Download Shakespeare`s Plays: Tragedy

Shakespeare's Plays:
Tragedy
The genre of tragedy is rooted in the Greek dramas of Aeschylus (525-456 B.C., e.g. the
Oresteia and Prometheus Bound), Euripides (ca. 480?-405 B.C., e.g. Medea and The
Trojan Women) and Sophocles (496-406 B.C., e.g. Oedipus Rex and Antigone). One of
the earliest works of literary criticism, the Poetics of the Greek philosopher Aristotle
(384-322 B.C.), includes a discussion of tragedy based in part upon the plays of
Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. While Shakespeare probably did not know Greek
tragedy directly, he would have been familiar with the Latin adaptations of Greek drama
by the Roman (i.e. Latin-language) playwright Seneca (ca. 3 B.C.-65 A.D.; his nine
tragedies include a Medea and an Oedipus). Both Senecan and Renaissance tragedy were
influenced by the theory of tragedy found in Aristotle's Poetics.
Classical Tragedy: According to Aristotle's Poetics, tragedy involves a protagonist of
high estate ("better than we") who falls from prosperity to misery through a series of
reversals and discoveries as a result of a "tragic flaw," generally an error caused by
human frailty. Aside from this initial moral weakness or error, the protagonist is basically
a good person: for Aristotle, the downfall of an evil protagonist is not tragic (Macbeth
would not qualify). In Aristotelian tragedy, the action (or fable) generally involves
revolution (unanticipated reversals of what is expected to occur) and discovery (in which
the protagonists and audience learn something that had been hidden). The third part of the
fable, disasters, includes all destructive actions, deaths, etc. Tragedy evokes pity and fear
in the audience, leading finally to catharsis (the purgation of these passions).
Medieval tragedy: A narrative (not a play) concerning how a person falls from high to
low estate as the Goddess Fortune spins her wheel. In the middle ages, there was no
"tragic" theater per se; medieval theater in England was primarily liturgical drama, which
developed in the later middle ages (15th century) as a way of teaching scripture to the
illiterate (mystery plays) or of reminding them to be prepared for death and God's
Judgment (morality plays). Medieval "tragedy" was found not in the theater but in
collections of stories illustrating the falls of great men (e.g. Boccacio's Falls of Illustrious
Men, Chaucer's Monk's Tale from the Canterbury Tales, and Lydgate's Falls of Princes).
These narratives owe their conception of Fortune in part to the Latin tragedies of Seneca,
in which Fortune and her wheel play a prominent role.
Renaissance tragedy derives less from medieval tragedy (which randomly occurs as
Fortune spins her wheel) than from the Aristotelian notion of the tragic flaw, a moral
weakness or human error that causes the protagonist's downfall. Unlike classical tragedy,
however, it tends to include subplots and comic relief. From Seneca, early Renaissance
tragedy borrowed the "violent and bloody plots, resounding rhetorical speeches, the
frequent use of ghosts . . . and sometimes the five-act structure" (Norton Anthology of
English Literature, 6th ed., vol. I, p. 410). In his greatest tragedies (e.g. Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear and Macbeth), Shakespeare transcends the conventions of Renaissance
tragedy, imbuing his plays with a timeless universality.