What Is a Tragedy? From Aristotle's Rules to the Death of a Salesman
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A play in which a good man is destroyed by a mistake he could not have avoided should be unbearable, and audiences have paid to watch exactly that for two and a half thousand years. Tragedy is the oldest surviving form of drama, invented in Athens in the sixth century BC, defined by Aristotle in the fourth, remade by Shakespeare and by the French, pronounced dead more than once, and still being written. What it is has been argued over for as long as it has existed, and the argument is part of the form.
Athens
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.
What Aristotle said
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
Shakespeare and the breaking of the rules
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.
Modern tragedy
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.
Why watch it
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.
The takeaway
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.