ABSTRACT
The word ‘tragedy’ in common usage today means little more than a sad or unnecessarily unpleasant event: a motorway crash in which several people died is described as a ‘tragedy’ in the newspapers; a promising career cut short by cheating is described as ‘tragic’. But in drama, the term ‘tragedy’ is specific, even technical, and refers to a particular type of play. Discussion of tragedy as a dramatic form must begin with the
Greek scholar and philosopher, Aristotle (384-22 BCE). In his small book – perhaps it is no more than lecture notes – known as The Poetics, he attempts a dispassionate, intellectual examination of poetry, focusing especially on drama, and within drama on tragedy. He never saw the plays of Aeschylus (c.525-456 BCE), Sophocles (c.496-06 BCE) and Euripides (c.485-07 BCE) – but he read them closely and tried to draw conclusions about what typifies their works. Aristotle begins his examination with the assertion that poetry,
like the other arts, is an ‘imitation’ of life. By this, he does not mean that poetry, or the arts in general, merely imitate the surface experience of living day-to-day; he means that art reproduces the rhythms of life, it creates experiences which, if we enter into them, are like the experiences of life. The sensitive spectator at a good
performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It has an experience something like ‘falling in love’: the play imitates falling in love. The appreciative listener at a concert performance of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony experiences something like heroism, pride, elation or triumph. For Aristotle, the purest form of poetic imitation is drama, and the purest form of drama is tragedy. Aristotle says that: ‘Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is
admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable . . . performed by actors . . . effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions’ (Aristotle, Poetics, p. 10). This general definition, especially the last clause, raises serious issues which have been debated heatedly over centuries, and even millennia, and to which we shall return. Before we enter that debate, however, we should note Aristotle’s further observations. He lists six elements of tragedy, as follows:
1 Plot, that is the action, the story, which, he adds, is enacted by people, actors, as opposed to be being narrated or sung.
