Greek Tragedy

Origin: the art of drama developed in the ancient Greek city-state of Athens in the late sixth century B.C. From the religious chants honoring Dionysus arose the first tragedies, which centered on the gods and Greece¡¯s mythical past.

Three tragedians in the fifth century: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Themes: the good and evil that existed simultaneously in the world as well as the other contradictory forces of human nature and the outside world.

Sources: All three tragic playwrights drew their material from Greek myths and legends; they each brought new developments to the art form. Aeschylus, whose Oresteia trilogy examines the common tragic themes of vengeance and justice, brought tragedy to the level of serious literature. Sophocles wrote perhaps the greatest tragic work of all time, Oedipus the King. The last great tragedian, Euripides, questioned traditional values and the ultimate power of the gods. In plays such as Medea, Euripides explores the choices that humans make under difficult situations.

C. M. Bowra's comment in his Classical Greece: ¡°Greek tragedy provides no explicit answers for the sufferings of humanity, but it . . .shows how they happen and how they may be borne.¡±

Paul Roche's comment in his The Orestes Plays of Aeschylus: ¡°The theme of all tragedy is the sadness of life and the universality of evil...The inference the Greeks drew from this was not that life was not worth living, but that because it was worth living the obstacles to it were worth overcoming.¡±

Masks in Greek Theatre: Actors wore masks so that the audience may see the facial expression clearly, allow them to tell the characters apart and make the theme of the story (comedy or tragedy) clearly obvious to the spectators. The actors needed to make sure they made exaggerated body movements so that the audience could understand what was happening, and they also needed to project their voices as the mask might of effected how loud their voices could be heard. When actors were switching roles, they needed to be careful, when changing masks to not show the spectators their actual face and the roles being switched. They would face to the back of the skene and put on the mask.

Mythology and the Gods

The ancient Greeks believed that tragedy should deal with illustrious figures and significant events, thus the pantheon of gods is ever-present and, often, omniscient. Aeschylus¡¯ plays, for instance, often centered on the justification of the gods¡¯ ways in relation to humankind or the comprehension of the form of justice meted out by the gods. The gods might punish the characters, as Zeus punished Prometheus in Prometheus Bound, or they might settle the seemingly insurmountable conflicts the characters faced, as when Athena decreed that the Furies must give up their torment of Orestes in the Oresteia. The tragedians took the basic premise of their stories from mythology but transformed them for dramatic intent, infusing the heroes and heroines with human qualities and relating their themes to the present day. Mythology also lent the tragedians¡¯ plays a more universal quality, allowing them to comment on topical events without limiting their scope to contemporary events and figures.

Aristotle's Poetics

Aristotle¡¯s Poetics, though short, has been widely influential outside philosophical circles. Yet it is doubtful that it can be fully appreciated outside Aristotle¡¯s philosophical system as a whole. Central to all Aristotle¡¯s philosophy is the claim that nothing can be understood apart from its end or purpose(telos). Not surprisingly, The Poetics seeks to discover the end or purpose of all the poetic arts, and especially of tragic drama.

Understood generally, the goal of poetry is to provide pleasure of a particular kind. The Metaphysics begins, ¡°All men desire to know by nature,¡± and the Nicomachean Ethics repeatedly says that the satisfaction of natural desires is the greatest source of lasting pleasure. The Poetics combines these two with the idea of imitation. All people by nature enjoy a good imitation (that is, a picture or drama) because they enjoy learning, and imitations help them to learn. Of particular interest to Aristotle is the pleasure derived from tragic drama, namely, the kind of pleasure that comes from the purging or cleansing (catharsis) of the emotions of fear and pity. Though the emotions of fear and pity are not to be completely eliminated, excessive amounts of these emotions are not characteristic of a flourishing individual. Vicariously experiencing fear and pity in a good tragedy cleanses the soul of ill humors.

Though there are many elements of a good tragedy, the most important, according to Aristotle, is the plot. The centrality of plot once again follows from central doctrines of Metaphysics and Nichomachean Ethics. In the former, Aristotle argues that all knowledge is knowledge of universals; in the latter, he states that it is through their own proper activity that humans discover fulfillment. For a plot to work, it must be both complete and coherent. That means that it must constitute a whole with a beginning, middle, and end, and that the sequence of events must exhibit some sort of necessity. A good dramatic plot is unlike history. History has no beginning, middle, and end, and thus it lacks completeness. Furthermore, it lacks coherence because many events in history happen by accident. In a good dramatic plot, however, everything happens for a reason. This difference makes tragedy philosophically more interesting than history.

Literary Terms concerning Tragedy

Catharsis: "purgation" or "purification" in Greek.

Aristotle in the first place sets out to account for the undeniable, though remarkable, fact that many tragic representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed, but relieved, or even exalted.

In the second place, Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the reader, which he calls "the pleasure of pity and fear," as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from comic or other forms, and he regards the dramatist's aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of a tragic protagonist and the organization of the tragic plot.

Tragic Hero: neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both, and "better than we are" with higher moral worth.

Hamartia(tragic flaw): suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia—his "error of judgment" or, as it is often though less literally translated, his tragic flaw.

Hubris(Pride): (One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that "pride" or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law.

Anagnorisis: discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero.

Peripeteia: or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster.