ABSTRACT
The proposition that tragedy is anti-feminist requires a syllogistic counter-proposition: if tragedy is anti-feminist, then feminism must perforce be anti-tragic. Ferminist critics of Renaissance tragedy who have drawn attention to the ways in which the genre of tragedy victimises its female characters have not generally been concerned with the fact that the genre also, with equal frequency and intensity. Feminist critics of classical Greek and Roman tragedy point the study of tragedy in a different direction. In Greek tragedy, they note, difference sometimes implies a distinction that is not necessarily hierarchical, and in some cases when it is, the hierarchy represented places the feminine at the top. There are dimensions of both reality and imagination to these lives, while the city would like to make them fundamentally a matter of social reality. These feminist critics offer a radical revaluation of tragedy insofar as their readings refocus attention on the foregrounded representation of the feminine.
