Reader in Tragedy

An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory

Marcus Nevitt, Tanya Pollard, Marcus Nevitt, Tanya Pollard

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781474270427
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474270441
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This unique anthology presents the important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different varieties of environmentalist, feminist, leftist and postcolonial thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for recent generations of artists, critics and thinkers. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 21st century theorists. Ideas of tragedy and the tragic have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato through to Martha Nussbaum have analyzed the genre of tragedy to probe the most fundamental of questions about ethics, pleasure and responsibility in the world. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information? In order to illustrate the different ways that writers have approached the answers to such questions, this Reader collects together a comprehensive selection of canonical writings on tragedy from antiquity to the present day arranged in six sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts.

Chapter 1

Antiquity and the Middle Ages

When charting the terrain of tragedy, all roads lead to Greece. Classical antiquity is not only the genre’s point of origin; it has also remained the primary touchstone for defining, admiring, and condemning the tragic theatre’s unsettling power. For many, tragedy will evoke plays such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, or Euripides’ Medea: dramas focused on a powerful protagonist whose life will be destroyed over the course of the action in large part because of his or her own actions. It might also call to mind forceful secondary characters who support or challenge the protagonist; gods who prove unpredictably vicious, indifferent, or instrumental; and a chorus of onlooking witnesses, at first bemused and then increasingly anxious and stricken. This pattern does not fit all Greek tragedies – among other things, as Aristotle observed, some in fact end happily – but it has achieved an indelible stamp on our collective imaginations. From the brief but striking moment of its Greek beginnings, tragedy developed its primary identity as a dramatic genre associated with anguish, error, and inevitability, all on a grand scale.

The earliest tragedies that have survived were written in Athens in the fifth century BCE, during a time of social and political transition. Amid the developing institutions of democracy, the city reflected on its evolving identity at the civic and religious festivals where tragedies were staged. As public, city-sponsored events, the plays responded to both of these contexts. Although tragedies did not directly dramatize current events, they explored political and philosophical questions through their depictions of the mythological past, and their recurring interest in the fall of proud rulers has been linked with Athenian democracy’s hostility to tyrants.¹ The plays also reflect their identification with religious ritual in their attention to prophesies, sacrifices, and the dangerous omnipotence of the gods, whose irrational and incomprehensible power contrasts starkly with the powerlessness of the human world.² By depicting the catastrophes of ancient myth through the intimate frameworks of personal passions, crises, and retaliations, playwrights elicited identification with past imagined worlds, raising questions about ongoing struggles between the sexes and between the generations, and reminding audiences of the precariousness of their own domestic worlds.

One thing that Greek tragedies did not do was invent new stories. Although tragic playwrights adapted and tinkered, they took their material from a well-known stock of myths that audiences would have known. Many of their stories came from Homer, the revered figure identified with epic poems on the Trojan War and its aftermath. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all wrote tragedies about the legendary traumas of Troy, in which they responded directly to Homer as well as to each other; Aeschylus reportedly claimed that ‘all of our tragedies are slices from Homer’s great banquets’.³ Even beyond this shared subject matter, early critics saw tragedy as building on epic’s literary strategies. Plato noted with disapproval that Homer’s epics, like tragedies, rely heavily on direct first-person speech and dialogue; he described Homer as the ‘first teacher and leader’ of tragedy, and referred to heroes from ‘Homer or some other of the makers of tragedy’, suggesting that they were in the same category (extract 1.1).⁴ Aristotle similarly, though more approvingly, described Homer as the father of tragedy, and observed that his epics joined tragedy in depicting serious, heroic men entangled in struggles (extract 1.2).⁵ Sung by skilled actors called rhapsodes, epic poems also offered a prototype for dramatic performances. Yet while Homer’s stories played out against the vast backdrops of Trojan battlefields and Mediterranean seas, tragedies took a miniaturizing lens to focus on the oikos, or household, where they could dissect the fault lines that shaped and resulted from these mythic collisions. Contained within one act and the finite space of the stage, these plays were marked by compression, brevity, and intensity, serving as microcosms for the larger existential crises they illuminated.

Just as tragedies revolve around violent opposition, from very early on they sparked violent opposition as well.⁶ Despite the genre’s prestige and prominence in Athens, the earliest extant philosophical account of tragedy condemned it, arguing that plays should be banned for harming their listeners. In The Republic (c.380–360 BCE), Plato’s Socrates described tragedy’s emotional intensity as irresistibly pleasurable, but concluded that surrendering to it threatened the rational self-control necessary to a stable and just society. Writing a generation later, Plato’s student Aristotle came to a nearly opposite stance, describing tragedy’s pleasures as beneficial and instructive. In his Poetics (c.350–330 BCE), Aristotle agreed with his former teacher that tragedy aroused the passions, but argued that it could productively transform them. In particular, he argued that by producing pity and fear, tragedy could bring about a catharsis of these emotions, prompting centuries of debate over a term whose meanings could encompass purgation, purification, transformation, and more. In contrast to Plato’s heated and lyrical attack, Aristotle adopted a characteristically methodological approach, anatomizing tragedy by breaking it down into what he saw as its essential parts, and analysing how each of these parts could contribute most fully to its telos, or goal. He observed that tragedy could take many forms, but claimed that to best elicit the pity and fear conducive to tragic pleasure and catharsis, it should depict a reversal of fortune from happiness to suffering, brought about by error rather than by accident or evil, and accompanied by a recognition or revelation. The protagonist who commits the error and experiences the resulting suffering should be ethically good enough to earn the audience’s concern and empathy, but imperfect enough to bear some responsibility for the terrible events that unfold.

Despite their disagreements, Plato and Aristotle agreed that tragedy was defined especially by its status as mimesis, another multivalent Greek word that refers to imitation, representation, and fiction. Both thinkers were interested in the effects of allowing characters to speak directly in their own voices, drawing playwrights, actors, and audience members into their minds, and eliciting a potent form of identification. The experience of imaginative alignment with a fictional character would become one of tragedy’s most compelling and contentious aspects. For Plato, identification endangers listeners, by invading our hard-earned rationality and restraint with another’s experience of intolerable pain. For Aristotle, on the other hand, this participation in another’s suffering is the crucial element necessary for the tragic pleasure and catharsis that make playgoing valuable. As additional writers began weighing in on the nature of tragedy, debates continued to centre on this imaginative identification and its attendant emotional intensity, as well as on the structural principles that might most effectively conjure its force.

Although Athenian tragedy was a local and historically specific phenomenon, it was preserved, revived, and performed throughout the Greek-speaking world and beyond. As the rival civilization of Rome began to develop its own tradition of tragedy, after a similar political transition from monarchy to republic, it turned to Greek models. Romans not only staged Greek tragedies, but also began writing their own tragedies in conversation with Greek originals.⁷ The earliest known playwright to write tragedies in Latin, Livius Andronicus (c.284–c.205 BCE), was himself Greek, and began his literary career translating Greek texts into Latin. His plays, which have not survived, showcase Greek tragic subjects in their titles, which include Achilles, Aegisthus, and Aiax. The best known Roman tragic playwright, Seneca (c.4 BCE–65 CE), similarly looked to Greek tragic models in his plays, which include Agamemnon, Oedipus, Medea, Hippolytus, Hercules, and The Trojan Women. As theatrical traditions continued to develop, conventionally Greek tragic plays were joined by alternate tragic forms, such as pantomimes featuring dance, concerts featuring song, and solo aria performances.⁸

Just as Roman playwrights began their ventures into the genre by looking to the authority of Greek tragic traditions, Roman poets and philosophers did the same when reflecting on the nature of tragedy. In his Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BCE) turns to Greek authors, plays, and myths to illustrate how to write tragedies; less directly, he draws on Aristotle as a model in formulating a set of rules that tragedies should follow in order to be effective (extract 1.3). Horace describes emotional involvement as a constituent part of tragedy; he explains that playwrights should depict emotions onstage in order to move their audiences, since these emotions will spr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Texts
• General Introduction
• 1 Antiquity and the Middle Ages
• 2 The Early Modern Period
• 3 The Eighteenth Century
• 4 The Nineteenth Century
• 5 1900 to 1968
• 6 POST-1968
• Supplementary Reading
• List of Sources
• Permissions Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyright