Tragedy

Tragedy, play dealing in an elevated, poetic style with events which depict man as the victim of destiny yet superior to it, both in grandeur and in misery. The word is of Greek origin and means ‘goat-song’, possibly because a goat was originally given as a prize for a play at the Dionysia. The classic Athenian tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles developed from the choral lyric, an art which reached its height among the Dorian peoples of the Peloponnese during the 6th century BC. The earliest plays began with the parados, or entrance of the chorus, which was soon preceded by a prologos for the actor or actors. Each formal ode, or stasimon, for the chorus alternated with a dramatic scene, or episode; lyrical dialogue between an actor and the chorus was called a kommos; and all that followed the final stasimon was the exodus. The chorus sang, or chanted, in unison, but probably spoke through its leader. As nothing is known about the music and dancing of the chorus, and the music-rhythms of the odes cannot be translated into speech-rhythms, it is impossible to dogmatize about the original productions of the great texts which have come down to us, and all translations and revivals can only be approximations. It was the subject-matter of the plays which exercised the greatest influence on the drama of the future. Taken from the myths of gods and heroes, it retained a link with its religious origins by the beneficent intervention, usually at the end of the play, of a god—the deus ex machina—who descended from above the stage by means of a crane or pulley. The Roman theatre produced excellent writers of comedy in Plautus and Terence, but no tragedies for the stage have survived; those by Seneca, which had an immense influence on later European drama, were closet plays.

Tragedy in Renaissance Italy, more under the direct influence of the Greeks than of Seneca, developed early, but did not produce any outstanding playwright until the 18th century, with Alfieri. In France tragedy developed under the influence of Seneca, modified by the contemporary interpretation of Aristotle which gave rise to the theory of the unities of time, place, and action, though only the last was consistently observed by Greek dramatists, the unities of time and place being imposed on the play by the continuous presence of the chorus. The greatest exponents of French classical tragedy were Corneille and Racine, whose successors up to the end of the 18th century continued to employ their outward forms but without their inward excellence.

In England, where the influence of Seneca was paramount, Marlowe and Shakespeare evolved a form of tragedy mingled with comedy which was sui generis. Because of its powerful appeal to English audiences, the English theatre remained impervious to the influence of French classical tragedy, even after the Restoration, when such plays as Addison's Cato (1713) brought the letter but not the spirit of Corneille and Racine briefly on the English stage. Spain, too, had her native tragedy, formulated by Calderón, and efforts to import French tragedy failed, as did the attempts of Gottsched and Carolina Neuber in Germany. The German theatre later produced its own writers of tragedy in Goethe and Schiller; but it was the melodramatic aspect of their tragedies which had the greatest appeal, and this, added to the influence of Shakespeare all over Europe at the end of the 18th century, produced the highly coloured melodrama which in the 19th century replaced true tragedy everywhere. Meanwhile, in the 18th century, in the plays of Lillo, Lessing, and Mercier, efforts had been made to apply the formula of classical tragedy to middle-class existence, resulting in ‘domestic tragedy’ or tragédie bourgeoise. It was not a success. Tragedy in the narrow theatrical sense demands a cast of heroes or demi-gods, an unfamiliar background—exotic, romantic, or imaginary—and a sense of detachment heightened by the use of verse or rhetorical prose. Even the plays of Ibsen and his successors, though often tragic in their implications, are dramas rather than tragedies in the Greek sense. In modern times efforts have again been made to tame tragedy and bring it within the family circle. But it is interesting to note that Murder in the Cathedral (1935) by T. S. Eliot, which has as protagonists a king and an archbishop, was a success, unlike his The Family Reunion (1939) which, though based on a Greek myth, was firmly rooted in suburbia.