What Is a Tragedy? From Aristotle's Rules to the Death of a Salesman

The word means goat song, and nobody is sure why; a goat was probably the prize, or the sacrifice, at the festivals of Dionysus where the plays were performed. Every spring the city of Athens watched three playwrights present three tragedies each, in an open-air theatre holding fifteen thousand people, in competition for a prize, and the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, thirty-two out of hundreds, are nearly the whole inheritance. Their subjects were the old myths, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Medea, Antigone, already known to the audience, so that the interest was never in what would happen but in watching it happen to someone who did not yet know.

About a century after Sophocles, Aristotle set down in the Poetics what made these plays work, and his description became a set of rules for the next two thousand years:

• •Tragedy imitates a serious and complete action of some size, in language made beautiful, through people acting rather than narrating
• •Its hero is neither wholly good nor wholly bad but a person of standing brought down by hamartia, a word meaning an error or a missing of the mark, later hardened by translators into a tragic flaw
• •The best plots turn on peripeteia, a reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis, a recognition of a truth that had been hidden, and the finest, as in Oedipus, have both at once
• •The effect on the audience is pity and fear, and through them a catharsis, a purging or clarifying of those emotions, which is why watching the terrible does good
• •The plot should be unified, with nothing that can be removed without damage, and it should turn on what is probable or necessary rather than on chance

The Renaissance rediscovered the Poetics and turned Aristotle's observations into laws, adding ones he had not stated, such as the unities of time and place, which the French theatre of Corneille and Racine obeyed with results of concentrated intensity. Shakespeare ignored all of it. His tragedies range over years and countries, mix clowns with kings, put a gravedigger's jokes before Hamlet's death and let Lear's fool sing through the storm, and their heroes are destroyed not by a single error but by a whole character meeting a whole situation. Macbeth is brought down by ambition, Othello by jealousy and Iago, Lear by pride and age, and Hamlet by something that four centuries of criticism have not agreed on. The plays kept what mattered from Athens, the fall of a great figure, the recognition that comes too late and the sense of waste at the end, and dropped the rest.

By the nineteenth century tragedy seemed to require kings, and there were few left. Ibsen wrote it about a doctor, a builder and a bourgeois wife; Chekhov about provincial landowners who fail to change their lives; and in 1949 Arthur Miller put an ordinary salesman, Willy Loman, at the centre of Death of a Salesman and defended the choice in an essay arguing that the tragic feeling is evoked whenever a person is ready to lay down their life to secure their sense of personal dignity, and that this was as available to a salesman as to a prince. Critics who held that the modern world, without gods or fate, could not produce tragedy at all, only pathos, had a case, and the plays answered it by finding fate in economics, family and character instead.

The word has meanwhile been worn down in ordinary speech to mean any sad event, a road accident or a lost final. The literary sense is narrower. A tragedy is not merely sad; it is the account of a fall that follows from what the fallen person is, that could not be undone once begun, and that leaves the audience understanding more than the characters did.

The question that Aristotle's catharsis was an answer to is still open: why does watching suffering give pleasure? Hume thought the eloquence of the telling converted grief into delight; Nietzsche thought tragedy let the audience look directly at the meaningless cruelty of existence and affirm life anyway; modern readers often say that it makes the worst thing bearable by giving it shape. All three agree that the form is not consolation. A tragedy does not tell its audience that things will be all right. It tells them that things will not, that the fault lay partly in the person who fell, and that the watching was worth it, and it has been finding people willing to hear that since the goat was the prize.

One feature of Athenian tragedy that later versions mostly dropped is the chorus, a group of performers who sang and danced in the space in front of the stage between the spoken scenes. They usually played ordinary people caught up in the story, the elders of Thebes or the women of a city, and their songs comment on what has happened, recall older myths and voice fears the main characters cannot. Aristotle records that Aeschylus added a second speaking actor and Sophocles a third, so a handful of masked men played every named role between them.

The chorus gives you a way into a Greek tragedy that is easy to miss on the page. It stands for the community that survives the hero, watching a powerful person act and suffer, and it often senses the truth before the hero does without being able to stop anything. Later drama found other devices for the same job: Shakespeare's soliloquies let a character speak straight to the audience, and modern productions sometimes restore a chorus as a crowd, a narrator or a group of neighbours who see everything and change nothing.

Not every theatre culture developed tragedy in the Greek sense, and the differences are revealing. Classical Sanskrit drama, guided by the Natyashastra, an ancient treatise on performance, generally avoided showing death on stage and steered its plots towards reconciliation, aiming to give the audience the savoured emotional experience its theorists called rasa rather than pity and fear. Bhasa's play The Broken Thigh, which ends with the dying warrior Duryodhana, is the exception scholars most often point to. The convention reflected a different idea of what drama was for, closer to restoring harmony than to confronting catastrophe.

Japan offers a closer parallel to Arthur Miller's ordinary heroes, two and a half centuries earlier. In 1703 the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote The Love Suicides at Sonezaki for the puppet theatre of Osaka, based on a real double suicide by a shop clerk and a courtesan only weeks before. Its hero is a merchant's employee trapped between love, debt and duty, with no king or god in sight, and the play's success led to many more works on the theme. Plays of this kind became so popular, and so closely linked in the public mind with real suicides, that the shogunate later restricted them.

Athenian playwrights wrote tragedies by the hundred for the festival competitions, but only a small fraction survive complete. Thirty-two tragedies have come down to us whole, and every one is by three writers: seven by Aeschylus, seven by Sophocles and the rest attributed to Euripides. The work of dozens of other tragedians, some of whom beat these three in competition, is known only from titles, quotations and fragments.

The survivors owe their existence partly to later schoolteachers and scholars, who selected particular plays for study and kept copying them while the rest fell out of use. Fragments of lost plays still turn up occasionally on scraps of papyrus from Egypt. It is worth remembering that the Greek tragedy studied today is a selection made by later readers, not a full picture of what Athenians watched.

A tragedy is a serious drama in which a person of standing falls to catastrophe through an error or a trait of their own, with a reversal and a recognition on the way, leaving the audience in pity and fear that Aristotle called catharsis. Athens invented it, Aristotle described it, the Renaissance turned the description into rules, Shakespeare broke them, and Ibsen and Miller showed it could be written about ordinary people once kings had run out.