ABSTRACT
The familiar account of the history of tragedy takes it for granted that modernity brings it to a halt. As George Steiner puts it in The Death of Tragedy, The decline of tragedy is inseparably related to the decline of the organic world view and of its attendant context of mythological, symbolic, and ritual reference. Tragedy depends on a theatre and an audience - more precisely, on a representative theatre and a deeply involved audience, along Athenian lines. If Eliot's play shows that it is actually counter-productive to invoke mythology without re-creating it, Yeats's intensely mythic drama reveals another problem: that the value of any mythology depends, not on its antiquity, but on the quality of thought that has gone into it. In Riders to the Sea, peasants wear flannel and burn peat, and old mothers lose their sons to a credible enemy, the sea.
