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Your Rough Guide to Tragedy

Introductory quotations from writers throughout history.

Notes are roughly organised. They can be used as a foundation for further research or reflection on texts you are studying.

Some initial quotations.

1) The tragic hero. "A man.... whose misfortune .... is brought upon him not by vice or depravity, but by some error of judgment."

"The change in the hero's fortunes be not from misery to happiness, but on the contrary from happiness to misery, and the cause of it must not lie in any depravity, but in some great error on his part." ARISTOTLE 'Poetics'

"A figure who is manifestly doomed, induces awe, induces a sense of being larger than the fate that befalls him."

"Usually people of 'heigh degree', of manifest eminence. Eminence can be achieved, though, by the qualities of the character, his virtues and beliefs."

"The hero has a fall to endure, a fall that affects others."

2) "Tragedy as a narrative of the fortunes of heroic characters in adversity." DIOMEDES

3) "Sad stories of commonwealths and kings." Isadore of Seville.

4) "...beginning in joy, ends in grief." John of Garland

5) "Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,

As olde bokes maken us memorie,

Of him that stood in greet prosperitee

And is y-fallen out of heigh degree

Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly."

CHAUCER

6) "...Tragedy, that openeth the great wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue..." SIDNEY

7) "....The whole or order against which the individual part shows itself powerless..." Bradley

8) "The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil itself." ANOUIHL

9) "Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are ..... condemned . Each move is dictated by the previous one." STOPPARD

Tragedy: theory and practice

1) Greek tragedy: man's subjection to the gods; Necessity; Fate.

"The Gods are a controlling element.... but not in what the actors do and suffer: that is entirely their own affair." Kitto on Greek tragedy.

Consider the issue of the tragic act.

Through suffering men have the opportunity of growing.

"A bad man cannot be a tragic hero." ARISTOTLE.

Stoicism: Seneca proposed that stoicism was the only refuge from the tragic dilemma.

Consider the concept of PATHOS.

Consider the concept of TRAGIC GRANDEUR, particularly in characterisation.

CATHARSIS. Aristotle. Tragedy, by encouraging pity and fear, purges them. Tragedy, then, 'exorcises' these emotions, that is tempers and reduces them. The reader is the better or wiser for the reading.

PERIPETY/PERIPETEIA. A sudden reversal of fortune. "In the word peripety is contained the idea of the boomerang or recoil effect of one's own actions, of being hoist by one's own petard." HOUSE

ANAGNORSIS. Knowledge. In tragedy there is a "change from ignorance to knowledge, and this is to either love or hate, in the personages marked for good or evil fortune." Suffering may precede anagnorsis. ARISTOTLE

The tragedy should not overwhelm us. We end up assured in some way?

2) Later views:

English Renaissance plays "stressed the horror of the world and the desirability of leaving it."

"Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!

Borne under one Law, to another bound:

Vainely begot, and yet forbidden vanity;

Created sicke, commanded to be sound:

What meaneth Nature by these diverse Lawes?

Passion and Reason selfe-division cause:

Is it the marke or Majesty of Power

To make offences that it may forgive?

Nature herselfe doth her owne selfe defloure,

To hate those errours she her selfe doth give."

GREVILLE

"If Nature did not take delight in blood,

She would have made more easie wayes to good."

GREVILLE

"A tragic sense of life." Racine

"How can these things be?" Lope de Vega in The Knight From Olmeda.

"Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" King Lear. Shakespeare.

TRAGIC BRAVURA: defiance of fate, as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet - "I defy you stars".

Tragedy can be associated with a character's inability to 'break through' the general, imposed patterns of life. IBSEN'S work.

Is there a 'poetic justice' in tragedy? (Characters bring their own downfall upon themselves).

"... a tragedy tells a story that, in nearly every instance, we are fully warned cannot have any other than a disastrous ending .... yet we feel (the hero) to be as free as we are." Leech

'The ultimate effect of tragedy is to sharpen our feeling of responsibility, to make us more fully aware that we have erred as the tragic figures have erred." Leech.

Tragedy is often set in the past, and based around a figure from a past we feel is now dead. This is CATHARTIC in that we feel released from the tragedy of history. The tragic pattern is only evident later.

The struggle between 'mighty opposites' is crucial to much tragedy.

The tragic hero:

Fatal imperfection of character.

"The characters contribute to a developing process of events which ultimately include their personal disasters." Leech

The issue of 'fee will' is often raised in terms of the characters' dilemmas.

The idea of the scapegoat - someone who pays unfairly for wrongs that originate somewhere else.

3) Modern views

This is a large subject, but the general trend in the twentieth century has been to reject the notion of tragedy on the basis of a general loss of faith in mankind and in the loss of a belief in heroes or heroic figures. The replacement of heroes by the the view that we all 'common men' with common primary natures, needs and desires has undermined the sense in which someone or something great has been lost in the tragic action. For more on this , see 'Tragedy' by Clifford Leech; 'Modern Tragedy' by Raymond Williams, etc.

Note: chauvinist phrasing has been retained in all quotations.