ABSTRACT
The quotation from Lust’s Dominion is damaging: tragedy is to ‘jet upon’ the stage there, though author have to remember that this is a poor play. Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead suggests that author should put Hamlet in his place, directing our sympathy towards the attendant lords who were to conduct him to death but found that their own deaths were to come prior to his and were to be less splendidly acclaimed. But their fate, too, was tragic, because they came to a realization of what was happening to them. In George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy (1961), the concluding pages suggest that tragedy has died to be reborn –in, for example, the silent scream of Mother Courage in Brecht’s play. That is tragedy for the people now, as Pinter also shows it in the over-talkative Davies coming to a final silence in The Caretaker (1960).
