ABSTRACT
Tragedy tears us apart, it shatters our sense of ourselves and the world. Theterrifying power of tragedy is suggested by Sir Philip Sidney when he speaks, in An Apology for Poetry (1595), of
Tragedy has to do with strangeness. It involves an overwhelming sense of what Sidney calls ‘the uncertainty of this world’. It involves – as Aristotle suggested, more than 2,300 years ago – a paradoxical combination of emotions, at once pity and fear or (as Sidney says) ‘admiration and commiseration’. Tragedy involves an encounter not only with the death of a character on stage (or in the pages of a book) but also with the idea of our own deaths. Tragedy resists simple explanations. As A.C. Bradley observed, in 1904: ‘[T]ragedy would not be tragedy if it were not a painful mystery’ (38). In this chapter we propose to elucidate this sense of ‘painful mystery’ and to consider some examples of tragic literature, ranging from Shakespeare to the present.
