TRAGEDY

branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual. By extension the term may be applied to other literary works, such as the novel. Although the word tragedy is often used loosely to describe any sort of disaster or misfortune, it more precisely refers to a work of art that probes with high seriousness questions concerning the role of man in the universe. The Greeks of Attica, the ancient state whose chief city was Athens, first used the word in the 5th century BC to describe a specific kind of play, which was presented at festivals in Greece. Sponsored by the local governments, these plays were attended by the entire community, a small admission fee being provided by the state for those who could not afford it themselves. The atmosphere surrounding the performances was more like that of a religious ceremony than entertainment. There were altars to the gods, with priests in attendance, and the subjects of the tragedies were the misfortunes of the heroes of legend, religious myth, and history. Most of the material was derived from the works of Homer and was common knowledge in the Greek communities. So powerful were the achievements of the three greatest Greek dramatistsAeschylus (525456 BC), Sophocles (c. 496406 BC), and Euripides (c. 480406 BC)that the word they first used for their plays survived and came to describe a literary genre that, in spite of many transformations and lapses, has proved its viability through 25 centuries. Historically, tragedy of a high order has been created in only four periods and locales: Attica, in Greece, in the 5th century BC; England in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, from 1558 to 1625; 17th-century France; and Europe and America during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Each period saw the development of a special orientation and emphasis, a characteristic style of theatre. In the modern period, roughly from the middle of the 19th century, the idea of tragedy found embodiment in the collateral form of the novel. This article focusses primarily on the development of tragedy as a literary genre. For information on the relationship of tragedy to other types of drama, see dramatic literature. The role of tragedy in the growth of theatre is discussed in theatre, history of. branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual. By extension the term may be applied to other literary works, such as the novel. The origins of the tragic form are Greek, as are those of the term itself, meaning goat-song and possibly referring originally to the sacrifice of a goat in the vegetation and fertility rituals associated with the god Dionysus, in whose honour tragedies were performed. The starkly universal themes of tragedy, the problems and conditions of life lived under the shadow of death and disaster, may be connected with the seasonal rhythms of life, decay, death, and rebirth. To begin with, it seems, these mysteries were celebrated in movement and song by a chorus. Later an individual emerged from the chorus to engage in dialogue with it. Aeschylus is credited with the innovation of isolating a second speaker so that dialogue between characters became possible. By the time of Sophocles and Euripides it had become customary for up to three characters to appear on stage at once. The materials of Greek tragedy were drawn from familiar myths of gods and men found in the works of Homer and elsewhere, so that the dramatic interest was less in the story than in the presentation of the changing awareness and responses of those involved, including the chorus. Major events tended to happen offstage and to be reported and commented on rather than presented directly. The plot, as in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, often traces the stages by which the hero or heroine becomes involved in an intolerable yet ultimately inescapable situation, prompted by will or circumstance, fatal ignorance, or binding obligation, but confronted in the end by the workings of an inexorable fate that ensures an unhappy outcome. The experience of ordeal is not wholly negative, however, for it may disclose unsuspected dimensions of human grandeur and dignity in extreme circumstances. Roman adaptations of Greek tragedy, particularly by Seneca, tended toward violent sensation and declamatory rhetoric, qualities that were taken up in Elizabethan tragic drama. For Chaucer and the European Middle Ages, tragedy came to mean simply the edifying account of how a great man's fortunes altered from initial prosperity to final wretchedness. But the new adventurous spirit of Elizabethan England, with its voyages of discovery and fascination with the rewards and perils of individual achievement, produced a frequently bombastic neo-Senecan tragedy of blood, of which Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedie (c. 1589) is an example. Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1587) and Doctor Faustus (c. 1588) introduced the overambitious hero, awe-inspiring in his ambition and magnificent even in his fall. Shakespearean tragedy incorporates elements of the drama of the time but goes further in presenting an imaginative vision of evil and of the resources with which man confronts it in his extremity. By taking a prominent but imperfect public figure as tragic heroKing Lear or Hamlet, Prince of DenmarkShakespeare contrived to involve a whole social and political order in the deeds and misfortunes of the protagonist. Seventeenth-century French classical tragedy, unlike Elizabethan tragedy, self-consciously returned both to the legendary subject matter and to the highly conventionalized unities of time, place, and action attributed to Greek tragedy by Aristotle and later critics. The gods of the Greek pantheon became literary and conventional in the theatre of Racine and Corneille, but the sense of tragic necessity remained so that individuals, often confronted with intolerable choices such as that between love and duty, were shown to have achieved the heights of human dignity even in keen personal anguish. A new kind of tragedy emerged in northern Europe in the 19th century. Unlike earlier tragedies, the plays of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov were written in prose rather than formal verse and dealt with painful contemporary situations. Ibsen explored individual frustration, particularly when an unusually perceptive character falls victim to hereditary blight or the constrictions and corruptions of society against which he has sought to protest. Strindberg explored compulsive but destructive sexuality, while Chekhov examined the boredom and emptiness of privileged lives in a decaying social order. Tragedy in its fullest dimensions was rarely conspicuous in 20th-century drama, though the American playwright Eugene O'Neill wrote many undeniably successful tragedies. Tragedy did assume prominence in another literary form, that of the novel. Such important novelists as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and William Faulkner wrote books that unmistakably recall the values of the tragic tradition. But by the late 20th century, despite the unimaginable evils of World War II that might have inspired tragic drama and despite moving explorations of human loneliness and desolation in the postwar theatre, tragedy was thought by many to be a moribund literary form. Additional reading A lengthier development of many of the points made in this article may be found in R.B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (1959). J. Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (1962), examines the origins of Greek tragedy. Works concentrating on modern tragedy include George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (1961); Walter Kerr, Tragedy and Comedy (1968); and Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (1966). Special aspects of tragedy are treated in J.M.R. Margeson, The Origins of English Tragedy (1967); Eugene Vinaver, Racine and Poetic Tragedy (1955); and A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). A useful anthology of writings on tragedy is Lionel Abel (ed.), Moderns on Tragedy (1967). Other works on the subject include Richmond Hathorn, Tragedy, Myth, and Mystery (1962); Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (1960); Dorothy Krook, Elements of Tragedy (1969); and Timothy J. Reiss Tragedy and Truth (1980).