12 Key excerpts on "Tragedy in Drama"
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Tragedy and Dramatic TheatreHans-Thies Lehmann, Henry Erik Butler(Authors)
2016(Publication Date)
Routledge(Publisher)
5 By the same token, any perspective is inadequate which sees theatrical phenomena only abstractly and discusses them as such; while seeking to avoid the error of limiting matters to textual substance, one must not disregard the radical historical transformations that have occurred in the theatre – the contexts in which tragedies took (and take) shape in the first place. Ancient theatre and medieval plays, Renaissance and Baroque tragedy (which we will define as “dramatic”), the bourgeois proscenium stage, the radical opening of the theatre undertaken by the historical avant-gardes, postdramatic and performance-oriented theatre in the age of mass media – time and again, the art of theatre has reinvented itself so thoroughly that it is never accurate to discuss “the” theatre, in general, as an aspect of tragedy. It is only possible to speak of “the” theatre of tragedy if one presumes that there is only one basic form of theatre, the “dramatic” form; yet doing so means holding to a norm which in fact has been more or less restricted to a few centuries of European history.
This point brings us to the second impulse to which the work at hand owes its genesis. Our study seeks to submit the fruits of decades of exploration in order to bring the perspective derived from investigating the “postdramatic” character of contemporary theatre in the broadest sense to bear on the “dramatic” tradition of tragedy in the narrower sense. In the context of the questions raised – which have larger historical ramifications – the concept of the “postdramatic” undergoes further elaboration. In this context, it refers not just to experimental forms of theatre since the 1960s, but also to what the author’s book Postdramatic Theatre identified as their “prehistories”.
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Tragedy: The BasicsSean McEvoy(Author)
2016(Publication Date)
Routledge(Publisher)
6 The Survival of Tragedy
Contexts
In the final third of the twentieth century different ways of looking at literature emerged which reflected larger changes in society and politics. The idea of unchanging, timeless abstract qualities in literary studies was challenged by a new wave of critics who accused these timeless notions of underpinning the power and privilege of existing elites. Tragedy itself came under fire, apparently because in traditional criticism it was associated with the nobility and metaphysical destiny. On one side some took their cue from Brecht’s notion that tragedy was a way of making human suffering seem part of an inevitable destiny and thus a means of making social injustice irremediable (see above, p. 123). On the other were those such as George Steiner (see above, p. 127) who claimed that modern tragedy was impossible in a democratic world without gods, myths or noble heroes.
But tragedy from the past continued to be performed again and again in the theatre, and continued to speak to people. Edith Hall pointed out in 2004 that ‘more Greek tragedy has been performed in the last thirty years than at any point in history since Greco-Roman antiquity’ (Hall 2004: 2). The Greeks and Shakespeare have also been reworked with considerable power and authority, and contemporary dramatists have continued to produce work for which the term tragedy seemed unavoidable. They went beyond the idea in much serious twentieth-century drama that the suffering of human beings alienated by the specific conditions of modern existence could be reduced to analysis of contexts. As Edith Hall, again, remarks, ‘a tragedy that made material and economic forces the exclusive causes of the suffering enacted would no longer be tragedy: it would be left-wing agitprop [mere political propaganda]’ (Hall 2014: 781) At a time when the proponents of postmodern
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Greek Tragedy(Author)
2008(Publication Date)
Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
14 TRAGEDY IN ITS ATHENIAN CONTEXT Scholars typically distinguish this ordinary-language use of tragedy from the artistic form, locating tragedy not in such events but in their structuring into art, and in the audience response to that structure. Historically, tragedy has virtually boiled down to any serious drama—it is not comedy, although Chekhov confuses the issue when he calls his very serious and pessimistic plays “comedies.” Many people, including most of my students, assume that a tragedy is a play that ends badly, and most often with death. Or, with more detail, they take tragedy to be the fall of an important person from a high place because of a flaw. The flaw is often interpreted as a deep error of character, generally pride. Most elements of the basic definition my students look for (the fall of a person from a high place because of a flaw) come from slight misreadings of Aristotle’s Poetics, a very brief and fragmentary treatise dating to the 330s. Although Aristotle was not contemporary with fifth-century tragedy, he had a great deal more evidence at his disposal than we do; at the same time, he also had his own philosophical per- spective and cannot be taken as giving an objective or authoritative verdict on the subject. According to Aristotle, a tragedy is “an imita- tion of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of those emotions” (6.2, trans. Butcher). Aristotle begins by contrasting tragedy with epic poetry, in which a single rhapsode, or singer, narrates a story rather than enacting it, but likens the two forms in that they both make men better than they are (in contrast to comedy) (1–3).
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TheatreA Way of Seeing
Milly Barranger(Author)
2014(Publication Date)
Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
The words tragedy , comedy , and tragicomedy are not so much ways of classifying plays by their endings as ways of talking about the playwright’s vision of experience—of the way he or she perceives life and its outcomes. The content and endings also furnish clues about how the play is to be taken or understood by audiences. Is the play a serious statement about, say, relationships between men and women or parents and children? Does it explore issues of gender and sexual orientation? Does it despair at the possibilities of mutual understanding? Or does it hold such attempts up to ridicule? Or does it explore humanity’s unchanging existential situation? THEATRICAL WRITING: PERSPECTIVES AND FORMS If art reflects life it does so with special mirrors. 1 —B ERTOLT B RECHT , A S HORT O RGANUM FOR THE T HEATRE Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. TRAGEDY It is not altogether simpleminded to say that a tragedy is a play with an unhappy end-ing. Tragedy, the first of the great dramatic forms in Western drama, makes a statement about human fallibility. T HE T RAGIC V ISION The writer’s tragic vision of experience conceives of people as both vulnerable and invincible, as capable of abject defeat and transcendent greatness. Tragedies such as Oedipus the King , Medea , Hamlet , Ghosts , Death of a Salesman , and A Streetcar Named Desire show the world’s injustice, evil, and pain. Tragic heroes, in an exercise of free will, pit themselves against forces represented by other characters, by their own inner drives, or by their physical environment.
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Tragic FailuresEvina Sistakou(Author)
2016(Publication Date)
De Gruyter(Publisher)
1.Tragedy, from Athens to Alexandria
The contexts of Hellenistic tragedy
Whereas the tragic is “a condition of existence and a process in art”33 and therefore a universal, almost transcendental phenomenon of human society and culture, tragedy is the finest product of one city in a particular period of history. In a way similar to Renaissance Italy or Elizabethan England, icons of unprecedented achievements in art and literature, classical Athens was the necessary and sufficient condition for tragedy to exist and develop from its very beginnings until its maturity and inevitable ‘death’. It was during the subsequent fourth century that Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were considered the canon, their tragedies became a standard repertoire in theatres across Greece and an official copy of their plays was preserved in the state archive of Athens, and it was then that Aristotle gave his own account of tragedy as a genre in completion and perfection in the Poetics : all manifestations of the end of an era—or perhaps not?34 Considering the fact that during the next centuries a wealth of original tragic plays was written and performed alongside the classical ones,35 it is worth asking why ‘Hellenistic tragedy’ marks a gap in the history of literature, primarily as regards the textual transmission of the plays, until the revival of the genre in imperial Rome. An obvious explanation for the lack of records for Hellenistic tragedy, and drama in general, is the standardization of literature by later scholarship, chiefly of Atticistic orientation, as well as the performative habits and school practices in the ancient world. A different explanation should be sought in the direction of the new political, religious and social circumstances following the emergence of the Hellenistic empire.36
The polis formed the core around which fifth-century tragedy revolved, while the complex matters of city and citizenship were addressed onstage by recourse to tragic myth. The obsession of Greek tragedy with politics in the broadest sense was a unique phenomenon in both the ancient and the modern world. Actually it was much more than this:37
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A History of Literary Criticism in the RenaissanceJ. E. Spingarn(Author)
2019(Publication Date)
Columbia University Press(Publisher)
CHAPTER III T H E THEORY OF THE DRAMA ARISTOTLE'S definition of tragedy is the basis oi the Renaissance theory of tragedy. That definition is as follows: Tragedy is an imitation of an ac-tion that is serious, complete, and of a certain mag-nitude ; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narration; through pity and fear effecting the proper katharsis or purgation of these emotions. 1 To expand this definition, tragedy, in common with all other forms of poetry, is the imitation of an action; but the action of tragedy is distinguished from that of comedy in being grave and serious. The action is complete, in so far as it possesses per-fect unity; and in length it must be of the proper magnitude. By embellished language, Aristotle means language into which rhythm, harmony, and song enter; and by the remark that the several kinds are to be found in separate parts of the play, he means that some parts of tragedy are rendered through the medium of verse alone, while others receive the aid of song. Moreover, tragedy is dis-1 Poet. vi. 2. 60 CHAP, HI.] THE THEORY OF THE DRAMA 61 languished from epic poetry by being in the form of action instead of that of narration. The last por tion of Aristotle's definition describes the peculiar function of tragic performance. I. The Subject of Tragedy Tragedy is the imitation of a serious action, that is, an action both grave and great, or, as the six-teenth century translated the word, illustrious. Now, what constitutes a serious action, and what actions are not suited to the dignified character of tragedy ? Daniello (1536) distinguishes tragedy from comedy in that the comic poets deal with the most familiar and domestic, not to say base and vile operations; the tragic poets, with the deaths of high kings and the ruins of great empires.
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Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the PoeticsAngela Curran(Author)
2015(Publication Date)
Routledge(Publisher)
Poetics 2, Aristotle cites rhythm and melody, along with language, as three basic media that tragedy uses to achieve the imitation of human life and action. So while plot, the organization of events in the play, is the central component of tragedy, embellished language is nevertheless a component of tragedy that contributes to its function as an imitation of human action.
The fifth aspect of the definition of tragedy is its distinctive mode of storytelling. Tragedy is an imitation of action that accomplishes its purpose through the dramatic mode of storytelling, with imitation proceeding by characters that are actively doing things. On the one hand, Aristotle thinks that the dramatic form is the superior form of imitation, for he commends Homer for departing from the method of other epic poets and keeping narration to a minimum and to “bring on stage” characters who speak and act out the drama.16 Nevertheless, there is also an advantage to the narrative form, for it allows many parts of the action to be presented simultaneously, and if these events are all relevant to the overall theme, they enhance the poem’s seriousness and weight.17
UNIFIED ACTION: THE NECESSARY OR LIKELY CONNECTION BETWEEN EVENTS
Closely related to the completeness of the plot is the requirement that it imitates a single unified action (7.1451a1; 7.1451a16 –17; 26.1462b4). For a plot to be unified, the events must be linked by necessity or probability.18 These connections are the cement that binds together the events in the plot into an integrated whole. This means that a well-ordered plot does not simply line up one event after another, as in the sequence of events, “The king died and then the queen died.”19 Aristotle calls a plot that threads one event after another episodic and disjointed.20 If the poet instead writes, “The king died and then the queen died of grief,” the reader can grasp what brought on the queen’s death and the significance of the king’s death to the queen’s passing.
This illustrates a fundamental constraint that Aristotle places on the plot. This is the idea that in the plot, things happen because of
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Friendship and Virtue Ethics in the Book of JobPatricia Vesely(Author)
2019(Publication Date)
Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
7 Tragic Literature and the Cultivation of Character Tragedy is terrifying because it shows how a person’s virtue can lead not to happiness, but to the greatest suffering. It raises all our lingering doubt about the connection between happiness and virtue, and arouses the fears and uncertain- ties that we moralistically deny in order to reassure ourselves. Tragedy makes us ask why a person should try to live a morally good life when it seems that the good man suffers most. The tragic spectacle does not lay our minds to rest; it makes us question the adequacy of our theoretical (philosophical and theological) explan- ations for the good man’s suffering. By raising such doubts, tragedy not only functions as an incentive to further reflection, but it may help us perceive more compassionately the misery of others. The humanizing potential of tragedy lies in its ability to shatter settled notions about blame and responsibility by presenting in poignant detail the suffering of others. 1 In the previous chapter, I explore how virtue ethics elucidates those character traits that Job deems essential to moral goodness and vital for the welfare of both the human and non-human communities of which he is a part. I argue that Job’s declaration of innocence in chapters 29–31 functions not only as an attempt to showcase his blameless character but also as a plea that his audience respond as friends, offering those same qualities of character that he once demonstrated to the grief-stricken. In this chapter, I consider how the book as a whole invites contemporary readers to develop those character traits that Job expects in a friend, particularly in response to one who is suffering greatly. According to Wayne Booth, texts function like potential friends, the best of which 1 Barbour, Tragedy as a Critique of Virtue, 186. 221
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A Companion to TragedyRebecca Bushnell(Author)
2008(Publication Date)
Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Absent from this idea of tragedy is the notion of hamartia , whether understood as a misjudgment or a flaw of character. The tragic fall was considered as inherent to nobility or political power, when the wheel of Fortune ground through its inexorable turns. This medieval conception of tragedy was fundamentally a critical concept, not a theatrical reality. Before the sixteenth century, tragic drama as we know it was not played in the streets and halls of medieval England. What were performed, the mystery plays of the medieval cities and the morality plays of schools and aristocratic households, did leave their mark on the unique form of tragedy that emerged in London in the sixteenth century. The mystery plays contributed to the performative style of later tragedy, while also carving out a space for tragic theater in the market-place and city space. The allegorical morality plays, the stuff of school and court theaters, with their core of moral conflict and homilies of fall and redemption, reinterpreted the medieval theory of tragedy for ‘‘everyman’’ and helped to define a new tragic political drama. The vernacular mystery (or miracle) cycle plays had a long life span, extending from the twelfth century right up through Elizabeth’s reign. Thus, when English tragedy came to flower in the third decade of the sixteenth century, their influence was still active. The mystery plays were a pan-European phenomenon, a mode for performance of biblical events often focusing on the life of Christ. In England, we know that in the mid-twelfth century, clerics in elaborate costumes acted a mixed Latin–French play, Myste `re d’Adam , on a scaffold outside a church (Woolf 1972: 49–50). While still religious in theme, in later centuries the English plays became detached from the liturgical year, occurring mostly during the festivals of Whitsun-tide and Corpus Christi (and hence they are sometimes referred to as Corpus Christi plays) (Woolf 1972: Ch. 4).
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Gods in EuripidesJoan Josep Mussarra Roca(Author)
2015(Publication Date)
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag(Publisher)
So, at least in a broad sense, the content of tragedies, according to H EATH , is religious: tragedy re-produces the ideas about gods and heroes that were common among the Greeks. 9 We should also take pre-Aristotelic treatises about theater into account. We cannot say much about them because little material is preserved. But the tes-timonies and fragments we have suggest that they were aimed at the resolu-tion of the practical problems posed by the performance, not at a theoretical analysis of tragedy as such. The evidence preserved is to be found in B AGOR-DO 1998. Of course there is also a dearth of critical discourse to be found in the scattered allusions to poetry that are to be found in non-critical texts. See H OLZHAUSEN 2000 about tragedy in Aristotle‘s Poetics and Aristophanes‘ Frogs , and the possibility of interpreting both texts as evidence for a non-didactic, non-political comprehension of tragedy. See W RIGHT 2010 for inter-esting insights about the views on poetry expressed in Euripidean tragedy. 10 Cf. V ERNANT / V IDAL -N AQUET 1972, 1986, G OLDHILL 1987, W INKLER / Z EITLIN Eds. 1990. An interesting reassessment in R HODES 2003. 2.1 Tragedy in its Context 63 not be grounded in the existence of an obvious, explicit program. Proponents of this view are obliged to presuppose the existence of social mechanisms that cannot be documented. Of course mecha-nisms of this kind may have existed, but without any firm evi-dence for them there is a risk that we might be begging the ques-tion. In fact we lack a clear notion of the audience‘s reactions during the representation of tragedy; nor do we know how this audience would have verbalized the sense of the theatrical performance. All we know for sure is that the performances took place as a part of the celebrations honoring Dionysus; we do not know how this celebration was understood, or exactly what value was attributed to the stories enacted.
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A Companion to the Philosophy of LiteratureGarry L. Hagberg, Walter Jost(Authors)
2009(Publication Date)
Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Poetry, for Aristotle, is a type of making, and the activity of any making occurs in the person or thing toward which the making is directed. 71 For example, the activity of the teacher teaching is occurring, not in the teacher, but in the students who are learning; the activity of the builder build-ing is occurring, not in the builder, but in the house being built. It stands to reason that, for Aristotle, the activity of the poet creating his tragedy occurs ultimately in an audience actively appreciating a performance of the play. 72 Not only does Aristotle define tragedy in terms of its effect; he thinks that various tragic plots can be evaluated in terms of their effects on an audience. We assume that, for the finest form of tragedy, the plot must be not simple but complex; and further, that it must imitate actions arousing fear and pity, since that is the distinct-ive function of this kind of imitation. It follows, therefore, that there are three forms of plot to be avoided. A good man must not be seen passing from good fortune to bad, or jonathan lear 206 a bad man from bad fortune to good. The first situation is not fear-inspiring or piteous, but simply disgusting. The second is the most untragic that can be: it has no one of the requisites of tragedy; it does not appeal either to the human feeling in us, or to our pity, or to our fears. Nor, on the other hand, should an extremely bad man be seen falling from good fortune into bad. Such a story may arouse the human feeling in us, but it will not move us to either pity or fear; pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves; so that there will be nothing either piteous or fear-inspiring in the situation. 73 The important point to note about this passage is that Aristotle is evaluating plots not on the basis of feelings, but on the basis of the emotions.
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The Impact of Idealism: Volume 3, Aesthetics and LiteratureThe Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought
Christoph Jamme, Ian Cooper, Nicholas Boyle, Liz Disley(Authors)
2013(Publication Date)
Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
i. Historical background: tragedy, poetics and the rise of the ‘Modern System of the Arts’ The consideration of the tragic drama within a larger systematic scheme of the artistic genres of course predates German Idealism. What is the historical Tragedy and the human image 51 origin of the philosophical project of comparing the artistic genres within which Hegel and Schelling give the tragic drama such a high status? I am going to differentiate two different schemes under which tragedy appears within a larger scheme of arts that have a bearing on the representation of the human being: one in an older, Aristotelian sense; the other stemming from a series of reflections in the Renaissance and early modern period that lead to what Kristeller has called, in a much-cited pair of articles, the ‘Modern System of the Arts’. Both play an important role in the historical background of the Idealists’ systematic project with respect to the genres, although, as I will argue, the shifts associated with the second of these rep- resent a particular catalyst for the genre project of Hegel and Schelling, even though their fundamental construal of tragedy as a form of action derives from Aristotle. Up through the seventeenth century, the philosophical context for con- sideration of tragedy had been one located most often within the tradition of poetics that emerged from Aristotle. This remark needs an immediate qualification concerning the continuity we can associate with this tradition in a post-classical world which did not always have first-hand experience of something like Greek tragic drama – whether by that we mean the secular, somewhat bookish and historically contextual experience that characterised Aristotle’s engagement with tragedy in the fourth century bce, or the more immediate and provocative fifth-century experience with all its social and religious import which so impressed and worried Socrates and Plato.
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Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
