Tragedy

• 1. Introduction

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  Tragedy names something both ancient and familiar. The word itself is Greek for "goat song," and for two and a half millennia it has described a particular kind of suffering staged for an audience. The paradox at the heart of the form is this: watching terrible things happen to people we care about can produce not only pain but something close to pleasure. Aristotle called that effect catharsis. Whatever the mechanism, audiences have kept returning.

  The tradition stretches from the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, which seated around twelve thousand people, through Shakespeare's Globe, through the domestic dramas of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, all the way to contemporary novels and films. A long line of philosophers pursued the question of what tragedy actually is. Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Camus are all on that list. No consensus has ever held for long.

  What exactly is at stake when a story qualifies as tragic? Why did the Greeks allow only free citizens to compete at their annual festival for Dionysus? Why did playwrights writing in Renaissance Italy choose a Carthaginian princess who drank poison as their subject? Why did George Steiner argue in 1961 that genuine tragedy may no longer be possible at all? Those questions will open up as the documentary unfolds.

• 2. Goat Song Origins

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  Scholars tracing the etymology of the word "tragedy" arrive at the ancient Greek phrase tragoidia, which joins tragos ("he-goat") and oide ("singing" or "ode"). The name suggests a time when a goat was either the prize in a choral dancing competition or the animal around which a chorus danced before its ritual sacrifice.

  A second explanation comes from Athenaeus of Naucratis, writing in the 2nd-3rd century CE. He proposed that the original form of the word was trygodia, combining trygos (grape harvest) with ode, because the earliest performances coincided with that seasonal celebration.

  Aristotle, writing in 335 BCE long after what he called the Golden Age of 5th-century Athenian tragedy, described the form as growing from the improvisations of the leader of choral dithyrambs: hymns sung and danced in praise of Dionysos, the god of wine and fertility. His account captures the gradual, evolutionary quality of the art. Tragedy, he wrote, "grew little by little, as the poets developed whatever new part of it had appeared; and, passing through many changes, tragedy came to a halt, since it had attained its own nature."

  The clearest surviving evidence for the goat-song explanation comes from the Parian Marble, a chronicle inscribed around 264-263 BCE. Under a date falling between 538 and 528 BCE, it records that the poet Thespis first produced a tragedy and that a billy goat was established as the prize. Horace, in his Ars Poetica (lines 220-24), confirms the image: "he who with a tragic song competed for a mere goat." Friedrich Nietzsche, working from different premises in The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, suggested the name traces to a chorus of goat-like satyrs in the original dithyrambs from which the genre grew.

• 3. The Athenian Stage

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  Athenian tragedy emerged sometime during the 6th century BCE and reached its peak in the 5th century. Only 32 of the more than a thousand tragedies performed in that single century have survived. Aeschylus' The Persians is recognized as the earliest extant Greek tragedy among them.

  Performances took place in late March or early April at an annual state religious festival honoring Dionysus. Three playwrights competed over three successive days. Each offered a tetralogy: three tragedies followed by a concluding comic piece called a satyr play. The Greek theatre sat on a hillside in the open air, and a full day likely ran through all four plays. The Theatre of Dionysus at Athens probably held around twelve thousand people. Evidence on whether women attended is scant.

  All choral parts were sung to the accompaniment of an aulos, and actors sometimes answered the chorus in song as well. All performers were male and wore masks. A Greek chorus both danced and sang, though the exact steps are lost. Choral songs were typically divided into three sections: the strophe ("turning, circling"), the antistrophe ("counter-turning, counter-circling"), and the epode ("after-song").

  Playwrights relied on a device called the ekkyklema: a platform hidden behind the scene and rolled out to display the aftermath of violent events that could not be shown directly. Aeschylus used it memorably after the murder of Agamemnon in the Oresteia, wheeling out the king's body in plain view. A separate device, the mechane or crane, hoisted gods and goddesses onto the stage when they were supposed to arrive by flight. That device gave the world the phrase "deus ex machina": the surprise intervention of an unforeseen external force that changes the outcome of an event. Only one complete trilogy of tragedies has survived from this entire era: the Oresteia of Aeschylus.

• 4. Rome and Seneca

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  Rome encountered Greek tragedy as the Roman Republic expanded into several Greek territories between 270 and 240 BCE. The year 240 BCE marks the beginning of regular Roman drama. Livius Andronicus began writing Roman tragedies around that time, creating some of the earliest important works of Roman literature. Five years later, Gnaeus Naevius added his own tragedies, though he was better known for comedy. Historians also know of three other early tragic playwrights: Quintus Ennius, Marcus Pacuvius, and Lucius Accius. No complete early Roman tragedy survives.

  From the imperial period, two playwrights' tragedies remain. One author is unknown; the other is the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Nine of Seneca's tragedies survive, all of them fabula crepidata: tragedies adapted from Greek originals. His Phaedra, for instance, drew directly from Euripides' Hippolytus. Seneca's plays were probably meant to be recited at elite gatherings rather than staged. They differ sharply from their Greek models, dwelling on long declamatory narratives, prominent moralizing, and bombastic rhetoric. Detailed accounts of horrible deeds sit alongside extended reflective soliloquies. The gods rarely appear, but ghosts and witches abound.

  Senecan tragedy explores revenge, the occult, the supernatural, suicide, blood, and gore. The Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558), who knew both Latin and Greek, considered Seneca superior to Euripides. That preference would have enormous consequences: when classical drama reached Renaissance Italy, it was Seneca's work that Italian scholars found first and studied most closely.

• 5. Renaissance Reinvention

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  Classical Greek drama was largely forgotten in Western Europe from the Middle Ages until the beginning of the 16th century. Medieval theatre turned instead to mystery plays, morality plays, farces, and miracle plays. The recovery began in Italy. The Paduan scholar Lovato de' Lovati (1241-1309) reawakened interest in Seneca; his pupil Albertino Mussato (1261-1329), also of Padua, wrote the Latin verse tragedy Eccerinis in 1315. That play used the story of the tyrant Ezzelino III da Romano to warn about the threat Cangrande della Scala of Verona posed to Padua. It stands as the first secular tragedy written since Roman times.

  In 1515, Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550) of Vicenza wrote Sophonisba in the vernacular that would become Italian. Based on Livy's account of the Carthaginian princess who drank poison rather than face Roman captivity, it followed classical rules closely. The Portuguese poet and playwright António Ferreira wrote A Castro around 1550 (published only in 1587), dealing with the murder of Inês de Castro in polymetric verse.

  Printed copies of the works of Sophocles, Seneca, and Euripides became available across Europe from around 1500. The following four decades saw humanists and poets translating and adapting those tragedies. From 1553 onward, Jesuit colleges hosted a Neo-Latin theatre written by scholars. Seneca's influence proved especially strong in humanist tragedy: his plays, with their ghosts, lyrical passages, and rhetorical oratory, shifted many humanist writers toward language and rhetoric rather than dramatic action.

  In France, the most important sources for Renaissance tragic theatre were Seneca, Horace, and Aristotle; plots came from classical authors such as Plutarch and Suetonius, from the Bible, from contemporary events, and from short story collections. The Spanish Golden Age playwrights Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, and Lope de Vega supplied additional models, with many of their works translated and adapted for the French stage.

• 6. Shakespeare and the British Stage

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  British tragedy, particularly in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, diverged from classical models in both form and theme. Rather than following the classical unities of time, place, and action, British playwrights favored a flexible dramatic structure that could accommodate psychological complexity, political instability, and moral ambiguity. High and low characters mixed; tragicomic tones appeared alongside the gravest subjects.

  William Shakespeare wrote eleven works that fall under tragedy, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. He expanded the genre by integrating comedy, history, and philosophy into those works, and he made extended soliloquy a primary vehicle for exploring fate, madness, and human agency. The critic George Steiner, writing in The Death of Tragedy in 1961, and again in the foreword to a new edition in 1980, argued that Shakespeare's dramas are not a renewal of the classical tragic model but "rather, a rejection of this model." Shakespeare's imagination was, in Steiner's view, "so encompassing, so receptive to the plurality of diverse orders of experience" that his forms became "richer but hybrid" compared to those of Greek antiquity and French classicism.

  Christopher Marlowe also wrote important tragedies in English, notably The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine the Great. Doctor Faustus merges medieval morality traditions with Renaissance humanism, depicting a protagonist who seeks knowledge and power at the cost of salvation. John Webster (born around 1580, died around 1635) contributed The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil.

• 7. Aristotle's Framework

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  Aristotle's Poetics, written in 335 BCE, remains the most frequently cited definition in the history of the form. He defined tragedy as an imitation of a serious, complete action with magnitude, performed by actors rather than narrated, and producing through pity and fear a purification of those emotions. The term he used for that purification was catharsis.

  Central to Aristotle's framework is the reversal of fortune he called peripeteia. He preferred the reversal from good to bad over the reverse: a descent into misfortune, as in Oedipus Rex, arouses more pity and fear than an ascent. That reversal must follow from the hero's hamartia: a word often translated as a character flaw but whose original Greek etymology traces to hamartanein, a sporting term for an archer or spear-thrower missing the target. The misfortune, Aristotle argued, is brought about not by vice or depravity but by "some particular error or frailty." If a character's downfall comes from an external cause alone, Aristotle called that a misadventure rather than a true tragedy.

  Aristotle identified four species of tragedy: the complex (involving peripety and discovery); the suffering (examples include the mythological stories of Ajaxes and Ixions); the character tragedy (seen in the Phthiotides and Peleus); and the spectacle, a horror-like variety represented by works such as Phorcides and Prometheus.

  He also described what he called anagnorisis: the hero's recognition or revelation about human fate, destiny, and the will of the gods. He termed it "a change from ignorance to awareness of a bond of love or hate." Oscar Mandel, in A Definition of Tragedy published in 1961, identified two essentially different paths for defining tragedy: the derivative way, which asks what ordering of the world tragedy expresses, and the substantive way, which starts with the work of art itself and identifies its constituent elements.

• 8. Tragedy's Later Life

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  Toward the close of the 18th century, the Scottish playwright Joanna Baillie proposed a new direction for tragedy. She defined it as "the unveiling of the human mind under the dominion of those strong and fixed passions, which seemingly unprovoked by outward circumstances, will from small beginnings brood within the breast, till all the better dispositions, all the fair gifts of nature are borne down before them." She put the theory into practice in her Series of Plays on the Passions, published in three volumes beginning in 1798.

  Bourgeois tragedy, known in German as Bürgerliches Trauerspiel, emerged in 18th-century Europe as a product of the Enlightenment and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Its protagonists were ordinary citizens rather than kings. The first true bourgeois tragedy is usually identified as George Lillo's 1731 play The London Merchant; or, the History of George Barnwell. In Germany, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson, first produced in 1755, is cited as the earliest example of the form in that tradition.

  Arthur Miller's 1949 essay "Tragedy and the Common Man" made the philosophical case that tragedy could and should depict ordinary people in domestic surroundings. The domestic tragedy introduced newly dealt-with themes: wrongful convictions and executions, poverty, starvation, addiction, alcoholism, debt, structural abuse, and domestic violence. The genre became the most common form adapted into modern television, books, and films.

  George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy, published in 1961, raised the possibility that genuine tragedy may no longer exist in comparison to its classical manifestations. British playwright Howard Barker pushed back against that view, arguing strenuously for tragedy's rebirth in the contemporary theatre. In his volume Arguments for a Theatre, Barker wrote: "You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool." Numerous works continue to be written in the tragic tradition: among them Froth on the Daydream, The Road, Sophie's Choice, and The Handmaid's Tale.