nothing of the destinies of the mass of mankind. All this was now changed.

Coleridge (Coleridge, Samuel Taylor)

      But it is not certain that what was good for the revolution was good for tragedy. Coleridge in his critical writings of 1808–18 said that:

there are two forms of disease most preclusive of tragic worth. The first [is] a sense and love of the ludicrous, and a diseased sensibility of the assimilating power . . . that in the boldest bursts of passion will lie in wait, or at once kindle into jest . . . . The second cause is matter of exultation to the philanthropist and philosopher, and of regret to the poet , . . . namely, the security, comparative equability, and ever-increasing sameness of human life.

      In accord with this distaste for an excess of the mundane, Coleridge attacked the new German tragedies in which “the dramatist becomes a novelist in his directions to the actors, and degrades tragedy to pantomime.” To describe, or rather indicate, what tragedy should ideally be, Coleridge said “it is not a copy of nature; but it is an imitation.”

      Coleridge's operative words and phrases in his discussions of tragedy were “innate,” “from within,” “implicit,” “the being within,” “the inmost heart,” “our inward nature,” “internal emotions,” and “retired recesses.” The new philosophical dispensation in Coleridge, like the new social dispensation in Lessing, reversed the old priorities; and where there were once princes there were now burghers, and where there were once the ordinances of God and the state there were now the dictates of the heart. By means of this reversal, Coleridge effected a reconciliation of the “tragedy of fate” and the “tragedy of character” in his description of the force of fate as merely the embodiment of an interior compulsion different in scale but not in kind from the interior compulsions of character. In Classical tragedy, he said the human “will” was “exhibited as struggling with fate, a great and beautiful instance and illustration of which is the Prometheus of Aeschylus; and the deepest effect is produced, when the fate is represented as a higher and intelligent will. . . .”

      According to Coleridge, Shakespeare used the imaginative “variety” that characterizes man's inward nature in place of the mechanical regularity of the Neoclassical unities to produce plays that were “neither tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one, but a different genus, diverse in kind, not merely different in degree,—romantic dramas or dramatic romances.” In his preoccupation with the mixture of genres and his distinction between the “mechanical” (Neoclassicism) and the “organic” (Shakespeare), Coleridge was influenced by Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (delivered 1808–09, published 1809–11), by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, perhaps the most influential of German Romantic critics.

Schlegel (Schlegel, August Wilhelm von)

      Like Coleridge and most Romantic critics of tragedy, Schlegel found his champion in Shakespeare, and, also like them, he was preoccupied with the contrast between Classic and Romantic. Like Coleridge, Schlegel emphasized Shakespeare's inwardness, what Coleridge called his “implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.” It is in Shakespeare's most profound insights that Schlegel locates one of the principal distinctions between Classical and Shakespearean tragedy, in what he calls Shakespeare's “secret irony.” The irony in Oedipus the King consists in the relation between the audience's knowledge of the protagonist's situation and his own ignorance of it. But Shakespeare's “readiness to remark the mind's fainter and involuntary utterances” is so great, says Schlegel, that “nobody ever painted so truthfully as he has done the facility of self-deception, the half self-conscious hypocrisy towards ourselves, with which even noble minds attempt to disguise the almost inevitable influence of selfish motives in human nature.”

      The irony Schlegel sees in Shakespeare's characterizations also extends to the whole of the action, as well as to the separate characters. In his discussion of it he suggests the reason for the difficulty of Shakespeare's plays and for the quarrelsome, irreconcilable “interpretations” among Shakespeare's commentators:

Most poets who portray human events in a narrative or dramatic form take themselves apart, and exact from their readers a blind approbation or condemnation of whatever side they choose to support or oppose . . . . When, however, by a dexterous manoeuvre, the poet allows us an occasional glance at the less brilliant reverse of the medal, then he makes, as it were, a sort of secret understanding with the select circle of the more intelligent of his readers or spectators; he shows them that he had previously seen and admitted the validity of their tacit objections; that he himself is not tied down to the represented subject but soars freely above it. . . .

      In Greek tragedy, the commentary by the chorus was an explicit and objective fact of the drama itself. In the presentation of Shakespeare's plays, such a commentary is carried on in the separate minds of the spectators, where it is diffused, silent, and not entirely sure of itself. When the spectators speak their minds after the curtain falls, it is not surprising that they often disagree.

      In Oedipus the King, which Aristotle cited as the model of Classical tragedy, the irony of the protagonist's situation is evident to the spectator. In Hamlet, however, according to the American philosopher George Santayana (Santayana, George), writing in 1908, it is the secret ironies, half-lights, and self-contradictions that make it the central creation of Romantic tragedy. As has been noted, Coleridge objected to the dramatist's giving directions to the actors, but part of the price of not having them is to deny to the audience as well an explicit indication of the playwright's meaning.

Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich)

      George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), the immensely influential German philospher, in his Aesthetik (1820–29), proposed that the sufferings of the tragic hero are merely a means of reconciling opposing moral claims. The operation is a success because of, not in spite of, the fact that the patient dies. According to Hegel's account of Greek tragedy, the conflict is not between good and evil but between goods that are each making too exclusive a claim. The heroes of ancient tragedy, by adhering to the one ethical system by which they molded their own personality, must come into conflict with the ethical claims of another. It is the moral one-sidedness of the tragic actor, not any negatively tragic fault in his morality or in the forces opposed to him, that proves his undoing, for both sides of the contradiction, if taken by themselves, are justified.

      The nuclear Greek tragedy for Hegel is, understandably, Sophocles' Antigone, with its conflict between the valid claims of conscience (Antigone's obligation to give her brother a suitable burial) and law (King Creon's edict that enemies of the state should not be allowed burial). The two claims represent what Hegel regards as essentially concordant ethical claims. Antigone and Creon are, in this view, rather like pawns in the Hegelian dialectic—his theory that thought progresses from a thesis (i.e., an idea), through an antithesis (an idea opposing the original thesis), to a synthesis (a more comprehensive idea that embraces both the thesis and antithesis), which in turn becomes the thesis in a further progression. At the end of Antigone, something of the sense of mutually appeased, if not concordant, forces does obtain after Antigone's suicide and the destruction of Creon's family. Thus, in contrast to Aristotle's statement that the tragic actors should represent not an extreme of good or evil but something between, Hegel would have them too good to live; that is, too extreme an embodiment of a particular good to survive in the world. He also tends to dismiss other traditional categories of tragic theory. For instance, he prefers his own kind of catharsis to Aristotle's—the feeling of reconciliation.

      Hegel's emphasis on the correction of moral imbalances in tragedy is reminiscent of the “poetic justice” of Neoclassical theory, with its similar dialectic of crime and punishment. He sounds remarkably like Racine when he claims that, in the tragic denouement, the necessity of all that has been experienced by particular individuals is seen to be in complete accord with reason and is harmonized on a true ethical basis. But where the Neoclassicists were preoccupied with the unities of time and place, Hegel's concerns, like those of other Romantics, are inward. For him, the final issue of tragedy is not the misfortune and suffering of the tragic antagonists but rather the satisfaction of spirit arising from “reconciliation.” Thus, the workings of the spirit, in Hegel's view, are subject to the rationalistic universal laws.

      Hegel's system is not applicable to Shakespearean or Romantic tragedy. Such Shakespearean heroes as Macbeth, Richard III, and Mark Antony cannot be regarded as embodiments of any transcendent good. They behave as they do, says Hegel, now speaking outside of his scheme of tragedy, simply because they are the kind of men they are. In a statement pointing up the essence of uninhibited romantic lust and willfulness Hegel said: “it is the inner experience of their heart and individual emotion, or the particular qualities of their personality, which insist on satisfaction.”

Schopenhauer (Schopenhauer, Arthur) and Nietzsche

      The traditional categories of tragedy are nearly destroyed in the deepened subjectivities of Romanticism of the 19th-century German philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer and his disciple Friedrich Nietzsche. In Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The World as Will and Idea), much more than the social or ethical order is upturned. In place of God, the good, reason, soul, or heart, Schopenhauer installs the will, as reality's true inner nature, the metaphysical to everything physical in the world. In Schopenhauer, there is no question of a Hegelian struggle to achieve a more comprehensive good. There is rather the strife of will with itself, manifested by fate in the form of chance and error and by the tragic personages themselves. Both fate and men represent one and the same will, which lives and appears in them all. Its individual manifestations, however, in the form of such phenomena as chances, errors, or men, fight against and destroy each other.

      Schopenhauer accordingly rejects the idea of poetic justice: “the demand for so-called poetical justice rests on entire misconception of the nature of tragedy, and, indeed, of the nature of the world itself . . . . The true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight, that it is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin, i.e., the crime of existence itself. . . .” Schopenhauer distinguishes three types of tragic representation: (1) “by means of a character of extraordinary wickedness . . . who becomes the author of the misfortune”; (2) “blind fate—i.e., chance and error” (such as the title characters in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and “most of the tragedies of the ancients”); and (3) when “characters of ordinary morality . . . are so situated with regard to each other that their position compels them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do each other the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong” (such as, “to a certain extent,” Hamlet).

      This last kind of tragedy seems to Schopenhauer far to surpass the other two. His reason, almost too grim to record, is that it provides the widest possible play to the destructive manifestations of the will. It brings tragedy, so to speak, closest to home.

      Schopenhauer finds tragedy to be the summit of poetical art, because of the greatness of its effect and the difficulty of its achievement. According to Schopenhauer, the egoism of the protagonist is purified by suffering almost to the purity of nihilism. His personal motives become dispersed as his insight into them grows; “the complete knowledge of the nature of the world, which has a quieting effect on the will, produces resignation, the surrender not merely of life, but of the very will to live.”

      Schopenhauer's description has limited application to tragic denouements in general. In the case of his own archetypal hero, the hero's end seems merely the mirror image of his career, an oblivion of resignation or death that follows an oblivion of violence. Instead of a dialogue between higher and lower worlds of morality or feeling (which take place even in Shakespeare's darkest plays), Schopenhauer posits a succession of states as helpless in knowledge as in blindness. His “will” becomes a synonym for all that is possessed and necessity-ridden.

      Nietzsche's Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872) was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer. The two elements of tragedy, says Nietzsche, are the Apollonian (related to the Greek god Apollo, here used as a symbol of measured restraint) and the Dionysian (from Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy). His conception of the Apollonian is the equivalent of what Schopenhauer called the individual phenomenon—the particular chance, error, or man, the individuality of which is merely a mask for the essential truth of reality which it conceals. The Dionysian element is a sense of universal reality, which, according to Schopenhauer, is experienced after the loss of individual egoism. The “Dionysian ecstasy,” as defined by Nietzsche, is experienced “not as individuals but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united.”

      Nietzsche dismisses out of hand one of the most venerable features of the criticism of tragedy, the attempt to reconcile the claims of ethics and art. He says that the events of a tragedy are “supposed” to discharge pity and fear and are “supposed” to elevate and inspire by the triumph of noble principles at the sacrifice of the hero. But art, he says, must demand purity within its own sphere. To explain tragic myth, the first requirement is to seek the pleasure that is peculiar to it in the purely aesthetic sphere, without bringing in pity, fear, or the morally sublime.

      The essence of this specifically aesthetic tragic effect is that it both reveals and conceals, causing both pain and joy. The drama's exhibition of the phenomena of suffering individuals (Apollonian elements) forces upon the audience “the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena,” which in turn communicates “the exuberant fertility of the universal.” The spectators then “become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and . . . we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy.” Thus, he says, there is a desire “to see tragedy and at the same time to get beyond all seeing . . . to hear and at the same time long to get beyond all hearing.”

      The inspired force of Nietzsche's vision is mingled with a sense of nihilism:

“only after the spirit of science has been pursued to its limits, . . . may we hope for a rebirth of tragedy . . . I understand by the spirit of science the faith that first came to light in the person of Socrates—the faith in the explicability of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.”

      Nietzsche would replace the spirit of science with a conception of existence and the world as an aesthetic phenomenon and justified only as such. Tragedy would enjoy a prominent propagandistic place. It is “precisely the tragic myth that has to convince us that even the ugly and disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself.” And, consummately: “we have art in order that we may not perish through truth.”

Tragedy in music (music, Western)

      Musical dissonance was Nietzsche's model for the double effect of tragedy. The first edition of his book was titled The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, another influence from Schopenhauer, for whom music differed from all the other arts in that it is not a copy of a phenomenon but the direct copy of the will itself. He even called the world “embodied music , . . . embodied will.” Nietzsche's theorizing on the relation of the tragic theme to art forms other than the drama was in fact confirmed in such operas (opera) as Mussorgsky's version of Pushkin's tragedy Boris Godunov, Verdi's of Macbeth and Othello, and Gounod's Faust. In contrast to these resettings of received forms, Wagner, Verdi, and Bizet achieved a new kind of tragic power for Romanticism in the theme of the operatic love-death in, respectively, Tristan and Isolde, Aida, and Carmen. Thus, the previous progression of the genre from tragedy to tragicomedy to romantic tragedy continued to a literary–musical embodiment of what Nietzsche called “tragic dithyrambs.”

      An earlier prophecy than Nietzsche's regarding tragedy and opera was made by the German poet Friedrich von Schiller (Schiller, Friedrich von) in a letter of 1797 to Goethe:

I have always trusted that out of opera, as out of the choruses of the ancient festival of Bacchus, tragedy would liberate itself and develop in a nobler form. In opera, servile imitation of nature is dispensed with . . . here is . . . the avenue by which the ideal can steal its way back into the theatre.

20th-century critical theory

      In the 20th century, discussion of tragedy was sporadic until the aftermath of World War II. Then it enjoyed new vigour, perhaps to compensate for, or help explain, the dearth of genuine tragic literature, either in the novel or in the theatre. In the 1950s and 1960s countless full-length studies, articles, and monographs variously sought the essence, the vision, the view of life, or the spirit of tragedy out of a concern for the vital culture loss were the death of tragedy to become a reality. They also attempted to mediate the meaning of tragedy to a public that was denied its reality, save in revivals or an occasional approximation. Since the Romantic critics first ventured beyond the Aristotelean categories to consider tragedy, or the tragic, as a sense of life, there was an increasing tendency to regard tragedy not merely as drama but as a philosophical form. It is noteworthy that the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno's influential book, The Tragic Sense of Life (1921), barely mentions the formal drama.

      From the time of Aristotle, tragedy has achieved importance primarily as a medium of self-discovery—the discovery of man's place in the universe and in society. That is the main concern of Aristotle in his statements about reversal, recognition, and catharsis, though it remained for the Romantic critics to point it out. The loss of this concern in the facile plays of the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in the reduction of tragic mystery to confused sentimentalism. Critics of the 20th century, being less certain even than Schopenhauer or Nietzsche of what man's place in the scheme of things may be, experimented with a variety of critical approaches, just as contemporary dramatists experimented with various “theatres.” Although these critics lacked the philosophical certainties of earlier theorists, they had a richer variety of cultures and genres to instruct them. The hope of both critics and dramatists was that this multiplicity would produce not mere impressionism or haphazard eclecticism but new form and new meaning.

Leonard W. Conversi

Additional Reading

A lengthier development of many of the points made in this article may be found in R.B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (1959). J. Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (1962), examines the origins of Greek tragedy. Works concentrating on modern tragedy include George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (1961); Walter Kerr, Tragedy and Comedy (1968); and Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (1966). Special aspects of tragedy are treated in J.M.R. Margeson, The Origins of English Tragedy (1967); Eugene Vinaver, Racine and Poetic Tragedy (1955); and A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). A useful anthology of writings on tragedy is Lionel Abel (ed.), Moderns on Tragedy (1967). Other works on the subject include Richmond Hathorn, Tragedy, Myth, and Mystery (1962); Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (1960); Dorothy Krook, Elements of Tragedy (1969); and Timothy J. Reiss Tragedy and Truth (1980).

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