TRAGEDY

Aristotle, in the Poetics, laid out a standard pattern for TRAGEDY, which
all later playwrights have either followed or reacted against, but no one is
able to ignore it.
1. The PROTAGONIST is a highly placed man (or woman), one of high rank,
power, or fortune.
2. He suffers a CATASTROPHE [Greek peripeteia], reversal of fortune, or
downfall. He suffers beyond what most people endure. As Aristotle
said, his suffering is meant to arouse both pity (for the protagonist)
and fear (for themselves being made to suffer) in the audience.
3. His downfall is brought about by a choice or series of choices that
are due to a TRAGIC FLAW in his character (HAMARTIA). In short, he
brings about his own downfall. The most common example of
hamartia is sinful, overweening PRIDE, or HUBRIS [sometimes rendered
as hybris], but there are other possible tragic flaws, e.g., willful
stubbornness, disobedience, fanaticism, spiritual or mental
blindness.
4. The protagonist recognises his own flaw in a scene of selfrecognition.
5. This spectacle provides an emotional release, or
audience.

CATHARSIS,

for the

6. The action of the classical drama is bound by the three UNITIES of

time, place, and action. The drama takes place in one area, in one
day, and all the action is sequential, involving only one protagonist.
In short, there is only one PLOT. In later forms of drama, the unity of
action was dissolved and one or more SUB-PLOTS might be found in
the same play.
In classical TRAGEDY, the protagonist is always a man or woman of
magnificence. This is also true in ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY, which, however,
depends on shock and violence for much of its effect. In later ages, the
protagonist may be a person of any rank, from a shoe salesman to a king
or a powerful businessman. In ROMANTIC TRAGEDY, the downfall is almost

always due to an excess of love or passion. Hence the "star-crossed lovers"

theme that has continued in popularity down to the present day.
One device that recurs in many Greek dramas is the deus ex machina (the
god from the machine), a device by which the playwright resolves an
insurmountable plot complication in order to resolve the drama. Usually a
god or goddess actually appears on the stage, but the device may merely
be announced to the audience as divine intervention.
Like any dramatic narrative, play, story or novel, a tragedy has:
introduction
rising action [plot development or complication]
climax
falling action
resolution [denouement]
Cf. also Elizabethan tragedy, revenge tragedy, tragedy of blood

DRAMA:
Aristotle called drama imitated human action. But since his meaning of imitation is in doubt,
this phrase is not so simple or clear as it seems. Professor J. M. Manly sees three necessary
elements in drama: (1) a story (2) told in action (3) by actors who impersonate the characters
of the story. This admits such forms as PANTOMIME. Yet many writers insist that DIALOGUE must
be present, e.g., Professor Schelling, who calls drama a picture or representation of human
life in that succession and change of events that we call a story, told by means of dialogue and
presenting in action the successive emotions involved. Dramatic elements have been combined
and emphasized so differently in dramatic history as to make theoretical definition difficult.
Origins: Greek and Roman Drama Some account of how drama originated and how it has
developed will perhaps throw more light upon its nature. Drama arose from religious
ceremonial. Greek COMEDY developed from those phases of the Dionysian rites which dealt
with the theme of fertility; Greek TRAGEDYcame from the Dionysian rites dealing with life and
death; and mediaeval DRAMA arose out of rites commemorating the birth and the resurrection
of Christ. These three origins seem independent of each other. The word COMEDY is based upon
a word meaning revel, and early Greek comedy preserved in the actors costumes evidences
of the ancient phallic ceremonies. Gradually comedy developed away from this primitive
display of sex interest in the direction of greater decorum and seriousness, though the Old
Comedy was gross in character. SATIRE became an element of comedy as early as sixth century
B.C. Menander (342-291 B.C.) is a representative of the "New Comedy" a more
conventionalized form which was imitated by the great Roman writers of COMEDY , Plautus and
Terence, through whose plays classical COMEDY was transmitted to the Elizabethan dramatists.
The word TRAGEDY seems to mean a "goat song," and may reflect Dionysian death and
resurrection ceremonies in which the goat was the sacrificial animal. The DITHYRAMBIC chant
used in these festivals is perhaps the starting point of TRAGEDY. The possible process of
development has been thus stated by Professor Nicoll:
From a common chant the ceremonial song developed into a primitive duologue between a
leader, dressed probably in the robes of the god, and the chorus. The song became elaborated;
it developed narrative elements, and soon reached a stage in which the duologue told in
primitive wise some story of the deity. Further forward movements were introduced. Two

leaders instead of one made their appearance. The chorus gradually sank into the background,
no longer taking the place of a protagonist.
The great Greek authors of TRAGEDIES were Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.), Sophocles (496-406
B.C.), and Euripides (480-406 B.C.). Modelled on these were the Latin CLOSET DRAMAS of
Seneca (4? B.C.-A.D. 65), which exercised a profound influence upon Renaissance TRAGEDY.
Rebirth of Drama in the Middle Ages The decline of Rome witnessed the disappearance of acted
classical DRAMA. The MIME survived for an uncertain period, and perhaps aided in preserving
the tradition of acting through wandering entertainers (see JONGLEUR, MINSTREL). Likewise,
dramatic ceremonies and customs, some of them perhaps related to the ancient Dionysian rites
themselves, played an uncertain part in keeping alive in mediaeval times a sort of substratum of
dramatic consciousness. Scholars are virtually agreed, however, that the great institution of
MEDIAEVAL DRAMA in Western Europe, leading as it did to modern drama,was a new form which
developed, about the ninth and following centuries, from the ritual of the Christian Church (see
MEDIAEVAL DRAMA). The dramatic forms resulting from this development, MYSTERY or CYCLIC
PLAYS, MIRACLE PLAYS, MORALITIES, flourishing especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, lived on into the RENAISSANCE.

Renaissance English Drama The new interests of the RENAISSANCE included

TRANSLATIONS and IMITATIONS of classical DRAMA, partly through the medium of SCHOOL and
UNIVERSITY PLAYS, partly through the work of university-trained professionals, engaged in
supplying dramas for the public stage or the court or such institutions as the INNS OF COURT,
and partly through the influence of classical dramatic CRITICISM, much of which reached
England through Italian scholars. Thus a revived knowledge of ancient drama united with the
native dramatic traditions developed from mediaeval forms and technique to produce in the
later years of the sixteenth century the vigorous and many-sided phenomenon known as
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA, with its spectacular and patriotic CHRONICLE PLAYS, its TRAGEDIES OF
BLOOD, its light-hearted COURT COMEDIES, its dreamy and delightful ROMANTIC COMEDIES, its
PASTORAL PLAYS, satirical plays, and realistic presentations of London life.

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA: This phrase is commonly used for the entire body of RENAISSANCE English
DRAMA produced in the century preceding the closing of the theatres in 1642, although it is
sometimes employed in a narrower sense to designate the DRAMA of the later years of
Elizabeth's reign and the few years following it. Thus, Shakespeare is an Elizabethan dramatist,
although more than one third of his active career lies in the reign of James I. Modern English
DRAMA not only came into being in Elizabethan times but developed so rapidly and brilliantly
that the Elizabethan era is the Golden Age of English DRAMA.
Lack of adequate records makes it impossible to trace the steps by which Elizabethan
drama developed, though the chief elements which contributed to it can be listed. From
MEDIAEVAL DRAMA came the TRADITION of acting and certain CONVENTIONS approved by the
populace. From the MORALITY PLAYS and the INTERLUDES in particular came comic elements.
With this mediaeval heritage was combined the classical TRADITION of DRAMA, partly drawn
from a study of the Roman dramatists, Seneca (tragedy) and Plautus and Terence (comedy), and
partly from humanistic CRITICISM based upon Aristotle and transmitted through Italian
RENAISSANCE scholarship. This classical influence appeared first in the SCHOOL PLAYS. Later it
affected the DRAMA written under the auspices of the royal court and the INNS OF COURT.
Eventually it influenced the plays of the university-trained playwrights connected with the
public stage. Indeed, the part played by the UNIVERSITY WITS in adapting classical dramatic
materials to the demands of of the popular stage seems to have advanced dramatic technique to
a point where it was ready for the perfecting touch of the master dramatist himself. The
modern theatre arose with Elizabethan drama
(see PUBLIC THEATRES, PRIVATE THEATRES). For types of Elizabethan drama and names of
dramatists see Outline of Literary History (pp. 532-541) and TRAGEDY, ROMANTIC TRAGEDY,
CLASSICAL TRAGEDY, TRAGEDY OF BLOOD, COMEDY, COMEDY OF HUMOURS, COURT COMEDY,
REALISTIC COMEDY CHRONICLE PLAY, and MASQUE.

REVENGE TRAGEDY: A form of TRAGEDY made popular on the Elizabethan stage by Thomas Kyd,
whose Spanish Tragedy is an early example of the type. It is largely SENECAN in its inspiration
and technique. The theme is the revenge of a father for a son or vice versa, the revenge being
directed by the ghost of the murdered man, as in Hamlet. Other traits often found in
the revenge tragedies include the hesitation of the hero, the use of either real or pretended
insanity, suicide, intrigue, an able, scheming villain, philosophic soliloquies, and the sensational
use of horrors (murders on the stage, exhibition of dead bodies, etc.). Examples of the type are
Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Marston's Antonio's Revenge,
Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hoffman (author not known), and Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy. See
SENECAN TRAGEDY, TRAGEDY OF BLOOD.

TRAGEDY OF BLOOD: An intensified form of the REVENGE TRAGEDY popular on the Elizabethan
stage. It works out the theme of revenge and retribution (borrowed from Seneca) through
murder, assassination, mutilation, and downright carnage. The horrors which in the Latin
Senecan plays had been merely described were placed upon the stage to satisfy the craving for
morbid excitement displayed by an Elizabethan audience brought up on bear-baiting spectacles
and public executions (hangings, mutilations, burnings). Besides including such revenge plays as
Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and Hamlet,the tragedy of blood led to
such later "horror" TRAGEDIES as Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. See
REVENGE TRAGEDY, SENECAN TRAGEDY.

FROM THE BOOK SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES

The terms comedy and tragedy in English usage were first applied to narrative
poems with happy or unhappy endings respectively. Tragedies in this period were
primarily stories about the falls of princes
(sometimes referred to via the Latin as de casibus tragedy). It was really from about
the 1530s that comedy and tragedy began to be used more widely as terms
descriptive of dramatic genre, though comedy could still be used to mean simply
play for some time after this.
But by about 1600, Shakespeare himself has Polonius describe the actors who come
to Elsinore as [t]he best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history,
pastoral, pastoralcomical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comicalhistoricalpastoral, scene individable, orpoemunlimited; Seneca cannot be too heavy,
nor Plautus too light (Hamlet, 2.2.396401). The length and overcomplication of the
list makes a joke of genre categorisation, but the joke tells us that categorisation
according to genre was becoming an increasingly fashionable and complex matter.
Francis Meres, Shakespeares contemporary, also used Plautus and Seneca as the
comparators for Shakespeares greatness in his own time. Shakespeares classical
models,where he followed them,were late Roman plays, not early Greek theatre or
theorists; and two of his earliest plays, one comedy and one tragedy (The Comedy of
Errors (1594) and Titus Andronicus (1592)), show him openly imitating these two
great predecessors.
The tragedies of Seneca, the first-century Roman dramatist, were far better known
throughout Europe in this period than those of the ancient Greek dramatists (fifth
century bce) and affected the writing of English tragedy more substantially than any
body of theoretical writing, including Aristotles. (Hyppolitus was staged in the mid1540s. Senecas plays were especially influential in two ways: on violent and
sensational

content, especially in revenge tragedy, and on the development of an elevated

rhetoric, including especially the pronouncement of sententiae (moral and
universalising statements).
Shakespeare almost certainly never read Aristotle, so that, as Alexander Pope put it
in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1725), to judge . . . of Shakespeare by
Aristotles rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those
of another. Aristotles Poetics was printed in Latin translation in 1498, but did not
become widely known until after the publication of Francesco Robertellos
commentary in 1548, and was not translated into English until the eighteenth
century.
The view that tragedy requires a certain elevation of both style and content and
concerns persons of high estate comes from Aristotle, whom Johnson, writing later
than Sidney and Shakespeare, certainly did know.
Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action
that is
complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a
whole that
is wanting in magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a
middle, and
an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by
causal
necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An
end, on the
contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either
by
necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that
which follows
something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot,
therefore,
must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these
principles.
Aristotle, Poetics, ch. VII
Gorboduc (1562), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, is usually cited as the
earliest English tragedy,
but it could have been preceded by Thomas Prestons King Cambyses (c. 155869).
These two very different kinds of play represent two identifiable, though crossfertilising, strands of English tragedy before Shakespeare, the first openly imitating
classical style and the second representing a native tradition of vernacular drama.
Senecan tragedies nevertheless continued to please popular audiences for many
years to come, as Ben Jonson, making fun of such old-fashioned spectators in 1614,
pointed out with reference to two of the most enduringly popular Senecan English
plays,ThomasKyds SpanishTragedy (15859) and Shakespeares Titus Andronicus
(1592).
When Sackville and Norton first produced the tragedy of Gorboduc in 1562,
however, it represented a new direction for English tragedy. it was the first English
tragedy modelled on classical form, adopting a five-act structure and a unified
approach to plot and character. As in Seneca, violence took place offstage
and was reported by a messenger. Its use of dumb-shows before each act, for
example, developed an existing
visual and emblematic quality in English drama in a new and influential way, and it
was the first English drama to use blank verse, which was to become the norm for
almost all verse-drama of the Shakespearean period. Its subject matter too was
English, contemporary and political. Though it represented a tale of ancient
Britain, its early spectators understood that to be a veil for an otherwise direct

intervention in the contemporary and highly controversial subject of who was to

succeed the unmarried and childless Queen Elizabeth.
Kyd and Marlowe were probably both writing plays for the public theatres before
Shakespeare, andMarlowe
was born in the same year as Shakespeare, but both died before Shakespeares
career reached its height. Kyd, like many of his own predecessors, brought classical
and native elements together in creating a phenomenon altogether new to the
English popular stage: revenge tragedy. The plot structure was in some
ways Senecan, with its act divisions and its focus on a final bloody climax, and
revenge itself had been the impetus underpinning several of the most famous
ancient plays (the Oresteia and Medea, for example). Kyds Spanish Tragedy openly
acknowledges its debt to Seneca, quoting directly fromthe Latin text of
his plays, but at the same time it also brings Christian ethics into open collision with
the pagan ethos of revenge. Marlowes plays show many of the same qualities as
Kyds: a strong grasp of pictorial stagecraft, the same tendency to mix humorous and
serious matter and a similar combination of the classical with the native medieval
dramatic inheritance. His Dido, Queen of Carthage (15856), probably written with
Nashe, takes its subject from Virgils Aeneid, but adapts it in various ways for a
childrens company on the English stage (Dr Faustus, Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine 1 & 2,
Massacre at Paris).