Tragedy

Main article: w:Greek tragedy

Operatic & metrical tragoidos means “goat-song”; the nature of tragedy is political, and they usually address politics directly. General characteristics of the tragedy include:

Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant, Antigone au chevet de Polynice

• Mimetic Perspective — the sudden and catastrophic fall of a great person from fortune to misfortune.
• Affective (audience response) Perspective — arouses a catharsis of pity and terror.
• Causal relationship between character and fate — character contributes to destiny.
• Character not eminently good or noble, a mean between goodness and depravity. Possesses a hamartia, tragic flaw or simply a mistake in judgement.
• Universe is not perfectly ordered; achieves balance between order absurdity. Great people seem to die while the mediocrity rule.
• Tragic protagonist dies bravely.
• Tragic protagonist achieves a degree of anagnorisis or a moment of enlightenment; also an acceptance of his/her flaw. Aristotle defines anagnorisis as “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune.”
• Tragic protagonist makes important choices. Her/his choices matter because they effect more than just the tragic protagonist. Aristotle defines peripeteia as “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune.”

Some Views on Tragedy

A tragedy must not be a spectacle of a perfectly good man brought from prosperity to adversity. For this merely shocks us. Nor, of course must it be that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity; for that is not tragedy at all, but the perversion of tragedy, and revolts the moral sense. Nor again, should it exhibit the downfall of an utter villain: since pity is aroused by undeserved misfortunes, terror by misfortunes befalling men like ourselves. There remains, then, as the only proper subject for tragedy, the spectacle of a man not absolutely or eminently good or wise, who is brought to disaster not by sheer depravity, but by some error or frailty. Lastly, the man must be highly renowned and prosperous—an Oedipus, a Thyestes, or some other illustrious person.

— Aristotle, Poetics

First, the hero. The Shakespearean tragic hero, as everyone knows, is an overstater. His individual accent will vary with his personality, but there is always a residue of hyperbole. This, it would seem, is for Shakespeare the authentic tragic music, mark of a world where a man’s reach must always exceed his grasp and everything costs not less than everything. [. . .] I think most of us believe that tragic drama is in one way or other a record of man’s affair with transcendence.

— Maynard Mack, “Tragic Form and the Jacobean Tragedies”

Tragedy should be used to describe the situation in which a divided human being faces basic conflicts, perhaps rationally insolvable, of obligations and passion; makes choices, for good or for evil; errs knowingly or involuntarily; accepts consequences; comes to a new, larger awareness; suffers or dies, yet with a larger wisdom.

— R. B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama

• A tragedy is a story of human actions producing exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man of high estate.
• In almost all [of Shakespeare’s] tragic heroes we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction, a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind. This it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait… It is a fatal gift, but it comes with it a touch of greatness, and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or genius, or immense force, we realize the full power and reach of the soul and the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe.
• The central feeling [in a Shakespearean tragedy] is one of waste.
• [At the end of a Shakespearean tragedy] we remain confronted with a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with glorious good, evil which it is able to overcome or by self-torture and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy.
  — A. C. Bradley, The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy

Bibliography

• Aristotle (1994) [350 BCE]. Poetics. Translated by Butcher, S.H.
• Bradley, A. C. (1904). "The Substance Of Shakespearean Tragedy". Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–28.
• Heilman, R. B. (1906). Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
• Mack, Maynard (1970). "Tragic Form and the Jacobean Tragedies". In Kernan, Alvin B. Modern Shakespearean Criticism; Essays on Style, Dramaturgy, and the Major Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.