TRAGEDY

Tragedy is one of the oldest and most resilient forms of narrative. Considering
texts from ancient Greece to the present day, this comprehensive introduction
shows how tragedy has been re-imagined and redefined throughout Western
cultural history.
Tragedy offers a concise history of tragedy tracing its evolution through key
plays, prose, poetry and philosophical dimensions. John Drakakis examines a
wealth of popular plays, including works from the ancient Greeks, Shake­
speare, Bertolt Brecht, Sarah Kane and Tom Stoppard. He also considers the
rewriting and appropriating of ancient drama though a wide range of authors,
such as Chaucer, George Eliot, Ted Hughes and Colm Tóibín. Drakakis also
demystifies complex philosophical interpretations of tragedy, including those
of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Benjamin.
This accessible resource is an invaluable guide for anyone studying tra­
gedy in literature or theatre studies.

John Drakakis is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Stirling. His

publications include Shakespeare’s Resources (2022), Alternative Shakespeares,
Second Edition (2002), and Tragedy (co-edited with Naomi Conn Liebler 1998).
 THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING

The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to today’s cri­
tical terminology. Each book:

� provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the term;
� offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and cultural critic;
� relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation.

With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible breadth of
examples, The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to key topics in lit­
erary studies.

Trauma
Stef Craps and Lucy Bond
Children’s Literature
Carrie Hintz
Pastoral
Second edition
Terry Gifford
Fantasy
Lucie Armitt
Intertextuality
Third edition
Graham Allen
Literary Geography
Sheila Hones
Metafiction
Yaël Schlick
Ecocriticism
Third edition
Greg Garrard
Fictionality
Karen Petroski
Tragedy
John Drakakis

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/The-New­

Critical-Idiom/book-series/SE0155
TRAGEDY

John Drakakis
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First published 2024
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ISBN: 978-1-032-01385-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-01380-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17840-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408

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For Eilidh
 CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface viii

Acknowledgements ix

1 Introduction 1
2 Histories, Archaeologies and Genealogies 20
3 Ontology and Dramaturgy 38
4 The Philosophy of Tragedy 67
5 From Action to Character 100
6 Tragedy: Gender, Politics and Aesthetics 115
7 Rethinking the Tradition 124
8 Tragedy, the Post-modern and the Post-human 144
Conclusion 164
Glossary 170

Bibliography 176
Index 183
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to

extend the lexicon of literary terms in order to address the radical
changes which have taken place in the study of literature during the last
decades of the twentieth century. The aim is to provide clear, well-
illustrated accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use,
and to evolve histories of its changing usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one where
there is considerable debate concerning basic questions of terminology.
This involves, among other things, the boundaries which distinguish
the literary from the non-literary; the position of literature within the
larger sphere of culture; the relationship between literatures of different
cultures; and questions concerning the relation of literary to other cul­
tural forms within the context of interdisciplinary studies.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic
and heterogeneous one. The present need is for individual volumes on
terms which combine clarity of exposition with an adventurousness of
perspective and a breadth of application. Each volume will contain as
part of its apparatus some indication of the direction in which the defi­
nition of particular terms is likely to move, as well as expanding the
disciplinary boundaries within which some of these terms have been
traditionally contained. This will involve some re-situation of terms
within the larger field of cultural representation, and will introduce
examples from the area of film and the modern media in addition to
examples from a variety of literary texts.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Tragedy is the term we use to describe a particular artistic genre, but it

also has an everyday use to apply to any form of disaster or catastrophe.
It is usually associated with the unexpected and has, although not
always, been associated with death. Anyone who writes about tragedy is
surrounded by examples of its various usages, and cannot fail to be
influenced by them. The present volume is no exception, coming in the
middle of sundry wars, industrial strikes, and daily accounts of disaster.
I have incurred many debts over the years in engaging with the differ­
ent aspects of tragedy. My first debt is to generations of students in
Honours option classes on Tragedy, on Shakespearean Tragedy, and on
Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy, as well as in the wider field of Tra­
gedy itself at Stirling. Also my former colleagues (and now friends) with
whom I co-taught courses on Tragedy: Robin Sowerby, Angus Vine and
Katie Halsey, were a constant source of knowledge, and they provided a
wonderful context for discussion. I am also grateful to colleagues in the
Stirling University Library whose assistance from time to time was
invaluable. At Routledge a succession of in-house Humanities editors
oversaw the New Critical Idiom series, from its inception with Jane
Armstrong, through Talia Rogers, Polly Dodson, and now Karen Raith.
They have all been a constant source of practical wisdom, and along
with Chris Ratcliffe have made routine tasks pleasurable. Special thanks
should go to Sue Cope whose superbly professional copy-editing skills,
eagle eye for detail, and speed of response made what might otherwise have
been routine activities pleasurable. To Faber my thanks for permission to
quote from T.S.Eliot, Ted Hughes and Tom Stoppard. And finally to my
choric quartet of Christine, Alexia, Helena and Eilidh for their persistent
enquiries concerning the progress of the volume, much thanks.
 1
INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of his devastating critique of the term ‘tragedy’ and

the language in which it has become usual to discuss it, Terry Eagleton
observes that “Like comedy, it can refer at once to works of art, real-life
events and world views or structures of feeling.” (Eagleton (2003), p. 9)
He argues that ‘tragedy’ then, would appear to evolve in a three-step
process from describing a play or piece of writing to denoting an
account of historical adversity, and from there to designating historical
adversities themselves.” (p. 14) He concludes, dismissively, that “Few
artistic forms have inspired such extraordinarily pious waffle.” (p. 16)
We have all been familiar with each of the steps that Eagleton
describes, from engagements with the plays of ancient Greek dramatists
such as Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, their rewritings in the plays
of the Roman Seneca and their translations, adaptations and appropria­
tions across the centuries to our own time; through a narrative of “his­
torical adversity” in general, to particular, often catastrophic “historical
adversities themselves.” Eagleton’s introduction of a phrase Raymond
Williams used, “structure of feeling” is worth pausing over in this
context because it speaks to a problem that classical scholars have had to
face when dealing with the ancient world. When asked to reflect on the
efficacy of the phrase, Williams drew a clear distinction between “an
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408-1
2 INTRODUCTION

articulate structure of feeling,” which in the case we are dealing with,

ancient Greek drama, seems to have been relatively explicit in its con­
cerns, and in the texts that remain, and “inarticulate experience” which
might point to complex but partly unexpressed social and political
pressures that are ‘lived’ as ‘experience.’ (Williams (1981), pp. 166–72)
Although his focus was on the nineteenth century where Williams
sought to draw a distinction between “the knowable” but “incomplete”
community (p. 172) and “experience [as] a lived contact with the
available articulations, including their comparison” (p. 171), his caution
has a more general application and raises questions concerning the ideological
aspects of those ancient Greek theatrical texts that have come down to us,
and that still perform cultural work in shaping certain kinds of experience.
This is an issue that will be taken up in later chapters and will involve the
ways in which we are invited to read ancient Greek tragedy.
It is this category, transposed, occasionally, into everyday events, that
has become the most common to be invoked, where usually any species
of personal suffering or death can be described as ‘tragic.’ One example
that strains the term by its unusual combination of the formal and the
contingent might be the case of the death of the Welsh comic perfor­
mer, Tommy Cooper. Deaths of performers onstage are by no means
unusual and there is a long list of musicians, pop stars and even pro­
fessional wrestlers that come to mind. However, the case of Tommy
Cooper, who died onstage in the middle of a televised performance from
Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, Live from Her Majesty’s, on 15 April
1984, compressed together virtually all of the elements that we associate
with the epithets ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy.’ The ‘reality’ of Cooper’s life
was that during the 1970s he had suffered heart attacks, and was known
for his excessive smoking and drinking. His TV appearance in April
1984, designed as a ‘come-back,’ featured a series of conjuring tricks
that invariably failed, giving the hilarious impression that he was a
casually incompetent magician. His fatal heart attack occurred when he
put on a gown as preparation for yet another inept conjuring trick and
slumped backwards onstage. The theatre audience thought that this was
part of his comic act and laughed, but Cooper’s death was real; indeed,
what began as ‘comedy’ was later described as a ‘tragic’ event.
That Tommy Cooper’s death was ‘sad’ goes without saying, but it
was not catastrophic, nor was it the punishment of some divine power.
The fact that the theatre audience thought that it was part of an act
 INTRODUCTION 3
demonstrates the uncomfortable proximity of ‘comedy’ to more serious
concerns, especially death. We might remind ourselves of another, this
time fictional, transposition from ‘comedy’ to ‘tragedy’ as an expected
conclusion is subverted. Halfway through the final act of Shakespeare’s
comedy Love’s Labours Lost (c.1595) Mercade, an ambassador of death
interrupts the ostensibly comic proceedings to tell the Princess that her
father has died, with the result that the play’s formal comic ending is
postponed. Having egregiously undermined the linguistic currency of
‘love’ in the play, even the knowing courtier Berowne is forced to prove
his alleged sincerity by visiting “the speechless sick” and “With all the
fierce endeavour of your wit / To enforce the pained impotent to smile.”
(Shakespeare (1998) 5.2.839–42) Berowne’s response is to highlight an
impossibility:

To move wild laughter in the throat of death?

It cannot be, it is impossible.
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.
(5.2.843–5)

And yet, because of the distance between the invented persona and
the reality of the performer’s death, this is, in fact, what the reality of
Tommy Cooper’s stage death appears to have done. Indeed, Cooper died
‘cheering us up,’ although perhaps not quite in the sense that Eagleton
suggests is one of the many inadvertent definitions of ‘tragedy’ (Eagle-
ton (2003), p. 9). In the modern world, what we might loosely call the
‘fate’ of celebrity stands in for a familiar experience that we are invited
to observe, be entertained by, to share or, even more, to empathise with,
only in the most vicarious of senses.
‘Tragedy’ is, today, a nuanced formal category of experience, an
ontological category that is sometimes deployed to account for even the
most haphazard occurrence that particularly involves death. Death is
what will happen to us all and in the most fortuitous of circumstances,
or if we are in the wrong place at the wrong time; at the same time, it
is a particular event that we associate with a species of dramatic perfor­
mance that has a long and complex theatre history; and it can also be
the kind of narrative that extends beyond the formal constraints of
drama to encompass all art forms in which mediated forms of con­
tingency, fortuitousness, justice and suffering are intertwined. ‘Tragedy’
4 INTRODUCTION

is also a type of experience whose features shift as social, cultural and

anthropological realities adjust to the pressures of representation,
although this is not to say that the ‘reality’ it represents can be entirely
and exclusively reduced to the manner of its signification. While, as we
shall see, tragedy emerged historically as a particular kind of heavily
ritualised dramatic performance, alien in many respects from what we
might encounter in the modern theatre or in film or the novel, in all
three genres constant reference is made to a systematically essentialised
concept that we label ‘tragic.’ It is sometimes asserted that tragedy is a
universal and trans-historical experience whose essence travels from cul­
ture to culture. But let us begin by asking the question: where did
tragedy begin?

TRAGEDY AND MYTH

In his essay on “Tensions and ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” Jean-
Pierre Vernant observes that tragedy is grounded in social reality but
that it is much more than a reflection of it:

It does not reflect that reality but calls it into question. By depicting it
rent and divided against itself, it turns it into a problem. The drama
brings to the stage an ancient heroic legend. For the city [Athens] this
legendary world constitutes the past – a past sufficiently distant for
the contrasts between the mythical traditions that it embodies and the
new forms of legal and political, thought to be clearly visible; yet a
past still close enough for the clash of values still to be a painful one
and for this clash still currently to be taking place.
(Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (2006), p. 33)

Vernant does not develop the thought that ideology is embedded in

myth, but he does refer to the “mythical traditions” that are the collec­
tive, conservative repositories of ancient Greek culture, and the “new
forms of legal and political thought” that represent an emerging pre­
sent. Paul Ricoeur has put the matter succinctly in his observation that
“Myths, fairy tales, other-worldly promises of religion, humanistic fan­
tasies, travel romances, have been continually changing expressions of
that which is lacking in actual life.” But he points out that these forms
of “wishful thinking” were “more nearly complementary colours in the
 INTRODUCTION 5
picture of the reality existing at the time than utopias working in
opposition to the status quo and disintegrating it.” (Ricoeur (1936), p.
205) We shall return to this issue when we come to consider the extent
to which tragedy, in whatever historical form, replicates ideology or
subverts it. For the moment we should focus on the mythic content, not
just of early tragic drama, but of the complexities of Greek culture out
of which the drama grew.
H.D.F. Kitto. distinguishes between what he calls “historical or pro­
fessedly historical” myths such as the Trojan cycle or other folk myths
such as “Perseus cutting off the Gorgon’s head” in favour of “the over­
throw and mutilation of Cronos by his son Zeus, and the enormous
number of goddesses, nymphs and mortal women who were successfully
loved by Zeus and Apollo.” (Kitto (1967), p. 197) Kitto emphasises the
explanatory force of these myths, but in his attempt to describe their
complexity in pre-historic Greek religion, he observes that:

These ‘early Greeks’ were not a coherent nation, but tiny pockets of
people who pushed and jostled each other about for centuries, set­
tling here, resettling there, continually making contacts with new
neighbours.
(Kitto (1967), p. 198)

He identifies the exemplary myth involving the violent overthrow of

Cronos by his son Zeus, and he suggests that “myths like this are an
attempt to grapple with the origins of things, first of the physical uni­
verse, and then of the gods.” (Kitto (1967), p. 199)
Kitto offers this as an ‘explanation,’ but we might think of it rather
as a ‘type of speech.’ This is how Roland Barthes approaches myth in his
book Mythologies, insisting that “myth cannot possibly be an object, a
concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form.” (Barthes
(1973), p. 109) Barthes is ultimately concerned with two things: with
what he calls “the very principle of myth” which aims to “transform
history into nature” thereby ‘naturalising’ it (Barthes (1973), p. 129)
and the modern deployment of its structures designed to sustain
“everyday life, civil ceremonials, secular rites, in short, the unwritten
norms of interrelationships in a bourgeois society.” (Barthes (1973), p.
140) Barthes is preoccupied with bourgeois society and he is concerned
to point to the ways in which a particular process of mythologisation
6 INTRODUCTION

accomplishes its objective. But his insistence that myth transforms his­
tory into nature (p. 129) opens the way to consider myth historically,
and makes possible the identification of the link between other social
formations and the ideologies that sustain them. It does not treat par­
ticular myths, as structural ethnologists have tended to do, as manifes­
tations of what Lawrence Coupe has called “a necessary activity of the
human mind.” (Coupe (2009), p. 148) In his glossing of Ricoeur, and in
his critical account of the practices of such structuralist ethnologists as
Claude Levi-Strauss, Coupe argues, contra Kitto, that “we do an injustice
to myth if we read it as an explanation of the world: it can then be assessed
as being once true but no longer true, and so dismissed in the present as a
false remnant of the past.” (Coupe (2009), pp. 87–8) This is an important
caveat when we come to consider the various emphases, omissions and
transformations that tragedy has undergone through the ages.
Barthes begins his analysis of the ways in which ‘myths’ operate by
considering the role of the professional wrestler, and he makes a sur­
prising connection: “Wrestling participates of the nature of the great
solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights … and it is no more igno­
ble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of
the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque. (Barthes (1973), p. 15) The
performance is a “display, it takes up the ancient myths of public Suf­
fering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory.” (p. 21) And in a final
gesture that offers us a partial gloss on Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, he
draws a distinction between the performer in the ring, the person
behind the performer and the moral and ethical drama in which he has
just been a participant:

When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was a few
minutes earlier possessed of moral rage, magnified into a sort of
metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous,
carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no-one can
doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is
common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship. In the ring, and
even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods
because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature,
the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the
form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.
(p. 25)
 INTRODUCTION 7
This is not to say that what we are dealing with here is some sort of
trans-historical universal truth, rather, that elements of the past are
brought into the present and endowed with particular but temporary
historical meaning. All cultures construct their myths from fragments of
the past, so that, while we may recognise concepts such as Morality and
Justice, we demand that they be intelligible to us, and we occasionally
assume that other cultures, present and past, share our understanding of
them. That assumption often leads to embarrassing instances of ana­
chronism, unless we are prepared to recognise our own cultural and
political investments in these concepts, and the myths that are deployed
to give them meaning. At one level they may be simply ‘explanations’
in the anthropological sense insofar as they offer a description of parti­
cular social formations, as Kitto suggests. But they are also ‘motivated’
signs as Barthes indicates, and, when analysed, the processes of motiva­
tion embody the inflected workings of particular histories and the
ideologies that underpin them, as Terence Hawkes has observed: “a
complex system of images and beliefs which a society constructs in order
to sustain and authenticate its sense of its own being: i.e. the very fabric
of its system of ‘meaning’” (Hawkes (2003), p. 107) Barthes goes one
step further to argue that the very principle of myth in the modern
bourgeois world effectively transforms history into nature. (Barthes
(1973), p. 129) But as a primarily structural question this process is also
applicable in different ways to all cultures. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to
claim that the mythical narratives to which ancient Greece had access, the
poetic forms and rituals with which they were imbued, and the cultural
uses to which they were put, involved degrees of naturalisation and also
degrees of idealisation.

TRAGEDY AND RITUAL

Ancient Greek drama is full of examples of what we might describe as
‘ritual.’ Indeed, as George Thompson observed, “Myth was created out
of ritual,” and he notes that:

The latter term must be understood in a wide sense, because in pri­

mitive society everything is sacred, nothing profane. Every action –
eating, drinking, tilling, fighting – has its proper procedure, which
being prescribed is holy. In the song and dance of the mimetic rite,
8 INTRODUCTION

each performer withdrew, under the hypnotic effect of rhythm, from

the consciousness of reality, which was peculiar to himself, individual,
into the subconscious world of fantasy, which was common to all,
collective, and from that inner world they returned charged with a new
strength for action. Poetry and dancing, which grew out of the
mimetic rite, are speech and gesture raised to a magical level of
intensity.
(Thompson (1941), p. 59)

In ancient Greek tragedy elements of mimetic rite remain. For example,

there are altars, references to religious sacrifice, human and animal, and
there are ‘supplicants’ who mount appeals to gods; in Aeschylus’ The
Choephori (1965) Electra and a Chorus come with “offerings to the dead”
and in Euripides’ The Suppliant Women (2009) Aethra, mother of The­
seus, receives an appeal from a group of seven women from Argos who
wish to be allowed to bury their dead. The German classical historian,
Walter Burkert observes the proximity of ‘myth’ and ‘ritual’ in his
suggestion that these “are the two forms in which Greek religion pre­
sents itself to the historian of religion.” He goes on to define ‘ritual’ as
“a programme of demonstrative acts to be performed in set sequence and
often at a set place and time – sacred insofar as every omission or
deviation arouses deep anxiety and calls forth sanctions.” (Burkert
(1985), p. 8) Ancient Greek tragedy deploys a wide range of customary
ritual practices, but it often addresses differing interpretations of their
elements and, more importantly, violations. In his enquiry into Violence
and the Sacred (1977), and with the aid of evidence from comparative
social anthropology, René Girard develops and refines the concept of
ritual and suggests that its functional link with religion involves “the
proper re-enactment of the surrogate-victim mechanism” whose function
“is to perpetuate or renew the effects of this mechanism; that is to say,
to keep violence outside the community.” (Girard (1977), p. 92,
emphasis in the original)
For Girard violence is a natural state that ritual is designed to appease
and the mechanism for appeasement is the figure of the surrogate whom
he defines as “a replica, as faithful as possible in every detail, of a pre­
vious crisis that was resolved by means of a spontaneously unanimous
victimisation.” (p. 94) The surrogate victim then becomes the means of
re-establishing the order that has been destroyed in the reciprocal
 INTRODUCTION 9
violence that follows. He takes Oedipus as a yardstick of this process
and observes: “Like Oedipus, the victim is considered a polluted object,
whose living presence contaminates everything that comes in contact
with it and whose death purges the community of its ills – as the sub­
sequent restoration of public tranquillity clearly testifies. (p. 95)
Girard invokes the figure of the pharmakos, which was paraded about the
city of Athens and absorbed impurities and could then either be banished
or killed by the whole of the community. Jacques Derrida traces the term
pharmakos back to its Platonic origin in his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” before
repeating Girard’s account of an Athenian civic ritual:

The ceremony of the pharmakos is thus played out on the boundary

line between inside and outside, which has as its function ceaselessly
to trace and retrace. Intra muros / extra muros. The origin of difference
and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and pro­
jected. Beneficial insofar as he cures – and for that, venerated and
cared for – harmful insofar as he incarnates the powers of evil – and
for that, feared and treated with caution.
(Drakakis and Liebler (1998), p. 348)

Girard modifies the findings of the early twentieth-century Cambridge

Ritualists who linked this figure to seasonal change, “the ‘death’ and
‘resurrection’ of nature,” and he urges us to “take care not to confuse the
myth and the ritual on the one hand, with the essentially anti-mythical
and anti-ritualistic inspiration of the drama on the other.” (Girard
(1997), p. 95) Indeed, it is at this point that we need to turn to the
transition from ‘ritual’ to ‘drama.’
In his book, From Ritual to Theatre (1982), Victor Turner distin­
guishes between the demands of ‘ritual’ and those of ‘theatre.’ He
argues that

Ritual, unlike theatre, does not distinguish between audience and

performers. Instead, there is a congregation whose leaders may be
priests, party officials, or other religious or secular ritual specialists,
but all share formally and substantially the same set of beliefs and
accept the same system of practices, the same sets of rituals or
liturgical actions.
(p. 12)
10 INTRODUCTION

He then cites Richard Schechner’s claim that “Theater comes into exis­
tence when a separation occurs between audience and performers. The
paradigmatic theatrical situation is a group of performers soliciting an
audience who may or may not respond by attending.” (p. 12) However,
this is too clear a separation to account for the relationship between
actors and audiences in Greek tragedy. In his account of “The Audience
of Athenian Tragedy,” Simon Goldhill argues that the distinction
between ‘actors’ and ‘audience’ was blurred, in part by the claim that “the
culture of classical Greece was a performance culture,” thus implying that
the select audiences of these plays were required “above all to play the role of
democratic citizen.” (Goldhill (2013), p. 54). Theatre attendance, though
voluntary, appears to have been restricted to certain categories of the
population of Athens, and the price of a theatre ticket could be subsidised
by the city. Moreover, performances themselves involved ceremonial dis­
plays that “in different ways promotes and project[s] an idea and ideal of
citizen participation in the state and an image of the power and the polis of
Athens.” (p. 56) Ancient Greek drama has often been compared to medie­
val English drama although the Christian myths upon which the latter was
based are very different from the polytheistic pantheon of gods whose
activities were incorporated into the former, sometimes in controversial
ways. Bearing in mind the proviso that we identified with Girard earlier,
both kinds of drama, however, were performed during religious festivals,
and both were designed to display membership of particular kinds of
communities. In Athens, as Goldhill observes, the link between actors and
audiences was symbiotic: “As the city and its citizens are ceremonially on
display on stage at the Great Dionysia, so the audience constitutes what
may be called ‘the civic gaze.’” (p. 57)
The incorporation of myth and ritual into theatrical performance
serves to ‘invent’ an Athenian identity, but this is not without diffi­
culty. Polytheism, conflict and violence are all important formative ele­
ments in the emergence of Hellenic Greece, and these tensions are
difficult for modern audiences to read. In her book The Divided City: On
Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens Nicole Loraux attempts to chart
the various ways in which Athens represented its own history to itself
through a series of repressions of the violence that was deemed necessary
to sustain the political concept of ‘democracy.’ She invokes Plato and
the connection between ‘the city’ and the ‘individual soul’ and she
concludes:
 INTRODUCTION 11
The soul has become a city: a city with parties, enemies both within
and without, and a council of elders and military leaders. In short, a
city prey to stasis where it is necessary to impose harmony at all costs
and forever.
(Loraux (2002), p. 83)

Loraux seeks to develop the ‘myth’ of Athens, and to understand the

politics that underlie its invocation of ritual practices. Her concern
generally with Greek tragedy is in the manner of a “brief foray” (p. 167)
although what she has to say about Athenian identity feeds very much
into the plays themselves as the rituals, practices and political con­
troversies find their ways, often in mimetic form, into the plays.
Taken together, these are the critical tools that we need to under­
stand before engaging more fully with the question of the beginnings of
Greek tragedy. These ancient plays are, from a modern perspective,
strange and formal, and as we shall see, the strangeness and formality
emerges from their engagement with and representation of, aesthetic
elements, some of which are easier to transport across historical periods
than others. We will engage in later chapters with the various ways in
which, from the Renaissance onwards, Greek tragedy as a collection of
theatrical texts has imposed itself selectively upon dramatists, poets and
novelists so that ‘tragedy’ has been in many ways separated from its
historical moment of origin. And it is to that moment of origin and to
the complex interweaving of ‘myth’, ritual’ and festive theatre that we
will turn in Chapter 2.

TRAGEDY AND MORALITY

But before we do that, we need to distinguish between what has come
to be recognised as tragic conflict, and the issue of ‘morality’ with which
it is often associated. To take ‘morality’ first: one of the Oxford English
Dictionary definitions of ‘morality’ is that it is “a doctrine or system
concerned with conduct or duty,” an important area of philosophy that
stretches back to Aristotle’s third-century B.C. The Nicomachean Ethics
(1977) and The Eudemian Ethics (2011), through the Roman Cicero’s (De
Officiis (Of Duties) (2009), finding its way into the philosophy of David
Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature (1961), and more controversially into
Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals (1887). The last of these
12 INTRODUCTION

texts appeared some 15 years after Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and
the Genealogy of Morals (1956) which we will consider later. In his sec­
tion on “Myth and Religion” in The Greeks (1967), H.D.F. Kitto draws
an important distinction between the indiscriminate powers of the
Greek gods and the limits within which human beings are able to act
either to avoid, or even to thwart, those powers. This is how Kitto
describes the problem, where the pronoun ‘we’ refers to ancient Greeks:

Our life is in fact subject to external powers that we cannot control –

the weather, for example – and these powers are ‘theoi’, gods. All we
can do is to try to keep on good terms with them. These powers are
quite indiscriminate; the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Then
there are other powers – or so we hope – that will protect us: gods of
the tribe, clan, family, hearth. These, unseen partners in the social
group, must be treated with scrupulous respect. To all the gods
sacrifice must be offered in the prescribed form; any irregularity may
be irritating to them. It is not obvious that they are bound by the laws
that govern human behaviour; in fact, it is obvious that some of them
are not. That is to say, there is no essential connexion between
theology and morality.
(p. 195)

The final sentence is crucial here, in that it exposes a gap between what
we might call prescriptive behaviour (that which theology demands)
and descriptions of human behaviour (morality) that are often violated
by other demands. The result is occasional ambiguity. The opposition
between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ central to the philosophical discussion of
ethics, is not always easy to define in ancient Greek tragedy. For exam­
ple, in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the first of a trilogy of plays, set in Argos
(c.458 B.C.), a city to the west of Athens, while Clytemnestra may be
condemned as a murderess, the justification for the murder of her hus­
band, Agamemnon, is that he had responded to a divine injunction to
sacrifice their daughter Iphigenia in order to accelerate the ending of the
war against Troy. The chaos that follows reveals that his punishment is
the focus of a much more complex and lurid history; this includes the
dispute between Agamemnon’s father Atreus, the former ruler of Argos,
and Aegisthus’s father Thyestes involving the latter being given “his
own sons’ flesh” to eat. As Aegisthus (Clytemnestra’s lover) puts it:
 INTRODUCTION 13
That deed gave birth to what you now see here, this death.
I planned his killing, as was just: I was the third
Child of Thyestes, then a brat in baby-clothes;
Spared and sent off with my distracted father, till,
Full-grown, Justice restored me to my native land,
I, from a distance, plotted this whole evil snare,
And caught my man.
(Aeschylus (1965), p. 98)

Both Atreus and Thyestes were descendants through their father Tan­
talus’s line, of the Greek god Zeus, although what is uncertain is the
cause of their mutual animosity. This in no way excuses Clytemnestra’s
murder of Agamemnon for which there is an immediate cause (the
sacrificing of their daughter Iphigenia) but it does complicate the issues
of ‘sin’ and ‘justice.’ After Clytemnestra has killed Agamemnon, the
Chorus provides a gloss for what is a rapidly darkening ‘truth’ that
exposes a long litany of revenge:

Reproach answers reproach; truth darkens still.

She strikes the striker; he who dared to kill
Pays the full forfeit. While Zeus holds his throne,
The maxim holds on earth: the sinner dies
That is God’s law. Oh, who can exorcise
This breeding curse, the canker that has grown
Into these walls, to plague them at its will?
pp. 96–7, emphasis in original)

Clytemnestra picks up the clause “the sinner dies” and expresses satis­
faction with what she has done, urging “the Powers that persecute / Our
race” to “forget the past.” (pp. 96–7) Aegisthus also accepts responsi­
bility for “this evil snare” but he links it with the process of “Full­
grown Justice.” In Agamemnon, no one is free from taint, and so morality
is entangled with a compulsion to revenge where the act itself serves to
proliferate ‘evil’ and ‘sin.’ This projection of human behaviour onto
divine sources further complicates the nature of ‘virtue’ and raises ser­
ious questions about the prescriptive power of theology and the morality
that drives action. Actions are the result of a desire for ‘justice’ which
compel the actors to act, but their actions repeat in cumulatively more
14 INTRODUCTION

horrific forms those that stimulated them to act in the first place. We
shall say more about this process in Chapter 2 when we deal with
Aristotle’s Poetics, which provides a formal template for ‘tragedy.’
Aeschylus’ trilogy (1965) contains two further plays, The Choephori or
The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. The first deals with the return of
Orestes who proceeds to avenge the death of his father Agamemnon first
by killing Aegisthus, and then Clytemnestra: “A victory,” Orestes
declares, “whose pollution makes my life abhorred” (p. 141), although
he seeks to excuse himself from his mother’s death: “It was no sin to kill
my mother, who was herself / Marked with my father’s blood, unclean,
abhorred by gods” (p. 141) even though matricide was considered a
violation of the moral order. The Choephori concludes with the Chorus’s
hope that with the destruction “The tempest’s course is run” (p. 143).
The issue here is whether Orestes’ action is just or not. As one of the
libation-bearers Orestes’ sister Electra calls for an avenger: “let those
who killed taste death for death, / Justly!” (p. 109) although the ques­
tion is whether Orestes acts out of choice or out of compulsion. Cly­
temnestra admits her guilt but she also reminds Orestes of
Agamemnon’s ‘sin’: “Your father sinned too. Count his sins along with
mine.” (p. 137) In The Eudemian Ethics Aristotle observed that “Justice
exists only between people who are subject to law, and where there is
law there is also injustice because the law’s judgement is what dis­
criminates between what is just and what is unjust.” (Aristotle (2011),
p. 64)
It is this ambiguity that resides at the heart of the concept of a just
revenge that The Eumenides sets out to arbitrate, as Orestes is brought
before the court of the goddess Athene in Athens. Here the Chorus of
Furies at the trial represents the “old” law, and complains that Athene’s
judgement upsets an old order:

The old is trampled by the new!

Curse on you younger gods who override
The ancient laws and rob me of my due!
Now to appease the honour you reviled
Vengeance shall fester till my heart pours
Over this land on every side
Anger for insult, poison for my pain –
Yes, poison from whose killing rain
 INTRODUCTION 15
A sterile blight shall creep on plant and child
And pock the earth’s face with infectious sores.
Why should I weep? Hear Justice, what I do!
Soon Athens in despair shall rue
Her rashness and her mockery.
(Aeschylus (1965), p. 174)

Athene offers compromise insisting that her power of judgement

comes from Zeus, and the Chorus is finally appeased by being offered
both a place (Athens) and power. Under the guidance of Zeus Athens
becomes the repository of justice and the terrestrial power of the
Eumenides, the old gods, is contained.
Aeschylus’ trilogy of plays rehearses basic issues of morality and the
extent to which concepts such as virtue and justice that have an histor­
ical pedigree emerge in a world where the power of the gods has now
shifted. For Aristotle “the virtues are middle states” and “these virtues
themselves and their opposing vices are states that find expression in
choice.” (Aristotle (2011), p. 37) Also the ‘soul’ is the seat of reason and
the basic opposition between virtue and vice is that they are concerned
with “what is pleasant and what is painful, for punishments take effect
through these, and punishments are a kind of therapy that, like others,
works through opposites.” (p. 17) The Eudemian Ethics does little more
than acknowledge the existence of divine being as a prime mover: “For
in a manner the divine element in us moves everything. Reason is not
the originator of reasoning, but something superior. But what can be
superior to knowledge and intelligence, except God? For virtue is an
instrument of intelligence.” (pp. 145–6) Aristotle reasons from human
behaviour whereas Greek tragedy asks serious questions about the con­
stitution of those superhuman forces that interfere to complicate the
nature of virtue, vice and justice and the morality that influences human
behaviour.
A second example would be Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex which demon­
strates the consequences of trying to pit human ingenuity against divine
decree. Oedipus has already saved Thebes to become king, by breaking
the city’s “bondage to the vile Enchantress” (Sophocles (1967), p. 26),
but what hangs over him is Apollo’s prediction that he will kill his
father and marry his mother. Oedipus’s pedigree can be traced back to
Cadmus, who was to initiate the process by which Thebes was founded.
16 INTRODUCTION

Being aware of Apollo’s prophesy, Oedipus’s parents, Laius and Jocasta,

have him cast away with his ankles pinned together on a mountainside
as a means of thwarting Apollo, while guarding themselves against the
accusation of infanticide. The infant is saved by a combination of divine
decree and human compassion, and he is taken to Corinth and brought
up as the son of Polybus, king of Corinth, who he assumes to be his
father. When Oedipus hears of Apollo’s prophesy he leaves Corinth for
Thebes, and on the way he unknowingly kills a man who turns out to
be his real father, King Laius. He saves Thebes from the Sphinx, marries
Jocasta and she gives birth to sons and daughters. The tragic irony is
that both Oedipus’s real parents and he, himself, have done everything
that they could to undermine Apollo’s decree, but that their actions
only serve to bring it about. The human and the divine collide in what
begins as a quest to save Thebes from another disaster, but this is linked
to a quest for self-knowledge. At the beginning of the play the suppli­
cant Priest and the citizens of Thebes make a clear distinction between
the regal Oedipus and the gods:

If we come to you now, sir, as your suppliants,

I and these children, it is not as holding you
The equal of the gods, but as the first of men,
Whether in the ordinary business of mortal life,
Or in the encounters of man with more than man.
(Sophocles (1967), p. 26)

Oedipus then embarks on a journey that is initially intended to save

Thebes from pestilence, but this is the first stage in a deeper search for
truth and identity. He saves Thebes only, in the final analysis, to be the
source of its present corruption. Thus the virtuous man is forced into a
stark visual recognition of his own vice. The unwitting killing of Laius
was done in ‘anger;’ as Aristotle puts it: “When reason or appearance
announces an insult or a slight, temper rears up at once, as if reasoning
that one must take arms against anything of that sort.” (Aristotle
(2007), p. 99) But this “incontinence of anger” is followed by what
Aristotle calls “incontinence of desires,” which are the forces that pre­
sumably bring Oedipus and Jocasta together in marriage. Oedipus’s
persistence in seeking the truth culminates in the ocular recognition of
his own ‘sin’:
 INTRODUCTION 17
Alas! All out! All known, no more concealment!
O Light! May I never look on you again,
Revealed as I am, sinful in my begetting,
Sinful in marriage, sinful in shedding of blood!
(Aristotle (2011), p. 58)

From the purely human perspective of Jocasta, the unfolding narrative

reveals that human events are haphazard: “Chance rules our lives, and the
future is all unknown. / Best live as best we may, from day to day.” (p. 52)
The standards of morality are shown in this tragedy to come into conflict
with what from a human standpoint are the vicissitudes of daily life, and
the extent to which they come into conflict with powers beyond human
control. It is at this point of tension that the economy of tragedy is exposed:
right confronts wrong, virtue confronts vice and good confronts evil, and
they all co-exist in a spiral that appears to be beyond the capacity of
humans to control. In his The Genealogy of Morals (1887) Friedrich
Nietzsche recognised this tension as a conflict between what ancient Greek
culture regarded as important elements of ‘order’ and what the con­
sequences were of release from its constraints:

For these same men who, amongst themselves, are so strictly con­
strained by custom, worship, ritual gratitude, and by mutual surveil­
lance and jealousy, who are so resourceful in consideration,
tenderness, loyalty, pride and friendship, when once they step outside
their circle become little better than uncaged beasts of prey. Once
abroad in the wilderness, they revel in the freedom from social con­
straint and compensate for their long confinement in the quietude of
their own community.
(Nietzsche (1956), p. 174)

Nietzsche had an unconcealed admiration for these “noble races” within

whose depths “there lurks the best of prey, bent on spoil and conquest,”
(p. 174), although this is from a philosopher who advocated “a critique
of all moral values; the intrinsic worth of these values must, first of all
be called in question.” (p. 155) Indeed, while Nietzsche celebrates the
power of destructive energy, in The Choephori it is Orestes’ sister Electra
who laments at her father’s grave the prevalence of human suffering and
the fate of exile that she shares with her brother:
18 INTRODUCTION

Then, father, hear our tears’ alternate song.

Look on us, each your child,
Both suppliants, both exiled.
Where is one single good, not rendered vain
By universal pain?
What hope have we to wrestle with our doom?
(Aeschylus (1965), p. 115)

Aristotle observes, “in every divisible continuum there exists excess,

deficiency, and a mean … And in all cases it is the mean relative to us
that is the best.” (Aristotle (2007), p. 18). Tragedy occurs when that
‘mean’ and the morality that sustains it are radically disturbed.

TRAGEDY AND PLEASURE

In the various attempts to find meaning in the myths, rituals and their
theatrical representation in the form of ‘tragedy’ the question of ‘plea­
sure’ seems to have been obscured. Indeed, what A.D. Nuttall has
labelled “the pleasure of tragedy” causes some discomfort. He aims to
distinguish between Aristotle’s “oikeia hedone, ‘the proper pleasure’ of
tragedy,” and “the gloating envious spectator.” (Nuttall (1996), p. 1)
Aristotle’s The Poetics provides for Nuttall a filter through which mim­
esis can become both the source of pleasure and a yardstick to which
subsequent epochs have returned and refined it. We consider Aristotle’s
contribution to an understanding of tragedy in more detail in Chapter
2, but the interrogative nature of Nuttall’s title raises an important
question. It may be the case that sado-masochists find pleasure in the
violence enacted in, say, Sophocles’ Oedipus or Shakespeare’s King Lear.
This might be the kind of brute pleasure that audiences of American
professional wrestling derive from forms of spectacular and extreme
violence that always threaten to spill out of the wrestling ring and into
anarchy. The version of wrestling that Barthes analysed was medieval in
its invocation of a clear morality, whereas the modern version endlessly
manipulates that morality as wrestling stars periodically change their
professional personae. Here also, the repeated (disingenuous) warnings
not to “try this at home; these are professionally trained athletes” do
little to dissuade spectators from actual violence. The dynamic of tra­
gedy is different in that pleasure is often derived from the defeat of the
 INTRODUCTION 19
protagonist, and from a much more sophisticated triumph in the face of
that defeat. Nuttall takes the matter in stages beginning initially with a
glossing of Aristotle’s notion of psychic discharge that “really does
explain why pleasure might be possible for people watching a tragedy”
(Nuttall (1996), p. 39) and thence via Freud and Nietzsche returning
finally to Aristotle. He concludes a detailed reading of Shakespeare’s
King Lear with a rejection of the obvious truism that “Pity and fear are
fun” to suggest that

Aristotle’s interest was engaged not by the initial thrill experienced by

the audience as they sat in the theatre [this would be the stimulation
provided by what is now called “sports entertainment”] but by their
state of mind when the play was over, after the lucid demonstration of
a probable or necessary sequence of events leading to the dreadful
death of the protagonist.
(p. 39)

For Nuttall, tragedy moves well beyond the domain of arousal, even
though this is an element in a much more complex equation; for him
the “special pleasure” (Aristotle’s oikeia hedone) comes “at the level of
conclusion or closure.” He concludes:

I do not wish to set aside as irrelevant the pleasure of arousal. There

is no doubt that tragedy makes use of this phenomenon. But in tra­
gedy the irresponsible pleasure of arousal is joined with bonds of iron
to the responsibilities of probable knowledge and intellectual assent.
(p. 104)

Although at one level this formulation is persuasive, it requires us to

assent to a particular kind of “closure,” one in which aesthetic satisfac­
tion and the ideological commitment to a particular form of knowledge
go hand in hand. When we come to Bertolt Brecht in Chapter 6 we
shall see the political mechanisms by which the tragic protagonist is
actually produced that will require us to adjust Nuttall’s model of tragic
pleasure. However, in the next chapter we will consider the historical
beginnings of tragedy and the various ways in which its elements
underwent historical transformation.
 2
HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND
GENEALOGIES

It is generally thought that tragedy originated in Athens during the hundred

years between the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Indeed, one commentator
has observed that what used to be called “Classical Greek tragedy” is now
more accurately called “fifth-century Athenian tragedy.” (Hall (2013), p. 94)
Jean-Pierre Vernant argues that the emergence of tragedy developed along­
side the emergence of law in the ancient Greek world, as “the entire mental
universe of religion” that is “present in the rituals, myths, and graphic
representations of the divine” gives way to a range of “social institutions,
human practices, and mental categories” and that “it is these that define legal
thought as opposed to other forms of thought, in particular religious ones.”
(Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990), p. 30) It is for this reason that Vernant
wishes to emphasise the “context” of tragedy, which is “not so much a context
as an under-text, which a scholarly reading must decode within the fabric of
the work.” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990), p. 31)
The Oxford Classical Dictionary states that

tragedy in Greece was a religious ceremony in the sense that it

formed part of the festivals of Dionysus, and that it dealt with grave
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408-2
 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES 21
religious problems, but it was not an act of worship in the same way
as the dithyramb, in which the chorus represented the Athenian
people itself paying honour to the god, and its members remained in
their own persons.
(OECD (1961), p. 917)

This observation seeks to maintain a distinction between the notion of

the audience as a congregation, and the dynamic of a theatre in which
actors and audience are separated from each other conceptually as well as
physically. As we saw in Chapter 1 elements of religious practice are
represented onstage, and their contextual value is important, but we risk
misrepresenting tragedy if we reduce it to the question of religion.
Nonetheless, and despite the speculations to which commentators have
occasionally resorted, it would appear there is some connection between
the religious festivals to celebrate the god Dionysus, and the etymology
of the term ‘tragedy.’ The Greek gloss on the term tragoudia is ‘goat
song’ and this has led to various suggestions concerning the relationship
between ‘the goat’ and the figure of Dionysus, and to the idea that a
goat was the prize given to the winner of the festival competition.
In his book Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy (1927) A.W. Pickard-
Cambridge evaluated much of the evidence concerning the emergence of
tragedy, including the problems surrounding its association with the
dithyramb which originated as a choral song to the god Dionysus. The
dithyramb was originally an oral poetic form that Richard Seaford has
described as “a hymn to Dionysus, probably once consisting of solo
improvisation and choral refrain – sometimes sung by men dressed as
satyrs – in a procession escorting Dionysus into the city.” (Seaford
(2006), p. 25) Precisely how the elements of these festivities merged
into what we have come to recognise as the form of tragedy is uncertain,
just as there are a number of theories that seek to explain the evolution
of the tragic Chorus from the solo performer of the dithyramb, into the
figure of the actor, and the emergence of distinct dramatic characters.
What we do know is that by the time of Aeschylus at the beginning of
the fifth century B.C., plays put on in the city Dionysia at Athens
consisted of a trilogy of tragic plays, followed by a ‘satyr play,’ although
here again the connection between the two elements has been subject to
a number of speculations. Pat Easterling suggests that early tragedy was
“inseparable from satyr drama, with the same playwrights competing in
22 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES

the same event with tragedies and a satyr play.” (Easterling (2013), p.
37) Pickard-Cambridge dismisses out of hand the idea that there is any
connection between Dionysus and goat sacrifice “or of Dionysus con­
ceived as a goat, in connexion with the city Dionysia at Athens.” He
goes on to suggest that there is no convincing connection between tra­
goudia and “the song of men dressed in goat-skins as the worshippers of
the goat-god,” and he concludes that the term “must be considerably
anterior to the organisation of the city Dionysia as known to us; so that
the controversy is not of great importance for the history of tragedy.”
(Pickard-Cambridge (1997), p. 173) This does not entirely explain the
goatskin as the prize awarded to the best competitor in the festival
Dionysia, nor does it entirely account for the ‘satyr’ play that usually
accompanied a tragic trilogy. The situation is not helped by the fact
that only one full satyr play survives, Euripides’ Cyclops (412 B.C.?)
(Euripides (2008)), although fragments of others remain.
Many of the plays that have survived, including the Cyclops, incorpo­
rate and embellish characters and events from Homeric narratives, all of
which helps to comprise a quasi-mythical Hellenic past that the dra­
matists brought into the present. Cyclops recapitulates an episode from
The Odyssey in which Odysseus, on his return from the Trojan War is
imprisoned by the Cyclops who feasts on some of his crew. In a per­
version of a Bacchanalian feast the Cyclops is made drunk and blinded
in his one eye enabling Odysseus and his remaining companions to
escape. In her introduction to Robin Waterfield’s translation of the play,
Edith Hall notes that some of the favourite plot motifs of the satiric
plays included “servitude and escape, feasting and drinking, sexual
pursuits, hunting, athletics, and inventions;” and that this exclusively
male plot “revolves around alcoholic intoxication and morally unques­
tioned violence enacted against an outright villain who happens to be a
homosexual rapist.” Her claim is that “the plot is not the point” but
that “what is at issue is the satyrs’ perspective on the world and satyr­
drama’s relationship with its non-identical twin sister, tragedy.” (Eur­
ipides (2008), p. xxviii) This is true up to a point, but the violence
present in The Cyclops is of a rather different order from that in one of
Euripides’ tragedies such as Heracles.
It is only when we think of tragedy in relation to what the late Pierre
Clastres called “the archaeology of violence” that we can, perhaps,
extend this argument. In a direct challenge to the classical Marxist idea
 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES 23
of primitive society as one involving commerce or exchange, Clastres
insists that this kind of society contradicts “the logic of generalized
exchange, which is a logic of identity, because it is a logic of identifi­
cation.” To succumb to the logic of identification would involve the loss
of “its very being and its difference, losing the ability to think of itself
as autonomous.” (Clastres (2010) p. 263) In Inventing the Barbarian:
Greek Self-definition through Tragedy, Hall outlines the various ways in
which in the Odyssey the Cyclopes invert the order of Greek civilisation:
they eat “dairy products rather than consume bread, meat and wine,”
they do not use bronze weapons, they do not involve themselves in
agricultural labour and “they know no communal rules or assemblies.”
(Hall (2004), p. 52) Although the principles of ‘violence’ and the pre­
valence of ‘war’ are features that Greek civilisation share with Clastres’
primitive society, and self-definition operates through difference, it is clear
that the uncritical application of the epithet ‘primitive’ to Greek civilisa­
tion, especially that of Athens of the fourth-century B.C., risks diminishing
the sophistication of which tragedy is an example. The inversions of the
satyr play, insofar as we can generalise on the basis of a single example,
appear to contribute to the deconstruction of tragic material even as it
attempts to replicate some of its features in a lower key. This suggests an
economy of difference that in tragedy operates to define Greek identity, but
that in the satyr play pokes fun at the tragic materials themselves by
appropriating them and subjecting them to laughter. What would seem to
be a fundamental link between tragedy and laughter survived the ancient
Greek example, and resurfaced in the jig that was often performed at the
end of tragedies in England during the Elizabethan period.
We can see this contrast in Euripides’ Heracles (2008) where the fate
of Hercules grows out of a familial history of violence culminating in
his murder of his wife and children. The city of Thebes is troubled even
before Heracles returns from Hades, as exemplified in the initial con­
frontation between the tyrant Lycus, who plans to kill Heracles’ family,
and Amphytrion, Heracles’ father, who is charged with defending his
son’s reputation for bravery. The history of this violence is complicated,
having its roots in the disruption of kinship relations, and in the inter­
ference in human affairs of the god Zeus. Amphytrion, who has been
the victim of Zeus’s promiscuity, is the first to question the power of
the god. After Megara (Heracles’ wife) and his children are ushered into
the house to prepare for death, Amphytrion voices the following regrets:
24 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES

Zeus, it turns out that there was no point in my having you as my

wife’s partner, no point in my calling you co-father of my son. It turns
out you were less of a friend than you seemed. Though I am a man
and you a great god, I am the better person because I did not betray
Heracles’ sons. You are a past master at sneaking into others’ beds
and taking other men’s wives without their permission, but you don’t
know how to have members of your own family. Either you are an
unfeeling god, or there is no justice in you.
(p. 43)

This scepticism concerning divine power is repeated throughout the

play, and becomes particularly focused on the devastating madness of
Heracles when he returns from Hades and slaughters his immediate
family. The focus on madness and on the contours of ‘Hell’ became the
emphasis that the Roman Seneca sought to emphasise in his Hercules
Furens. In his Introduction to the 1927 reissue of Seneca His Tenne Tra­
gedies T.S. Eliot points out that

The characters of Seneca’s plays have no subtlety and, strictly speak­

ing, no ‘private life.’ But it would be an error to imagine that they are
merely cruder and coarser versions of the Greek originals. They
belong to a different race.
(p. xii)

It was this emphasis on crime and the extreme representation of the

sublunary world that attracted the attention of English Jacobean trage­
dians, as we shall see.
Precisely how the cultural and historical materials of ancient Greek
tragedy finally came together remains uncertain. Pickard-Cambridge
attempts to produce an historical account of the progress of the god
Dionysus beginning from “Thraco-Phyrgian stock” and he argues that

it is probable that he was worshipped both in Thrace and in Asia

Minor long before he was received in Greece … While an elementary
form of drama, probably at Icaria, at Acharnae and very possibly in
other Attic villages also, was the foundation of the tragedy of Thespis,
the worship of the god in the Peloponnese (whither it had also tra­
velled by unrecorded stages) contributed in all probability [to] the
 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES 25
higher lyric elements which found a place in tragedy, and also the
satyr-play which was brought into Athens from Phlius.
(Pickard-Cambridge (1997), p. 174)

More recent scholarship has departed from the discussion of origins to

consider the composition of Athenian society and the extent to which
the tragedies it produced reflected or represented its social, political and
cultural preoccupations. This Foucauldian shift away from “tradition, of
tracing a line,” and to an “archaeology,” involves the problem “of
transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foun­
dations.” (Foucault (1977), p. 5) Foucault emphasises not continuity
and linearity but discontinuity in an attempt to replace what he calls
“the continuous chronology of reason” that saw “dispersed events –
decisions, accidents, initiatives, discoveries” as something that the his­
torian “re-arranged, reduced, effaced in order to reveal the continuity of
events.” (p. 8) Some aspects of this process were anticipated in George
Thompson’s pioneering book Aeschylus and Athens, first published in
1941 and republished in four succeeding editions before being re-issued
in 1980. Thompson notes how in sociological terms the Ionian aris­
tocracy was impelled “to call in question the origin and evolution of the
world in which they lived.” What was a tribal structure had organically
evolved into a series of clans linked together by cooperation, competi­
tion, rivalry and the provision of services. (Thompson (1980), p. 76)
These clans competed with each other for power and prestige, inter­
married or engaged in feudal rivalries, and this balance remained until
it was challenged by the growth of private property. (pp. 76–7)
Thompson identifies the beginning of this social transformation during
the tyranny of Peisistratos (560–528 B.C.) who made the worship of
Dionysus official. In order to neutralise the power of the aristocracy
Peisistratos revitalised the festival of the city Dionysia, and he intro­
duced recitals of Homeric poems, with the intention of fostering a
national self-consciousness. (p. 84) Peisistratos’s tyranny barely survived
his death, and its function was, as Thompson observes, “transitional.” It
provided a challenge to aristocratic dominance and it also “enabled the
middle class to consolidate its forces for the final stage in the democratic
revolution, which involved the overthrow of tyranny itself.” (p. 86)
What Thompson describes here is a bourgeois revolution, and up to a
point this view is shared by Perry Anderson. (Anderson (1981), pp.
26 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES

35ff.) But as Anderson notes, and Hall emphasises, Athenian democracy

should not be given a modern gloss as in its Hellenic guise the term
described “a zenophobic, patriarchal, and imperialist community, eco­
nomically dependent on slavery and imperial tribute.” (Hall (2013), p.
93) It was hostile to outsiders, and regarded women as inferior, while
slaves were simply regarded as property; indeed, G.E.M de St. Croix
distinguishes between slaves and “large numbers of free men and
women, mainly peasant, living not much above subsistence level, who
were exploited by the ruling class to a greater or less degree.” (de St.
Croix (2004), p. 226) These social divisions (with the possible exception
of slaves) are important and are to some extent discussed by Aristotle in
The Politics and The Athenian Constitution, insofar as they find their way
into the realm of tragedy. There is some disagreement about how these
social divisions in the fabric of Greek life should be described and
accounted for. But it is important to note, what almost all commenta­
tors have recognised, that the historical emergence of Athenian democ­
racy and its problems all found their way into ancient tragedy,
suggesting that the problems of political organisation were important
fault-lines in the urban Greek culture that these plays represented, even
though they may not have fully succeeded in resolving them.

ARISTOTLE’S THE POETICS

Much of the information, and some of the methodology, with which
ancient Greek tragedy is concerned is to be found in Aristotle’s The
Poetics (1953) which offered a careful, though not uncontroversial,
rejoinder to his teacher Plato’s banishment of the artist that had
appeared in The Republic. It is to Aristotle that we owe the formal details
of tragedy, many of which continue to be deployed in modern critical
analysis. Although he did not produce a poetics of comedy, throughout
The Poetics Aristotle was aware of the important distinctions between the
two genres. For example, beginning from the principle that all art
involves representation he proceeded to identify what he calls “the means of
representation,” and he continued:

Since living persons are the objects of representation, these must

necessarily be either good men or inferior – thus only are characters
normally distinguished, since ethical differences depend upon vice
 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES 27
and virtue – that is to say either better than ourselves or worse or
much what we are.
(Aristotle (1953) p. 9, emphasis in original)

This is the foundation of the essential distinction between tragedy and

comedy: “[t]he latter sets out to represent people as worse than they are
to-day, and the former as better.” (p. 11) One of the basic elements of
tragedy is its use and development of existing poetic forms, in particular
the dithyramb, which, as we saw, is thought to have begun as a choral
song to the god Dionysus and performed at Dionysiac festivals in
Athens to the accompaniment of the flute. (Pickard-Cambridge (1997),
pp. 47ff.) It was also performed at the Thargelia, “an early harvest fes­
tival celebrated in May” (Frazer (1994), p. 580), and attributed to the
god Apollo, involving the acknowledgement of a series of vegetative
myths and realised through a series of performed rituals.
Aristotle shows how the improvisations of the different stages of these
performances culminated, in the cases of both comedy and tragedy, in
the gradual emergence of the figure of the actor and the emphasis that
came to be placed on dialogue rather than upon choric performance. He
argued that it was Aeschylus “who first raised the number of actors from
one to two” and that Sophocles introduced a third actor and “scene­
painting.” (Aristotle (1953), p. 19) Aristotle’s claim that tragedy
evolved from the ‘satyr-play’ (p. 19) is questionable, but the connection
between ‘epic’ and tragedy seems more convincing. He argued that epic
poetry, “was a metrical representation of heroic action” although it
deployed “a single metre” and was in “narrative” form. (p. 21) Another
crucial distinction was that epic narrative was not subject to the con­
straints of time whereas the tragic action occurred within a single day.
(p. 21) Thus while Athenian tragedy made use of some of the material
of Homeric epic, its formal constraints imposed limitations upon it as it
did upon the celebratory rituals that were part of the Dionysian and
Thargelian celebrations.
Perhaps the most controversial feature of Aristotle’s description lies in
the relationship between the six parts of tragedy that he enumerates:
“plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle and song,” and of these the
relationship between plot and character has proved the most difficult
and the most enduring. Aristotle insisted that the most important
aspect of tragedy is “plot,” which is “the arrangement of incidents,”
28 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES

that, as he immediately went on to qualify, “for tragedy is not a repre­

sentation of men but of a piece of action, of life, of happiness and
unhappiness, which comes under the head of action.” (p. 25) Indeed, he
is adamant that tragedy aims at “not the qualities of character but of
some action; and while character makes men what they are, it is their
actions and their experiences that make them happy or the opposite.”
(p. 25) Over the long history of tragedy there has been a conflict
between whether plot (action) or character predominates in tragedy,
however Aristotle is quite clear in making an important distinction
between the representation of action as the primary aim of tragedy, and
character which is preoccupied with questions of morality and ethics;
these latter questions are to do with the balance between virtue and vice
(the ‘mean’) and what motivates humans to behave in the ways that they
do whether that be the result of voluntary or involuntary impulsion.
Aristotle outlined this in The Nichomachean Ethics, The Eudemian Ethics
and The Politics, and although we need to be aware of the fuller expla­
nations these three texts contain, we cannot pursue their detailed rami­
fications here.
Let us focus on the element that Aristotle regards as the central fea­
ture of tragedy, action – “the soul of tragedy” – as opposed to character
which “comes second;” indeed, it is possible, he claimed, to have a tra­
gedy without character, but it is important to note that what he calls
“the emotional effect of tragedy” lies in “reversals and discoveries” that
“are parts of the plot.” (p. 27) A tragedy is unsuccessful if the element
of character assumes primary importance over plot, and this will be
important when we come to consider the emotional impact of tragedy
and the pleasure that it generates. The action of a tragedy comprises a
whole that consists of “a beginning, and middle and end”:

A beginning is that which is not a necessary consequent of any­

thing else but after which something else exists or happens as a
natural result. An end on the contrary is that which is inevitable or,
as a rule, the natural result of something else, but from which
nothing else follows; a middle follows something else and some­
thing follows from it. Well constructed plots must not therefore
begin and end at random, but must embody the formulae we have
stated.
(p. 31)
 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES 29
Aristotle’s “beginning” is not, strictly speaking, accurate even though
he is aware of this, since in a number of Greek tragedies events take
place before the ‘action’ proper in the form of a back-story, and to a
considerable extent determine their course; for example, as in Aeschylus’
Agamemnon the action is generated by the animosity of Clytemnestra
towards Agamemnon because of the sacrifice of their daughter Iphi­
genia, and of Aegisthus for Atreus’s expulsion of his father Thyestes
from Argos, while in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex the decision to expel the
infant Oedipus from Thebes becomes an integral part of the play’s pre­
history. Even so, the action must be aesthetically complete in that it
represents a critical stage in a series of linked events, and must produce
a response in the audience that will cause “pity and fear,” emotions that
are generated when “the incidents are unexpected and yet one is a con­
sequence of the other.” (p. 39)
We saw earlier that tragedy is a representation of action, whereby the
process of imitation (mimesis) involves selection in the interests of unity
in contrast to the structure of epic narrative in which incidents that may
be unconnected organically are allowed to proliferate. The focus may be
on leading members of families, or on individuals, who are in positions
of power, people who, “like ourselves,” share the audience’s humanity
and can generate pity and fear for their “undeserved misfortune.” Aris­
totle goes on to describe both the character and the situation:

This is the sort of man who is not pre-eminently virtuous and just,
and yet it is through no badness or villainy of his own that he falls
into the misfortune, but rather through some flaw in him, he being
one of those who are in high station and good fortune.
(p. 47)

This bridge between actor and audience has been the source of some
confusion in relation to the concept of hamartia. The so-called tragic
“flaw” does not submerge the audience’s own identity in the subjectivity
of the protagonist, nor should we read this flaw as a feature of the dra­
matis persona’s personal psychology. As an effect of the action what we
might, from a modern perspective, read as the autonomy of the prota­
gonist is fundamentally a relation between the action in which he/she is
involved and the cultural milieu of the audience. (Drakakis and Liebler
(1998) pp. 8–9) Indeed, the Aristotelian notion of personal autonomy is
30 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES

deeply entwined in the elements of plot and, indeed, qualified by a gen­

ealogy in which it is enmeshed with the emergence from the pressures of
the natural world of the gods, as Hesiod outlined in his Theogony:

Night bore loathsome Doom and black Fate and Death, and she bore
sleep, and she gave birth to the tribe of Dreams. Second, then,
gloomy Night bore blame and painful Distress, although she had
slept with none of the gods, and the Hesperides, who care for the
golden, beautiful apples beyond glorious Ocean and the trees bearing
this fruit. And she bore (a) Destinies and (b) pitilessly punishing
Fates, (a) Clotho (Spinner) and Lachesis (Portion) and Atropos
(Inflexible) who give to mortals when they are born both good and
evil to have, and (b) who hold fast to the transgressions of both men
and gods; and the goddesses never cease from their terrible wrath
until they give evil punishment to whoever commits a crime. Deadly
Night gave birth to Nemesis (Indignation) too, a woe for mortal
human beings; and after her she bore Deceit and Fondness and
baneful Old Age, and she bore hard-hearted Strife.
(Hesiod (2018), p. 21)

In this context hamartia might be glossed as ‘missing the mark,’ the

result of making a choice between alternatives of equal value that
cannot be traced to the independent psychological inadequacy of the
protagonist. Rather, the resulting ‘error’ emerges from the complex
nature of the action of which the protagonist is ostensibly the bearer
rather than the originator. Sophocles’ Oedipus offers a very complex
version of this scheme in that the protagonist’s quest for knowledge is
initially concerned with the plight of Thebes and his responsibilities as
king. But as the action unfolds both protagonist and spectator are
implicated in patterns of discrepant knowledge that ultimately expose
the conditions of their formation. Tragic irony is located at the
moment when social contradiction, which it is the business of ideology
to obscure, is revealed.
One more important feature of Aristotle’s account of tragedy involves
the issue of catharsis: the idea that the effect of tragedy upon an audience
is the purging of potentially harmful emotions. Aristotle is not here
concerned in a didactic sense with some resulting morality that can be
extracted by the audience from the tragic action as a sort of lesson.
 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES 31
Indeed, the pity and fear that the protagonist provokes in the audience
does not involve the latter’s loss of its identity as audience. A.D. Nuttall
sought to restore the medical gloss on the term catharsis (Nuttall (1996),
pp. 15ff.), although he also suggests that Aristotle does not offer “a Galenic
account of emotions as physical humours, requiring actual excretion from
time to time;” rather, “he is proposing an analogy: as the body seeks to ease
its load of waste matter, so the soul – the higher faculty if you like terms of
value – seeks to ease its burden of emotion.” (p. 36) Thus the spectator
leaves the theatre restored to the balance that the tragedy itself has dis­
turbed, and to the happiness that that balance customarily produces.
It is, perhaps, within the context that Nuttall provides that we
should position Aristotle’s comments on the composition of the tragic
hero. “This is the sort of man,” Aristotle argues,

who is not pre-eminently virtuous and just, and yet it is through no

badness or villainy of his own that he falls into the misfortune, but
rather through some flaw in him, he being one of those who are in
high station and good fortune, like Oedipus and Thyestes and the
famous men of such families as those.
(Aristotle (1953), p. 47)

Taken at face value Aristotle would appear to locate the flaw in character,
although the examples he chooses suggest that there is something embed­
ded in the larger family structures of these plays – prior “actions” if you
like – that circumscribe the choices of the protagonists. In other words, the
flaw is located in the man but its origins are in ‘action’ that extends well
beyond the question of his personal individual psychology. It is this that we
have to take into consideration when describing “[t]he successful plot”:

The successful plot must then have a single and not, as some say, a
double issue; and the change must be not to good fortune from bad
but, on the contrary, from good to bad fortune, and it must not be
due to villainy but to some great flaw in such a man as we have
described, or of one who is better rather than worse.
(p. 47)

In the case of Oedipus the ‘flaw’ is in him but is not of his own making,
and the reminder of that flaw is in the etymology of his name (Oedipus:
32 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES

‘swollen foot’). Moreover, the issue of ‘Fortune’ as a term describing an

initially inexplicable fall from prominence assumes a greater explanatory
force, the further the human protagonist is away from the sources of
divine power, the less he/she has control of events. This is an issue that
resurfaces, during the medieval period where success in earthly life
confronts the requirements of humility that are part of Christian
theology.
But let us return to Aristotle’s emphasis on the plot, where he initi­
ally isolates two elements in what he calls “the emotional effect of tra­
gedy”: these are “reversals” and “discoveries” (Aristotle (1953), p. 27)
and which he will later go on to define further. A reversal (peripeteia) is
“a change of situation into the opposite” (p. 41) although this extends
beyond what we might expect of the protagonist or what he/she
intends. Aristotle invokes the example of the arrival of the messenger
from Corinth in Oedipus with the news that Polybus and Merope are not
Oedipus’s real parents, thereby leading Oedipus towards the truth of his
birth and subsequent actions. The second term (anagnorisis) involves
discovery that Aristotle describes as “a change from ignorance to
knowledge, producing either friendship or hatred in those who are des­
tined for good fortune or ill.” (p. 41) Both of these mechanisms are
indispensable elements of plot and both involve a reaction in the audi­
ence of “either pity or fear, and it is actions such as these which,
according to our hypothesis, tragedy represents.” (p. 43) In other words,
it is the effect that these mechanisms have upon an audience that tragedy
is responsible for representing since it is these that produce pity and
fear. Aristotle then adds to this a third element “calamity” which he
describes as “a destructive or painful occurrence such as a death on the
stage, acute suffering and wounding and so on.” (p. 43)
These are what Aristotle calls “the constituent parts” of tragedy, but
he then offers a further quantitative – we might say, formal division of
“Prologue, Episode, Exode, Choral song, the last being divided into
Parode and Stasimon.” (p. 43)

A prologue is the whole of that part of a tragedy which precedes the

entrance of the chorus. An episode is the whole of that part of a tra­
gedy which falls between whole choral songs. An exode is the whole
of that part of a tragedy which is not followed by a song of the chorus.
A parode is the whole of the first utterance of the chorus. A stasimon
 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES 33
is a choral song without anapaests or trochaics. A commos is a song
of lament shared by the chorus and the actors onstage.
(pp. 44–5)

W. Hamilton-Fyfe observes that the term ‘stasimon’ is attributed to “all

choruses in a tragedy other than those sung during entry or exit.” (p. 44 fn.a)

FATE, FORTUNE AND PROVIDENCE

What Aristotle describes here is a form that in its details would appear
alien to the expectations of a modern audience despite occasional
attempts by productions to reconstruct the conditions of ancient Greek
performance. Moreover, while scholars have debated the accuracy of
some of Aristotle’s observations, The Poetics still remains an important
critical document that subsequent centuries have sought to reinterpret.
In addition to the confusion concerning character that we will revisit in
Chapter 4, Jean-Pierre Vernant asks an important question that gets to
the heart of what motivates action in Greek tragedy:

What is the significance, in psychological history of the will, of this

tension that the tragedians constantly maintain between the active
and the passive, intention and constraint, the internal spontaneity of
the hero and the destiny that is fixed for him in advance by the gods?
(Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990), p. 79)

Vernant suggests that there emerges a distinction in a play such as

Oedipus between “the ancient religious conception of the misdeed as a
defilement attached to an entire race and inexorably transmitted from
one generation to the next in the form of an ate- or madness sent by the
gods,” and a new legally based conception “according to which the
guilty one is defined as a private individual who, acting under no con­
straint, has deliberately chosen to commit a crime.” According to
Vernant, questions of “decision and responsibility” remain enigmatic
in tragedy and they are undecided because they raise “questions that,
in default of any fixed and unequivocal answers, always remain
open.” (p. 81)
What Vernant pinpoints is a kind of emergent individualism in
Greek culture where action could be the exclusive preserve of human
34 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES

agency, but “[w]hat it lacked was the power of realization, the efficacy
that was the exclusive privilege of the divine.” (p. 83) He concludes:

Tragedy expresses this weakness inherent in action, this internal

inadequacy of the agent, by showing the gods working behind men’s
backs from beginning to end of the drama, to bring everything to its
conclusion. Even when, by exercising choice, he makes a decision, the
hero almost always does the opposite of what he thinks he is doing.
(p. 83)

In order to understand the nature of the links between gods and humans
we need to return to Hesiod’s Theogony where a clear genealogy and a
mythography are laid out. The ascendancy of Zeus is charted, and his
acquisition of wisdom, good and evil is described as part of an entire
polytheistic structure; the emergence of the seasons, of law, justice
(Dike) and peace is then accounted for in relation to “care for the works
of mortal human beings.” Of particular importance were “the Desti­
nies,” upon whom the counsellor Zeus bestowed the greatest honour,
Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos, who gave to mortal human beings
both good and evil. (Hesiod (2018), p. 75)
Good and evil were initially properties of godhead, but they were
bequeathed to human beings in such a way as to offer them a limited,
but carefully circumscribed, freedom. In some ways the idea of choice
that this implies points forward to Renaissance debates concerning the
role of free will in Christian theology, but we are still some distance
away from this. Indeed, Hesiod described what Vernant has called “this
internal inadequacy of the agent,” by mapping out the ways in which
the gods operated “behind men’s backs from the beginning to the end of
the drama.” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990), p. 83) The conflict
between ‘freedom’ and ‘determination’ was, as Walter Burkert observed,
part of a lifelong struggle that was dependent upon how the various ele­
ments of the world were “apportioned” and how boundaries were “drawn
in space and time.” The mechanism of apportionment was Moira, which
was “not a person, not a god, or a power, but a fact” that was the means of
demarcating all boundaries including “the most important and most
painful boundary … death.” (Burkert (1998), pp. 29 and 174)
All of these elements were part of a polytheism that accommodated
different kinds of religious emphasis, what H.D.F. Kitto described as “a
 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES 35
religion that had to do with the social group and a religion that had to
do with nature-worship.” (Kitto (1967), p. 200) Greek tragedy did not
simply represent “mythological personages,” rather, the plays focused on
the dramatists’ “strivings with the religious, moral philosophical pro­
blems of their time, and they used myth much as Shakespeare used
Holinshed – and with just as much freedom.” (p. 201) It is also within
this context that Aristotle’s “good fortune or ill” (Aristotle (1953), p.
41) requires to be read as parts of the process of apportionment within
whose boundaries the human subject is constrained to act. It was not
until the early modern period that ‘Fortune’ emerged as a more secular
means of describing those pressures that were beyond the individual’s
control. For example, Machiavelli’s The Prince has a long chapter entitled
“Of New Principalities Gotten by Fortune, and Other Men’s Forces” in
which he explores the pragmatism required to secure and maintain
political power, ending with a reference to the reign of Caesar Borgia
and to the Old Testament book of Daniel, attributing to a Christian
God the power to control human affairs:

Policy shewed it selfe short sighted; for hee foresaw not at the time of
his Fathers death, he himself should bee brought unto deaths doore
also. And methinks this Example might have given occasion to our
Author to confesse, that surely there is a God that ruleth the earth.
And many times God cutts off those cunning and mighty men in the
hight of their purposes, when they think they have neare surmounted
all dangers and difficulties.
(Machiavelli, (1640), pp. 60–1)

Invariably Machiavelli concerns himself with the human errors of gov­

ernment, and here the invocation of the supreme power of God provides
an ideological weapon designed to protect the authority of powerful
men. In this context ‘Fortune’ is simply that which is beyond the indi­
vidual’s control, while the rule of God is made to seem remote by
comparison with the divinities, problematic though they may be, that
oversee and frequently intervene in human affairs.
Machiavelli is concerned with one God, but the polytheism of ancient
Greece was imagined in human terms with the result that, as H.D.F.
Kitto argues, “[t]he gods became, one might say, sublimated Kings”
while “the impulse to unity and order reduced the number of gods and
36 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES

combined them into a family and a family council.” (1967, p. 196)

Kitto observes that “[t]he powers therefore that rule the physical uni­
verse must also rule the moral universe” with the result that the gods
become “spiritualised,” and that “other divine powers, like the Furies or
Erinnyes who punish violence and injustice,” including “Ananke or
Moira,” become the agents of Zeus. (p. 197) With a greater critical
emphasis on worldly matters, on the physical world as a post-lapsarian
world and on individual success or failure, Renaissance Christianity in
its various forms established an even closer link between secularism
and morality, to the extent that success or failure in everyday life
depended upon how individuals behaved, and how that behaviour
could determine the expected quality of an afterlife. Renaissance Pro­
testantism came to understand what Max Weber identified as “work in
the world” as evidence of a “calling” imposed upon the individual by
“a special command of God” to fulfil particular duties determined by
“the Divine Will.” (Weber (1976), pp. 84–5) This placing of the
individual in the world by God was regarded as “a direct manifestation
of divine will” and involved an emphasis on Providence, which Weber
describes:

The individual should remain once and for all in the station and call­
ing in which God had placed him, and should restrain his worldly
activity within the limits imposed by his established station in life.
While his economic traditionalism was originally the result of Pauline
indifference, it later became that of a more and more intense belief in
divine providence, which identified absolute obedience to God’s will,
with absolute acceptance of things as they were.
(p. 85)

This is precisely the conclusion to which Hamlet comes immediately

before the final confrontation with Claudius in Shakespeare’s play. What
we might recognise as contingency, the Prince, on his return from
England, acknowledges as the operation of a divine power; he dismisses
Horatio’s caution following the challenge to “play” a duel with Laertes,
with an invocation to a Protestant Providence:

Not a whit. We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of

a sparrow. If it be, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now.
 HISTORIES, ARCHAEOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES 37
If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all, since no man of
aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be.
(Shakespeare (2006), 5.2.197–202)

Hamlet’s “The readiness is all” is crucial here in that it allows him to

behave as though he is free, thereby countering a possible claim that he
is rigidly predestined to a fate over which he has absolutely no control.
In the later version in King Lear, it is Edgar who offers the less active
alternative that is closer to stoicism when he seeks to pacify his father
after the defeat of Lear and Cordelia. Earlier Gloucester had lamented
that “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their
sport” (Shakespeare (1997), 4.1.38–9), but later he seeks to console his
father by acknowledging the impossibility of resistance: “What, in ill
thoughts again? Men must endure / Their going hence even as their
coming hither. / Ripeness is all.” (5.2.9–11)
The alternative to stoic acceptance is a focus on human activity,
especially of the kind that violates moral and ethical norms, of which
crime is a cardinal example. Thus, a combination of stoic acceptance,
and an assertion of individuality alongside a willingness to accept things
as they are was what some Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists found so
appealing, and it addresses, modifies and adapts the question of moti­
vation that in its various forms had come down from ancient Greek
drama. Indeed, while we may recognise the appeals in Elizabethan and
Jacobean tragedy to recognisably Greek deities, these exist uncomfor­
tably alongside various emphases on elements of Christian theology, and
with the advent of Renaissance humanism, on a tension between action
and character that is rooted in practical questions of the behaviour of
those in power. To this extent, Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy
developed aspects of radicalism that could be discerned in ancient Greek
tragedy, and was further modified in Senecan tragedy, albeit the his­
torical contexts in each case were different. In all these examples, tra­
gedy emerges when faultiness in religious belief, in morality and ethics
and in the relations between human contingency and what are often
discerned as powers beyond human control are brought into question.
 3
ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

We have suggested that tragedy has a dual significance: it is the name

that we give to a particular kind of dramatic structure, a methodology,
that has a long historical pedigree, but it is also an ontological category,
what we might call a condition of being, with a content that is
responsive to historical change. Very often these categories are inter­
twined, but at particular moments in history the dramatic structure,
often the site of innovation, assumes primacy of attention and a new
urgency. During the medieval period the ready definition of tragedy
followed a simplified Aristotelian line, with Chaucer’s observation in the
Prologue to The Monk’s Tale:

Tragedie is to seyn a certain storie,

As olde bokes maken us memorie,
Of him that stood in greet prosperitee
And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.
(Chaucer (1988), p. 241)

The emphasis remained upon the suffering that was the result of falling,
but also upon the idea of narrative (“a certain storie”), while gradually
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408-3
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 39
the moral element of tragedy as payment for deviation from the path of
virtue came to assume a more prominent place within the framework of
Christianity. In his The City of God (inspired by the sacking of Rome by
Alaric and the Goths in 410 A.D.) St Augustine was prompted to con­
sider the ways in which Christian providence operated. Unlike the
pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses who variously interfered in
human affairs, sometimes with no clear motive, St Augustine pondered
on the extent to which “God’s just judgment” allows him to invite
“the wicked unto repentance as this scourge doth instruct the good
unto patience.” (Augustine (1967), 1.8) The Christian universe is,
therefore, a moral universe regulated by God, who distributes rewards
and punishments:

The mercy of God embraceth the good with love, as His severity doth
correct the bad with pains. For it seemed good to the almighty provi­
dence to prepare such goods, in the world to come, as the just only
should enjoy and not the unjust; and such evils as the wicked only
should feel, and not the Godly.
(1.9)

If the wicked should have access to the benefits that God provides for
the good, then the choice is offered to them in the hope that they will
repent their wrongdoing. Indeed, “the same violence of affliction pro­
veth, purifieth, and clarifieth the good, and condemneth, wasteth, and
casteth out the bad.” (1.9) In the Christian universe that St Augustine
describes the choice is not between alternatives that are equally desirable
or equally compelling, and for the faithful suffering has a purpose in
that it determines the quality of an afterlife. Chaucer’s definition of
tragedy assumes that not all success in this world is providential, but
that it may be temporary, resembling the trajectory of a wheel that
allows the man that “stood in greet prosperitee” to thrive, but then to
fall “out of heigh degree” and to end “wrecchedly.”
This was also the model for John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes that
began with the fall of Adam and Eve that Christ’s conquest of death had
‘raunsoumed”:

Therby men may / that prudent ben & wyse

The ioyes clayme / whiche ben eternall
40 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

And entre ayen into paradise

Fro when Adam had a fall
To which place / above celestiall
O Christ Jesu / so brynge us to that glory
Which by thy deth / haddest the victory.
(Lydgate (1554), fol. iiii)

In part Lydgate rewrote a series of Greek tragic narratives within this

Christian framework, and this became the model of tragedy that coun­
selled the powerful to curb their behaviour and the meek to endure
their suffering. It also minimised the tragedy of the crucifixion in favour
of the conquest of death and the re-entry of the faithful into paradise.
However, as the sixteenth century progressed dramatists such as Kyd,
Shakespeare and Marlowe came to occupy a particular place in this
gradual evolution since they all, in different ways, offered much more
nuanced versions of the narrative of decline and fall by inviting not so
much pity and fear at the plight of their protagonists as some degree of
sympathy (if not empathy) with them. In an attempt to reinstate the
overlooked French origins of English Renaissance tragedy Richard
Hillman focuses on Shakespeare’s Richard II as an example of a tragic
protagonist whom, he suggests, “is felt to take on both emotional
weight and psychological depth,” an impression, that he argues is
“produced by his relentlessly eloquent oscillation between flagrant self-
deception and agonizing self-knowledge.” The result is a delicate bal­
ance between “the play’s cold-blooded political morality, which attri­
butes disaster to the king’s errors and others’ ability to exploit them.”
The refusal to eradicate the protagonist’s many “flaws,” and his “larger
than life” agony is made “universal, and most ironically, as transcend­
ing the banality to which he himself would reduce them for his own
Mirror for Magistrates anthology: ‘sad stories of the death of kings’.”
(Hillman (2010), p. 17) We might, of course, argue that a play such
as Hamlet had a significant afterlife in the early nineteenth century by
the conversion of the protagonist’s experience into a universal phe­
nomenon that could be detached from its immediate theatrical con­
text. Hamlet’s alleged pusillanimity became Coleridge’s in the latter’s
statement that he had “a smack of Hamlet” in him. We shall return in
Chapter 5 to this emphasis on ‘character’ and its role in the dynamics
of causation.
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 41
However, while Christianity in its various manifestations concerned
itself with metaphysical questions that dealt with the organisation of
order, and the conditions under which the disposition of benefits and its
consequences were undertaken, in the rapidly emerging theatre renewed
emphasis was placed upon some of the issues that Aristotle had raised in
The Poetics. The emphasis on the status of the tragic protagonist was
underlined, as indeed was the choice between two equally valid alter­
natives, together with the ‘flaw’ in the protagonist that makes him
behave in the way that he does. The Christian preoccupation with ‘rise’
and ‘fall’ gradually assumed a more secular context, where religious
precepts appeared to collide with more pragmatic considerations that
had to do with the acquisition, retention and loss of political power.
Writers such as Machiavelli, Erasmus and Montaigne, Sir Thomas Elyot,
Sir Thomas Smith and Richard Hooker, alongside classical figures such
as Aristotle, Ovid and Virgil, helped to expand a rapidly growing lex­
icon of rhetorical, political, literary and cultural examples. The return to
classical models, intensified by the influence of the Senecan rewriting of
the ancient Greek tragedies, and the deployment of a range of classical
non-dramatic texts as part of the Elizabethan education system, all
found their way into the rapidly developing institution of the popular
theatre.
In his attempt to locate the metaphysics of tragedy Georg Lukács
contrasts a compulsion that is “the result of the inescapable workings of
causality” and what he calls a “Being-necessary” that “leaps across all the
causes of empirical life” and is “intimately bound up with the essence.”
(Lukács (1974), p. 155) Stripped of the accoutrements of “ordinary life”
tragedy is the “moment” when the centre as self is exposed:

It is a moment; it does not signify life, -it is life –a different life

opposed to and exclusive of ordinary life. This is the metaphysical
reason for the concentration of drama in time, of the condition of the
unity of time. It is born of the desire to come as close as possible to
the timelessness of this moment which yet is the whole of life.
(p. 158)

It is also, Lukács suggests, a moment in which time is almost frozen to

the point where we approach a “timelessness” that is desired. William
Storm, in his book After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic offers a slightly
42 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

different version of this essentialism. He links the critical exposure of

selfhood to a Dionysiac energy that while acknowledging “selfhood and
identity,” then tests “under the most extreme circumstances, the ability
of that selfhood to cohere and retain its integrity.” (Storm (2010), p. 26)
From the very beginning of Renaissance tragedy the concentration on
‘selfhood’ and the pressure to which it is subjected can be seen, for
example in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c.1587), arguably the
first theatrical success of the newly popular Elizabethan theatre. Presid­
ing over the action of the play throughout is the Ghost of Don Andrea,
and Revenge, the one returned from purgatory because his “rites of
burial” have not been performed, and the other a personification of an
abstract force. Don Andrea’s long description of his experience of the
underworld shares an ethos similar to that of the opening dialogue of
Seneca’s Thyestes (2005) between Tantalus and the Fury Magaera. In
Kyd’s play the uncertain destiny of Don Andrea in the life after death
initiates an action that is presided over throughout by his Ghost and
Revenge:

Here finding Pluto with his Propserpine,

I showed my passport humbled on my knee:
Whereat Proserpine began to smile,
And begg’d that only she might give my doom.
Pluto was pleas’d and seal’d it with a kiss.
Forthwith Revenge, she rounded thee in th’ ear,
And bade thee lead me through the gates of horn,
Where dreams have passage in the silent night.
No sooner had she spoke but we were here,
I wot not how, in twinkling of an eye.
(Kyd (1977), 1.1.76–85)

Don Andrea’s passage through “the gates of horn” promises true visions,
and so the ensuing action is stamped with the seal of ‘truth,’ guaranteed
by both the Ghost and Revenge. What follows is in some sense pre­
determined, although Hieronimo, his son Horatio and Bel Imperia as the
principal participants in the action are not fully aware of the events in
which they participate. At the centre of the tragedy is the contradiction
between Hieronimo’s public role as ‘Knight-Marshal’ responsible for the
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 43
dissemination of justice and the punishment of crime, and his familial
obligation to seek justice for the murder of his son, Horatio.

Though on this earth justice will not be found,

I’ll down to hell, and in this passion
Knock at the dismal gates of Pluto’s court,
Getting by force, as once Alcides did,
A troop of Furies and tormenting hags
To torture Don Lorenzo and the rest.
(3.13.108–13)

Throughout, the presiding figures interfere, although there is a ten­

sion between the pace of the systematic working-out of the plot and
Don Andrea’s impatience to have his fate in the afterlife, and the reaf­
firmation of his identity, resolved. At the end of the play the complex­
ities of plot are resolved, revenge is meted out and Don Andrea, Bel
Imperia, Horatio and Hieronimo are ushered into a positive afterlife,
while Don Lorenzo, Balthazar, Serberine and Pedringano are all rele­
gated to the torments of Hell. In one sense the play works out poetic
justice, although the focus is on the suffering of the protagonist Hier­
onimo, on the violence of which he is ostensibly the cause and on the
ultimate ascription of identity that is underwritten by supernatural
forces. As Hans-Georg Gadamer observes, “tragedy does not exist where
guilt and expiation balance each other out, where a moral bill of guilt is
paid in full.” (Gadamer (1993), p. 131) Hieronimo’s suffering and the
violence that he subsequently enacts upon others, and finally upon
himself, is excessive, and is felt by the theatre audience to be so. The
audience is drawn into the tragedy through the internal spectatorship of
the Ghost of Don Andrea and Revenge, and the excessive energy that is
produced is Dionysiac in its chaotic violent potential. Indeed, the play
never quite balances the various forces that neither the untimely death of
Don Andrea nor the subsequent deaths unleash. Hieronimo “writes” the
tragedy of Soliman and Perseda, and the stage spectators are drawn into the
play, while both the King of Spain and the Viceroy of Portugal are made to
replicate Hieronimo’s suffering with the deaths of brother and son respec­
tively. Kyd’s play multiplies the ingredients of tragedy and brings it into
the early modern period with an emphasis upon ‘human’ suffering. This
tendency gradually becomes more sophisticated in later versions of revenge
44 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

tragedy, especially in plays such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but further in the

Jacobean tragedies of John Marston, John Webster, George Chapman,
Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Middleton.

RADICAL TRAGEDY
For the last 40 years or so, however, scholars have been engaged in
radical rereadings of ancient Greek tragedy, in which dramatists such
as Euripides have been associated with the problematising of particular
Hellenic institutions and attitudes and subjected to historical analysis.
In a parallel movement, a new inflection of Renaissance English tra­
gedy as ‘radical’ emerged with Jonathan Dollimore’s path-breaking
Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare
and His Contemporaries (1984) that has now gone through three edi­
tions (1984, 1989 and 2004) and attacked head-on the claim that
literature generally and tragedy in particular were the repositories of
universal trans-historical values. Dollimore argues that all of the plays
that he discusses share a common theme in that they transgress or
challenge “the Elizabethan equivalent of the modern obsession with a
telos of harmonic integration.” (p. 5) He is concerned to analyse the
ways in which, in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries,
Renaissance scepticism exploits “Elizabethan/Jacobean fears of cosmic
decay … as a way of destabilising providentialism.” (p. 21) In short,
the metaphysical order was in crisis, and the “rejection of metaphysical
harmony” in Jacobean tragedy “provokes the rejection of aesthetic
harmony and the emergence of a new dialectical structure. Coherence
comes to reside in the sharpness of definition given to metaphysical
and social dislocation, not in an aesthetic, religious or didactic reso­
lution of it.” (p. 39, emphasis in original) Dollimore dismisses the
notion that Jacobean tragedy is somehow ‘decadent’ since he finds in
all of the tragedy of the period – but especially in Jacobean tragedy –
a serious challenge to “the essentialist concept of ‘man’ that had
hitherto mystified and obscured the real historical condition in which
the actual identity of people is rooted” (p. 153). He develops a
“materialist analysis” of tragedy and he begins from the claim that
while Jacobean tragedy could either incorporate subversive elements
into itself, or interrogate what we have come to recognise as ideolo­
gical values “from within, seizing on and exposing its contradictions
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 45
and inconsistencies and offering alternative ways of understanding
social and political process,” it might also go further to become

a tragedy which violates those cherished aesthetic principles which

legislate that the ultimate aim of art is to order discordant elements;
to explore conflict in order ultimately to resolve it; to explore suffer­
ing in order ultimately to transcend it. All three principles tend to
eliminate from literature its socio-political context (and content)
finding instead supposedly timeless values which become the uni­
versal counterpart of man’s essential nature – the underlying human
essence.
(p. 8, emphasis in original)

We may note in passing that this mounted a serious challenge to the

“timeless moment” that Lukács identified as the primary objective of
tragedy. In the second edition (1989) Dollimore went further to spell
out his own methodology by contrasting it with the New Historicism of
North American critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and Stephen Mul­
laney who had suggested that both in the theatre and in wider culture
“potentially subversive social elements are contained in the process of
being rehearsed.” (Dollimore (1989), p. xxi, emphasis in original) In his
third edition (2004) Dollimore went yet another stage further to challenge
the claim that “aesthetic didacticism” was complicit with censorship,
and that

such didacticism, far from foreclosing on subversive thought, was

often its precondition from a creative, a theatrical and an intellectual
perspective. The didactic dénouement does not so much close off
that questioning as enable it: it subscribes to the law’s letter precisely
in order to violate its spirit; far from foreclosing on it, a conforming
framework actually licenses a subversive content via the aesthetics of
lip-service.
(p. xxiii)

We shall return to the methodology that Dollimore enunciates here in

Chapter 5, but for the moment we need to draw attention to it as an
important stage in the evolution of critical approaches to Renaissance
tragedy.
46 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

In his essay on “The Stoicism of Seneca” T.S. Eliot remarked that

the differences between the fatalism of Greek tragedy, and the fatal­
ism of Seneca’s tragedies, and the fatalism of the Elizabethans, pro­
ceed by delicate shades; there is a continuity, and there is also a
violent contrast, when we look at them from far off.
(Eliot (1951), pp. 133–4)

There is, of course, a fatalism at work in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, but
there is also the beginning of a human resistance to forces beyond the pro­
tagonist’s control, even though we may detect in Hieronimo’s behaviour a
certain tragic irony. Michael Neill notes a tension between the formal
ending of The Spanish Tragedy and what he sees as “something sinister in the
vision of an afterworld which is to consist of endless re-enactments of the
drama of retribution we have just seen enacted.” (Neill (1998), p. 112).
Neill notes a similar tension in Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragical
History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1962, c.1589), although
Faustus’s low social origins and his rise to intellectual superiority introduce
a series of specific contrasts between the demands of religious belief and the
human desire to challenge them. The Chorus outlines this tension in terms
of an opposition between the force of Faustus’s insatiable desire for absolute
mastery and the power of the “heavens” to contain it:

So much he profits in divinity,

The fruitful plot of scholarism grac’d,
That shortly he was grac’d with doctor’s name,
Excelling all, and sweetly can dispute
In th’ heavenly matters of theology;
Till, swollen with cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, heavens conspir’d his overthrow;
For, falling to a devilish exercise,
And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursed necromancy;
(ll. 15–25)

The conflict is cast in both biblical and classical terms as one between
the human capacity to exceed limits, and the divine power to impose
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 47
limits, a struggle that elicits sympathy for the protagonist even though
his attempts to master his earthly existence ultimately prove futile. Here
the force of Renaissance humanism collides with the demands of reli­
gious faith to produce a fate that Neill argues produces “reduplicated
signs of closure” that the Latin tag “Terminat hora diem; terminat
Author opus” [‘The hour ends the day; the Author ends his work’] aims
to reinforce. However, the sparagmos of Faustus’s dismemberment at the
end of the play and the descent of his soul into endless hellish torment
raises fundamental questions about the prospect of a compassionate
God, and about the delusory power of the freedom of the human will.
This ‘tearing apart’ of Faustus at the end of the play reminds us of the
maenads’ dismemberment of Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae and
alludes to a ritual dismemberment associated with the celebration of the
ancient Greek rites of the god Dionysus. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is a
revenge play in which the protagonist who seeks to establish his own
power of control in the face of divine certainty is caught on the horns of
a dilemma: his persistence in upholding his vow to Mephistopheles fuels
a despair that will result in ultimate defeat, dismemberment and eternal
anguish. What was in ancient Greece a polytheistic culture is subsumed
in late Elizabethan English culture into a vivid visual monotheistic
conception of the Christian Hell.
Faustus is ripped apart by conflicting forces that pull him in different
directions, but there are also more explicit analytical accounts of the
dilemma that beset early modern culture. Arguably one of the most
radical writers of his age, Fulke Greville, could, in the conclusion of his
Senecan closet-drama Mustapha (first performed 1609), exhort ‘Man’ to
“Forsake not nature, nor misunderstand her” since “Her mysteries are
read without faith’s eye-sight. / She speaketh in our flesh, and from our
senses / Delivers down her wisdoms to our reason.” (Greville (1973), ll.
26–9) There follows another concluding Chorus (Chorus Sacerdotum) that
is even more explicit in its description of the dilemma of humanity:

Oh wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound:
Vainly begot, yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound:
What meaneth nature by these divers laws?
Passion and reason self-division cause:
48 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

Is it the mark or majesty of power

To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give.
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
We that are bound by vows, and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To teach belief in God and stir devotion,
To preach of heaven’s wonders and delights:
Yet when each of us in his own heart looks,
He finds the God there far unlike his books.
(ll. 1–24)

Fulke Greville offers us something more than an “anatomie” of the kind

of world that the metaphysical poet John Donne describes in his “First
Anniversarie” (c.1611) (Donne (1960)). Indeed, his description of the
conflict that ravages humanity is fundamentally tragic, and that tragedy
resides in a series of constitutive contradictions inscribed in the human
heart. We can say that this was one of the consequences of Renaissance
humanism, and in Caroline tragedies such as Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a
Whore (c.1629) the fragility of reason itself is subjected to scrutiny.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet extends the Marlovian preoccupation with the
protagonist’s humanism and exploits what had become by 1603 a
revenge tradition albeit in innovative ways. The ‘madness’ of Kyd’s
Hieronimo remains, as do the frustrations that result from the various
obstacles placed in his path to the resolution of his dilemma. But
instead of the simple conflict between the demands of political office
and the desire for justice, the action turns to the contemplation of
metaphysical matters. Hamlet cannot fully understand the nature of the
task that the Ghost has given him, and he must do so before he can act.
In this play the ideology that can protect the monarch against regicide
is shown to be completely ineffectual, but the secretiveness of the regi­
cide itself also paralyses the protagonist who is forced, against his better
judgement, to act in a temporal world in which “the time is out of
joint; O cursed spite? That ever I was born to set it right.” (Shakespeare
(2006), 1.5.186–7) Hamlet’s task, however, leads directly to a con­
sideration of the much larger ontological question of ‘being’ in the
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 49
world, which becomes the central focus of his “To be, or not to be”
speech (3.1.55ff.). Here the possibility of the nobility that involves the
suffering of “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (3.1.57) that
will delay action is set against its active counterpart of taking of arms
“against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them” (3.1.58–9).
Both alternatives may lead to the same conclusion – the fear of con­
sequences – and the conflict is rooted in the regulatory conscience of the
protagonist that acts as an obstacle to action:

Who would fardels bear

To grunt and sweat under a weary life
But that the dread of something after death
(The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns) puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus conscience does make cowards –
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
(3.1.75–87)

Francis Barker goes a step further to argue that

At the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is, in

short, nothing. The promised essence remains beyond the scope of
the text’s signification: or rather, signals the limit of the signification
of this world by marking out the site of an absence it cannot fill.
(Barker (1995), p. 33)

But at this point in the play we are offered a clear insight into Hamlet’s
interiority that emerges gradually in the ensuing events of the play, and
in particular, in the later interview with his mother where he lays out
his own values and regards his task as a contradictory one: “but heaven
hath pleased it so / To punish me with this, and this with me, / That I
must be their scourge and minister.” (Shakespeare (2006), 3.4.171–3)
50 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

After a series of false starts, and in the face of the task that Rosen­
crantz and Guildenstern have been ordered to carry out, Hamlet returns
to Denmark to be threatened by a stock revenger (Laertes), and where
Ophelia, deprived of her father’s patriarchal control, goes mad. This
should tell us something about what has often been described as Ham­
let’s madness – something which is by his admission early in the play
faked, and yet that indicates serious mental disturbance flowing from a
parallel source to that of Ophelia: the death of a father. We know what
happens on board the ship taking Hamlet to England, but what is
uncertain is the effect that this event has on Hamlet’s own psychology.
Shakespeare’s innovation lies in the emphasis that is placed on Hamlet’s
psychology at moments such as this, and Hamlet’s interactions with
Ophelia reflect this clearly.
Immediately before Ophelia’s funeral cortège Hamlet muses on the
passage of time, human decay and the absolute power of death to level
social difference:

Alexander died. Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth

to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of
that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a
beer-barrel?
(5.1.198–201)

Once the cortège arrives, Hamlet displays what the onstage onlookers
regard as madness in his rhetorical outburst of grief for Ophelia. In the
following scene he recounts to Horatio the events that happened during
the voyage including his own part in emending the letter that Rosen­
crantz and Guildenstern were carrying to the English king. The letter is
opened and then resealed, an action that is attributed ultimately to a
higher power; when Horatio asks how the letter was sealed, Hamlet
replies, “Why even in that was heaven ordinant: / I had my father’s
signet in my purse – / Which was the model of that Danish seal.”
(5.2.48–50) This is the first explicit acknowledgement that behind the
events of the play some supernatural force is at work, and this is reaf­
firmed by Osric’s message challenging Hamlet to a duel with Laertes.
The ineffectual attempt on the part of the Lord to persuade him to
attend trumps Horatio’s misgivings and leads to a bold statement about
the operation of “Providence” which provides an explanation for all that
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 51
has happened up to this point in the play and suggests a key to the
immediate future:

Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a

sparrow. If it be, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now.
The readiness is all, since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t
to leave betimes. Let be.
(5.2.197–202)

The opaque chiliastic sentiment: “If it be, ‘tis not to come. If it be not
to come, it will be now” registers what is uncertain from a human per­
spective, but the Calvinist understanding of the nature of divine inter­
vention in worldly matters is augmented here with the readiness to act
if any opportunity presents itself. If the protagonist fails to act at the
appropriate moment then he will miss his opportunity suggesting that
there is more at issue than a deterministic God manipulating a human
agent. Up to this point in the play there seems to have been an occa­
sional disjunction between opportunity and what it offers to further
Hamlet’s task. The performance of The Mousetrap is indecisive in its
effect, and the killing of Polonius is a rash error but it leads ultimately
to a contrast between Hamlet and Laertes as agents of revenge, and
ultimately to the theatrical act (‘play’) that exposes Claudius’s regicide
to public view. Similarly, although Hamlet has the opportunity to kill
Claudius while he is apparently at prayer he passes it up on the
assumption that his father’s killer will go to heaven after having asked
forgiveness for his sins. However, the play ends with a provisional con­
clusion since the poison that kills Claudius also kills Hamlet. Justice is
served but at a cost, a cost that momentarily reveals the contract
between events in the world of the play and the actions of Providence
that does, and does not, determine human action. Claudius’s regicide is
given a biblical explanation as a feature of a post-lapsarian world,
whereas the passing of the crown of Denmark to Fortinbras, who in
some ways resembles the ethos of Old Hamlet, does nothing to elim­
inate the threat of future regicide. The tragedy of the play derives from
the tension between a humanist imperative to heed a call to action and
the internal energy required to carry it out, on the one hand, and those
metaphysical forces that seek to impose a pattern upon the behaviour of
human subjects whose identities are recognisably within a biblical
52 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

framework of the conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ on the other. Two
kinds of activity are proposed in the play: the one (Claudius) is a pro­
duct of evil and of the operation of an anarchic will, and the other
(Hamlet) is, albeit largely unwittingly, guided in large part by a pro­
vidence that ultimately guarantees a measure of success. And yet, as
Michael Neill has observed, Hamlet is a play that is “permeated with the
most intense narrative and interpretative desire,” with “a kind of
speaking which offers to put a form on the inchoate matter of experi­
ence” but where the strategies for doing so “are always under question.”
(Neill (1998), pp. 218–19)
Hamlet is a play about action, and eventually the protagonist’s “the
readiness is all” is a call to action. That pattern is significantly emended
in Shakespeare’s later play, King Lear (c.1605), where the questioning is
of a much more sceptical nature, and where an initial action produces
intense and extreme suffering. The world of King Lear is one in which
everything is contingent: a king decides to divide his kingdom, he
devises a test in which love is measured and he suffers the consequences
of his decision. In this play families are already precarious as structures
designed to guarantee order and stability; Gloucester fathers both a
legitimate and an illegitimate son, and it is the illegitimate son
Edmund who interrogates traditional explanations of human character.
Gloucester projects disorder in the human world onto cosmic forces that
may harbour secret reasons: “These late eclipses of the sun and moon
portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of Nature can reason it
thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by sequent effects.” (Shakespeare
(1997), 1.2.103–4) This residual faith in a metaphysical order is coun­
tered by Edmund’s much more sceptical explanation of human beha­
viour in which the “goddess” Nature is something other than a book in
which we can read some divine plan:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in
fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon and the stars, as if we were villains on
necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers
by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars and adulterers by an
enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in
by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man,
to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star. My father
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 53
compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity
was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut
I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardising.
(1.2.118–33)

This is a different kind of Nature from the one to which Lear appeals
once his daughters have begun to turn on him: “Hear, Nature, hear,
dear goddess, hear: / Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend / To
make this creature fruitful.” (1.4.266–7) Those who are loyal to Lear
seem to persist in the belief that human behaviour is governed by the
influence of the planets; for example, Kent’s response to Cordelia’s
reaction to the letters she has received about her father’s plight echoes
Gloucester’s earlier comment:

It is the stars
The stars above us govern our conditions,
Else one self mate and make could not beget
Such different issues.
(4.3.33–6)

In Hamlet the aftermath of death is a question, while in King Lear the

reality is suffering contingent upon imprudent decisions. While
Edmund deliberates over which sister to take, the blind Gloucester is
ushered to the shade of a tree pending the outcome of the battle
between Cordelia and her adversaries. At the news of defeat Gloucester
sinks into despair, but Edgar’s response offers a key to the unforeseen
consequences of contingency:

What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure

Their going hence even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all. Come on.
(5.2.9–11)

Gloucester’s reply: “And that’s true too” is a telling comment on the

essential passivity of suffering. In the world of Lear the norm is not
action, but passive endurance in the face of unspeakable horror and
desperate disappointment. There is no providence whose secret
54 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

operations can provide an explanation for the workings of society or for

human identity, nor is there any restoration of a system of checks and
balances that will permit a glimpse of what is won and what is lost in
the struggle with perfidious natural forces. The gods, who in Greek
tragedy could intervene in human affairs, are so remote here as to be
imperceptible. And yet, despite all of these questions, critics have still
applauded “the moral emphasis and focus which unifies the sprawling
structure of Shakespeare’s play.” (Ornstein (1965), p. 129)
This critical judgement seeks to oppose Shakespeare to one of the
most experimental of Jacobean dramatists, John Webster, who in two
plays, The White Devil (c.1609) and The Duchess of Malfi (c.1611)
appears, according to Robert Ornstein, “to sacrifice dramatic structure
to tragic idea.” (p. 129) In a carefully nuanced overview of the context
of Jacobean tragedy Ornstein focuses upon its transitional nature. He
argues:

Caught between a dying feudal order and a modern society struggling

to be born, perplexed by conflicting interpretations of political fact
which they can neither reject nor wholly accept, the Jacobeans seek to
moralise about the very political realities which, if admitted, vitiate
moral conclusions. They cling to a traditional moral view of of politics
even though they sense that medieval ideals are no longer meaningful
to their society.
(p. 31)

Ornstein’s claim is that the ‘moral vision’ of Jacobean tragedy is that it

has no moral vision, or, at least, not the kind of moral vision that can be
excavated from Shakespeare’s tragedies. While we may detect elements
of King Lear in a play such as The Duchess of Malfi, in the latter play
human action is remote from the shaping force of a metaphysical order.
Ornstein seeks to restore a balance with his final claim that “if it is true
that the Duchess is a threnody for the dying Renaissance, then it is
altogether fitting that it should reaffirm that ineffable quality of the
human spirit which the Renaissance defined as the dignity of man.” (p.
150) Ornstein’s hesitant conclusion is, perhaps, a testimony to the dif­
ficulty in gauging the shifting tones of Webster’s play. The Duchess’s
Euripidean insistence upon her identity at the moment of her death may
well be a reaffirmation of “that ineffable quality of the human spirit,”
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 55
although it appears in a play where earlier Bosola, the complex mal­
content villain, had attempted to console Antonio (the Duchess’s infer­
ior and her husband) with the thought that birth and origin are no
guarantee of status:

Search the heads of the greatest rivers in the world, you shall see
them but bubbles of water. Some would think the souls of princes
were brought forth by some more weighty cause than those of
meaner persons – they are deceived, there’s the same hand to them:
the like passions sway them, the same reason that makes a vicar
go to law for a tithe-pig and undo his neighbours, makes them
spoil a whole province, and batter down goodly cities with a
cannon.
(Webster (1964), 2.1.99–107)

Webster’s play is full of disarming comments that serve to undercut

the metaphysical sentiments that seem to be dredged up only to be
dismissed. His grotesque inventory of the Old Lady’s boudoir and of her
habit of face-painting leads him to a ‘meditation’:

What thing is in this outward form of man

To be beloved? We account it ominous
If nature do produce a colt, or lamb,
A fawn, or goat, in any limb resembling
A man; and fly from’t as a prodigy.
Man stands amaz’d to see his deformity
In any other creature but himself.
But in our own flesh, though we bear diseases
Which have their true names only ta’en from beasts,
As the most ulcerous wolf, and swinish measle;
Though we are eaten up of lice and worms,
And though continually we bear about us
A rotten and dead body, we delight
To hide it in rich tissue: all our fear –
Nay, all our terror – is lest our physician
Should put us in the ground, to be made sweet.
(2.1.45–60)
56 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

Elements of these sentiments are recognisable in Hamlet and King Lear

but in The Duchess of Malfi they are coupled with a radical questioning
of planetary influence. What we might call a metaphysical order is so far
away as to be almost irrelevant to human behaviour. In a truncated
version of a Calvinistic axiom Bosola’s “’Tis rumoured that she hath had
three bastards, but / By whom, we may go read i’ th’ stars. (3.1.59–60),
and Ferdinand’s observation that “Why some / Hold opinion, all things
are written there” produces an almost throwaway response: “Yes, if we
could find spectacles to red them –.” (3.1.60–1) In King Lear Gloucester
works through these sentiments, as indeed does Lear himself, but in
Webster they are elements of a post-lapsarian universe in which con­
tingency and accident are the products of human desire.
Webster’s Duchess, who is different from either Euripides’ or Seneca’s
Medea, is confronted by a series of obstacles to her marriage to Antonio,
although we are never certain of the precise nature of her brother Fer­
dinand’s motives for revenge, and Bosola, as his instrument, changes
with the experience of carrying out his employer’s wishes. The play
raises and then cuts through the commonplace accounts of the anarchy
of female desire to create a protagonist capable of great constancy in the
face of a bewilderingly changing world. While Antonio can think of
‘marriage’ as an institution that denies the existence of purgatory: “It
locally contains, or heaven or hell; There’s no third place in’t” (1.1.393–
4), the mercurial waiting-woman Cariola offers the following summa­
tion of her mistress’s behaviour:

Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman

Reign most in her, I know not, but it shows
A fearful madness; I owe her much of pity.
(1.1.504–6)

While Webster uses a recognisable Christian and, perhaps, even an

Aristotelian vocabulary, the lack of connection with a larger metaphy­
sical order is underscored by the episodic nature of the play’s plotting.
In a fragmented world, where temporising seems to be the norm, tra­
gedy becomes a question of commitment and constancy, qualities that
excite pity and fear in those who are onlookers but who can be drawn
into the conflict almost at a moment’s notice. Throughout the play
Cariola is an observer of the Duchess, and she declares her loyalty to her
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 57
but when her life is threatened her declaration of constancy melts away.
Similarly, Julia, the Cardinal’s mistress, gets sucked into his web of
intrigue and is poisoned by what would appear to be an act of devotion.
Indeed, the very book that she kisses, in a ritual religious gesture, pre­
sumably a bible, kills her and she dies going “I know not whither.”
(5.2.289)
In Webster’s universe justice is swift, indiscriminate and perfunctory
and ‘conscience’ in plays such as The Duchess of Malfi is not so much an
awareness of a fully operational force that governs behaviour, as some­
thing that emerges from the panoply of criminal acts that return to
plague the doer. For example, having arrived just after the death of
Julia, and having agreed with the Cardinal to kill Antonio, Bosola pri­
vately changes his mind, again using traditional religious vocabulary to
describe fortuitous and deadly contingency:

I must look to my footing:

In such slippery ice-pavements, men had need
To be frost-nail’d well; they may break their necks else.
The precendent’s here afore me: how this man
Bears up in blood! Seems fearless! Why, ‘tis well:
Security some men call the suburbs of hell,
Only a dead wall between.
(5.2.332–8)

Bosola’s strategy is now to think about joining Antonio in “a most just

revenge” (5.2.343), which symbolically represents “the sword of justice,”
but the thought invokes the memory of the Duchess: “still methinks the
duchess / Haunts me: there, there! – / ‘Tis nothing but my melan­
choly.” (5.2.345–7) Two scenes later he kills Antonio in error, an act
that seems to exemplify one aspect of Shakespeare’s Gloucester’s thought
that “We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and banded / Which
way please them.” (Shakespeare (1997), 5.4.54–5) Antonio completes
this thought with: “In all our quest of greatness, / Like wanton boys
whose pastime is their care, / We follow after bubbles, blown in th’ air.”
(Webster (1964), 5.4.64–6) Between Bosola and Antonio such utter­
ances have a theatrical rather than a philosophical pedigree, and these
gestures towards a metaphysical order are emptied of their significance.
In the next scene Bosola underlines the emptiness of what were
58 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

originally substantive moral and ethical symbols, when, before stabbing

the Cardinal, he reminds him of what ‘Justice’ has now become: “when
thou kill’st thy sister, / Thou took’st from Justice her most equal bal­
ance, / And left her naught but her sword.” (5.5.39–41) After a frenzy
of stabbing the Cardinal dies appealing to Justice: “O Justice! / I suffer
now for what hath former been: / Sorrow is the eldest child of sin.” (5.5.53–
5, emphasis added) Of course, this is not ‘Justice,’ except in a very
perfunctory sense, nor is the Cardinal’s death in any way tragic. Here
death is simply the wages of ‘sin.’
For the Cardinal this is the culminating gesture in a religious life
totally devoid of meaning. In the aftermath of the killing of Julia he
appeals to his “conscience”:

O, my conscience!
I would pray now: but the devil takes away my heart
For having any confidence in prayer.
(5.4.26–8)

He begins the following scene puzzling over a theological question,

but quickly passes on to dismiss the pressures of his conscience while
acknowledging that there is something indistinct that threatens him;
this is perhaps not so much ‘conscience’ in the sense that Hamlet uses
the term but a fantasy of past crimes that threaten:

How tedious is a guilty conscience!

When I look into the fish-ponds, in my garden,
Methinks I see a thing arm’d with a rake
That seems to strike at me.
(5.5. 4–7)

This has nothing of the specificity of Bosola’s conscience that is inter­

nalised as both his ‘melancholy’ and his memory of the Duchess. Ironi­
cally Bosola’s intentions completely misfire. Not only that, but
“wretched” eminence leaves no history or “fame” behind it: “These
wretched eminent things / Leave no more fame behind ‘em than should
one / Fall in a frost, and leave his print in the snow; / As soon as the sun
shines, it ever melts, / Both form and matter.” (5.4.113–17) The play
ends on a proverbial note suggesting that the only antidote to death is
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 59
“integrity of life.” (5.5.120) The Duchess’s life, lived with integrity is,
tragically, all that can be salvaged from a world that has fallen so far
from grace that all it can do is mouth the platitudes that in the past
have held a universal order together. In a play that sorts into boxes the
discursive elements that once held the social, religious and philosophical
order together, The Duchess of Malfi injects into a situation such as the
final moments of Lear a sardonic humour that in some respects antici­
pates the world of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the fragmentary,
comic universe of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1990).

TRAGEDY AFTER THE RENAISSANCE

Perhaps we should think of early modern tragedy in anatomical terms in
which conflict leads to forms of discovery of the disposition of contradictory
emotions and their relation to the various cultural forms of displaying,
controlling and violating accepted modes of behaviour and belief. Michael
Neill connects Vesalius’s dramatic dissections of the human body with the
larger cultural project of “opening up the hidden truths of the human
fabric” thereby associating biological anatomy “with the larger discourse of
discovery that found its most characteristic expression in the geographic and
cartographic literature of the age.” (Neill (1998), pp. 125 and 129) How­
ever, once that fervour of investigation subsides, then the major theatrical
form in which it is represented begins to lose its immediacy. The increasing
vogue for tragi-comedy and comedy began to supplant tragedy in the early
seventeenth century, although tragedy itself continued to be regarded as the
most serious form of theatrical expression, and following the example of
Seneca, was not necessarily linked axiomatically with performance.
In his An Apology for Poetry (c.1583) Sir Philip Sidney had sought to
justify the superiority of poetry in relation to philosophy and history.
For him, tragedy as a species of poetry may have had a didactic function
but its revelatory function was also important; tragedy, he argued,

Openeth the greatest wounds and sheweth forth the Vlcers that are
couered with Tissue; that maketh Kinges feare to be Tyrants, and
Tyrants manifest their tirannicall humors; that, with sturring the
affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the vncertainty this
world, and vpon how weake foundations guilden roofes are builded.
(Sidney (1904), I.177)
60 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

It was Sidney who coined the phrase “sweet violence” to describe the
substance of tragedy and it was Sidney who emphasised the Aristotelian
unities of “place and time” (p. 197) that he thought many contemporary
dramatists had violated. He castigated plays that were “neither right
Tragedies, nor right Comedies” because they mingled “Kings and
Clownes by head and shoulders, to play a part in maiesticall matters,
with neither decencie nor discretion.” (p. 199)
Sidney put together a history of poetry that sought to justify its par­
ticular elements, offered reasons for its existence and duration and
assembled rules that were to last well into the seventeenth century and
beyond the Interregnum. The demise of the theatre in the decades
leading up to the English Civil War (1642–60) played a large part in
halting the popularity of tragedies, although the examples that Sidney
had enumerated remained and continued, along with other forms of
writing such as epic which he had traced back to Homer and to the
ancient Greeks. But as we saw earlier, many of the myths that were
represented in ancient Greek tragedy were mediated through Seneca
whose formal and rhetorically dense dramas were not intended for the
stage. When John Milton wrote his play Samson Agonistes (c.1670) he
chose to justify it with reference both to Aristotle and the ancient
Greek tragedians that Roman writers had used as examples. He
repeated Sidney’s strictures concerning the “intermixing [of] comic
stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and
vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd,
and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people.”
(Milton (1969), p. 518) And he also upheld the three unities: of
time, place and action.
The reduction of tragedy to a set of rules, derived initially from
Aristotle’s The Poetics, became part of a development that sought to
regularise rules for poetry in general. Ben Jonson’s translation of Horace’s
The Art of Poetrie, unsurprisingly, repeated elements of Sidney’s Apology for
Poetry. Horace’s comment on Aeschylus’s tragic style demonstrates an
ignorance of the role of the ancient Greek satyr play, but insists upon a
uniformity of tone:

For Tragedie is faire,

And far unworthy to blurt out light rimes;
But, as a Matrone drawne at solemn times
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 61
To dance, so she should, shamefac’d, differ farre
From what th’obscene and petulant Satyres are.
(Jonson (1965), 8.321)

And he goes on to insist that “where the matter is provided still, /

There words will never follow ‘gainst their will.” (8.349) The question
of the propriety of language exercised Thomas Sprat in his History of the
Royal Society (1667) who asserted that “we generally love to have Reason
set out in plain, undeceiving expressions” but he also observed that “the
purity of speech and greatness of Empire have in all countries still met
together.” (Spingarn (1968), II.112–13) Sprat inveighed against the
degeneration of “the ornaments of speaking” that are “in open defiance
against Reason, professing not to hold much correspondence with that,
but with its Slaves, the passions.”(Spingarn (1968), pp. 116–17, emphasis
in original) At the end of the century George Granville, Lord Lans­
downe’s poem “On Unnatural Flights in Poetry,” applied these stric­
tures to the subject of poetry, emphasising the proportionality of
representation. Granville recognises the importance of “figures” in
poetry though he castigated their “intemperant” usage:

As Veils transparent cover, but not hide,

Such metaphors appear, when right apply’d;
When, thro’ the phrase we plainly see the sense,
Truth, when the meaning’s obvious, will dispense.
The Reader, what in Reason’s due, believes,
Nor can we call that false which not deceives.
(Spingarn (1968), III.293)

But it is John Dryden’s long essay, “Of Dramatic Poesy: An Essay”

(1668) (Dryden (1964)) that fixes the critical discourse within which
discussions of tragedy are contained as the theatre returned in a much
reduced form after the Restoration. Sidney had introduced his Apology
for Poetry through the frame of a reference to the rhetoric of horseman­
ship that had forced him to consider himself and his skill as a poet. If
this introduction is a little tongue-in-cheek, though referring to an
essential element of aristocratic skill, then Dryden’s setting of his essay
against the background of an imperial conflict, an Anglo-Dutch trade
war, suggests that the defence of “dramatic poesy” is as culturally
62 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

necessary as the outcome of an international trade war. Something has

changed here in that economics has now begun to take precedence over
other forces that control human behaviour. In his analysis of French
tragedy Lucien Goldmann attributes the change to the growth of
individualism:

Like any other world vision, both rationalistic and empiricist individu­
alism can retain certain rules of conduct which it may refer to as
moral or ethical norms. But in fact, whether its ideal is one of power
or one of prudence or wisdom, any thorough-going individualism will
need to deduce these rules either from the individual’s mind or from
his heart, since by very definition individualism has abolished any
supra-individual reality capable of guiding man and offering him gen­
uinely transcendent norms.
(Goldmann (1977), p. 30)

Dryden’s discussion that takes place in a boat on the Thames is between

Eugenius (Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst), Crites (Sir Robert
Howard), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sedley) and Neander (John Dryden).
The issues debated in the essay concern the regularity or otherwise of
the rules of English tragedy in the face of criticism from French com­
mentators, questions of tone of the kind that we have seen in earlier
commentaries and the extent to which, in dramatic practice, the three
Unities are adhered to. Lisideius (Sedley) is persuaded to offer a defini­
tion of a play: “A just and lively image of human nature, representing its
passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the
delight and instruction of mankind.” (Dryden (1964), I.5, emphasis in ori­
ginal) Aristotle and Horace provide the yardsticks (1.27) although
Horace says nothing about the three Unities, and Aristotle only men­
tions two of them (time and action but not place). Moreover, what for
Aristotle was an empirical description of actual tragedies is transformed
for the seventeenth century and beyond into a set of ‘rules’ against
which particular examples are to be measured. Eugenius (Charles Sack­
ville) refuses to accept that Medea belonged to Seneca on the grounds
that it did not have sufficient gravity (“omne genus scripti gravitate
tragaedia vincit” [‘tragedy surpasses every other kind of writing in
gravity’]) (1.41) Lisideius (Sedley) compares French tragedies with their
English counterparts and observes that Corneille and his contemporaries
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 63
are superior because they observe a version of the three Unities (1.44)
and they preserve a unity of tone. He notes that “the French avoid the
tumult which we are subject to in England by representing duels, bat­
tles, and the like; which renders our stage too like the theatres where
they fight prizes.” (1.50–1) In a sentiment that harks back to the
ancient Greek theatre he urges that the representation of death on the
stage is likely to elicit laughter:

I have observed that, in all our tragedies, the audience cannot for­
bear laughing when the actors are to die; ‘tis the most comic part
of the whole play. All passions may be lively represented on the
stage, if to the well-writing of them the actor supplies a good
commanded voice, and the limbs move easily, and without stiff­
ness; but there are many actions which can never be imitated to a
just height: dying especially is a thing which none but a Roman
gladiator could naturally perform on the stage, when he did not
imitate or represent, but naturally do it; and therefore it is better to
omit the representation of.
(I.51, emphasis in original)

This speaks to the resistance to the mixture of tragedy and comedy to

which Neander (Dryden) had some objection (1.58) although his
defence of “underplots” is given a scientific support in the suggestion
that they may progress underneath “the motion of the primum mobile, in
which they are contained.” (1.59) Shakespeare is acknowledged to be
supreme, but Jonson appears to have been the more influential, and the
essay concludes with an analysis of Jonson’s comedy The Silent Woman.
By the end of the seventeenth century there was a sea change in the
ethos of tragedy. The radical separation of religion from philosophy and
the gradual emphasis upon the power of reason serve to diminish the
social, intellectual and political tensions that had informed a dialectic
that was crucial to the formulation of tragic conflict. The result was a
simplification of the ethos of tragedy as a dramatic form and a tendency
simply to imitate, adapt and iron out its complexities. According to
Granville, even Dryden himself was not free from this:

Dryden himself, to please a frantick Age,

Was forc’d to let his judgment stoop to Rage;
64 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

To a wild Audience he conform’d his voice,

Comply’d to Custom, but not err’d thro’ Choice.
(Spingarn (1968) III.294, emphasis in original)

All For Love (1677), Dryden’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s Antony and

Cleopatra, offers a telling example (Dryden (1962)). Gone are the com­
plex Shakespearean perspectives, and the shuttling between Rome and
Egypt, with the emphasis now on a simple choice between “the world”
(which is the Roman world of politics and military prowess) and “Love,”
which translates into an opposition between ‘reason’ and ‘passion.’ In an
early conversation between Ventidius, Antony’s general, and Alexas,
Cleopatra’s eunuch, Ventidius makes the contrast clear:

Oh, she has decked his ruin with her love,

Led him in golden bands to gaudy slaughter,
And made perdition pleasing: She has left him
The blank of what he was.
(1.1. 21)

Both Antony and Cleopatra reinforce this view a little later in the
play, although they accept full responsibility for their own actions,
thereby diminishing the pressure of any tragic forces beyond their
immediate control. When the lovers meet in Act 2 both acknowledge
that they must separate, but they both acknowledge that they them­
selves are in total control of their actions:

Cleo. Is this a meeting?

Then we must part.
Ant. We must.
Cleo. Who says we must?
Ant. Our own hard fates.
Cleo. We make those fates ourselves
Ant. Yes, we have made them; we have loved each other
Into our mutual ruin.
(2.1. 34)

Even when comparing themselves with classical deities such as Mars

and Venus (Act 3, scene 1) these are little more than gestures of self­
 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY 65
delusion, thereby placing the focus ultimately on the question of ‘char­
acter.’ Ventidius’s Roman perspective produces a residual analysis of
Antony’s character that he attributes to “the Gods” in which ‘virtue’ and
‘crime,’ rather like the dialectic between ‘reason and passion,’ are the
determining features:

Vent. I am waning in his favour, yet I love him;

I love this man, who runs to meet his ruin;
And sure the gods, like me, are fond of him:
His virtues lie so mingled with his crimes,
As would confound their choice to punish one,
And not reward the other.
(3.1.41)

Shakespeare’s association of Egypt with creativity – both fecundity and

poetry – is absent in Dryden’s adaptation, indeed, at one point Cleopa­
tra dismisses the praise of her beauty as “Mere poetry.” (4.1. 54) Also,
the suggestion that the passionate Cleopatra is attracted to Dolabella
results in Antony harbouring a form of jealousy, aided and abetted by
his wife Octavia and Ventidius, which resembles, and verbally echoes,
the Claudio of Shakespeare’s comedy, Much Ado About Nothing:

Ant. What woman was it, whom you heard and saw
So playful with my friend?
Not Cleopatra?
Vent. Even she, my lord.
Ant. My Cleopatra?
Vent. Your Cleopatra;
Dolabella’s Cleopatra, every man’s Cleopatra.
(4.1. 59)

The quotation itself, echoing and paraphrasing aspects of Shakespeare’s

Much Ado About Nothing, reduces the status of Cleopatra who, unlike
Shakespeare’s innocent Hero, seems unable to contain her own passion
as a reflex against Roman ‘reason.’ Even when Charmian appeals to
‘heaven’ against the punishment of ‘virtue’ as an indication “that chance
rules all above. / And shuffles with a random hand the lots, / Which
man is forced to draw” (5.1. 67), or when Cleopatra invites the gods to
66 ONTOLOGY AND DRAMATURGY

“bear witness,” there is something empty, or unmotivated in these sug­

gestions that forces beyond human control are at work. Granville’s
strictures are adequately borne out by the unevenness of Dryden’s
manipulation of the elements of tragedy.
Nahum Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1699) does
much to expose the post-Restoration aesthetics of tragedy and, in par­
ticular, important changes of literary taste. In a prefatory letter to his
“esteem’d friend, Thomas Boteler” Tate offers the following rationale:

‘Twas my good Fortune to light on one Expedient to rectify what was

wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale, which was to run
thro’ the whole, as love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia; that never chan­
ged word with each other in the Original. This renders Cordelia’s
Indifference and her father’s passion in the first Scene probable. It
likewise gives Countenance to Edgar’s Disguise making that a gener­
ous Design that was before a poor Shift to save his life. The Distress
of the Story is evidently heightned by it; and it particularly gave
Occasion of a New Scene or Two, of more Success (perhaps) than
Merit. This method necessarily threw me on making the Tale con­
clude in a Success to the innocent distrest Persons: Otherwise I must
have encumbered the Stage with dead Bodies, which Conduct makes
many Tragedies conclude with unseasonable jests.
(Tate (1699), sig.A2r)

The matter of poetic justice, combined with a distaste for the repre­
sentation of violence in the final stages of the tragedy, suggest a sig­
nificant shift in the aesthetics of tragedy and a commitment to a series
of ‘rules’ that were applied critically to tragic form as the eighteenth
century progressed. Indeed, Samuel Johnson in a note on King Lear in
1765 could observe critically that “Shakespeare has suffered the virtues
of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of
justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the
faith of the chronicles.” (Johnson (1969), p. 126)
By the end of the nineteenth century the pressures upon human
behaviour had changed considerably as, indeed, did ways of representing
them. We shall revisit some of these issues in Chapter 5, but in Chapter
4 we turn to the link between tragedy and philosophy.
 4
THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

So far we have considered tragedy as a theatrical form, although we

should remember that Aristotle was, among other things, a philosopher.
Thus, the term fulfils a dual function: as a particular kind of drama, and
as an ontological category. In his introduction to The Philosophy of Tra­
gedy (2013) Julian Young argues that philosophers have located ‘tragic
effect’ “either on the level of sense and emotion, or on the level of
intellect and cognition.” This dichotomy corresponds to the philoso­
phical distinction between empirical experience, on the one hand, and,
on the other, a recognition of the independent operation of reason. We
have observed earlier that tragedy as a dramatic form affords a certain
kind of pleasure, but Young notes that it also posits “the acquisition of
some kind of knowledge.” (p. 1, emphasis in original) It is this knowl­
edge that permits a bridge between dramatic form and philosophy,
and this connection has been established in different ways, and with
different consequences, since Plato and Aristotle. Classical scholars,
leaning towards history and sociology have observed that the crisis
that produced Greek tragedy was generated by a tension between dif­
ferent forms of government in the city state of ancient Athens; and
as we observed in Chapter 3, it was the tension between religion and
the secular world that provided the impetus for much Renaissance
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408-4
68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

tragedy. In his magisterial account of the history of Antigones (1986),

George Steiner makes an important general point about the connection
between tragedy and philosophy when he notes that: “Because it iso­
lates and enacts summary moments in human uncertainty, because it
stresses behaviour to the breaking-point of disaster – disaster being the
final logic of action – tragedy has, pre-eminently, attracted philo­
sophic ‘use’.” (p. 103) The late-seventeenth and the early-eighteenth
centuries preoccupied themselves with adherence to the ‘rules’ of tra­
gedy, an offshoot of the more general philosophical preoccupation with
the rules that governed morality and ethics in relation to ‘action,’ and
that extended to the emerging sphere of aesthetics. But the emphasis
upon the faculty of ‘reason’ gradually attenuated the impact of the
‘tragic effect.’ More recently Simon Critchley has mounted a spirited
challenge to the dualism of reason/myth, especially in its Nietzschean
guise, in his insistence that “Tragedy is not some Dionysian celebra­
tion of the power of ritual and the triumph of myth over reason.”
(Critchley (2019) p. 119)
Samuel Johnson’s The Tragedy of Irene pinpoints this in the dialogue
between the protagonist Irene and her fellow Greek companion Aspasia
both of whom are captives at the court of Mahomet, emperor of the
Turks. Here Irene formulates a traditional account of the relationship
between the exceptional tragic figure, the human world and the meta­
physical order:

Thus meaner spirits with Amazement mark

The varying Seasons. And revolving Skies,
And ask, what guilty Pow’rs rebellious Hand
Rolls with eternal Toil the pond’rous Orbs;
While some Archangel nearer to Perfection,
In easy State presides o’er all their motions,
Directs the Planets with a careless Nod,
Conducts the Sun and regulates the Spheres.
(Johnson (1749), p. 44)

Aspasia’s response is to dismiss this account of a transcendentally

predetermined world in favour of the material, moral and interrogative
voice of ‘reason’ which introduces a political and potentially tragic tension
into the discussion:
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 69
Well may’st thou hide in Labyrinths of Sound
The Cause that shrinks from Reason’s powerful Voice,
Stoop from thy Flight, trace back th’ entangled Thought,
And set the glitt’ring Fallacy to view.
Not Pow’r I blame, but Pow’r obtain’d by Crime,
Angelic Greatness is Angelic Virtue.
(p. 44)

This dismantling of a metaphysical order underpinned by a Christian

theology raises questions concerning the nature of human agency, and
implies a projection of ‘Virtue’ from its earthly location to a kind of
moral absolute (‘Angelic greatness’). The scepticism that produces this
tension, and that contributes to Aspatia’s conception of human freedom
that transcends her captive state, is further extended in Thomas Paine’s The
Age of Reason (1793), where he asserts dismissively that “The Christian
theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accom­
modated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason
and philosophy to abolish the ambitious fraud.” (Paine (2015), p. 11) For
Paine the Christian narrative is one of a number of “human inventions, set
up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit”
(p. 8), and as a ‘story’ it proves unable to stand up to the rigorous inter­
rogation of ‘reason’ and ‘philosophy.’
But what of those narratives that do not disguise their own fiction­
ality, that engage a broad range of human emotions and that exist
alongside those that seek to define the human condition? This is one of
the problems that the Scottish, eighteenth-century philosopher David
Hume (1711–76) confronts in his short essay “Of Tragedy.” His com­
ment on the effect of some of Cicero’s epilogues upon readers prompts
the question: “What is it then, which in this case raises a pleasure from
the bosom of uneasiness, so to speak: and a pleasure, which still retains
all the features and outward symptoms of distress and sorrow?” Hume’s
answer is that some sort of ‘conversion’ takes place, as sorrowful content
“receives a new direction from the sentiments of beauty.” (Hume
(1757), p. 3) Young, preoccupied with the philosophical basis of tra­
gedy, is convinced that Hume had not read Aristotle’s The Poetics since
he seems to have been unaware of the notion of catharsis (Young (2013),
pp. 58–9). The following is Hume’s account of the relations between
‘pity’, ‘fear’ and ‘delight’ that tragedy smoothes out:
70 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

The soul, being, at the same time, roused by passion, and charmed by
eloquence, feels on the whole a strong movement, which is altogether
delightful. The same principle takes place in tragedy: with this addi­
tion, that tragedy is an imitation: and imitation is always of itself
agreeable. This circumstance serves still farther to smooth the
motions of passion, and convert the whole feeling into one uniform
and strong enjoyment.
(p. 192)

Here the quasi-medical account of the cathartic effect is transferred into

the realm of an aesthetics that for Hume can be explained empirically.
The effect on an audience is intensified by replicating the delay of parts
of the narration that is the experience of the dramatic character in order
“first to excite his curiosity and impatience before you let him into the
secret.” (p. 194) This is a far cry from Aristotle’s peripeteia in the tra­
jectory of the narrative where the reversal is related to the action and not
to character; and the example Hume chooses of Iago’s “artifice” in
intensifying Othello’s jealousy in Shakespeare’s play, along with other
stimuli such as “absence” which is “a great source of complaint among
lovers” (p. 195), is pinpointed as the source of pain and pleasure that an
audience is invited to experience mimetically. Hume notes:

The force of imagination, the energy of expression, the power of numbers,

the charms of imitation; all these are naturally, of themselves delightful to
the mind: And when the object presented lays hold of some affection, the
pleasure still rises upon us, by the conversion of this subordinate move­
ment into that which is predominant. The passion, though, perhaps,
naturally, and when excited by the simple appearance of a real object, it
may be painful; yet is so smoothed, and softened, and mollified, when
raised by the finer arts, that it affords the highest entertainment.
(Hume (1757), p. 5)

Here the ‘finer arts’ are “the charms of imitation,” and their combined
effect is to ‘soften’ and ‘mollify’ what in reality may be painful, with the
result that pain is transformed into the pleasure that is stimulated by
the recognition of artistic imitation.
Hume’s account, of the smoothing and softening of the painful that is
the result of the pleasure associated with artistic imitation, is a far cry
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 71
from Aristotle’s catharsis, but it is also qualitatively different from
Edmund Burke’s explanation of the sublime and the beautiful in his “A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful”. Burke
locates the sublime in nature and the effect that it has on the observer
“is Astonishment” which is “that state of the soul, in which all its
motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” (Burke (2015), p. 47)
Burke continues:

In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot
entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which
employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from
being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us
on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect
of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration,
reverence and respect.
(p. 47)

This momentary recognition of a feature of ‘nature,’ familiar to

Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, exceeds the capacity of
human reason in order to produce terror and “admiration, reverence and
respect.” In the preceding sections on “Sympathy” (sections X111–
X1V), in a very short section “Of the Effects of TRAGEDY” (Part 1,
section XV) and in the section that follows on “Imitatio” (section XV1),
Burke, who had read Aristotle, rejects Hume’s account of the amelior­
ating effects of tragedy as imitation, to ask “how we are affected by the
feelings of our fellow creatures in circumstances of real distress” (section
X1V). ( p. 39) However, he carefully distinguishes between “a simple
pain in the reality” and “a delight in the representation.” (p. 40) The
sympathy and pity that Hume downplays, Burke highlights here:

It is certain that it is absolutely necessary my life should be out of any

imminent hazard before I can take delight in the suffering of others,
real or imaginary, or indeed anything else from any cause whatsoever.
But then it is a sophism to argue from thence, that the immunity is
the cause of my delight either on these or on any occasions. No one
can distinguish such a cause of satisfaction in his own mind I believe;
nay when we do not suffer any very acute pain, nor are exposed to any
imminent danger of our lives, we can feel for others, whilst we suffer
72 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

ourselves; and often then most when we are softened by affliction; we

see with pity even distresses which we would accept in the place of
our own.
(p. 41)

For Burke imitation has a heuristic value in that it is the means by

which we acquire knowledge. (p. 42) He is careful to avoid any accu­
sation of Schadenfreude or delight in the suffering of others, urging us to
relieve their suffering thereby relieving ourselves. This is generated by
“an instinct that works us to its own purposes, without our con­
currence.” (p. 40) What Burke collapses into an “instinct” Aristotle
would have attributed to a culminating balance that allows the spectator
a momentary glimpse of a metaphysical order, notwithstanding the
exemplary suffering of the protagonist.

TRAGEDY AND THE SUBLIME

By the mid-eighteenth century what was originally a concept that dealt
principally with elevated literary style, the sublime, became a means of
describing the experience of nature as well as art. Burke saw the concept
of ‘infinity’ as a source of the sublime:

Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful
horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sub­
lime. There are scarce any things which can become the objects of
our senses that are really, and in their own nature infinite. But the eye
not being able to perceive the bounds of many things. They seem to
be infinite, and they produce the same effect as if they were really so.
We are deceived in like manner.
(Burke (2015), p. 60)

We saw that for Burke “sympathy in the distresses of others” as in tra­

gedy was contingent upon the recognition that it was an imitation, and
‘pity’ could be transformed from terror into delight “when it does not
press too close … because it arises from love and social affection.” (p.
39) Burke’s account of the sublime reconceptualises Aristotle’s ‘pity’ and
‘fear’ in such a way that at one extreme they produce Gothic terror, but
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 73
at the other they become parts of an aesthetic pleasure that is equally
applicable to art and Nature.
Although he made only passing comments on tragedy, the Enlight­
enment German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) produced an
account of the sublime as part of his Critique of Judgement (1790) in
which he associated it with “the supersensible” as “pure intellectual
finality;” without this emotions are reduced “only to motion, which we
welcome in the interests of good health.” (Kant (1992), p. 126,
emphasis in original) This is very different from Aristotle’s quasi-medi­
cal account of catharsis. For Kant, there is a clear difference between
“the restoration of the equilibrium of the various vital forces within us”
(p. 126), on the one hand, and, on the other, the sublime that “must in
every case have reference to our way of thinking, i.e. to maxims directed
to giving the intellectual side of our nature and the ideas of reason
supremacy over sensibility.” (p. 127, emphasis in original) Without this
clear distinction the spectator of a tragedy may delude him/ herself into
thinking that the experience will improve him/her when, in fact, “he
is merely glad at having got well rid of the feeling of being bored.”
(p. 127) Kant goes on to acknowledge the link in tragedy between
the sublime and “fine art” that “may be brought into union with
beauty in a tragedy in verse, a didactic poem, or an oratorio, and in this
combination fine art is even more artistic.” (p. 190, emphasis in
original) In an observation that to some extent anticipates T.S.
Eliot’s critique of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as lacking an ‘objective cor­
relative’ to represent the magnitude of the protagonist’s predicament,
Kant defines the category of “the monstrous” as

the mere presentation of a concept which is almost too great for

presentation, i.e. borders on the relatively monstrous; for the end to
be attained by the presentation of a concept is made harder to realize
by the intuition of the object being almost too great for our faculty of
apprehension.
(pp. 100–1)

For Kant, the mathematical realisation of the magnitude of an object

contaminates the human subject’s judgement by attaching to the object
a teleological or purposive element that taints it. He concludes that: “A
pure judgement upon the sublime, must, however, have no end
74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

belonging to the Object as its determining ground, if it is to be aes­

thetic and not to be tainted with any judgement of understanding or
reason.” (p. 101)
Joshua Billings outlines the wider philosophical objective of Kant’s
Critique of Judgement but he emphasises that it “in no way anticipates
tragedy as the privileged object of a philosophy of art.” (Billings (2014),
pp. 78–9) (Kant (1992), p. 6) What changed at the end of the eight­
eenth century to give tragedy precedence in philosophical discussions of
aesthetics? But before we answer that question we need to consider
briefly what Raymond Williams has called “the secularisation of tra­
gedy.” (Williams (1966) p. 26)

SECULARISING TRAGEDY
Williams notes that from the late seventeenth century onwards “the
moving force of tragedy was now quite clearly a matter of behaviour,
rather than either a metaphysical condition or a metaphysical fault.” He
claims that the Aristotelian notion of hamartia had hitherto “been con­
tained within a description of action,” and was therefore “related to the
action, which was in itself a general mutability.” (Williams (1966), p.
26) This leads Williams to the conclusion that:

The moral question, of the nature and therefore the effect of a tragic
action, becomes a question in abstracted human nature: that is to say,
not an enquiry into a specific response which must then necessarily
include the action to which the response is made, but an attempt to
find reasons for an assumed general form of human behaviour.
(p. 27)

It is also Williams’ claim that the tragic hero was thereby “remade in
the image of the tragic spectator, whose assumed division of feeling [of
‘pleasure’ and ‘grief’] was projected as a tragic cause.” (p. 27) What
Williams identifies as “question in abstracted human nature” becomes a
vehicle for engaging tragedy as a form of knowledge. (p. 27)
Williams argues, in a way that echoes Peter Szondi (2002), that
Greek tragedy and Renaissance tragedy including Shakespeare were
reinterpreted by the pressing concerns of eighteenth-century neo-classi­
cism; or, in other words, it was a manifestation of “the familiar case of
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 75
selecting and re-selecting a tradition.” (Williams (1966), p. 29) Wil­
liams focuses on the German dramatist and philosopher, Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), who rejected neo-classicism and defended
Shakespeare, and on the German Enlightenment and the European
Romantic movement’s investments in the Greek-Elizabethan identity.
(p. 29) The result was the emergence of bourgeois tragedy that recast
Greek tragic narratives in a contemporary idiom, and that represented
what Terry Eagleton regards as part of “an ideological assault on the
traditional order by its middle-class humanitarian opponents” (Eagleton
(2003), p. 160); indeed, Eagleton goes a stage further to dismiss “pity
and tenderness” as “domestic and bourgeois” and to identify “this
swooning and snivelling” as “a potent critique of upper-class barbarism
and hauteur.” Like Williams, though in a much more aggressive vein,
Eagleton attributes to Lessing “a full-blooded historical revisionism
which sidelines neoclassical drama, stomping ground of the frigid
nobility, and redraws the lines of tradition from the Greeks to Shake­
speare and straight to the middle-class present.” (p. 160)
In addition to a revision of the tradition of tragedy, the extension of
the discussions of form into the realm of knowledge production, on the
one hand, and the need to justify its peculiar link with the historically
overdetermined pleasure and unpleasure of the spectator as part of an
aesthetic experience, on the other, are central to this shift. The history of
Western drama has always involved some kind of return to Greek tra­
gedy as a model, but the eighteenth-century appropriation of it into
systems of rules and subjecting it to the aesthetic category of ‘taste’
initiated and directed enquiry into political and social (as well as phi­
losophical and psychological) domains. In his “Introduction on Taste” in
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) Edmund
Burke states:

It is known that the Taste (whatever it is) is improved exactly as we

improve our judgement, by extending our knowledge, by a steady
attention to our object, and by frequent exercise. They who have not
taken these methods, if their Taste decides quickly, it is always
uncertainly, and their quickness is owing to their presumption and
rashness, and not to any sudden irradiation that in a moment dispels
all darkness from their minds.
(Burke (2015), p. 26, emphasis added)
76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

It is in the sections on “Sympathy” (section X111) and its “Effects” (section

X1V), “Imitation” (section XV1) and “Ambition” (section XV11) that
Burke displays a partisan historical awareness of the context of tragedy and
the assimilation of its effects into the psychology of the spectator. For him
sympathy involves “how we are affected by the feelings of our fellow crea­
tures in circumstances of real distress.” (p. 39) He thinks that art and his­
tory can induce similar emotional effects, and that our responses depend on
what it is that stimulates them, but he shapes a modern argument through
the prism of ancient Greek or Roman examples, fictional and historical:

The prosperity of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so agree­

ably affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of Macedon, and the
distress of its unhappy prince. Such a catastrophe touches us in history
as the destruction of Troy in fable. Our delight in cases of this kind, is
very greatly heightened, if the sufferer be some excellent person who
sinks under an unworthy fortune. Scipio and Cato are both virtuous
characters; but we are more deeply affected by the violent death of the
one, and the ruin of the great cause he adhered to, than with the
deserved triumphs and uninterrupted prosperity of the other; for terror
is a passion which always produced delight when it does not press too
close, and pity is a passion accompanied with pleasure, because it arises
from love and social affection.
(p. 39)

To some extent Burke gives his own political situatedness away in his
comment on ‘ambition,’ as a gift from God that arises from “the con­
templation of his excelling his fellows in something deemed valuable
amongst them.” (p. 43) This God-given freedom to excel exposes the
political limitations of ‘imitation’ since imitating others prevents
“improvement.” (pp. 42–3) Already, politically we are here drifting away
from some of the classical ingredients of tragic form, while Burke continues
to identify what are ostensibly the Aristotelian effects of ‘pity’ and ‘fear’
(recast as parts of the ‘sublime’) as important elements of tragic experience.

SCHILLER ON TRAGEDY
The German dramatist and philosopher, Friedrich Schiller, a near con­
temporary of Immanuel Kant, produced both an essay “On the
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 77
Sublime” and an essay “On the Tragic Art,” both of which were imbued
with a Kantian philosophical vocabulary. In “On the Sublime” Schiller
begins by asserting that “man is the being who wills” (Wertz and
Wertz (1990), p. 135) but he immediately qualifies this by observing
that man can overcome everything but death whereby he is subjected to
the power of a Nature that he cannot control. How, therefore, Schiller asks,
can Man overcome the violence of Nature? Either he can oppose “violence
with violence” or “ideally, when he steps out of Nature and so, in regard to
himself annihilates the concept of violence.” (p. 135, emphasis in original.)
He admits that this will only take Man so far since what he calls this
“physical culture” compromises Man’s freedom. Schiller goes on to ask:

He ought, however, to be Man without exceptions, therefore in no

case suffer something against his will. Can he therefore no longer
oppose to the physical forces a proportional physical force, so noth­
ing else remains left to him, in order to suffer no violence, than: to
annul; altogether a relation, which is so disadvantageous to him and to
annihilate as a concept the violence, which he must in fact suffer. To
annihilate violence as a concept, however, is called nothing other,
than to voluntarily subject oneself to the same. The culture, which
makes him apt thereto, is called the moral.
(p. 137, emphasis in original)

Schiller goes on to argue that the morally educated man develops “feel­
ings for beauty” that make him, “up to a certain degree, independent of
nature as a power.” (p. 138) The beautiful and the good are not simply
the products of human longing, but are the results of a demand that
they should be thus. Schiller concludes that:

That frame of mind, which is indifferent as to whether the beautiful

and good and perfect exist, but with rigorous sternness desires, that
the existing objects be good, beautiful, and perfect, is called preferably
great and sublime, because it contains all realities of the beautiful
character, without sharing its limits.
(p. 138)

Schiller’s further elucidation of the features of the sublime bear a strik­

ing resemblance to the dynamics of tragedy in his attempt to negotiate:
78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

a combination of woefulness, which expresses itself in its highest

degree as a shudder, and of joyfulness, which can rise up to enrapture,
and, although it is not properly pleasure, is yet widely preferred to
every pleasure by fine souls.
(p. 139, emphasis in original)

The sublime, gives access to an “absolute moral capacity, which is

bound to no natural condition” and as a result “procures for us an exit
from the sensuous world, wherein the beautiful would gladly always
keep us imprisoned.” (p. 140) This absolute moral capacity fulfils the
function of a Kantian “a priori principle” that makes possible “the
transition from the realm of the concept of nature to that of the concept
of freedom.” (Kant 1992, p. 38) It is at the level of conceptualisation
that a model of the tragic is fused with philosophical enquiry.
In “On the Tragic Art” Schiller identifies a “state of passion in itself,
independently of the good or bad influence of its object on our mor­
ality,” which he links to a particular human experience:

Experience teaches us that painful affections are those which

have the most attraction for us, and thus that the pleasure we take
in an affection is precisely in an inverse ratio to its nature. It
is a phenomenon common to all men, that sad, frightful things,
even the horrible, exercise over us an irresistible seduction,
and that in presence of a scene of desolation and of terror we
feel at once repelled and attracted by two equal forces.
(Schiller (n.d.), p. 346)

This describes the sublime, but it also describes the spectator’s experi­
ence of tragedy. He regards this “irresistible seduction” as a human
instinct, but in the case of “a well-bred man” it is compensated by a
“painful strength of compassion [that] carries the day over this instinct,
or it is kept under by the laws of decency.” (p. 347) However, Schiller
distinguishes clearly between the experience of pain produced by the
“struggle of a heart drawn asunder between its inclinations or contrary
duties” which “is a cause of misery to him who experiences it,” and the
“delight” of “the person who is a mere spectator.” (p. 347) He goes on
to locate “the displeasure we feel in disagreeable affection” in the ten­
sion between “our sensuous faculty” and our “moral faculty;” and to
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 79
state that “the degree of liberty that may prevail in the affections
depends on the proportion between the moral nature and the sensuous
nature of man.” (p. 348) The sensuous faculty is the seat of the ego and
of ‘individuality’ whereas “a moral philosophy” draws our attention
“constantly towards general laws [and] weakens in us the feeling of our
own individuality.” For Schiller tragic conflict involves a struggle
between the “sublime state of mind [that] is the lot of strong philo­
sophic minds” and “the egotistical instinct” which these minds “have
learned to bridle.” (p. 349) The cultivated spectator in this account is
culturally privileged, and the struggle that he/she witnesses bears a close
resemblance to that which Sophocles depicts in his Antigone, a play that
has consistently attracted commentators since the eighteenth century.
Schiller admits that the spectator responds to “the vividness and force
of the ideas awakened in our imagination, the moral excellence of the
suffering persons [and] the reference to himself of the person feeling
pity.” (p. 350) The sympathetic pleasure we take in an emotion is
“because the attack made on our sensibility is precisely the condition
necessary to set in motion that quality of mind of which the activity
produces the pleasure we feel in sympathetic affections.” Thus, the
experience of vicarious suffering is an activity that stimulates “the free
exercise of reason” that is “independent in its moral acts” because it
speaks to and activates “that quality of mind of which the activity pro­
duces the pleasure we feel in sympathetic affections.” Tragedy, we are
told, stimulates “the pleasure of pity,” but at the same time it awakens
“that moral power in us [that] is superior to the power of the senses.”
(p. 352) Schiller’s ‘philosophical’ subject is possessed of sufficient intel­
lectual refinement to recognise and control the world of the senses, and
to be able to make fine moral discriminations that it is the business of
tragedy to stimulate. He cites Shakespeare’s King Lear as an example of a
tragic protagonist who produces a weakened response from the spectator
because our interest in Lear “is sensibly lessened by the circumstance
that this aged man, in his second childhood, so weakly gave up his
crown, and divided his love among his daughters with so little dis­
cernment.” (p. 353) Thus the balance between Lear’s ‘suffering’ and
what Schiller calls, more generally, “moral activity” is not well mana­
ged. For Schiller what is most important is the tension between ‘mor­
ality’ and ‘instinct,’ between that which gives the spectator access to the
realm of the sublime and the world of the senses. On the issue of
80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

‘action’ Schiller has little to add to Aristotle: “tragedy is the imitation of

a complete action;” he also distinguishes between tragedy and ‘history’
where the latter is constrained. This is a version of the distinction
between ‘poetry’ and ‘history’ that Sidney had observed in his “Apology
for Poesy” (1576).

HEGEL ON TRAGEDY
In the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
tragedy occupies a particular place, situated initially within the geo­
graphical location of Athens, and is indicative of a particular moment in
the larger pattern of world history. Although references to tragedy can
be found throughout Hegel’s philosophical writings, it is in The Philo­
sophy of the Fine Arts (Hegel (n.d.)) and the Introductory Lectures on Aes­
thetics (Hegel (1993)) that it is addressed at length. Hegel’s definition of
‘dramatic action’ points in two directions: firstly it is “confined to the
simple and undisturbed execution of a definite purpose,” and secondly it
“depends throughout on conditions of collision, human passion and
characters, and leads therefore to actions and reactions, which in their
turn call for some further resolution of conflict and disruption.” (Hegel
(1975) pp. 2–3)
This definition of dramatic action has become known as Hegelian
dialectic, although the philosophical concept itself can be traced back to
ancient Greek philosophy and to Plato, where it simply means ‘con­
versation’ that permits an exchange of views relating to a particular
topic. In Hegel the term becomes part of a method designed ultimately
to uncover “pure thought.” This is how the Russian Marxist philoso­
pher, Alexandre Kojève, puts it in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel:

The dialectical movement is a movement of human thought and dis­

course; but the reality itself which one thinks of and of which one
talks is in no way dialectical. Dialectic is but a method of philosophical
research and exposition. And we see, by the way, that the method is
dialectical only because it implies a negative or negating element:
namely the antithesis which opposes the thesis in a verbal fight and
calls for an effort of demonstration, an effort, moreover. indis­
tinguishable from a refutation. There is truth properly so-called – that
is scientific or philosophic truth, or better, dialectical or synthetic
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 81
truth – only when there has been discussion or dialogue – that it,
antithesis negating a thesis.
( Kojève (1996), p. 181, emphasis in original)

This seems a little abstract, but if we align Hegel’s ‘method’ with his
own philosophy of history, and with his account of aesthetics, and then
with his privileging of ancient Greek culture – and particularly its
plastic and dramatic arts – then his focus on tragedy becomes clearer.
To begin with, in The Philosophy of History Hegel observed that what
he called “the rudiments of Greek Culture” depended upon “the physi­
cal condition of the country [that] does not exhibit a characteristic
unity” and therefore does not “exercise a powerful influence over the
inhabitants.” (Hegel (1956), p. 233)

In the face of the break-up of power into fragmentary forms, men’s

attention is more largely directed to themselves and to the extension
of their immature capabilities. Thus, we see the Greeks – divided and
separated from each other – thrown back upon their inner spirit and
personal energy, yet at the same time most variously excited and
cautiously circumspect.
(p. 233)

For Hegel the Greek ‘character’ is defined as “Individuality conditioned by

Beauty, which is produced by Spirit, transforming the merely Natural
into an expression of its own being.” (p. 238, emphasis in original)
Within this larger philosophical context the Aristotelian notion of the
primacy of ‘action’ in tragedy is reversed in Hegel, so that action issues
from ‘character’:

Action is here the executed will, which as such is at the same time
recognised, recognised, that is, not merely in its origin and point of
departure from the inner feeling, but also in respect to its ultimate
purpose. In other words, all that issues from the action, issues so far
as the personality in question is concerned, from himself, and reacts
thereby on his personal character and its circumstances. This con­
stant relation of the entire complexus of external condition to the
inwardness itself of the self-realized and self-realizing individuality,
who is at once the basis and assimilating force of the entire process,
82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

marks the point where dramatic poetry falls in line with the truly lyri­
cal principle.
(p. 5, emphasis in original)

Ancient Greece was, to use Terry Eagleton’s words, “a society which Hegel
likens to an artefact, where a spontaneous knowledge of the whole was still
routinely available.” (Eagleton (1990), p. 141) Or, to put it another way,
moments of self-realisation and self-consciousness, which, according to
Hegel, it is the purpose of philosophy to identify, appear at particular tran­
sitional conjunctures in human history, hence the focus on ancient Athens
and its tragedies and the English Renaissance. At the level of what Hegel
styles “dramatic personality” the persona is emphatically not “allegorical”
but a unity that simultaneously displays a “permeating individuality” or
‘spirit,’ while incorporating ‘deed(s)’ and behaviour whose determinations
are located in the various elements of Greek culture:

vital and self-identical throughout, a complete whole in short, the

opinions and characterisation of which are consonant with its aims
and actions. It is not the breadth of particular traits which is here of
first importance, but the permeating individuality, which synthetically
binds all in the central unity, which it in truth is, and displays a given
personality in speech and action as issuing from one and the same
living source, from which every characteristic, whether it be of idea,
deed or manner of behaviour, comes into being.
(Hegel (1975), p. 26)

For Hegel tragic conflict occurs when the ancient Greek protagonist
who “irrefragably adhere(s) to the one ethical state of pathos which alone
corresponds to their own already formed personality” confronts “an
ethical Power which opposes them and possesses an equal ethical claim
to recognition.” (p. 84, emphasis in original) These two elements of a
dialectical opposition can only be surmounted by means of “the resolu­
tion of specific ethical and substantive facts from their contradiction into
their true harmony.” (p. 73) To this extent Hegel regards Sophocles’
Antigone, in which the equal ethical claims of Antigone to bury her
brother’s dead body and Creon’s no less compelling ethical obligations
to the city of Thebes, make it “the most excellent and satisfying work of
art.” (pp. 74 and 133)
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 83
Hegel asks questions that tragedy raises, not least involving the issue
of why spectators take pleasure in the dilemmas and catastrophes of the
dramatic characters themselves. But pleasure itself is shifted onto the
protagonist for whom “the pleasure enjoyed has, indeed, the positive
significance that the self has become aware of itself as objective self-
consciousness,” although this is accompanied by a “negative import”
that cancels it and reveals its own partiality. Thus “realisation” is
experienced as a contradiction “in which the acquired reality of its
individual existence finds itself destroyed by the negative element,
which stands without reality and without content over against the
former, and yet is the force which consumes it.” (p. 243)
At the centre of the tragic experience for Hegel, “ethical substance”
gets divided in such a way that the protagonist (or agent) “finds himself
thereby in the opposition of knowing and not knowing.” (p. 294) Such
is the case of Oedipus, but it is also the case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
and Macbeth. In the latter two instances, and especially in Macbeth:

Ethical rightness, which insists that actuality is nothing per se in

opposition to absolute law, finds out that its knowledge is one-sided,
its law merely a law of its own character, and that it has laid hold of
merely one of the powers of the substance.
(p. 295)

This effectively reconceptualises Aristotle’s anagnorisis as a partial self-

consciousness but within a dialectical method in which ‘spirit’ is self-
divided but folds back into itself. This is, to use the formulation of
Henri Lefevbre, “the movement of thought … turning back on itself.”
(Lefevbre (2009) p. 40). For Hegel tragedy is a demonstration of a phi­
losophical process, and art generally is a means of liberating “the real
import of appearances from the semblance and deception of this bad and
fleeting world, and imparts to phenomenal semblances a higher reality,
born of mind.” (Hegel (1993) p. 11, emphasis added) In fact Hegel has
very little to say directly about the Aristotelian categories of ‘pity’ and
‘fear,’ or, indeed, about the emotional investment that the spectator
makes in the tragic experience. The action of the tragedy may result in
death, or, in a play such as Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (405-401 B.C.)
in a resolution that postpones death, but in the case of the former there
is little awareness of loss; rather Hegel is preoccupied with the
84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

movement of the dialectic towards synthesis, and this reduces the pos­
sibility of a focus on the paradoxes that tragedy uncovers. It is to A.C.
Bradley’s reading of Hegel that we must now turn to develop some of
these observations.

BRADLEY ON HEGEL
A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy in 1904 was the culmination of almost a
century of placing the emphasis on the ‘characters’ of Shakespeare’s plays,
and it was to last until the early 1930s when other ways of reading Shake­
speare began to emerge. It is tempting to think that one of the things that
attracted Bradley to Hegel was the philosopher’s emphasis on the primacy of
‘character’ or ‘personality’ in tragic drama. But Bradley is very conscious of
the fact that Hegel’s comments on tragedy are embedded within a larger
framework that he must forcefully “tear from its connections with the
author’s general view of poetry, and with the rest of his philosophy.” (Hegel
(1975), p. 367) Some of Bradley’s observations are familiar and are equated
with the general tenor of discourse on tragedy; for example,

in all tragedy there is some sort of collision or conflict – conflict of

feelings, modes of thought, desires, wills, purposes; conflict of per­
sons with one another, or with circumstances, or with themselves;
one, several, or all of these kinds of conflict, as the case may be.
(p. 368)

Bradley acknowledges, as we saw earlier, that while tragedy may involve

“unhappiness,” not all of the ancient Greek tragedies that have come down
to us end in death. He observes firmly that in itself, “[p]ity for mere mis­
fortune, like fear of it, is not tragic pity or fear,” (p. 368). But he then
proceeds to isolate Hegel’s notion of ‘spirit’ as the locus of deep conflict. He
circles around the fundamental rationality of Hegel’s system of philosophy
and he reinterprets the Hegelian dialectic as embodying tragic conflict that
“appeals to the spirit” because “it is itself a conflict of the spirit” (p. 369);
this is crucial in Hegel, and Bradley goes on to gloss it as

A conflict … between powers that rule the world of man’s will and
action – his ‘ethical substance.’ The family and the state, the bond of
parent and child, of brother and sister, of husband and wife, of citizen
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 85
and ruler, or citizen and citizen, with the obligations and feelings
appropriate to these bonds; and again the powers of personal love and
honour, or of devotion to a great cause or an ideal interest like religion or
science or some kind of social welfare – such are the forces exhibited in
tragic action; not indeed alone, not without others less affirmative and
perhaps even evil, but still in preponderating mass.
(p. 369)

This is a comprehensive list and it allows Bradley to appeal to the par­

ticular Hegelian abstractions of ‘depth’ and ‘universality’ that are, he
insists, “essential to a great work of art.” ( p. 369)
Whereas in Hegel ‘reason’ and rationality are the keys to subjective
freedom, very much in line with Enlightenment thinking, Bradley stops
short of a full submission to the conclusion of the dialectic, to assert
that the self-division of the ‘spirit’ is fundamentally tragic: “the essen­
tially tragic fact is the self-division and the intestinal war of the ethical
substance, not so much the war of good with evil as the war of good
with good.” (p. 369) While this may have practical and structural con­
sequences, Bradley is content to fixate here on the source of tragic con­
flict in “the nature of the characters through whom these claims are
made.” (p. 369) What he downplays is the third, much more positive
element in Hegelian dialectic, the ‘synthesis’ (Aufhebung) (see Bhaskar
(1993) p. 22). We shall see in a moment what Bradley does with this,
since it depends upon a reinterpretation of Hegel which he acknowl­
edges will be his objective from the outset.
Bradley wants to dwell on one aspect of Hegel’s account: “the essen­
tial point to him is not the suffering, but its cause, namely the action or
conflict.” (Bradley (1992), p. 368) It is the case that Hegel is concerned
with a very particular kind of suffering, that sometimes ends in death,
and that sometimes transcends death. For Bradley the emphasis in tra­
gedy is upon “collision,” which occurs because of “the nature of the
characters through whom” a variety of claims are made. (p. 369) The
tragic conflict ends in “the denial of both the exclusive claims. It is not
the work of chance or blank fate; it is the act of the ethical substance
itself, asserting its absoluteness against the excessive pretensions of its
particular powers.” (p. 371) The result is that tragedy arrives at a par­
ticular impasse where something is gained, but also where something is
lost.
86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

Bradley explains the extent to which the Hegelian view of tragedy

extends beyond the morality of the acts of protagonists:

In the first place, it is most important to observe that Hegel is not

discussing at all what we should generally call the moral quality of the
acts and persons concerned, or, in the ordinary sense, what it was
their duty to do. And, in the second place, when he speaks of ‘equally
justified’ powers, what he means, and indeed, sometimes says, is that
these powers are in themselves equally justified. The family and the
state, the bond of father and son, the bond of mother and son, the
bond of citizenship, these are each and all, one as much as another,
powers rightfully claiming human allegiance. It is tragic that obser­
vance of one should involve the violation of another.
(p. 372, emphasis in original)

Bradley describes the positive and negative aspects of the Hegelian dia­
lectic, and after addressing Hegel’s critique of ‘modern tragedy’ he goes
on to discuss the latter’s “treatment of the aspect of reconciliation in
modern tragedy.” (p. 379) It is clear that Bradley includes Shakespeare
under the umbrella of ‘modern’ tragedy. According to Bradley Hegel
“does not notice that in the conclusion of not a few tragedies pain is
mingled not merely with acquiescence, but with something like exul­
tation.” (p. 379) He cites Hamlet, Othello and (surprisingly) King Lear,
where he notes that “This exultation appears to be connected with our
sense that the hero has never shown himself so great or noble as in the
death which seals his failure.” (p. 379) This is about as near as Bradley
gets to the Hegelian notion of ‘synthesis;’ he focuses on the impossi­
bility of an essential feature of the dialectic, preferring, in an explicitly
unHegelain fashion, to concentrate on loss. This is how he distorts
Hegel:

We have the more general idea – to use again a formula not Hegel’s
own – that tragedy portrays a self-division and self-waste of spirit, or a
division of spirit involving conflict and waste. It implies in this that on
both sides of the conflict there is a spiritual value. The same idea may
be expressed (again, I think, not in Hegel’s own words) by saying that
the tragic conflict is one not merely of good with evil, but also, and
more essentially, of good with good. Only in saying this, we must be
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 87
careful to observe that ‘good’ here means anything that has spiritual
value, not moral goodness alone, and that ‘evil’ has a similarly wide
sense.
(p. 381, emphasis in original)

Bradley adopts an empirical stance in focusing, sometimes on the plight

of the tragic protagonist – which in Hegel’s account of ancient Greek
tragedy occasionally leads to death, or to reconciliation – and at others
on the emotional stimulus to the spectator who is urged to recognise the
fundamental humanity that the tragic conflict brings to the surface and
that results in ‘waste’ or loss. Bradley’s reading of Shakespeare’s major
tragedies exposes to the spectator’s gaze a waste of a part of ‘spirit’ at the
very moment of death that robs the protagonist of the opportunity to
put the knowledge gained by suffering into practice. Pity here is asso­
ciated with loss, and fear with threat: we empathise vicariously with the
plight of the protagonist while simultaneously being made aware of the
consequences of his/her decisions in circumstances where the choices are
of equal value. This is rather different from the emphasis that Hegel
places on “Pity” and “Fear” in Book 4 of his Philosophy of the Fine Arts
where the former is associated with “the display of that which is conform­
able with the reason and truth of Spirit,” while the latter is concerned with
‘content’:

that which mankind has therefore in truth to fear is not the external
power and its oppression, but the ethical might which is self-defined
in its own free rationality, and partakes further of the eternal and
inviolable, the power a man summons against his own being when he
turns his back upon it.
(Hegel (1886), p. 653)

NIETZSCHE ON TRAGEDY
The emphasis in Hegel is ultimately on reconciliation and on the syn­
thetic unity of Spirit, and, as in the case of Aristotle, the tragic prota­
gonist is no ordinary person. This will become an issue when we later
consider tragedy in relation to what Arthur Miller refers to as “the
common man.” But Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) moved
beyond the debate about tragedy occasioned by Hegel and responded to
88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

complex thinkers such as the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher

Sǿren Kierkegaard in his Either/Or (1843). In his essay “The Tragic in
Ancient Drama” Kierkegaard opts for an art that his fictional editor
(Victor Eremita) calls “the disjointed and desultory character of unfin­
ished papers,” an art designed “to produce skilfully the same effect, the
same carelessness and fortuitousness, the same anacoluthic thought pro­
cess.” (Kierkegaard (1987), I.152) This is some distance from Hegel,
and to some extent anticipates the fragmentariness of modernism and
post-modernism.
In his The Philosophy of History (1830–1) Hegel defines what he calls
“the Greek spirit” as a particular phase in world history (Hegel (1956),
pp. 238–9). Nietzsche, on the other hand, goes back to a particular
ancient Greek cultural institution, the city Dionysia, and to the ritual
theatrical celebrations in Athens associated with the god Dionysius. He
reinterprets the Hegelian notion of “the Greek character as that of
Individuality conditioned by Beauty” (Nietzsche (1956), p. 239, emphasis
in original) as a conflict involving Apollo, as “the marvellous divine
image of the principium individuationis” (p. 22). Nietzsche borrows this
term immediately from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea
(1818 and 1844) where it is defined as “the way in which the individual
knows things as phenomena” (Schopenhauer (1964), I.455) and hence
its identification with time and space. Nietzsche associates the principium
individuationis with the god Apollo, “whose looks and gestures radiate
the full delight, wisdom, and beauty of ‘illusion’.” (Nietzsche (1956), p.
22) In Schopenhauer the principium “is free from all multiplicity, although
its manifestations in time and space are innumerable.” (Schopenhauer
(1964), I.146, emphasis in original) In Nietzsche the principium repre­
sents the fullness of illusion and the order of art (beauty). In contrast the
divine figure of Dionysius poses a serious challenge to that order by
resurrecting a plural and alien mystery that Apollonian order cannot
resist, and it comprises a ‘rapture’ that is both celebratory and terrifying
at the same time.

Dionysiac stirrings arise either through the influence of those narcotic

potions of which all primitive races speak in their hymns, or through
the powerful approach of spring, which penetrates with joy the whole
frame of nature. So stirred the individual forgets himself completely.
(Nietzsche (1956), p. 22)
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 89
Jean-Pierre Vernant reads Euripides’ The Bacchae in the context of an
opposition between ‘the city’ with its “rationalism of the sophists, with
their technical intelligence, their mastery of the art of argument, and
their denial of all that is invisible” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (2006),
pp. 402–3), on the one hand, and “a religious experience that has a
place for irrational impulses and leads to intimate union with the
divine, on the other.” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet(2006), p. 403)
Nietzsche recognises this opposition but not in terms of a Hegelian
dialectic. Rather, as Vernant points out in the case of The Bacchae, “the
tragedy does not so much establish an opposition between reason and
religion of the soul or intelligence and feeling; rather … it sets up two
parallel systems of values.” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet(2006), p. 403)
The Dionysiac force is not the negative of a self-divided essence but an
alien force that challenges reason and at the same time both celebrates
and confronts the order that suppresses it. Nietzsche states:

It is not difficult to imagine the awed surprise with which the Apollo­
nian Greek must have looked on him. And that surprise would be
further increased as the latter realised, with a shudder, that all this
was not so alien to him after all, that his Apollonian consciousness
was but a thin veil hiding from him the whole Dionysiac realm.
Nietzsche (1956), p. 28)

Nietzsche ascribes to Apollo a kind of aristocratic individualism which

involves “self-control, a knowledge of self-control” and an “artificially
restrained and discreet world of illusion” (pp. 34–5), and he then asks
us to imagine “how the Apollonian artist with his monotonous harp
music must have sounded beside the demoniac chant of the multitude.”
(Nietzsche (1956), p. 35) A.W. Pickard-Cambridge, we recall, offers a
long and complex account of the relationship between the dithyramb
and its association with “the festivals Dionysus, in Athens and else­
where.” (1927, p. 8) Nietzsche, however, associates it exclusively with
music and Dionysiac festivals, but specifically with “the demoniac chant
of the multitude,” and with a kind of wild orgiastic music. (Nietzsche
(1956), pp. 44–5) Thus, tragedy is situated within the tension between
the drive towards individualism and the order and harmony of ‘art’ that
accompanies it, on the one hand, and the ‘demoniac’ energy that is fes­
tive, threatening, ritualistic, orgiastic and terrifying, on the other. What
90 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

for Hegel are two elements of a dialectic that the tragic action resolves
are for Nietzsche an intermingling of antagonistic forces that are never
completely resolved or transcended, or, indeed, successfully contained.
However, he rejects completely (and in a way that partially contradicts
his earlier remark) the notion of the Chorus as “The idealised spectator,
or as representing the populace over against the noble realm of the set.”
Indeed, he also rejects the idea that tragedy has “any kind of social or
political context,” claiming that the origins of tragedy were “purely
religious.” He asserts that “No ancient polity ever embodied constitu­
tional democracy, and one dares to hope that ancient tragedy did not
even foreshadow it.” (p. 47) As we have already seen, the subsequent
scholarly enquiries of Thompson, Hall and others have rejected this
view, and we could add Critchley to this list.
This should not cloud the view that at times Nietzsche accurately
describes the impact of tragedy. For example, his quibble about the
nature of ‘character’ as “a luminous shape projected onto a dark wall,
that is to say appearance through and through” (p. 59, emphasis in ori­
ginal) is rapidly followed by a connection between what he calls “a
whole series of feminine frailties” that enter with “the Semitic myth of
the Fall” and its associated ‘guilt.’ Moreover, he concludes (and in a
language that we now regard as problematic):

The tragedy at the heart of things, which the thoughtful Aryan is not
disposed to quibble away, the contrariety at the centre of the universe,
is seen by him as an interpenetration of several worlds, as for
instance a divine and a human, each individually in the right, but
each, as it encroaches upon the other, having to suffer for its indivi­
duality. The individual, in the course of his heroic striving towards
universality, de-individuation, comes up against that primordial con­
tradiction and learns both to sin and to suffer.
(p. 64)

Sin is, perhaps, a pejorative term in this context since Nietzsche is

concerned to offer an historical account of the emergence of tragedy, and
at the same time to distinguish it from a series of explicitly Christian
categories. For Nietzsche, tragedy ‘dies’ with Euripides, because now
“the real antagonism was to be between the Dionysiac spirit and the
Socratic,” between religion and the Dionysiac “spirit of music” (p. 96)
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 91
and the logic of science: “the mechanism of concepts, judgments and
syllogisms” (p. 94), and “tragedy was to perish in the conflict.” (pp. 77
and 88) We shall return to the theme of ‘the death of tragedy’ later, but
it is enough for now simply to note Nietzsche’s particular interpretation
of it.
Despite what appears to be an earlier reservation about ‘character,’
Nietzsche’s historical account of the decline of tragedy involves an “anti-
Dionysiac, and mythic trend in the increased emphasis on character
portrayal and psychological subtlety from Sophocles onward”:

Character must no longer be broadened so as to become a perma­

nent type, but on the contrary must be so finely individualised by
means of shading and nuances and the strict delineation of every trait
that the spectator ceased to be aware of the myth at all and comes to
focus on the amazing lifelikeness of the characters and the artist’s
power of imitation.
(p. 106)

This sounds like a description of the novel, and might actually fit texts
such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but
as Bradley discovered, the historical case could be applied to Shake­
spearean tragedy, and in his comments on Hamlet in The Birth of Tragedy
(p. 51) Nietzsche might not have entirely disagreed. But the nearest
Nietzsche gets to some notion of the formal category of tragic resolution
is to identify “the metaphysical solace” in “the older tragedy” without
which “it is impossible to imagine our taking pleasure in tragedy.” (p.
107) For Bradley, with his revision of Hegelian dialectic, the con­
sciousness of loss that death entails remains uppermost and qualifies that
pleasure.
The Aristotelian categories of ‘pity’ and ‘fear’ do not figure promi­
nently in Nietzsche’s heady account of tragedy. The pathway through
which the spectator passes to the dangerous domain of “the womb of
things” is a myth that is interposed between “the universality of its
music and the Dionysiac disposition of the spectator” thereby “creating
the illusion that music is but a supreme instrument for bringing to life
the plastic world of myth.” (p. 126) The spectator experiences “supreme
delight” but he/she must pass through “annihilation and negation”
(presumably the element of ‘fear’) in order to commune with “the very
92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

womb of things.” (p. 133) For Nietzsche the objective is the witnessing
of “the fraternal union in tragedy of the two deities, or about the alter­
nation of Apollonian and Dionysiac excitation in the spectator,” and not
about “the triumph of the moral order, and about the purging of the
emotions through tragedy.” (p. 133) As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze
has suggested, for Nietzsche, “The Tragic is the aesthetic form of joy, not
a moral solution to pain, fear or pity” (Deleuze (1983), p. 17, emphasis
in original):

It is joy that is tragic. But this means that tragedy is immediately

joyful, that it only calls forth the fear and pity of the obtuse spectator,
the pathological and moralising listener who counts on it to ensure
the proper functioning of his moral sublimations and medical
purgings.
(p. 17)

BEYOND NIETZSCHE’S READING OF TRAGEDY

Various elements of Nietzsche’s account of tragedy continue to permeate
critical and philosophical thinking about the genre. A significant com­
pendium of these elements occurs in Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of
German Tragic Drama (1985) that seeks ostensibly to investigate the
German Trauerspiel or ‘mourning play.’ In a long section, “Trauerspiel
and Tragedy,” Benjamin offers a critical history that distinguishes
between ancient Greek tragedy and its modern (post-Renaissance)
German version, and he starts with the Nietzschean distinction between
‘myth’ and ‘history.’ He cites the mid-seventeenth-century German
commentator Martin Opitz and affirms the primacy of ‘myth’:

Opitz does not actually say so – for in his day it was self-evident – but
the incidents listed [the commands of kings, killings, despair, infanti­
cide and patricide, coflagrations, incest, war and commotion, lamen­
tation, weeping, sighing, and such like] are not so much the subject-
matter as the artistic core of the Trauerspiel. Historical life, as it was
conceived at that time, is its content, its true object. In this it is dif­
ferent from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history, but
myth, and the tragic stature of the dramatis personae does not derive
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 93
from rank – the absolute monarchy – but from the pre-historic epoch
of their existence – the past age of heroes.
(p. 62)

Benjamin notes the critical distribution of genres to particular social

classes, bequeathed to German literary history as the distinctions
between pastoral (peasantry), comedy (middle classes) and Trauerspiel,
along with the novel (‘princely estate’). (p. 64) In The Poetics Aristotle
distinguished between ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ where the latter was
qualitatively inferior to the former, and even the more sophisticated
social distinctions have come down through Nietzsche and others to the
point where Benjamin feels the need to reference them.
It is worth pausing over what Benjamin means by the phrase ‘abso­
lute monarchy’ since it points to the passage from “theocratic claims”
made by both by Church and State in Europe during the sixteenth
century, to protect their interests and the emergent Protestant rejection
of them. The Counter-Reformation sought to hold on to a “theological­
juridical mode of thought” in which the ideal constitutional position of
the prince was the exceptional figurehead whose executive power guar­
anteed “the continuity of the community, flourishing in feats of arms
and in the sciences, in the arts and in its Church.” (p. 65) For Benjamin
this Counter-Reformation model precedes the emergence of the baroque
period where the focus is on the conditional leadership of the ruler “if
war, revolt, or other catastrophes lead to a state of emergency.” (p. 65)
He goes on to argue that “The baroque knows no eschatology; and for
that reason it possesses no mechanism by which all earthly things are
gathered in together and exalted before being consigned to their end.”
(pp. 66 and 81) In other words, the emphasis is on fragmentation rather
than on organic unity.
Benjamin teases out the history of tragic drama as it passes through
the theological and philosophical debates of the seventeenth century,
marking some important differences between the baroque and ancient
Greek tragedy. The form that the conflict takes in Greek tragedy is, he
argues, “unique” and it leads him to the important question: “For what
does the tragic hero die?” Benjamin’s response is that “Tragic poetry is
based on the idea of sacrifice” although of a unique kind in that it is “at
once a first and final sacrifice” (p. 106), but one that has two parts: “A
final sacrifice in the sense of the atoning sacrifice to gods who are
94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

upholding an ancient right” and “a first sacrifice in the sense of the

representative action, in which new aspects of the life of the nation
become manifest.” (pp. 106–7) The following is how Benjamin defines
what he calls “the tragic death”: “The tragic death has a dual sig­
nificance: it invalidates the ancient rights of the Olympians, and it offers
up the hero to the unknown god as the first fruits of a new harvest of
humanity.” (p. 107)
But he does not stop there, since an alternative focus can be on
“tragic suffering” as evidenced in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’
Oedipus, where sacrifice undergoes a transformation

in which the subjection of the hero to death is replaced by a paroxysm

which just as surely does justice to the old conception of gods and
sacrifice, as it is patently clad in the form of the new conception.
(p. 107)

In dramatic terms, the tragic hero confronts “the demonic world-order”

but in philosophical terms “the tragic is to the demonic what the para­
dox is to ambiguity.” (p. 109) There is no clear conclusion in which the
moral order of the universe is restored, but following Nietzsche, Benja­
min notes the ‘silence’ of the tragic hero is an inarticulate acknowl­
edgement that he is “better than his gods” as he raises himself up “amid
the agitation of that painful world,” and that “[t]he paradox of the birth
of the genius in moral speechlessness, moral infantility, constitutes the
sublime element in tragedy.” (p. 110)
Benjamin’s concentrated style and his interweaving of quotations
makes him difficult to follow and his reliance on Nietzsche is selective.
His quarry is the shift from ancient Greek tragedy and its ritual ele­
ments to ‘modern’ tragedies, of which Shakespeare’s Hamlet becomes an
exemplar, with its contempt for the world in the face of an uncertain
hereafter. The emergence of Protestantism, with its emphasis on the
‘self’ as an individual, raises a number of questions concerning the rela­
tively new emphasis on ‘character.’ Moreover, the Christian focus on the
transitory nature of the world, and the notion of ‘redemption’ from sin
removed the terror from death and introduced a new element into the
dynamics of tragedy, almost to the point of negating its impact.
In his book Beyond Tragedy, the German theologian Reinhold Nie­
buhr considers the difference between Christianity and tragedy. He
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 95
begins by noting Christ’s rejection of pity as a human response to his
sacrifice and he asserts that “Christianity is a religion which transcends
tragedy” (Niebuhr (1965), p. 155) simply because of the possibility of
redemption in an afterlife. In the Christian narrative the choice between
good and evil, virtue and sin emerges from man’s freedom. Conse­
quently, Niebuhr argues, “The cross is not tragic but the resolution of
tragedy. Here suffering is carried into the very life of God and over­
come. It becomes the basis of salvation.” (pp. 155–6) Of course, salva­
tion is dependent upon faith, and pity is reserved for a post-lapsarian
human condition that is ultimately rectifiable beyond death. Niebuhr
invokes Nietzsche who insisted that “tragedy stands beyond pessimism
and optimism” (p. 157) and he cites as a paradigmatic case the novels of
Thomas Hardy where the characters are “pitiful” but not tragic. Hardy’s
characters “remain weak vessels and victims of an inscrutable fate which
weaves curious patterns with and into their lives” (p. 156), but from the
reader’s point of view the pity that they evoke is what Nietzsche calls
ressentiment which shades into pleasure derived from the suffering of
others. The typically Hardy protagonist “may shed tears of momentary
pain. But it does not rise sufficiently above its fate to survey its meaning
or to subdue the confusion out of which the pain arises.” ( p. 157)
It is Niebuhr’s contention that the nearer we get to ‘realism’ – as in
the plays of Ibsen – the more the emphasis is on “the pathos of human
sinfulness” (p. 157) and what is, surely, at issue here is the evocation of
one eschatological framework (Christianity and its focus upon the con­
tingent, but temporary, human world) in terms of another (the panoply
of superhuman forces and their demands that populate ancient Greek
tragedy). In Niebuhr’s lexicon the tragic only emerges under certain
conditions:

The genuinely tragic is curiously compounded with the pitiful. This

reveals itself whenever the victims of blind fate and chaotic impulse
are enmeshed in their suffering by strength as well as weakness, by
some noble purpose as well as by blindness.
(p. 159)

His two examples are Gina Ekdal from Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and Sha­
kespeare’s King Lear, where the former who is “an unimaginative wife
with a spotted past [who] bears the sorrows occasioned by the foibles of
96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

a self-righteous husband with such simple dignity and patience that her
sufferings are transmuted from the pitiful to the tragic,” and where the
latter “is a victim of both his love and his obtuseness so that he loves
the daughters who hate him and hates the daughter who loves him.”
(p. 159) In the former description, the ordinary is elevated to tragic
status but in the latter the ruler is reduced in stature. Niebuhr’s appeal
to what seems a kind of universality strips away the important pre­
occupation in King Lear with the relationship between the human and
the supernatural, while in The Wild Duck historical contingency is
brought directly into conflict with an idealism that is entirely con­
tingent. In King Lear it is possible to hang on to some of the severely
truncated elements of classical tragedy, such as the deus absconditus, but
in the case of Ibsen, as Niebuhr only partly recognises, in the interests
of realism, we need to adjust the compass of tragedy.
In Niebuhr’s account dynamic tragedy is “both romantic and aristo­
cratic” because “it affirms the whole of life,” and is the result of a con­
flict between “Dionysian impulse and Promethean will.” (p. 164)
However, he goes on to claim that the protagonist “needs a chorus to extol
his virtues and justify his actions” so that pity is necessarily invoked
because there is some doubt about where exactly in Greek tragedy “the real
centre of life lies, whether in its law or its vitality. Therefore the weak law­
abiders must honour the strong law-breakers, lest the latter seem dishon­
ourable.” (p. 165) Whereas in Greek tragedy the conflict revolves around
opposing but equal demands made upon the protagonist, or is generated
by complex Dionysiac forces that are imposed from without, the Christian
labelling of apparently transgressive actions as ‘sin’ transfers and inter­
nalises the resultant ‘guilt’ to mankind:

Sin emerges out of freedom, and is possible only because man is free;
but it is done in freedom, and therefore man and not life bears
responsibility for it. It does indeed accompany every creative act; but
the evil is not part of the creativity. It is the consequence of man’s
self-centredness and egotism by which he destroys harmony of
existence.
(p. 166)

The discrepancy here is between the formal demands of tragedy that

have been abstracted from classical Greek prototypes, and the assumed
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 97
transmission of some of its structural elements undiluted from one his­
torical moment to another.
But there is also another response to Niebuhr’s account that seeks to
reclaim a connection between Christianity and tragedy. In his book
Tragedy, Terry Eagleton insists that “Marxism and Christianity are
indeed tragic doctrines” because “they are conscious of the appalling
price that an unjust world must pay for its redemption.” (Eagleton
(2020), p. 18) This shifts the emphasis from Niebuhr’s focus on the
‘beyond’ of tragedy to the actual horror and the pity that the process of
redemption has to go through, whether this is crucifixion or violent
rebellion. Eagleton observes that “The risen body of Jesus, still bearing
the marks of his wounds, cannot annul the fact of his torture and
humiliation.” (p. 18) In an engagement with Nietzsche later in the
book he observes:

That good may spring from evil is tragic in two different senses. It
may be a description of tragedy itself for those who regard it as life-
affirming; or it may be tragic in the sense that there is something
warped about a world in which such a steep price must be paid for
happiness. The New Testament, for which what is awry with the world
is known as sin or lack of love, belongs to the latter camp.
(p. 205)

The challenge that Christianity poses to the classical models of tragedy

is exacerbated once tragedy as a concept migrates into the field of phi­
losophy proper. We have seen how philosophers address the relationship
between tragedy and eschatology, although, with the advent of various
types of Christianity tragedy itself fades into the background. It resur­
faces again within the framework of some of the problems that philo­
sophy encounters with epistemology and with theories of knowledge
and knowledge production. One conspicuous exponent of this kind of
link between tragedy and philosophy is the North American philoso­
pher, Stanley Cavell.
Unlike the philosophers of the Enlightenment, for whom Greek tra­
gedy provided models of the ethical problems that tragic protagonists
confronted as well as a philosophy of history, Cavell isolates a particular
field of enquiry involving scepticism, and he seeks to link the concept
with dramatists such as Shakespeare whose plays perform different facets
98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

of ‘doubt.’ What drives Cavell is not an historical enquiry per se,

although his references to Descartes and Montaigne suggest some
awareness of context:

I had seen that the extreme precipitousness of the Lear story, the velocity
of the banishments, figured the precipitousness of skepticism’s banish­
ment of the world, and I had surmised at some length that not only was
tragedy obedient to a sceptical structure, but contrariwise, that scepti­
cism already bore its own marks of a tragic structure.
(Cavell (1991), p. 5)

This inversion of historical method ushers in a kind of philosophical

presentism that allows Cavell to read a dramatist like Shakespeare, or a
contemporary popular film, as instances of the kind of epistemological
problems that contemporary philosophy faces. As a consequence, he is
able to avail himself of the insights derived from contemporary literary
theory and Freudian psychoanalysis in order to tease out the dilemmas
that Shakespearean characters encounter. The background to this is “the
origin of scepticism, as an intimation of, in Kant’s concept, human
conditionedness.” (p. 17) Cavell adds:

Then what philosophy calls sceptical doubt is a drive to reach the

unconditioned. Philosophy may think of the unconditioned, the inex­
plicable, or the limit of the explicable as the ‘given’. Empirical philo­
sophy will think of it as empirically given, say, sensuously given;
rational philosophy will think of it as the givenness of reason. Ordin­
ary language philosophy seems, intuitively linked with certain devel­
opments of French thought – I am thinking mostly of Lacan and
Derrida – in conceiving of the given as language.
(p. 17)

Cavell’s exercises in reading Shakespeare are designed to tease out a

range of texts – King Lear, Othello, Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale
among others – as complex demonstrations at the level of human psy­
chology of the philosophical problems of knowledge (epistemology) that
scepticism poses.
Cavell begins his essay on Othello by saying that he wants to think of
the play, and of tragedy generally, “as a kind of epistemological
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY 99
problem, or as the outcome of the problem of knowledge – of the
dominance of modern philosophical thought by it.” (p. 126) He locates
the play in an historical and sociological context, insisting that

We have to think in this play not merely about marriage but about the
marriage of a romantic hero and of a Christian man; one whose ima­
gination has to incorporate the idea of two becoming one in marriage
and the idea that it is better to marry than to burn.
(p. 131)

All of the categories that Cavell invokes are traceable to the language of
the play, its critical reception over time and St Paul’s justification of
marriage. But these categories, or types, quickly give way to a sophis­
ticated enquiry into the ‘character’ of Othello as he encounters an ‘other’
in the figure of Desdemona. Cavell edges carefully towards a conclusion
that highlights the protagonist’s individuality and offers us an account
of the condition of his ‘mind’:

If such a man as Othello is rendered impotent and murderous by

aroused, or having aroused, female sexuality – or let us say, if this
man is horrified by human sexuality, in himself and in others – then
no human being is free of this possibility. What I have wished to bring
out is the nature of this possibility, or the possibility of this nature, the
way human sexuality is the field in which the fantasy of finitude, of its
acceptance and its repetitious overcoming, is worked out; the way
human separateness is turned equally toward splendour and toward
horror, mixing beauty and ugliness; turned toward before and after;
toward flesh and blood.
(p. 137)

In this reading, Othello is, therefore both a unique ‘subjectivity’ in that

he is the distillation of a range of social, philosophical, religious and
psychological forces, but also a ‘typical’ human being whose motives we
can investigate and confirm by comparison with what we feel and think
vicariously about his situation. At the root of what we might call
Othello’s actions is his ‘character’ and it is the shift away from Aristotle’s
priority to its alternative (of which Cavell is a particularly sophisticated
example) that we must now turn in the next chapter.
 5
FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER

With Stanley Cavell we arrive at an important point of convergence of

“the birth of scepticism” and the emergence of a new form of sub­
jectivity that Cavell locates in Hegel’s claim that “with the birth of
Christianity a new subjectivity enters the world.” (Cavell (1991), p. 21)
This coincides with the shift from ‘action’ as the primary focus of tra­
gedy to ‘character,’ and to the emergence of the novel as a dominant
aesthetic form. Of course, tragedies as dramas continued to be written,
either in imitation of classical originals, or, in the case of English wri­
ters, in imitation of Renaissance forms. In the dramas of Shelley, Byron
and Joanna Baillie, for example, what is imitated and appropriated are
Marlovian or Jacobean models. At the same time translated versions of
ancient Greek and Roman tragedies continued to appear, as evidenced
in the cases of Ted Hughes’ version of Seneca’s Oedipus (1969), Tom
Paulin’s translation of Medea (2010) or Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of
Euripides (1973). But more recently, the epic material that ancient
Greek tragedy appropriated migrates in thoroughly modernised form
into the novels of Colm Tobín (The House of Names) or Pat Barker (The
Silence of the Girls and The Trojan Women) and their modernising themes
carry over into scholarly rereadings and reappraisals of the ancient Greek
originals. However, the inversion of Aristotle’s categories in order to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408-5
 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER 101
give primacy to ‘character’ is of a piece with a growing realism, alien to
Greek tragedy and also, in part, to Renaissance tragedy, along with new
emphases on what motivates character.
In The Origins of German Tragic Drama (1985) Water Benjamin
invokes Shakespeare’s Hamlet in order to point to the possibility that
“human actions were deprived of all value.” (p. 138) He goes on to ask:

What was the point of human life if, as in Calvinism, not even faith had
to be proved, if, on the one hand, faith was naked, absolute, effective,
but on the other there was no distinction between actions? There was no
answer to this except perhaps in the morality of ordinary people.
(p. 139)

On closer inspection ‘life’ could be considered “a rubbish heap of partial

inauthentic actions” (p. 139) but the resistance to the devaluation of life
by ‘faith’ and the profound terror that death could provoke resulted in
“the state of mind in which feeling revives the empty world in the form
of a mask, and derives an enigmatic satisfaction in contemplating it.”
(p. 139) That ‘mask’ is what Benjamin defines as “mourning” and it
emerges “unmistakably as a pendant to the theory of tragedy” and “can
only be developed in the description of the world which is revealed
under the gaze of the melancholy man.” (p. 139. In this argument,
Calvinism removes God from explicitly and visibly directing human
behaviour (or in the case of ancient Greek tragedy diminishes the
interference of deities in human action), relocating the ethical and moral
concerns of tragedy to the binding of “every feeling” to “an a priori
object, and the representation of this object is its phenomenology.” (p.
139) Consequently we can begin to see why Hamlet figures so largely in
Benjamin’s thinking, since it directs attention to intention:

Whereas in the realm of emotions it is not unusual for the relation

between an intention and its object to alternate between attraction
and repulsion, mourning is capable of a special intensification, a
progressive deepening of its intention.
(p. 139)

In ancient Greek tragedy the ‘intention’ of the character is limited and

subsumed into the ‘action.’ Here, however, and deprived of the explicit
102 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER

interference of some metaphysical force, only a phenomenological con­

nection between the subject and the complex stimulus of an object to
which feeling is attached is possible, and this leads directly to an
enquiry into the material conditions of existence and the motivation
that is required to engage with them.
This presents a problem for dramatic representation that is both perfor­
mative and at the same time selective in its mimetic task. But it also signals
a shift in the practice of reading. Maurice Morgann’s late-eighteenth­
century An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777) lifts
the dramatic character out of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays and rehabi­
litates him as someone who is not “an absolute coward.” (Morgann
(1981), p. 165) Morgann continues:

What there is to the contrary of this it is my business to discover.

Much, I think, will presently appear; but it lies so dispersed, is so
latent, and so purposely obscured that the reader must have some
patience while I collect it into one body, and make it the object of a
steady and regular contemplation.
(pp. 165–6)

While not exactly a symptomatic reading of the kind that we find in

Ernest Jones’s explicitly Freudian reading of Hamlet in Hamlet and
Oedipus (1949), Morgann inaugurated a reading practice that William
Hazlitt sustained in his summary dismissal of the criticisms levelled at
Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson “who did not find the individual traits,
or the dramatic distinctions which Shakespear has engrafted on this
general nature, because he felt no interest in them.” (Bate (1992), p.
177, emphasis in original) Characterological criticism of this kind
reached its apotheosis in A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904).
In ancient Greek tragedy, as we observed earlier, the motivations for
action were severely limited. The behaviour of the dramatic character
was clearly determined and there was very little in the way of additional
detail beyond the requirements for ‘action’ and its consequences. With
the advent of the novel and its focus on individuality attention shifted,
to the point that at the end of his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Thomas Hardy’s omniscient narrator could observe sardonically that at
Tess’s execution “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals
(in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.” (Hardy 2003), p.
 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER 103
397) Tess’s misfortunes at the hands of others are ironically ascribed to a
classical deity, but one that Hardy admitted was “allegorised as a per­
sonality” (p. 461).
Despite many attempts to appropriate the Classics for plots, or to
imitate them, the shift of emphasis towards the individual and to ‘per­
sonality’ harmonised with the emphasis in European drama on the
movement towards social realism in the plays of Strindberg and Ibsen,
and the developing emphasis on psychoanalysis that came to be focused
on the figure of Sigmund Freud. In the “Preface to Miss Julie” Strind­
berg claimed that social mores and tensions were “suitable matter for
tragedy,” and that there were “many possible motivations for Miss
Julie’s unhappy fate.” (Strindberg (1976), p. 93) Strindberg then pro­
duces the following catalogue:

The passionate character of her mother; the upbringing misguidedly

inflicted on her by her father; her own character; and the suggestive
effect of her fiancé upon her weak and degenerate brain. Also, more
immediately, the festive atmosphere of Midsummer Night; her
father’s absence; her menstruation, her association with animals; the
intoxicating effect of the dance; the midsummer twilight; the power­
fully aphrodisiac influence of the flowers; and finally, the chance that
drove these two people together into a private room – plus, of course,
the passion of the sexually inflamed man.
(pp. 93–4)

Just imagine attempting to apply such a list of motivations to a

figure such as Clytemnestra, Antigone or Oedipus, much less to Medea,
Pentheus or Agauë! For Strindberg, motivation is neither “purely phy­
siological” nor “exclusively psychological” (p. 94), but social in the
widest possible sense. It is not quite ‘naturalistic’ in the Zola-esque
sense of the term, nor is it exclusively programmatic in the way that
Hardy described the allegorisation of personality. For both Strindberg
and Ibsen action was a social activity, and tragedy itself was to be found
in the interaction between characters. For example, Ibsen’s eponymous
protagonist in Hedda Gabler betrays a catalogue of characteristics that
are, on the whole, not too dissimilar from those outlined by Strindberg,
and the presiding force in the play is the portrait of her militaristic
father, with whose pistol she commits suicide at the end of the play.
104 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER

The ‘possible motivations’ of Miss Julie or Hedda Gabler are similar to

those that we find in countless nineteenth-century novels, and would
certainly apply to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 1878) in which, as in other
nineteenth-century novels, what Jennifer Wallace describes as a “web of
interdependence and ‘vicissitude’ also becomes the very medium within
which individual aspiration is imprisoned and crushed.” (Wallace
(2007), p. 169)

FREUD, OEDIPUS AND HAMLET

The focus on female protagonists in Strindberg, Ibsen, Tolstoy and
Hardy all emphasise the connection between gender and tragedy, an
issue to which we will return in Chapter 6. But perhaps the most
influential link between character formation and tragic action is to be
found in the psychoanalytical studies of Sigmund Freud, for whom a
particular reading of the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus was regarded
as key to the male passage from infancy to adulthood. The story, as it
appears in Sophocles’ Oedipus concentrates on the failure of Oedipus’s
parents to thwart a divine decree that Oedipus would kill his father
Laius and marry his mother Jocasta. Indeed, both the parents and the
son do everything in their power to avert this particular fate, but by
what in human terms seems to be a series of accidents, they fail and the
result is a pollution of the state that Oedipus himself tries to solve. In
seeking the source of the pollution he discovers his own history and
identity, and is forced to enact a terrible justice on himself. In terms of
the economy of tragedy this recognition of self, and his taking respon­
sibility for his actions endows Oedipus with a humanity that compen­
sates for his suffering, and it is in the resulting balance that the tragedy
lies. It would be fair to say that Oedipus does not have a complex, and
that it is not sexual desire that drives him to kill his father and marry
his mother.
However, Freud reads the myth differently. In his 1924 essay “The
Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” Freud begins by asserting its
importance “as the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early
childhood.” (Freud (1983), p. 315) That it is an important element in
the formation of character and sexual identity in Freud’s lexicon is
unquestionable, but in this essay Freud notes that while at a certain
stage “the child’s ego turns away from the Oedipus complex” (p. 318) it
 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER 105
remains “repressed” at the same time as the super-ego develops. Freud
explains the process as follows:

But the process we have described is more than a repression. It is

equivalent, if it is ideally carried out, to a destruction and an abolition
of the complex. We may plausibly assume that we have come upon
the borderline – never a very sharply drawn one – between the normal
and the pathological. If the ego has in fact not achieved much more
than a repression of the complex, the latter persists in an unconscious
state in the id and will later manifest its pathogenic effect.
(p. 319)

At issue here is the passage from childhood to the adult recognition of

authority and the mental constraints that are placed on human beha­
viour. We shall see what this becomes in Jacques Lacan’s restructuring
of these Freudian categories later, but for the moment we need to focus
on the connection between pathological behaviour, which appears to be
subject to scientific analysis, and its consequences in the field of tragedy
where the opposition between ‘death’ and libidinal forces results in
pleasure for the spectator.
This is the subject of Ernest Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus (1954), a
study that places Shakespeare’s play under the microscopic gaze of the
practising psychoanalyst. Unlike Maurice Morgann, whose sympto­
matic reading of the figure of Falstaff was naively empirical, Jones
resorts to Freud’s Oedipus complex as a key to understanding what he
calls “the Hamlet problem.” (p. 91) which he describes in the follow­
ing way:

As a child Hamlet had experienced the warmest affection for his

mother, and this, as is always so, had contained elements of a dis­
guised erotic quality, still more so in infancy. The presence of two
traits in the Queen’s character accord with this assumption, namely
her markedly sensual nature and her passionate fondness for her
son … Nevertheless Hamlet appears to have with more or less suc­
cess weaned himself from her and to have fallen in love with Ophe­
lia … There are indications that even here the influence of the old
attraction for the mother is still exerting itself.
(pp. 91–2)
106 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER

This explanation bears a strong resemblance to elements of the narrative

of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers (1913) (Lawrence (1989)), but
it also gives to Shakespeare’s character a ‘childhood’ and a life beyond
the parameters of the dramatic action that can be scientifically studied.
In short Shakespeare’s characters “are created whose impersonating
representatives act and move on the stage, and we are asked to believe
that they are living persons; indeed, the dramatist’s success is largely
measured by this criterion, one in which Shakespeare was superbly pre­
eminent.” (Jones (1954), p. 19). Here ‘action’ of the Aristotelian kind is
subsumed into a larger predominating pattern of mimesis in which the
whole life of the tragic protagonist, and the ‘problem’ of his psycholo­
gical development, are revealed and explored as causes for his behaviour.
For example, Hamlet’s ‘hesitancy,’ we are told, “may have been due to
an internal conflict between the impulse to fulfil his task on the one
hand and some special cause of repugnance to it, on the other.” (p. 56)
Hamlet is mentally disturbed by the complexity of his task, but his
“psychoneurosis” suggests, pace Freud,

a state of mind where the person is unduly, and often painfully, driven
or thwarted by the ‘unconscious’ part of his mind, that buried part
that was once the infant’s mind and still lives on side by side with the
adult mentality that has developed out of it and should have taken its
place.
(p. 77)

The roman à clef is the Freudian reading of the Oedipus myth in which
the ‘action’ is a symptom of a fuller life, of which the protagonist is
unaware, that both precedes and encapsulates the play. In Jones’s
account, the Christian ‘Providence’ whose efficacy Hamlet finally comes
to acknowledge (Shakespeare (2006), v.ii.198) pales into insignificance
in the face of a diagnosis of the state of the protagonist’s ‘mind.’ No
longer is the concern to understand, or, indeed, derive pleasure from,
the ancient Greek dynamics of tragic experience; rather, the trajectory
from the late nineteenth century onwards is to refigure the conflict of
forces that produces tragedy, and the Freudian symptomatic reading, for
all its amalgamation of scientific discourse and metaphor, is a major step
in the direction of this new demonstration of the elements of character
motivation.
 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER 107
But nor is this all. In his book The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex
in Tragedy, André Green produces a revisionary account of the relation­
ship between Freud and tragedy in his suggestion that what delights
the psychoanalyst is that “Aristotle presents him with two of his
favourite parameters, childhood and pleasure.” (Green (1979), p. 8)
Green’s concern is with what passes between the spectator in the thea­
tre, the representation on the stage and the absences that the stage
representation obscures. He is at pains to point out that the epithet
‘Freudian’ attached to the noun ‘theatre’ “does not mean a theatre that
presents the discoveries of psycho-analysis, but a theatre that depicts the
processes whose formal characteristics Freud has stated.” (Green (1985),
p. 16) And yet, the pleasure that the spectator derives from watching a
tragedy is elusive in Green, compared, say, to A.D. Nuttall’s direct
confrontation of the issue via a quotation from Norman Holland: “Tra­
gedy pleases because of the formal control it provides”: Nuttall’s
response is to identify a ‘light’ and a ‘dark’ element inherent in the
Freudian scheme:

This is to exploit the light side – one might almost say – the familiar
element in Freud’s scheme. But the dark side of the theory – the side
which says there is that in us which actively desires death and vio­
lence – seems obstinately to offer more to one baffled by the pleasure
of tragedy.
(Nuttall (1996), p. 54, emphasis in original)

He reformulates the tension between Eros and the Death drive in Freud
as a quasi-Nietzschean conflict between Aristotle’s ‘Apollonian’ thought,
on the one hand, and Dionysus, “the god of the irrational.” (p. 54) on
the other. These forces, whether articulated in Freudian or Nietzschean
terms, are fundamentally interconnected, and their resolution (not
always, in Greek tragedy at least, in death) allows the spectator to
experience the conflict vicariously and to acknowledge a form of resolu­
tion that comes close to Aristotelian catharsis. In ancient Greek tragedy
the conflict is played out in terms of the opposition between the human
and the superhuman, but in the theatre where the primacy of ‘character’
predominates the conflict becomes increasingly located in exclusively
human and social motivations. For Green, his placing of “the Oedipus
complex in the forefront” of his reading of tragedy opens up “a double
108 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER

Oedipus complex, both positive and negative (the second being a reverse
of the first).” (Green (1985), p. 32)
These two terms each occupy one end of the chain, of which only
traces, which have survived repression, remain. The girl is subject to the
same structure as the boy. As a result, the human being of either sex
carries within, by the very fact of human bisexuality, a double identifi­
cation, masculine and feminine: the seal of Oedipus. It follows, there­
fore, that the Oedipus complex is at least quadruple – positive and
negative, masculine and feminine – for each individual. (p. 32)
This is, perhaps, a comment on, and a complication of, both the
Freudian and, as we shall see, the Lacanian deployment of the Oedipus
complex, but it may also be a reason why figures such as Antigone,
Electra and Medea have received much more recent attention than
hitherto, and we shall deal with that in more detail in Chapter 6. The
focus initially on ‘character’ and its complications, in particular its
demonstration of internal conflicts, leads ultimately to how it is repre­
sented and it is to this element that we shall now turn.

TRAGEDY AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN

The advent of Saussurean linguistics forces a reconsideration of the
structure of Freudian psychology, and, in particular, a rethinking of the
dynamics of the Oedipus complex that was the centre of Ernest Jones’s
reading of Hamlet. Whereas for Freud the unconscious provides the
empirical material to which the scientist makes reference and which
generates “a consensus about their meaning” he is also aware that “in
reality” they are subordinated to what are “strictly speaking … in the
nature of conventions.” Freud resists the allegation that these conven­
tions are “arbitrary”, rather that they are “determined by meaningful
connections with the empirical material, connections that, ostensibly,
we surmise before we can properly identify and substantiate them.”
(Freud (2005), p. 13) We saw how in Jones’s reading of Hamlet the
“empirical material” was determined by a series of “meaningful connec­
tions,” the key to which was the Oedipus complex, which in turn
depended upon a particular reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus. It is as
though, in his account of the unconscious, Freud is aware that the
clinical observer constructs a narrative that he/she then proceeds to vali­
date by empirical observation. Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud, that
 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER 109
predates Green, and in particular his insistence that “the unconscious is
structured like a language” inverts Freudian process and places the
emphasis on signifying practice. Lacan makes this clear in his essay on
“Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” when he says that “the
unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual; what it knows about
the elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier.” (Lacan
(1980), p. 170) There is a larger problem here in that, as Isobel Arm­
strong has observed in relation to André Green’s revisionary reading,
“Lacan creates a ‘pure’ idealist psychic syntax out of the structural
principles of the phoneme, morpheme, word and syntagm.” (Armstrong
(2000), p. 117) Armstrong’s concern is with the nature of ‘affect’ gen­
erally and would take the discussion beyond our present concern. It has
to be said, however, that for Lacan the signifier operates within the
larger sphere of culture, so that entry into language is coterminous with
the entry into the social and psychological pressures that form parts of
an emerging subjectivity. It reduces to a linguistic order what André
Green identifies as an “opposition between the sensible and the intelli­
gible, between the existent and the non-existent, the real and the
unreal, yet belongs to neither,” at the crossroads of which is positioned
“theatrical representation.” (Green (1979), p. 76) The history of ‘char­
acter’ from Morgann to Strindberg is now reformulated as a series of
pressures that are registered either in what Armstrong, discussing Green,
would describe as “the return of primal bodily material to language
from the unsayable” (Armstrong (2000), p. 118), or in the orderly pas­
sage from one stage to another in the operations of language. As
Katherine Belsey notes in her book on Desire: Love Stories in Western
Culture, in Lacan’s account:

The signifier replaces the object it identifies as a separate entity; the

linguistic symbol supplants what it names and differentiates, relegates
it to a limbo beyond language, where it becomes inaccessible, lost;
and in consequence the being of language is the non-being of objects.
(Belsey (1994), p. 55, emphasis in original)

Lacan’s categories of ‘the real,’ ‘the imaginary’ and ‘the symbolic’ record
the processes whereby the human subject is introduced into culture,
where he/she learns the body of rules and regulations that contribute to
the shaping of their subjectivity. This, perhaps, leads us directly to
110 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER

Lacan’s account of Sophocles’ Antigone in his seminar on The Ethics of

Psychoanalysis 1959–1960 (1999). At the end of his magisterial account
of the historical transmission of the myth of Antigone in Western
thought, George Steiner defines what he calls “the integral authority of
the classic” which “is such that it can absorb without loss of identity the
millennial incursions upon it, the accretions to it, of commentary, of
translations, of enacted variations,” and he notes that “Sophocles’s Anti-
gone will not suffer from Lacan.” (Steiner (1986), pp. 296–7) While
there is much to dispute in Steiner’s definition of the category of ‘the
classic,’ and indeed in his claim that the originary meaning survives
subsequent interpretations, he misses the significance of the Saussurean
linguistic turn that Lacan deploys to reread both Freud and Sophocles.
Lacan is not the first to have lighted on Antigone as an exemplary
tragedy. Hegel sought to focus on the unique relationship between
brother and sister in Antigone arguing that in contrast to the figure of
the wife whose “ethical life is not pure” because she is “without the
moment of knowing herself as this particular self in the other partner
[her husband],” a brother “is for the sister a passive, similar being in
general; the recognition of herself in him is pure and unmixed with any
natural desire.” Hegel concludes that “[t]he loss of the brother is there­
fore irreparable to the sister and her duty toward him is the highest.”
(Hegel (1977), p. 275, emphasis in original) In an extremely compli­
cated, but also misogynistic, passage Hegel distinguishes between ‘man’
as “universal self-conscious Spirit” and the “unconscious Spirit” of ‘woman’
with whom he unites; this unity is described as follows:

One from actuality down to unreality, the downward movement of human

law, organised into independent members, to the danger and trial of
death; and the other, the upward movement of the law of the nether world
to the actuality of the light of day and to conscious existence. Of these
movements, the former falls to man, the latter to woman.
(p. 278, emphasis in original)

We can, perhaps, see in this a version of the opposition between Antigone

and Creon in Sophocles’ play, and why Lacan, following Hegel, should
focus on the ethical element of the conflict.
For Lacan the tragic conflict in Antigone is not “a question of a right
opposed to a right,” but of a wrong opposed
 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER 111
to what? To something else that is represented by Antigone. Let me
tell you that it isn’t simply the defense of the sacred rights of the dead
and the family, nor is it all that we have been told about Antigone’s
saintliness. Antigone is borne along by a passion, and I will try to tell
you which one it is.
(Lacan (1992), p. 254)

Tantalisingly, Lacan postpones his answer, but when he does return to

the play in the following seminar he isolates the term “Atè” that “des­
ignates the limit that human life can only briefly cross” (pp. 262–3) but
that he later associates with the family. (p. 283) This represents the
violation that is the result of what Antigone finds unbearable in that
“[s]he lives with the memory of the intolerable drama of the one whose
descendance has just been destroyed in the figure of her two brothers.
She lives in the house of Creon; she is subject to his law.” (p. 263)
According to Lacan, Antigone “pushes to the limit the realisation of
something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as
such,” of which she is the incarnation. (p. 282) In what is effectively an
overview of The Theban Plays he suggests that her desire should be “the
desire of the Other and be linked to the desire of the mother” which he
takes to be “the origin of everything.” (pp. 282–3) He continues, “[T]
the desire of the mother is the founding desire of the whole structure …
but it is also a criminal desire,” and in choosing Polynices, Antigone
“chooses to be purely and simply the guardian of the being of the
criminal as such.” (p. 283) In all of this Lacan identifies Antigone’s
subversive feminine power, but he also wants to insist on her ‘beauty’
and “splendour,” upon her aesthetic appeal. If we take George Steiner’s
description of tragedy as:

The ‘polemic’ between God and man, the process of transcendental

collision [that] entails the death or, more rigorously expressed, the
self-destruction of the protagonist … Yet only in such death can there
be a restoration of equilibrium. The ‘organic’ now takes on universal
validity for the individual and the ‘aorgic’ [‘an unbounded, formless,
subconscious, and potentially all-consuming life force’] which rages in
the singular spirit is made subject to rational understanding and to
integration in nature and society.
(Steiner (1986), pp. 76–7)
112 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER

then we can begin to see why he should think that Lacan has done
damage to Sophocles’ play in that he questions the rational/emotional
conflict that Steiner appears to associate with masculine rationality. On
the other hand, to read the ending of Antigone as a restoration of (mas­
culine) rational order is to adopt the limited moralistic position of the
Chorus who counsel that “wisdom” demands holding “The Gods in
awe” as “the law” (Sophocles (1967), p. 162). Steiner’s implicitly anti­
feminist stance can be traced back to Hegel’s account of the subversive
power of “ethical consciousness” that engages in a conflict with “divine
law” and that sees in it “only the violence of human caprice”:

Since it sees right only on one side and wrong on the other, that
consciousness which belongs to divine law sees in the other side only
the violence of human caprice, while that which holds to human law
sees in the other only the self will and disobedience of the individual
who insists on being his own authority. For the commands of gov­
ernment have a universal public meaning open to the light of day; the
will of the other law, however, is locked up in the darkness of the
nether regions, and its outer existence manifests as the will of an
isolated individual which, as contradicting the first, is a wanton
outrage.
(Hegel (1977), p. 280)

In short, “order” is masculine and rational, while “human caprice” is

nothing more than the implicitly feminine “will of an isolated indivi­
dual” which is ‘a wanton outrage.’
It is André Green who departs from this formulation, in his
account of Euripides’ The Bacchae which emphasises “not so much a
struggle between passion and language – between Dionysus and
Apollo – as a struggle between one logos and another, with no cer­
tainty that either has finally triumphed.” Indeed, he sees tragedy as
“the representation of this alternate process of inscription and effa­
cement, in which each term strives to absorb the other.”(Green
(1979), p. 168) He is at pains to show that in this play ritual is not
a natural phenomenon that can be reduced to an embodiment of
female passion, but a female assault (provoked both by Pentheus’s
curiosity (desire) and by the masculine rational rejection of Dionysiac
desire) on the symbolic order itself:
 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER 113
On the contrary, it is the culturation of the natural. If the cultural
excludes it, the punishment of the god will fall: the Dionysiac rite
becomes frenzy sent by the god, in which the symbolic collapses
again under the pressure of the repressed, and the mother,
instead of devouring the living flesh of fawns, tears at her children’s
entrails.
(p. 171, emphasis added)

What is challenged in Euripides’ play is the role of the feminine as

‘object,’ and the place that desire occupies in a culture that resists its
energies. Green concludes: “Acceptance of the Dionysiac cult is, in the
end, the best way of rendering desire what is its due, of forcing the
excess that it expresses into a system of exchange.” (p. 176)
While the elements of tragic narrative shift from time to time they
move within the parameter of a recognisable series of alternatives, and
they depend upon grand narratives that emphasise particular structures
of power and posit a relation and a balance between the human and the
divine. To this extent tragedy has provided a metalanguage, which is
one way of describing the survival through repetition, translation,
appropriation or adaptation of ancient Greek models. However, the
advent of post-modernism, on the back of the linguistic turn, poses a
real challenge to this version of tragedy. What Jean-François Lyotard
describes as “the post-modern condition” in general “necessitates a
reformulation of the question of the legitimation of knowledge” (Lyo­
tard (1984), p. 43), and he suggests that

The principle of a universal metalanguage is replaced by the principle

of a plurality of formal and axiomatic systems capable of arguing the
truth of denotative statements; these systems are described by a
metalanguage that is universal but not consistent.
(p. 43)

That “principle of a plurality” stands in opposition to monolithic ‘truth’

indicating a challenge to its establishment of ‘knowledge’ validated by
“a subject that develops by actualising its learning possibilities,” and
replacing it with “a practical subject – humanity.” This “practical sub­
ject” bears an uncanny resemblance, mutatis mutandis, to the protagonists
of ancient Greek tragedy:
114 FROM ACTION TO CHARACTER

The principle of the movement animating the people is not the self-
legitimation of knowledge, but the self-grounding of freedom, or, if
preferred, its self-management. The subject is concrete, or supposedly
so, and its epic is the story of its emancipation from everything that
prevents it from governing itself. It is assumed that the laws it makes
for itself are just, not because they conform to some outside nature,
but because the legislators are, constitutionally, the very citizens who
are subject to the laws. As a result, the legislator’s will – the desire
that the laws be just – will always coincide with the will of the citizen,
who desires the law and will therefore obey it.
(p. 35)

Lyotard contends that this departs significantly from “a first proof or

transcendental authority” that traditionally underpins the act of legit­
imation, rather that

the conditions of truth, in other words, the rules of the game of sci­
ence, are immanent in that game … and that there is no other proof
that the rules are good than the consensus extended to them by
experts.
(p. 29)

We have seen over the previous four chapters how consensus is achieved
in relation to tragedy, and how it is challenged in the privileging of
‘character’ over ‘action’ (especially in the case of psychoanalysis). In the
remaining chapters we will explore further other challenges to that
consensus.
 6
TRAGEDY
GENDER, POLITICS AND AESTHETICS

The emphasis on the figure of Oedipus has, with one or two notable
exceptions, meant that tragedy is entangled in a masculine discourse. Plays
such as Antigone, Electra, Iphigenia in Aulis, Euripides’ Medea and The Bachae
all provide counter-examples to some extent, although the energy that
might attract the epithet ‘feminist’ has no independent identity. In the
early modern period, plays such as John Webster’s The White Devil (1609)
or The Duchess of Malfi (1612) sketch out female protagonists who struggle
in the face of an environment that is viciously masculine, and in some ways
Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) or Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1981) expose the
tragic consequences of the masculine shaping of female identity. It is
Webster who is most explicit, since his female protagonist, Vittoria Cor­
rombona, can anticipate her judge Monticelso’s allegation that she is a
“whore” and a “murd’ress”, who “Take[s] from all dead beasts, and from all
minerals / Their deadly poison,” (Webster (1966), 3.2.103–4) with the
audacious dismissal that “This character scapes me” (3.2.101), and can
counter it with a devastating deconstructive observation:

Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils,

I am past such needless palsy, – for your names
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408-6
116 TRAGEDY

Of whore and murd’ress they proceed from you,

As if a man should spit against the wind,
The filth returns in’s face.
(3.2.147–51)

Whereas Shakespeare allows female protagonists to share the limelight

with their male counterparts as in Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra,
only rarely does the sentiment expressed by Webster’s problematic prota­
gonists emerge, and even then, as in the case of Aemilia, Desdemona’s
waiting-woman in Othello, it is in the voice of a social inferior:

Let husbands know

Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell,
And have their palates both for sweet and sour
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is. And doth affection breed it?
I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too. And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.
(Shakespeare (2016), 4.3.92–102)

Both Vittoria and Aemilia comment on the masculine shaping of

female identity, giving them agency but only in exceptional circum­
stances in relation to their actions. Also, they rarely manage to disen­
tangle themselves from masculine stereotypes of the feminine. Moreover,
the choice of the myth of Oedipus as a constitutive feature of the psy­
chology of ‘character’ reinforces what Isobel Armstrong has called “a
phallocentric model of Oedipal loss” that even in the case of “the primal
separation from the mother’s body is predicated on phallic power.”
(Armstrong (2000), p. 207) It is this that determines female character­
isation, and that draws our attention to the ways in which it appears in
Greek tragedy where female tragic agency is frequently ambiguous, but
where masculine authority is occasionally undermined.
However, as Nicole Loraux has observed, “We should accept that
tragedy constantly disturbs the norm in the interest of the deviant, but
 TRAGEDY 117
at the same time we must be aware that under the deviant the norm is
often silently present.” (Loraux (1998) p. 248) For example, Hedda
Gabler shoots herself with her father’s pistol, thereby asserting a mas­
culinity in the face of a femininity that she constantly repudiates; also,
and in contrast, Hardy’s Tess is hanged, and the manner of her death
reflects that reserved in ancient Greek tragedy for women (pp. 237–40)
which makes her death pathetic rather than tragic, the victim of the
actions of other human agents, despite Hardy’s formal (perhaps heavily
ironical) displacement of the cause of her downfall onto superhuman
powers.
In addition to exploring the roles of women in ancient drama, and
augmenting that knowledge with sociological, historical and/or philo­
sophical information that might help to explain their behaviour, the
emergence of feminism placed a new emphasis on the issues of repre­
sentation, and also on modes of reading. The concern here was not with
the fidelity of the representation itself, but with the various ways in
which it was entangled historically and ideologically both in the
moment of its inscription and in the subsequent moments of its reception.
In this respect feminism (which was not a unified movement by any
means) took its place alongside other forms of rereading, all of which
problematised notions of subjectivity. We have seen how psychoanalysis
sought to analyse the tragic protagonist, finding behaviour to be a
symptom of concealed psychic activity. But tragedy also depended on
other energies that demanded attention.

TRAGEDY AND VIOLENCE

Pre-eminent among those energies was the problematic concept of vio­
lence. Terry Eagleton has observed that tragedy “deals in blasted hopes
and broken lives” (Eagleton (2003), p. 25) and that “it needs meaning
and value if only to violate them. It disrupts the symmetry of our moral
universe with its excess and inequity, but its power depends on a faith
in that even-handedness.” (p. 26) The return to “even-handedness” or
“aesthetics of tragedy” comprises the cathartic force of which is felt
vicariously by an audience. Whether the disruption of a moral universe
is attributed to demonic energy, as in the case of Nietzsche’s account of
the opposition between Dionysus and Apollo, or to the opposition
between a rational masculinity and an anarchic femininity, both appear
118 TRAGEDY

to be associated with a process of law. Tragedy is heavily implicated in

the processes of ‘law’ and ‘justice;’ it violently violates some aspect of
law, or pits one aspect against another, and to the extent that it does so,
it is also involved in the process of what Walter Benjamin called “power
making,” and “justice.” Indeed, he describes the connection in the follow­
ing manner: “Lawmaking is power making, and to that extent, an
immediate manifestation of violence. Justice is the principle of all divine
end making, power the principle of all mythical law making.” (Benjamin
(1978), p. 295)
Eagleton takes this a stage further in addressing the pleasurable effect
that the violence of Law can produce in its attempts to encourage
acknowledgement of its authority and to guarantee complicity as human
subjects:

The Law is not the least averse to our delight, so long as it is the
pleasure we pluck from allowing its death-dealing force to shatter us
erotically to pieces. It is tender for our fulfilment, ordering us to reap
morbid gratification from destroying ourselves; and the more guilt
this self-odium breeds in us, the more we clamour for the Law to
chastise us and so deepen our pleasure. Like all effective authorities,
the Law good-heartedly encourages the participation of its subjects. In
admirably paternalist spirit, it wishes us to take a hand in the busi­
ness of torturing ourselves, work all by ourselves, make it appear that
our self-undoing is our own doing, so that it may accomplish its ends
all the more successfully.
(Eagleton (2003), p. 269)

Applied to tragedy, this offers a hegemonic account of the purpose of

pleasure, and it re-establishes a moral framework which implies a poli­
tics that resides at the heart of the Aristotelian notion of catharsis. But
while we might say that the discourse of ancient Greek tragedy ritually
acknowledged the power of the gods, the critical discourse of, for
example, feminism (among other radical discourses) perceives in the
interstices of the form a critique of that power. In his attempt to dis­
tinguish between the violence of real life and that of ‘art’ Slavoj Žižek
counters Theodor Adorno’s claim that there can be no poetry after
Auschwitz with the observation that “[r]ealistic prose fails, where the
poetic evocation of the unbearable atmosphere of a camp succeeds,” and
 TRAGEDY 119
he adds that “poetry is always by definition, ‘about’ something that
cannot be addressed.” (Žižek (2009), p. 4) This offers a practical reason,
in passing, for the absence of onstage violence in ancient Greek tragedy,
although it does not fully account for the morbid fascination with vio­
lence on our cinema and TV screens.
But let us return to the link between tragedy and ritual that we
broached in earlier chapters, since for some commentators, whose
emphasis is on the ethnological and anthropological accounts of the
tragic, it also involves myth. We saw how Walter Benjamin regarded
mythical violence as “law making,” but René Girard takes the issue a
little further in his challenging suggestion that, firstly, “[m]yths are the
retrospective transfiguration of sacrificial crises, the re-interpretation of
these crises in the light of the cultural order that has arisen from them;”
and secondly, “tragedy is by its very nature a partial deciphering of
mythological motifs.” (Girard (1977), p. 64) In his chapter on Dionysus
in Violence and the Sacred, Girard reprises Emile Durkheim’s observation
that

the festival re-vitalises the cultural order by re-enacting its conception,

reproducing an experience that is viewed as the source of health and
abundance; re-enacting, in fact, the moment when the fear of falling
into interminable violence is most intense and the community is
therefore more closely drawn together.
(p. 120)

Girard’s archaeology of violence begins from the moment of “sponta­

neous and senseless violence” that is superseded by a “sacrificial expla­
nation” that is “rooted in an act of terminal violence, violence that can
only be labelled sacrificial retrospectively, because it brought the hosti­
lities to an end.” (p. 124) His ethnographical logic informs Girard’s
reading of Euripides’s The Bacchae and its staging of sacrificial crisis. He
argues that at the end of the play “no real contest ever existed between
the omnipotent Dionysus and the culpably weak Pentheus” and that the
dramatist is caught between “the symmetry of the tragic action and the
dissymmetry of the mythological content” that prevented him from “an
act of even greater audacity” in positing Pentheus as offering a genuine
human alternative to the power of the god. (p. 129) In a challenge to
the Freudian reading Girard insists that
120 TRAGEDY

[w]e cannot hope to understand the rite merely by attributing it to

psychic motivations, either conscious or unconscious. And in spite of
all appearances, gratuitous sadism plays no part in the procedure.
The rite is directed toward order and tranquillity, not violence. It
strives to achieve violence solely in order to eliminate it.
(p. 132)

Thus, at the root of Euripides’ play lies a myth and a ritual deriving
from “a generative act of unanimity.” (p. 132) This explains the sig­
nificance of the sparagmos (p. 131) as the violent act of dismemberment
of a living body, whether human or animal, but also its medicinal pur­
pose as a means of siphoning off potentially harmful impurities, and of
re-establishing a unanimity among the participants. The figure that
strides these two processes, and that displaces “the very real (though often
hidden) hostilities that all the members of the community feel for one another” is
the pharmakos. (pp. 95–7 and 99, emphasis in original) Here Girard follows
Derrida who, in Dissemination (1981) described the pharmakos as “harmful
insofar as he incarnates the powers of evil – and for that, feared and treated
with caution. Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed. The conjunc­
tion, the coincidentia oppositorum, ceaselessly undoes itself in the passage to
decision or crisis.” (Girard (1998), p. 348)
Girard’s complicated reading of ancient Greek tragedy identifies a
structure some of the elements of which are clearly trans-historical, and
his ethnographical explanation of the role of violence contains an ele­
ment of flexibility that permits different applications that extend into
the affective power of tragedy. But what Euripides’ The Bacchae raises
and what Girard identifies is what he calls [t]he pre[ponderance of
women in the Dionysiac cult” thereby raising the question of how their
presence might be read. Indeed, he sees this as effecting

a secondary mythological displacement, an effort to exonerate from

the accusation of violence, not mankind as a whole, but adult males,
who have the greatest need to forget their role in the crisis because,
in fact, they must have been largely responsible for it.
(Girard (1977), p.139)

A feminist reading would extend this further to account for the con­
struction of the female subject in the tragedy, and to show how ‘woman’
 TRAGEDY 121
is produced in this context. We shall return to the issue of the produc­
tion of the tragic subject in Chapter 7 where, in a play such as Brecht’s
St. Joan of the Stockyards, the protagonist is shown to emerge under a
particular set of social and economic pressures as the agent of a parti­
cular social class, and that takes us away from the domain of historical
anthropology bringing us closer to the present.

TRAGEDY AND AESTHETICS

We have seen how violence is dealt with historically, and how it is
represented as part of the content of tragedy, and we have also seen how,
in the case of a radical challenge to accepted critical procedures, femin­
ism poses some serious questions with regard to the nature of repre­
sentation itself. But tragedy also carries an affective charge that cannot
easily be reduced to its social or ethnological content. Indeed, Terry
Eagleton has described it as “simply the name given to that hybrid form
of cognition which can clarify the raw stuff of perception and historical
practice, disclosing the inner structure of the concrete.” (Eagleton
(1990), p. 16) Hegel put the matter a little more airily in his observa­
tion that:

The artistic semblance has the advantage that in itself it points

beyond itself, and refers us away from itself to something spiritual
which it is meant to bring before the mind’s eye. Whereas immediate
appearance does not give itself out to be deceptive, but rather to be
real and true, though all the time its truth is contaminated and infec­
ted by the immediate sensuous element.
(Hegel (1993), p. 11)

What does all this mean for tragedy? Once we have teased out its his­
torical and sociological origins in myth and ritual and the various ways
in which the “the raw stuff of perception and historical practice” dis­
close an actual history, we are left with something which the empirical
detail does not quite fully account for. Lacan, in his analysis of Sopho­
cles’ Antigone thought that something remained which the political
opposition between ‘family’ and ‘state’ could not fully explain. He called
it “the splendour of Antigone,” or, to adapt the words of Hans-Georg
Gadamer as part of his definition of the category of the aesthetic, “there
122 TRAGEDY

is something in our experience of the beautiful that arrests us and

compels us to dwell upon the individual appearance itself.” (Gadamer
(1986), p. 16)
Here what Jacques Rancière distinguishes as “the relationship of the
historical agent to the speaking subject” (his definition of the ‘historical
reality’) set against “the logic of fiction” can be traced back to Aristotle,
and to the difference between narrative and history. (Rancière (2004),
pp. 37–8) The problem with tragedy historically conceived is that it
combines the two categories of the rational and the sensuous, an issue
which Rancière claims aesthetics itself has exacerbated by “blurring the
boundaries between the logic of facts and the logic of fictions” (p. 36)
His objective is to elucidate the problem raised by the claim that his­
torical narrative itself is impregnated with certain rhetorical elements of
the discourse of ‘fiction’ that are themselves inherent in the materials of
signification (language) which aims at realism (history). Both discourses
aim at ‘truth,’ but no longer is the Aristotelian category of “what could
happen” autonomous. He concludes, “The poetic ‘story’ or ‘history’
henceforth links the realism that shows us the poetic traces inscribed
directly in reality with the artificialism that assembles complex
machines of understanding. (p. 38) While this ‘blurring’ serves to
identify the formal features of the poetic discourse of tragedy, it also
addresses its content and the political determinations that comprise a
representation of its historical content. This is why we can read ancient
Greek tragedy ‘otherwise,’ exposing its political and gender purchases to
the culture that produced it. It also gives us the freedom to posit an
essence of tragedy that can be recovered and refashioned from one epoch
to the next, opening up r-readings of its historical reality (the work of
cultural anthropology and ethnography) and of its aesthetic structure.
Perhaps we should qualify the term essence here since trans-historical
appropriations involve adjustments to the formal structure of tragedy
that result in revisions, adjustments of emphasis, the elimination or
transformation of original material (for example, the chorus) and
adjustments under the pressure of increasing realism of presentation.
One other element that we need to address briefly in this chapter is
the tension between persistent imitations of tragic form, which, mutatis
mutandis, we can identify at various historical conjunctures and the
occasional absence, dilution or even disappearance of the genre of tra­
gedy from time to time. What we might call the presence of tragedy
 TRAGEDY 123
depends in some measure on a particular combination of circumstances.
These include doubt about the independence and efficacy of human
agency and about what it is to be ‘human,’ forms of ritual practice and
the sharpness of an awareness of death. All of these concerns are com­
bined in tragedy to produce pleasure, but also to posit universal ‘truth.’
It is this that we need to be careful of, as Pierre Bourdieu has suggested.
Indeed, even while he is prepared to acknowledge that “Kant’s aes­
thetics is true” he offers this important qualification:

The experience of the beautiful of which Kant offers us a rigorous

description has definite economic and social conditions of possibility
that are ignored by Kant, and that the anthropological possibility of
which Kant sketches an analysis could become truly universal only if
those economic and social conditions were universally distributed.
(Bourdieu (1998), p. 135, emphasis in original)

However, an important mechanism in the structure of tragedy is a

conflict between the business of existence and the compensations, if any,
offered through suffering and death. Tragedy offers the possibility of
limited emancipation by advancing through what Theodor Adorno, in a
much larger context, calls “a determinate negation” (Adorno (2004) p.
227), new possibilities that force a reassessment of human purpose, and
establish rules that point towards an escape from impasse. Stripped from
its context, the mechanisms of tragedy appear formalistic, but the his­
torical determinants are crucial in that they contain the various forces
that provide models of what confronts the tragic protagonist. These
confrontations are agonistic, often deadly, but also implicitly ethical and
moral posing questions of justice, punishment and consolation. In this
the protagonist is representative, but in Aristotle’s terms that means
“better than the average.” Historically that has meant that tragedy is the
preserve of the aristocracy, but in the twentieth century this view has
come under serious challenge, and this is the subject of Chapter 7.
 7
RETHINKING THE TRADITION

In his 1910 essay on “The Metaphysics of Tragedy” Georg Lukács stated

that:

In vain has our democratic age claimed an equal right for all to be
tragic; all attempts to open this kingdom of heaven to the poor in
spirit has proved fruitless. And those democrats who are consistent
about their demand for equal rights for all men have always disputed
tragedy’s right to existence.
(Lukács (1974), p. 173)

For Lukács dramatic tragedy represents “the high points of existence, its
ultimate goals and ultimate limits,” (p. 159) making it majestic, if not
aristocratic, in its nature and its appeal. Democracy, which presupposes
egalitarianism, and which embodies political assumptions about the
perpetual and desirable nature of historical change and who may, by
virtue of their membership of the human race, contribute to it, reduces,
according to Lukács, the metaphysical dimension of ‘mystical’ experi­
ence which he deems an essential ingredient of tragedy.
Lukács was by no means the first to have made this claim and he was
not the last. More recently, this cause has been championed by George
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408-7
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 125
Steiner, whose book, The Death of Tragedy (1961) offers an extended
treatment of this position. Behind Steiner’s critique of the rationalism
associated with modernity lies a conservative impatience with, if not the
regret of, the passing of the ‘organic society’: “After the seventeenth
century the audience ceased to be an organic community to which these
ideas and their attendant habits of figurative language would be natural
and immediately familiar.” ( p. 197) In this unfashionably elitist cause,
Steiner pits the prosaic form of the novel against ‘verse’ which he
describes as “the prime divider between the world of high tragedy and
that of ordinary existence.” (p. 241) Indeed, according to Steiner, “verse
and tragedy belong together in the domain of aristocratic life. Comedy
is the art of the lesser orders of men.” (p. 247) In the plays of Ibsen,
Strindberg and Chekhov the dilemmas encountered are irreducibly
‘secular’ and they can be resolved by “rational innovation” (p. 291) and
the political optimism that accompanies it. We shall have more to say
about this account when we come to deal with the challenge posed by
radical commentators such as Raymond Williams.
What is missing for Steiner is an “organic world view” and the whole
“context of mythological, symbolic, and ritual reference” that supports it (p.
292), in short, the mythology and the narratives that underpinned ancient
Greek and early modern tragedy. Up to a point this is a form of critical
sentimentalism, but it sits uneasily with another of Steiner’s claims,
expressed here as a retreat into formalism, that “Every art form seeks to
define its own idiom either by enhancement of the available modes or by
reaction against them.” (p. 308) However, in the face of the imitations and
translations of the ancient Greek models of tragedy, Steiner seems unwilling
to accept the possibility that the meaning of the term ‘tragedy’ may not,
after all, be singular. His claim that “Christianity is an anti-tragic vision of
the world” (p. 331) would rule out of consideration a play such as Shake­
speare’s Hamlet in which ghosts languish in purgatory and where the tragic
hero (admittedly a prince) like his father, dies unshriven. If there is “a spe­
cial providence in the fall of a sparrow” that underpins every human con­
tingency in the play, then divine punishment or indeed forgiveness is less
than fully comprehensible from a human point of view. This is why Hor­
atio’s account of the drama does not progress beyond the field of the purely
contingent, and it is why, in the final analysis, providence is a little less than
even-handed. Horatio’s account is what happens in Hamlet but it is not all
that happens, and resolution is, in the final analysis, provisional.
126 RETHINKING THE TRADITION

Although modern life is distanced from that of ancient Greece, that

distance permits a certain kind of cognition that goes under the general
name of ‘tradition.’ This comprises a distillation of what we might call
the ‘essence’ of tragedy that, as Lukács observed, transcends its own
historical moment to provide a ‘universal’ account of the relationship
between the human and the divine, between suffering and joy and
between life and death. This gradual process of aestheticisation, exacer­
bated by early nineteenth-century philosophical accounts of the aes­
thetic, asserts, as Jacques Rancière has observed, “the absolute
singularity of art, and at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion
for isolating this singularity.” (Rancière (2004), p. 23) Thus, as we saw
earlier, attempts could be made to embed ancient Greek tragedy his­
torically in various processes of myth creation that involved its reduction
to an ahistorical essence that had universal validity and that had the
effect of insulating it from the details of ordinary life and its secular
patterns of order and causality.
Raymond Williams flew directly in the face of Steiner’s charting of
the death of tragedy by posing a simple question: “Is it really the case
that what is called the tradition carries so clear and single a meaning?”
(Williams (1966), p. 14) For him tradition was not a neutral monolithic
representation of the past but an ‘interpretation’ of it, “a selection and
valuation of ancestors, rather than a neutral record.” (p. 16) This
immediately freed a concept such as tragedy from the singularity of
meaning that Steiner had insisted on, and that he had extended, some
20 years after the appearance of Williams’ own Modern Tragedy, to
account for what he called “the Antigone predominance” (Steiner (1986),
p. 8). While it would be fair to say that Steiner is not unaware of the
dynamics of interpretation, he insists on the persistence through history
of a play such as Sophocles’ Antigone and maintains it was generally
thought by “European poets, philosophers, scholars that [it] was not
only the finest of Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection
than any other produced by the human spirit.” (Steiner (1986), p. 1)
What for Steiner was a non-transferable essence, for Williams is
something other than “an isolable aesthetic or technical achievement: it
is deeply rooted in a precise structure of feeling” (Williams (1966), p.
18), and that structure is susceptible to change. The phrase ‘structure of
feeling,’ however, is one to which Williams continually returns, and is a
way of identifying the historical and variable roots of the emotional life
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 127
of a culture that is transmuted into art. It is this ‘structure of feeling’
that exerts its own pressures on what has come down from the past to
the present, and it is what produces adjustments and changes in
interpretation.
The genesis of Williams’ phrase can be traced back to 1961, the year
of publication of The Long Revolution (the same year as the publication of
Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy) and to his delineation there of “three
levels of culture”:

There is the lived culture of a particular time and place, only fully
accessible to those living in that time and place. There is the recorded
culture of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts: the culture
of a period. There is also, as the factor connecting lived culture and
period cultures, the culture of the selective tradition.
(Williams (1961), p. 66)

For Williams “the cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection

and re-selection of ancestors” (p. 69), a process of selection and inter­
pretation that he was to rearticulate in Modern Tragedy (Williams
(1966)). Williams and Steiner would agree that ancient Greek tragedy
emerged from a particular set of cultural circumstances, but while Stei­
ner mourns the passing of a particular cultural context as the qualita­
tively reductive product of an embourgeoisification of social and artistic
experience with its emphasis on modernity and forms of artistic realism,
Williams is more hopeful and so he pays much greater attention to
emergent pressures and to their contribution to new contemporary
structures of feeling. The selection practised by Steiner would make of
tragedy a singular experience, constantly repeated in the face of cultures
for which there are no longer adequate intellectual, mythological and
emotional support structures, whereas for Williams the demise of one
ethos provides the opportunity for others to emerge.
It is worth pointing out here that Williams came to revise his view of
structures of feeling in the face of criticism that would force him to
recognise the challenge to its organic implications from an awareness of
the differences between social classes. Under some close questioning in
Politics and Letters he admitted that “the evidence for the concept is only
going to be articulate and available in fully expressed work” but that “it
can be objected that the notion illegitimately infers from this range of
128 RETHINKING THE TRADITION

evidence the existence of a structure which is much wider and is unex­

pressed.” (Williams (1981), p. 158) Indeed, he confesses that his
awareness of “a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones, for which the best
evidence was often the actual conventions of literary or dramatic writ­
ing” derived in purely empirical terms from the “actual experience of
literary analysis rather than from any theoretical satisfaction with the
concept itself.” (p. 159) Whereas for Lukács the tragic man’s struggle
involved the challenge posed by “autonomous selfhood” to “the total
dissolving of the self in a higher being” (p. 160), for Williams it
became “quite clearly a matter of behaviour rather than either a meta­
physical condition or a metaphysical fault.” (Lukacs (1961), p. 26)
Indeed, he goes on to challenge the “universalist character of most tragic
theory” and to challenge the idea of “a permanent and unchanging
human nature.” (p. 46) Moreover, he seeks to demystify what he calls “a
total meaning of tragedy” re-articulating it as “in fact a particular
meaning, to be understood and valued historically,” (p. 61) and locating
its tensions as a conflict “between the old and the new.” (p. 54)
This is an important context within which to read Modern Tragedy,
since Williams begins from the admission that even in its modern
secularised form it involves “an emptying out of content behind a
retention of terms.” (Williams (1966), p. 28) In his account of T.S.
Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral Williams shows what happens when a
play “based on an historical martyrdom … in all essentials is taken out
of its particular context and made part of an ‘eternal design’.” (p. 160)
In the play, which includes choruses, and is written in blank verse, the
protagonist becomes a tragic scapegoat who is part of a ritual sacrifice; it
is not, Williams argues, “to the heroic will of the martyr that our
response is directed, but to his subjection of himself to his part in the
pattern, and to the fertilising effects of his blood.” (p. 161) It is Wil­
liams’ contention that Eliot divides humanity “into the many uncon­
scious and the few conscious, in terms similar to the division between
unauthentic and authentic man,” but that

Tragedy rests not in the individual destiny of the man who must live
this sacrifice, but in the general condition, of a people reducing or
destroying itself because it is not conscious of its true condition. The
tragedy is not in the death, but in the life.
(p. 162)
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 129
To focus on the murder of Becket as protagonist would be to emphasise
the pathos of the event, whereas for Williams the effect of his death is to
be felt by the Chorus of the women of Canterbury who are the victims
of “various oppression” (Eliot (1969), p. 239) and who fear the future as
something beyond their control:

We wait, we wait,
And the saints and martyrs wait, for those who shall be martyrs and saints.
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen
Who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing,
Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time …
For us, the poor, there is no action,
But only to wait and to witness.
(Eliot (1969), p. 240)

Williams has little to say about the connection between martyrdom

and the philosophy of Christianity in this context, and this is perhaps
why he shifts the debate to the notion of Becket as scapegoat. However,
more recently, in his book Tragedy Terry Eagleton, rather as in Paulo
Passolini’s film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, cites Albert
Camus’ reformulation of the crucifixion of Christ as “as staging a clash
between a justified act of revolt and an indispensable framework of
order.” (Eagleton (2020), p. 178) Behind this formulation lies the
spectre, perhaps also the structure, of Sophocles’ Antigone.
Williams is less concerned with some of Eliot’s other plays, especially
The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party, though he discerns a wea­
kened form of the scapegoat formula which he observed in Murder in the
Cathedral. In all these plays, but especially in The Cocktail Party, “the
martyr, the life sacrificed, is not at the centre of the play;” indeed, the
centre “now, is the common condition, seen not so much in the alter­
native of bestiality as in the more negotiable alternative of the trivial
round which gives the play its title.” (Eliot (1969), p. 163) We are here
in the trivial world of J. Alfred Prufrock for whom tragic action is an
unrealisable fantasy, and where the life of an entire society is measured
out in coffee spoons. But the point is, surely, that despite this obvious
diminution of attention to the tragic protagonist Eliot persists in using
the basic forms of classical tragedy as essential elements of structure, and
they are at their most unstable in The Family Reunion with the
130 RETHINKING THE TRADITION

opportune appearances of the Eumenides, whose disruptive energies

underpin the urbane familial relationships that the play proceeds to
unravel.
Williams is critical of The Cocktail Party precisely because it never
quite rises beyond the “social world of temporary relationships, tran­
sience and bright emptiness,” even though he believes that Eliot tries to
connect “the essential triviality of this life to the particular place and the
people as to a common human condition.” Indeed, he argues that the
play’s “evident delight in its chosen particulars” sets up a tension
between structure and tone, with the former “dissenting” while the
latter “accepts.” (p. 164) While the traditional pattern of the “Christian
tradition of sacrifice and redemption,” towards which the reported hor­
rific death in the Christian village of Kinkanja of Celia Copplestone
gestures, is presented as residually tragic, this “controlling structure of
feeling” is replaced by another that turns out to be “a socially modu­
lated resignation.” (p. 166) Thus, Eliot’s apparent preservation of a sin­
gular structure of tragedy in The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party,
conflicts with its social content to the point where the drama itself never
quite rises above the prosaic. His characters represent a particular social
class and therefore fall short of the status accorded to a more general
‘humanity.’

DISMANTLING TRAGEDY
T.S. Eliot is writing out of a version of tragedy that is as comfortable in
the domain of the novel as it is in that of the drama. Steiner and Wil­
liams may disagree about the discourse of tragedy but they do not seek to
challenge it as one or more modes of experience. However, two modern
theatrical practitioners push the concept of tragedy in very different
directions, to the point where Williams can conclude his analysis with a
chapter on Brecht that he entitles “The Rejection of Tragedy.” We shall
come to the more recent example of this, Augusto Boal, in due course,
but for the moment let us concentrate first on Arthur Miller’s notion of
the ‘common man’ and on Brecht’s objections to the Aristotelian model
of theatre, both of which have proved influential across centuries.
Arthur Miller’s short essay on “Tragedy and the Common Man”
argues that the ‘common man’ is “an apt subject for tragedy” because
‘modern psychiatry’ bases “its analysis upon classical foundations, such
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 131
as the Oedipus and the Orestes complexes.” (Miller (1994), p. 3) He
suggests, not unlike Strindberg, that the pattern of tragedy derives from
the trans-historical migration of classical forms from one era to another,
but he also holds on to the singular view in which “the tragic feeling is
evoked when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay
down his life, if need be, to secure one thing – his sense of personal
dignity.” (p. 4) From this Miller concludes that “[t]ragedy, then, is the
consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.” (p.
4) In his essay on “The Family in Modern Drama” Miller addresses the
important question of form, between the pressures that realism imposes
upon dramatic form, and what it exerts upon poetry. He concludes, in a
slightly more emended version of ‘tragedy,’ with the suggestion that “it
is the everlastingly sought balance between order and the need of our
souls for freedom; the private lives and the life of the generality of men
which is our society and our world.” (Miller (1965), p. 233)
By bringing the ‘common man’ into the equation Miller simply refocuses
the generality of tragedy as a struggle between ‘man’ in the general sense,
and those forces beyond his control, although in the two essays in question
he is not explicit about those forces. In plays such as The Death of a Salesman
or All My Sons the forces are both secular and explicit, but the question
nevertheless remains: do they correspond in magnitude to the ‘fates’ of clas­
sical tragedy, and, indeed, should they? Moreover – and this is a question to
which Steiner responds in the negative – is tragedy possible in a society that
is in principle democratic? Miller’s depiction of Willy Loman in The Death of
a Salesman raises the question of whether his protagonist is possessed of suf­
ficient status to rise to the level of the tragic, or whether all that he elicits by
way of emotional response is pathos. The social forces to which Loman is
exposed are considerable, in that they shape his character and his interactions
with those around him. He is torn between a self-image that relies upon a
fantasy (the American dream of success) and a reality that undermines that
ideal. Willy’s suicide is a selfless attempt to provide for his partly dysfunc­
tional family but it exposes the emptiness and the anonymity at the heart of
a democratic competitive culture that defies ordinary human understanding.
In the “Requiem” to the play, Willy’s wife Linda exposes the final tragic
irony of her husband’s death:

I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry. I don’t understand it. Why did
you ever do that? Help me, Willy, I can’t cry. It seems to me that
132 RETHINKING THE TRADITION

you’re just on another trip. I keep expecting you. Willy, dear, I can’t
cry. Why did you do it? I search and search and I search, and I can’t
understand it, Willy. I made the last payment on the house today.
Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. A sob rises in her throat.
We’re free and clear. Sobbing more fully released: We’re free … Biff
comes slowly toward her. We’re free … We’re free … Biff lifts her to her
feet and moves out up right with her in his arms. Linda sobs quietly.
Bernard and Charley come together and follow them, followed by Happy.
Only the music of the flute is left on the darkening stage as over the house
the hard towers of the apartment buildings rise into sharp focus.
(Miller (1975), pp. 256–7)

Is Willy Loman’s suicide an example of someone who acts “against the

scheme of things that degrades them,” and can we really say that “from
this total onslaught by an individual against the seemingly stable
cosmos surrounding us” emerges “the terror and fear that is classically
associated with tragedy?” (p. 4) In his essay Miller goes a little further
suggesting that

If it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon

claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be
total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the
indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.
(p. 7)

In addition to a fundamental humanism that tragedy exposes, Miller is

conscious of the gap between what the play offers, and his own rheto­
rical appeal to the very notion of classical tragedy that his commitment
to ‘the common man’ implies. He ends, therefore, with a reference to
“we who are without kings” (p. 7) as an acknowledgement of the need
to update the concept of tragedy.
In another essay, “The Shadows of the Gods” which reflects on the
economic turmoil of what Miller calls “our Greek year,” 1929, he argues
that “a reality had been secretly accumulating its climax according to its
hidden laws to explode illusion at the proper time.” (p. 177) The eco­
nomic forces at work are here translated into “the big gods” who
represent “the hidden laws of fate,” but Miller’s enquiry does not stop
there. The laws of fate may be hidden from common view, but their
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 133
operations were what stimulated the enquiring dramatist to interrogate
“process” and “context.” (p. 178) In order to understand the catastrophe
of 1929 Miller needed to engage “the inner laws of reality,” a process
which defined his “impression” both of the particular historical con­
juncture and of “dramatic structure.” (p. 179) Here the artist becomes
“the destroyer of chaos” who is made “privy to the councils of the
hidden gods who administer the hidden laws that bind us all and
destroy us if we do not know them.” (p. 180) The artist’s ‘religion’ is,
Miller suggests, without gods, but it nevertheless possesses “godlike
powers,” that comprised the “economic crisis and political imperatives
which had twisted, torn, eroded, and marked everyone I laid eyes on.”
(p. 181) We are, of course, familiar with the symbolism here, which
rises to the surface in times of what appear to be repeated crises: phrases
such as ‘the global economy,’ forces beyond the control of politicians, all
of which lend themselves to becoming identified as ‘fate.’ Indeed,
economists and historians dedicate their enquiries to identifying laws of
causality in which individuals, political decisions, systemic shifts and
the ‘myths’ that sustain them are all deeply implicated. They all
impinge directly on the concept of tragedy, and it would seem that in
order to approach ‘modern’ tragedy in the sense that Miller and Wil­
liams define it, we may need to go much further than simply resur­
recting and translating categories of thought and feeling that take us
back to Aristotle and to the conservative notion of tragedy as a singular
event.

BRECHT AGAINST ARISTOTLE

Raymond Williams associates Bertold Brecht with two kinds of “rejec­
tion of tragedy,” both located in what he takes to be a crucial “response
to suffering.” (Williams (1966), p. 190) Both depend, as Williams
observes, on the distance of the spectator from suffering. In the first case
familiarity leads to complacency and indifference, but the alternative is
to encourage a mode of spectatorship that Brecht identified as “thinking
above the flow of the play [that] is more important than thinking from
within the flow of the play.” (p. 193) In his account of “The Literariza­
tion of the Theatre (notes to the Threepenny Opera)” Brecht resisted the
idea that “the text must express everything within its own confines,”
and he continued:
134 RETHINKING THE TRADITION

This way of subordinating everything to a single idea, this passion for

propelling the spectator along a single track where he can look neither
right nor left, up nor down, is something that the new school of play –
writing must reject.
(Willett (1978), p. 44)

What Brecht resists is the ‘singularity’ associated with classical tragedy,

preferring a level of complexity that is closer to social reality and to
which the artist must respond.
In The Messingkauf Dialogues in an early exchange between the Dra­
maturg and the Philosopher, Brecht is quite specific in his objection to
the Aristotelian notion of tragedy. The Philosopher argues that “The
ancients thought that the object of tragedy was to arouse pity and
terror,” and he continues, “That could still be a desirable object, if pity
were taken to mean pity for people and terror of people.” (Brecht
(1965), p. 31) He goes on to observe that “The causes of a lot of tra­
gedies lie outside the power of those who suffer them, so it seems,” but
he then insists that “Nothing human can possibly lie outside the powers
of humanity, and such tragedies have human causes.” (p. 32) In his
“The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre” Brecht went on to enumerate
a number of its characteristics; for example, “The human being is the
object of the enquiry,” “he is alterable and able to alter” and we should
think of “man as a process” whose “social being determines thought”
and for whom “reason” is emphasised over “feeling.” (Willett (1978), p.
37) This is not unlike Miller’s account of ‘process’ except that Brecht
takes its consequences in terms of politics and dramaturgy much
further.
Brecht’s theatre requires a different kind of narration, but also a dif­
ferent kind of acting, something that discourages audience identifica­
tion, and invites active critical engagement with what is being
represented onstage. In his A Short Organum for the Theatre he argues:

The theatre as we know it shows the structure of society (represented

on the stage) as incapable of being influenced by society (in the
auditorium). Oedipus, who offended against certain principles under­
lying the society of his time, is executed; the gods see to that; they are
beyond criticism. Shakespeare’s great solitary figures, bearing on their
breast the star of their fate, carry through with irresistible force their
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 135
futile and deadly outburst; they prepare their own downfall; life, not
death, becomes obscene as they collapse; the catastrophe is beyond
criticism. Human sacrifices all round! Barbaric delights! We know that
the barbarians have their art. Let us create another.
(p. 189)

Leaving aside the factual error in the claim that Oedipus is executed,
Brecht lays down a challenge to the Aristotelian notion of catharsis as a
rebalancing of the spectator’s emotions (a balance that Miller approves
of) that diverts any attention from the possibility of criticising the cat­
astrophe. The historicisation of the myths and rituals that lay behind
classical Greek tragedy seeks to reverse the practice of universalising any
essence that can be extracted from them. Indeed, Brecht counsels us to

drop our habit of taking different social structures of past periods,

then stripping them of everything that makes them different; so that
they all look more or less like our own, which then acquires from this
process a certain air of having been there all along, in other words of
permanence pure and simple.
(p. 190)

It is this identification that he sought to discourage since it is the point

where “the critical attitude begins.” (p. 190)
The kind of tragedy that Brecht rejected is precisely the one that
critics such as George Steiner believed was no longer possible in the
modern world. The ancient Greek infrastructure of myth, subjected to
critical analysis might be thought to attract another term that comes
out of Brecht’s explicitly Marxist lexicon: ideology. His logic depends
on the claim that the forces that motivate human behaviour are capable of
rational analysis, and that the spectator needs to look through the repre­
sentation to causes that can be corrected. Here the completed Aristotelian
‘action’ and the emotional engagement that it encourages, together with
the balance that its completion emphasises, are fragmented and subjected
to critical analysis. To some extent, Miller’s association of tragedy with “the
common man” and with human questions of causality gesture in this
direction, but do not go far enough. The important point to emphasise
here is that these shifts of interpretation require new definitions of ‘tragedy’
and a refocusing of its emphases.
136 RETHINKING THE TRADITION

ST. JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS, MOTHER COURAGE

AND GALILEO
We can get a clearer idea of what Brecht understands by tragedy by
looking a little more closely at three of his plays, all of which engage
with issues that can be identified as ‘tragic.’ St. Joan of the Stockyards was
written in 1929–31, the period during which Arthur Miller’s con­
sciousness of issues of causality brought into alignment economics and
dramatic structure. Brecht’s play is about ‘process,’ about how religion
and economics mutually support each other to maintain wealth and
poverty and about how even the most revolutionary of gestures can be
manipulated to support a particular conservative view of tragedy.
In a battle between the “well-known meat baron and philanthropist”
Pierpont Mauler and the factory owner Lennox in St Joan of the Stockyards
the victims are the starving workers. Philanthropy thrives on charity
and the protection of the law, but the world is “like a slaughterhouse”
in which the poor turn on each other in frustration. Into this situation
comes Joan, the figurehead of the Black Straw Hats, whose mission is
“to reintroduce / God.” (Brecht (1962) p. 7) Her message to the star­
ving Workers is to redirect their attention to the compensations of
religion:

just eat some hot soup and then everything will look real different, but
please give a little thought to Him who bestows it upon you. And
when you think that way you will see that this is really the complete
solution: Strive upwards, not downwards. Work for a good position up
above, not here below.
(p. 9)

Unwittingly, at this point, Joan is the instrument of an ideology that

counsels inaction, but faced with a situation in which the poor are
assumed to be victims of their own prejudices and short-sightedness,
Joan wants “to know” (p. 13) why they behave in the way that they do.
She is warned by her colleagues not to “mingle in the quarrels of this
world” but she insists: “I want to know.” (p. 14) The knowledge that
she seeks is dangerous and her investigations will uncover the very eco­
nomic laws that produce the poverty of the Workers.
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 137
While the Small Speculators lament the inscrutability of “the eternal
laws / Of human economy” (p. 66), Joan finally comes to realise how the
system works:

I see this system and on the surface

It has long been familiar to me, but not
In its inner meaning!
(p. 77)

Her gradual descent into the depths is accompanied by Pierpont

Mauler’s philanthropic gifts to the Black Straw Hats resulting in a
scandalous rebalancing of the social order in which force protects the
economic hierarchy of slaughterers, stockbreeders and wholesalers
against the violence of the Workers. But as Fredric Jameson has pointed
out, Mauler “is ready-made for the Aristotelian theatre of sympathy and
fellow feeling” (Jameson (2000), p. 157) and he ultimately fashions Joan
in his own Aristotelian image. Religion is subsumed into a reactionary
order that will ultimately engulf Joan herself, while she is made to feel
guilty on account of her own inadequacies. She dwells upon her inaction
and her failure to change the dominant order:

Again the world runs

Its ancient course unaltered.
When it was possible to change it
I did not come; when it was necessary
That I, little person, should help
I stayed on the sidelines.
(p. 105)

The play ends with Joan’s revolutionary voice drowned out, and her
death is co-opted into a reactionary celebration of a deeply tainted
‘humanity.’ The system itself, with its conflicts and contradictions is
what produces a particular kind of tragedy that threatens to mask the
inner workings of the social order. The tragedy is not the death of the
person Joan, but that of the repeated frustration of attempts to under­
stand and transform the economic order in the interests of a more fun­
damental humanism that is predicated upon a fair and equitable human
society. The tragedy is that even in her death Joan’s public image can
138 RETHINKING THE TRADITION

be manipulated both by the forces of capitalism and by the representa­

tives of religion working hand in hand.
If St. Joan of the Stockyards reveals deconstructively the inner workings
of a society that can sacrifice individuals with impunity and represent
the sacrifice as a certain kind of ‘tragedy,’ Mother Courage emphasises a
stubborn human persistence in which the tragic protagonist is defined
by those forces that consume her and her family.
In the Preface to his translation of Mother Courage and Her Children
Eric Bentley cites Sir Herbert Read’s comment that although “[w]e live
in a tragic age, we are unable to express ourselves in tragic poetry” and
that “[o]ur fatalism gives us a stoic appearance, but it is not genuine
stoicism. It is a dull animal endurance of misfortune, unfocused and
unexpressed.” Read also notes that “[m]odern war in all its destructive­
ness is a dumb acceptance of this anonymous fate.” (Brecht (1969), p.
vii) This partially addresses the content of Brecht’s play, but it does not
address what Jameson calls the “ambivalent relationship to money­
making” that “is not foreign to the ambivalence so many readers have
attributed to this ‘tragic’ drama in general.” (Jameson (2000), p. 148)
Written in the three years directly leading up to Word War II,
Mother Courage is offered as a “Chronicle” of the Thirty Years War and is
set in the years 1621–36. The play shows how the war consumes
Mother Courage’s children but subsumes her into its commercial prac­
tices. There is human sacrifice in the play, as evidenced in the price that
her daughter Katrin pays for warning the town of an imminent attack.
In scene 11 the Peasant Woman’s ineffectual appeal to religion: “O
Lord; we are in Thy hands, our cattle, our farm, and the town too, we’re
all in Thy hands, and the foe is nigh unto the walls with all his power”
(Brecht (1969), p. 76) is set against Katrin’s fatal gesture which saves
the town from the predations of war. Katrin’s is one kind of courage in
the face of all odds, but Mother Courage’s courage is another. The war is
the fate that drags her repeatedly into its dangers and it requires a par­
ticular kind of courage – sometimes expressed as fortitude, at others
ironically as a dehumanising compulsion – to continue. Jameson sees
the struggle as being between Mother Courage’s desire to preserve her
‘capital’ (the wagon) against the evanescent power of ‘money’ played out
against the backdrop of a never-ending war. (pp. 148–9) Her residual
humanity is slowly leeched away in the compulsion to survive a war
that “takes hold and will not quit,” but in the face of disaster she
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 139
remains resilient, if not entirely optimistic: “And though you may not
long survive / Get out of bed and look alive.” (p. 81)
Mother Courage and Her Children is a tragedy that engulfs an entire
society. Though she is the eponymous protagonist she continually
blocks our sympathies because she is harnessed to the wagon and to the
war. Her resilience is fatally shackled to an engine that is both violent
and commercial, and the ambivalence that she represents extends far
beyond her ‘character.’ Indeed, her psychology is determined by the
context in which she is embedded, and the ‘action’ such as it is com­
prises a series of open-ended episodes that fly directly in the face of any
Aristotelian prescription of ‘singularity.’ Whereas St. Joan of the Stock­
yards deconstructs Aristotelian tragedy, Mother Courage and Her Children
rewrites the classical conception of the ‘family’ at the same time that it
challenges the centrality of ‘action’ and to this extent it is an anti-Aris­
totelian tragedy.
The Life of Galileo, written at about the same time as Mother Courage
and Her Children, pushes this analysis further. Indeed, in his notes to
the play Brecht comments: “So, from the point of view of the theatre,
the question will arise whether The Life of Galileo is to be presented as
a tragedy, or as an optimistic play.” (Brecht (1971) p. 10) Galileo is
precisely the opposite of Arthur Miller’s “character who is ready to lay
down his life, if need be, to secure one thing – his sense of personal
dignity.” (Miller (1975), p. 4) Galileo is caught up in a momentous
‘action,’ “the dawn of a new age,” (Brecht (1971), p. 11) and despite
his imprisonment, he manages to complete his ‘Discorsi’ which his
student, Andrea Sarti, smuggles out of prison. Moreover, his confes­
sion in prison to his one-time student reads like a moment of self­
realisation that amounts to a failure to take a heroic stand against
power:

I maintain that the only purpose of science is to ease the hardship of

human existence. If scientists, intimidated by self-seeking people in
power, are content to amass knowledge for the sake of knowledge,
then science can become crippled, and your new machines will
represent nothing but new means of oppression. With time you may
discover all that is to be discovered, and your progress will only be a
progression away from mankind.
(Brecht (1971), p. 118)
140 RETHINKING THE TRADITION

It is Andrea Sarti who wants Galileo to become a tragic hero, to stand

up for ‘truth’ in the face of ecclesiastical oppression, but once Galileo
recants his heretical views Andrea laments “Unhappy the land that has
no heroes!” (p. 107) Galileo’s response is one that flies directly in the
face of one of the Aristotelian conditions of tragedy: “No. Unhappy the
land that is in need of heroes.” (p. 108) What Brecht’s play explores are
the negotiations and the compromises that are necessary conditions for
the advancement of knowledge. Galileo is shown to be embedded in the
ordinary day-to-day sensuous business of living while advancements in
science are perpetually subject to political and religious pressures. The
dawn of a new age carries with it the residual forces that threaten to
divert the impact of new knowledges and redirect them. At the points
of emergence, advances are never clear or pure, and what might be
hailed, or, indeed, welcomed in some quarters may lead to negative
outcomes. A failure of science to engage with society leads ultimately to
destruction, and the inadvertent consequence of Galileo’s scientific
investigations is the atomic bomb. In other words, science itself and the
necessary knowledge that it generates can be diverted in ways that will
prove tragic for society. The episodic life of the scientist, embedded in a
society that is in the process of change is one that requires compromises
to be made that do not always result in improvement. The play explores
the tensions that result from a desire for new knowledge against the
superstitious comforts of the old order. And Galileo represents those
tensions. What is at stake is both a birth and a death, the juxtaposition
of both an optimistic and a pessimistic view, precisely the kind of ten­
sion that we associate with tragedy, although not quite in the form that
we might expect. Thus, in a much more sophisticated way than in St
Joan of the Stockyards, or even Mother Courage, The Life of Galileo deploys
the materials of tragedy in the interests of a critique of tragedy. Galileo
is both hero and anti-hero, a figure who sacrifices personal dignity for an
objective which, it turns out, is ambiguous. The Discorsi’ provides the
means to improve society by exploring new knowledge, but it also
threatens the destruction of the very society that makes scientific inves­
tigation possible.
All three plays explore in different ways the mechanisms of affect by
inviting audiences to resist the kind of response prescribed by Aristotle.
If we submerge ourselves in the plights of their protagonists then we are
in danger of missing the manner of their production. Joan’s humanity
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 141
becomes the means whereby Pierpont Mauler can sustain his social
position, whereas Mother Courage’s defence of her dwindling family
becomes, paradoxically, a courageous compulsion that drives her to
follow the war that gives her a living. Galileo’s ‘humanity,’ on the other
hand, comprises a series of impurities that force him continually into
compromise. In short, we are never allowed to get too close to the
‘characters’ since critical distance is essential to an understanding of how
they are shaped by the society that surrounds them, and to the fostering
of a desire for improvement.

AUGUSTO BOAL AND TRAGEDY

But if Brecht is critical of the dynamics of Aristotelian tragedy and the
balance that it produces which reaffirms the status quo, then Augusto
Boal’s The Theater of the Oppressed (1979) offers a systematic challenge to
the entire Aristotelian edifice. Boal begins by tracing the Aristotelian
model of tragedy which “imitates those actions of man which have the
good as their goal,” the highest goal being “the political good” which
in turn “is justice.” (p. 21) He identifies ‘justice’ as “proportionality”
and he glosses Aristotle’s idea of tragedy as the imitation of “The
actions of a man’s rational soul, his passions turned into habits, in his
search for happiness, which consists in virtuous behaviour, remote
from the extremes, whose supreme good is justice and whose max­
imum expression is the Constitution.” (Boal (1979), pp. 23–4)
The Aristotelian model, according to Boal, is designed “to provoke
catharsis” (p. 25) and thereby fulfils a “repressive function” that has
bedevilled theatre ever since. Tragedy intervenes to correct any failure to
observe the Law and it does so “through purification of the extraneous
undesirable element which prevents the character from achieving his
ends.” (p. 32) Boal identifies that element as hamartia, the one ‘tragic
flaw,’ an “anti-constitutional flaw” (p. 37) that must be eliminated as a
barrier preventing the hero from conforming to “the ethos of the
society.” (p. 34)
Boal’s conclusion is stark and resembles to some extent Steiner’s claim
that tragedy only exists in certain, very specific circumstances. However,
for Steiner, society’s failure to produce the conditions of stability and
order that produce tragedy is an indication of its ‘death’ as an artistic
form. In Boal’s terms, then, Steiner’s lament of the death of tragedy
142 RETHINKING THE TRADITION

might be seen in terms of a failure of coercion, and of the conditions in

which the tragic hero confronts the constitution that has been vio­
lated. That failure might be the consequence of religious faith in a
hereafter, or the thought that metaphysical forces can be rationalised as
causes that can be overcome by political action. Boal’s objective is not
to preserve what he takes to be an outmoded form of tragedy, but to
encourage “the spectator to transform his society, to engage in revo­
lutionary action” which would require “another poetics.” (p. 47) He
does not rule out emotions such as empathy, but he is concerned to
focus on what stimulates it in the dramatic representation itself. He
asks:

How can one fail to be moved when Mother Courage loses her sons,
one by one, in the war? Inevitably the spectator is moved to tears. But
the emotion caused by ignorance must be avoided: let no one weep
over the ‘fate’ that took Mother Courage’s sons from her! Let one cry
rather with anger against war and against the commerce of war,
because it is this commerce that takes away the sons of Mother
Courage.
(Boal (1979), p. 103)

What Brecht and Boal insist on is that the spectator does not identify
completely with the tragic protagonist, but that he/she “reserves the right
to think for himself (sic), often in opposition to the character.” (p. 122)
The result is not the restoration of a ‘balance’ that might propose some
compensation for the operation of a supernatural ‘Fate,’ but a recognition
of social and economic conditions that might engulf the dramatis persona,
that expose forces that can be altered or transformed. Boal is aware that
Brecht does not always manage to produce a form of drama that guards
against a traditional reading, but both are committed to challenging the
traditional Aristotelian narrative of tragedy which has prevailed through
the ages.
Neither Brecht nor Boal underestimated the difficulty of revolution,
though their deployment of theatrical form to ‘rehearse’ it is important.
Both opposed the Aristotelian model of theatre because they regarded it
as regressive and conservative. Both were concerned to rewrite tradi­
tional dramatic narratives and to explore how they were utilised as a
means of obstructing criticism and progress. In many respects they
 RETHINKING THE TRADITION 143
advanced critique much further than Raymond Williams who, as we
saw earlier, was deeply critical of the conservative strain in criticism
represented by Steiner which lamented the passing of traditional expla­
nations of tragedy.
 8
TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN
AND THE POST-HUMAN

Throughout this book we have observed time and again that tragedy
provides an explanatory narrative for a particular kind of human
experience. Although that narrative might be inflected differently at
different historical moments, the conservative view is that tragedy
thrives only in certain circumstances, and that human history in the
West reveals a decline in those circumstances. However, there is an
alternative view that tragedy is not some essential quality that is handed
down from generation to generation, but that it is capable of endless
transformations that are entirely dependent on the particular structures
present in any society at any given time. Even so, what both versions
have in common is the emphasis that tragedy places on ‘Man’ as an
abstract universal category and the conditions under which ‘he’ (it is
usually the masculine pronoun) lives and is prepared to live. In ancient
Greek tragedy that definition of the human emerged from the protago­
nist’s engagement with the superhuman (the Gods), and it is the resul­
tant tension between the two forces that has provided the parameters of
a narrative that has been repeated from generation to generation. It is
possible to discern a tradition that, whatever its emphases, revisits that
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408-8
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 145
narrative, and adapts it to its present concerns. Repetition may be
important here, but, as with all repetition, it is accompanied by inno­
vation that gives to each instance new and fresh meaning.
What the Renaissance and the eighteenth century picked up from the
tradition was a narrative of what it is to be human, within a context
that signals a totality, and a term that has not been easy to define,
‘humanism.’ Whereas the Aristotelian model of tragedy emphasised an
action that concluded in a ‘balance’ of forces that signalled the rela­
tionship between the protagonist and the wider metaphysical context,
the Renaissance placed ‘Man’ firmly at the centre of the universe, and
justified his position in generally Christian terms. Thus, Sir Walter
Raleigh’s The History of the World (1618) could begin in the Garden of
Eden, as does Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man”
(c.1486) (Davies (2008), pp. 95ff.) where its claim as a foundational text
in the emergence of ‘humanism’ is based upon the foregrounding of the
representatively human Adam. As Tony Davies observes,

the Oration’s fame, and its extraordinary prominence in later accounts

of humanism, derive from the first few pages, in which the biblical
Creator of Genesis announces to the newly formed Adam that he will
stand apart from the rest of creation by virtue of the special freedom
and versatility with which he has been endowed. Whereas all other
creatures are circumscribed by the natural disposition conferred upon
them, Man alone has the capacity to choose his own nature.
(Davies (2008), p. 96)

As long as the relationship between the human and the divine remains
stable the tension between them is minimised, though not entirely
obliterated. However, crisis is reached when the two drift apart, and we
can see that happening in the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson,
Webster and their contemporaries. In plays like The White Devil (1609)
and The Duchess of Malfi (1612–13) the Machiavellian world of con­
temporary Italian politics, with its instrumental rationality, opens up
irresolvable fissures in any unifying narrative with the result that the
human actors are forced to rely on themselves and their interactions
with each other, perverse or otherwise. The tension arises between
meaning that can be imposed from without, and a defiant insistence
upon being in the face of an assault that has a lasting effect on only
146 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN

some of the observers of suffering. The pronouncement of Webster’s

Duchess that “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (Webster (1964), 4.2.142)
comes in the face of her tormentor Bosola’s definition of mortality and
of the meaninglessness of human life:

Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best, but a salvatory of green

mummy: – what’s this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-
paste; our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to
keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth­
worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? such is the soul in the
body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our
heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of
the small compass of our prison.
(4.2.124–33)

And it is Bosola who is later tormented by the memory of the Duchess

and attempts to compensate for her murder. In Renaissance tragedy, as
Jonathan Dollimore observes, “a regressive pessimism” that “resembles
the familiar tradition of contemptus mundi” mutates into an “anomie”
because it lacks “that tradition’s compensating faith in the eternal.”
(Dollimore (2004), p. 21) In Webster we see the collapse of a moral
universe and the consequences for human behaviour which is fickle,
often compulsive and, at times, irrational, and where it is not easy to
distinguish between categories such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. But the parti­
cular vision of the human condition that it proposes suggests that
looking back on the Renaissance it is possible to extrapolate from its
historical complexities a humanism that in retrospect can be celebrated
Davies distinguishes between Renaissance humanism as an historical
phenomenon, and its rediscovery in the nineteenth century as “an
essential humanity unconditioned by time, place, or circumstance.”
(Davies (2008), p. 24) Although he does not address tragedy directly as
a manifestation of this phenomenon, he is well aware of a narrative that
departs from an account of ‘Man’ as “an essential starting-point” and
engages with a telos which is “a destination, less a given set of intrinsic
qualities than the goal of an epochal and never-to-be-completed pro­
cess.” (p. 31) Hugh Grady regards such transitional moments – and he
pinpoints Greek and Renaissance tragedy as examples – as instances
where “instrumental reason is challenging tradition, where mythos is
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 147
giving way to logos.” (Grady (2005), pp. 28–31) The teleological
impetus of the Aristotelian account of tragedy is catharsis. However, a
tentative balance between forces that shape a moral universe, in forms
such as the nineteenth-century novel (Davies cites Thomas Hardy and
George Eliot as examples) indicate that what Davies refers to as these
two versions of what he calls “the human condition” emerge. It is not
my concern to replicate Davies’ account of the complex history of
humanism, or to foreground the syncretic way in which it has accumu­
lated varying definitions as it has become subject to the materialist
analysis of social, cultural, economic and philosophical pressures. In
some respects the history of the emergence of humanism provides the
context for the shifts of emphasis that I have tried to chart in earlier
chapters. While elements of the narrative change in accordance with
these constitutive pressures, the essential model has either been reaf­
firmed or challenged to the extent that conservative thinkers have been
persuaded to lament the ‘death’ of tragedy while others have sought to
provide alternative accounts that emphasise transformations of the tra­
dition rather than a repetition of it. This is what Grady succinctly
identifies as ‘materialist.’ (p.138) At the heart of the problem is what
counts as, and how we access, knowledge of the ‘human’ and the extent
to which it is sui generis subjected to metaphysical powers that help to
shape ethical concerns, or whether the forces that contribute to the
structures of thought are social, economic or cultural. At issue, also, is
the nature of ‘action’: whether it exists as a category that simply sub­
sumes external pressures that stimulate human desire and can be
resolved, or whether its motivations are unstable, multidimensional and
internal.
The shift from ‘action’ to ‘character,’ particularly during the
Enlightenment and beyond, effectively modified and transformed the
trajectory of tragedy from an aristocratic form which was exclusionary,
to one in which it could be applied to ‘the common man’ and to the
kind of individualism that we associate with the liberal humanist sub­
ject and with social and political formations such as capitalism. Of
course, cultural critics such as Raymond Williams or theatre practi­
tioners such as Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal were aware of the issues
at stake, and sought to explain them in materialist terms which was
why in St. Joan of the Stockyards Brecht could lay bare the way in which
tragedy was ripe for appropriation and consumption as a production
148 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN

designed to uphold and consolidate the interests of a ruling capitalist

class. To this extent Davies’ complex history of humanism comes to rest
on two alternative narratives, the one abstract and essentialist – what he
calls “ the master narrative of transcendental Man” (Davies (2008), p.
141) and the other deconstructive and progressive where “identity” is a
question of “movement, not destination,” (p. 143) although at issue is
also the question of what is considered important in human life, how
tragedy “thematizes the contest between freedom and fate,” as Terry
Eagleton puts it, and how its “imaginary solution to a real contradiction
plaguing modernity” turns out to be “the very prototype of ideology.”
(Eagleton (2003), p. 119) Thus, in addition to asking to what extent
social conditions can or cannot be changed, tragedy becomes a political
and aesthetic means to pinpoint what is considered important in human
life, although it is frequently more tentative about how conditions can
be changed.
Other challenges to humanism, however, have dwelt less on the pro­
blem of definition than on the challenges to the master narrative that
sustains it, and the changes in emphasis of the concept of tragedy
coincide to some extent with the larger pressure exerted by modernism
on its content and its form. The application of tragic motifs to realist
and surrealist modes of representation perform their own effects of
destabilisation of the nature of ‘Man,’ the notion of what Peter Childs
has described as “uncertainty in a godless universe” and the tension
between “the constraints of convention” and “the drives of passion and
black humour” that he pinpoints in the work of writers such as Samuel
Beckett. (Childs (2017), p. 7) This also points in the direction of a
further, more radical challenge that Raymond Williams formulates as a
resistance to nineteenth-century realism which he describes as “a way of
seeing the world in which it was possible to experience the quality of a
whole way of life through the qualities of individual men and women.”
(Williams (1966), p. 139) Once any sense of that “whole way of life”
dissolves then there develops a “radical uncertainty about the self” (p.
149), what Williams sees as “the final crisis of individualism, beyond
the heroic deadlock of liberal tragedy, where the individual could pit
himself against a total condition outside him, even at the risk of his
life.” (p. 151) Williams follows this crisis across the range of modern
European drama, and he observes the adjustments made to the con­
servative model of tragedy that follow from it. However, since 1966
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 149
even more radical challenges have emerged, which bear the labels ‘anti­
humanism’ or ‘post-humanism,’ both of which might accompany the
category of ‘anti-hero.’

ANTI-HUMANISM AND POST-HUMANISM

To take ‘anti-humanism’ first, this is the term that Rosi Braidotti
deploys to describe the process of “delinking the human agent from this
universalising posture, calling him to task, so to speak, on the concrete
actions he is enacting,” with the result that “[d]ifferent and sharper
power relations emerge, once this formerly dominant subject is freed
from his delusions of grandeur and is no longer allegedly in charge of
historical progress.” (Braidotti (2013), p. 24)
Braidotti goes on to observe the consequences of the challenge to “the
human norm” that “stands for normality, normalcy and normativity” (p. 26):

The awareness of the instability and lack of coherence of the narra­

tives that compose social structures and relations, far from resulting
in a suspension of political and moral action, become the starting
point to elaborate new forms of resistance suited to the polycentric
and dynamic structure of contemporary power.
(pp. 26–7)

That “polycentric and dynamic structure” carries with it a serious chal­

lenge to the unitary subject (and to agency in tragic ‘action’), to the
extent that “the focus is shifted accordingly from unitary to nomadic
subjectivity, thus running against the grain of high humanism and its
contemporary variations.” (p. 49) “Nomadic subjectivity” presents a very
real challenge to, and indeed removes, “the obstacle of self-centred
individualism” that has become the cornerstone of humanism (pp. 49–
50) and replaces it with a more complex and variable model of causality
that requires “an enlarged sense of interconnection between self and
others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others.” (p. 50)
Braidotti’s ‘nomadic subjectivity’ derives its force from the challenge
mounted to the principles of meta-discourse and meta-narrative by the
French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, whose The Post-modern Con­
dition seeks to augment the claim that “The grand narrative has lost its
credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of
150 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN

whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.”

(Lyotard (1984), p. 37) The result, post World War II, is a shift of
emphasis “from the ends of action to its means” (p. 37); but more
importantly, “the advanced liberal capitalism” characterised by a Key­
nesian economics or its communist alternative, appears unable to with­
stand, or compensate for, “the decline of the unifying and legitimating
power of the grand narratives of speculation and emancipation.” (p. 38)
Williams lays the groundwork for this radical assault in his account of
the artistic representation of what he called “personal impenetrable
worlds” (Williams (1966), p. 151) and the illusions that sustain them
and that are projected back into a now fragmented society. The assault
on the ‘human’ that Braidotti charts leaves death as the only reality
which, as Williams observes, “significantly often, is violent and arbi­
trary.” (pp. 152–3) We shall see the results of this shortly in our dis­
cussion of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love.
Let us focus on Braidotti’s much more positive account of the post-
human as a starting point for an ethics of a “non-unitary subject” that
“proposes an enlarged sense of interconnection between self and others,
including the non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of
self-centred individualism.” (Braidotti (2013), pp. 49–50) This post-
human dispersal of the self into its intersectional fragments raises fun­
damental questions concerning the motivation of human actions, and for
Braidotti the first step to an ethics that this “nomadic subjectivity”
breeds is a recognition of the right to existence of each fragment. The
question then arises of who does the recognising, and what tensions and
oppositions might flow from that process of recognition. Here the pla­
cing of hitherto marginalised positions on a political agenda involves
acts of recognition: of the different narratives that now comprise the
human: feminism, psychoanalysis, social critique, but also of other forms
of life that are not human and that can only be humanised by acts of
projection. In the post-human world where bodies can be altered phy­
sically, and where the various demands of a biosphere need to be taken
into consideration, the result is a decentring of the human, and a refo­
cusing of ethics to take full account of the different forms of ‘otherness’
that exert pressure upon the “non-unitary” and “nomadic” subject. In
the era of the post-human actions can have unforeseen consequences, as
the current debate about climate change reveals, while the debate about
transgender people presents a very real challenge to the traditional
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 151
definitions of sexual identity. Fragmentation, which Lyotard regards as
an indication of modernism precedes post-modernism which he defines
as the invention of “allusions to the conceivable which cannot be
represented.” (Lyotard (1984), p. 81) He formulates the problem as a
tension between the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, where the one
strives for autonomy, while the other produces the notion of a totalising
unity which is “a transcendental illusion.” Lyotard concludes:

We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and
the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the
transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general
demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mut­
terings of desire for a return of terror, for the realisation of the fantasy
to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage war on totality; let us be
witnesses to the unrepresentable; let us activate the differences and
save the honour of the name.
(pp. 81–2)

What Lyotard labels as “the reconciliation of the concept and the sen­
sible” finds its apotheosis in the traditional emphasis placed in tragedy
upon final resolutions of the disruption of order. Grady is right to sug­
gest that our knowledge of ancient Greece or Renaissance Europe flies in
the face of these tidy resolutions, and he wants to know what order has
been re-established at the end of Euripides’ Medea or Marlowe’s Tam­
burlaine or Shakespeare’s King Lear. (Grady (2005), p. 135) The same
question might be posed in relation to Ibsen’s The Wild Duck or Miller’s
Death of a Salesman. Lyotard pinpoints the political risks that follow
from “totality” since he hears in it the threat of “totalitarianism,” while
the focus on “the unrepresentable” forces us back to the question of
representation and the extent to which it is instrumental in shaping the
operations of ideology. Lyotard’s pluralising of knowledge and Brai­
dotti’s nomadic subject emphasise different aspects of the same phe­
nomenon, and they force us to reconsider the traditional simplification
of the relationship in tragedy between action and character. While the
post-modern releases a plethora of narratives, but abolishes meta-narra­
tive, the post-human explores the consequences of plurality and what it
might mean for the knowledge that tragedy provides. Lyotard’s and
Braidotti’s enthusiastic embrace of plurality may, at the end of the day,
152 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN

give us a comic world, but there is a negative side to fragmentation, to

the power of illusion and to the fact of death, all of which are present in
Lyotard’s ‘war’ on totality. This is not so much evidence of a desire for
order, as a realisation of the discord that follows from the untuning of
the principle of a moral order.

SAMUEL BECKETT: WAITING FOR GODOT

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952) is described as a “tragi-comedy in
two acts,” and the first principle that the play violates is that of ‘action.’
It begins with Estragon trying and failing to take off his boot, and, after
a second attempt, coming to the conclusion that there is “Nothing to be
done.” (Beckett (1990), p. 11) He is reunited with his companion,
Vladimir and they discuss briefly the violent world in which they live,
before Vladimir declares: “When I think of it … all these years … but for
me … where would you be …? [Decisively.] You’d be nothing more than a
little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.” (p. 11)
Both men have a limited perception of their bleak surroundings and
they are restricted both by their immediate experience of it and by their
occasional and often imperfect recollection of the past. They are largely
confined to immediate bodily sensations and conditions and Estragon’s
observation that Valdimir “always” waits “till the last moment” prompts
the incomplete recollection of an Old Testament quotation: “Hope
deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?” (p. 12) The full
quotation from Proverbs 13.12 is “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick;
but when the desire cometh it is a tree of life.” There is a tree on the
stage in this scene, but as a representation of life it is minimal, and the
desire that both characters evince is neither philosophical nor metaphy­
sical. This is also the first indication we get of failed memory, of a fail­
ure to recall a narrative that is part of a more complete and profound
mythos. Here the partial thought is prompted by reference to an
immediate bodily sensation: for Estragon, his entire world is focused on
the pain of removing his boot, while for Vladimir it is the constant
reminder of a urinary problem that obstructs his capacity to think, to
reflect and even to laugh. In Beckett’s world mythos and logos, and any
struggle that they might represent, are reduced to the physical imme­
diacy of struggle, and by what turns out to be an illusory expectation
that their condition might change when Godot arrives. Indeed, the
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 153
sickness that the imperfect recollection of the metaphysical conditions of
hope might alleviate is all that remains, so that “life” is reduced to the
difficulty of satisfying bodily desires. Moreover, what they may attempt
in the way of action is frustrated: Vladimir cannot laugh at his condi­
tion, and Estragon cannot think because of the discomfort of his feet.
It is Vladimir who prompts recollection, but when he asks Estragon,
“Did you ever read the Bible?” and “Do you remember the Gospels?,”
the response he gets is one of irrelevant triviality:

I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very
pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me
thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for
our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.
(p. 13)

Undeterred, Vladimir perseveres with an attempt to recollect an

important part of the narrative of Christian redemption but its truth is
dispersed in the varying narratives of the Gospels, suggesting that
redemption itself is uncertain, and that the only reality is death. All of
these elements appear as part of the ethos of tragedy, but in Beckett’s
play they simply fail to cohere as a definitive tragic ‘action.’ The play
pushes beyond the boundaries of modernity to offer sardonic laughter as
an inadequate panacea for a bare life that is tragic because it is ines­
capable. Vladimir and Estragon cannot move because they are “Waiting
for Godot,” and they can only alleviate the agony and the boredom of
that waiting by amusing themselves; they also amuse their audience,
who are also waiting for something to happen but never does and who
are diverted by what they see and hear onstage.
In the first part of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) the elements
that appear in Beckett’s play are formulated in a series of nostalgic
questions that point towards a quasiBiblical past whose remains in the
immediate aftermath of a world war are nothing but “broken images.”
(Eliot (1963), p. 61) Eliot’s poem deals with devastation and loss,
whereas Beckett’s two characters, preoccupied with simply passing the
time while they wait, seem almost unaware of the wreckage that they
inhabit. For Eliot it is the searing loss of ritual in modern life destroyed
by the carnage of World War I that is crucial, whereas for Beckett’s
characters such ritualistic validation of existence is without meaning in
154 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN

a post-Holocaust post nuclear world, and is reduced to a state where

devastation and loss give way to diversion in which the light-hearted
and the serious jostle for attention.
Into Beckett’s tragic world of diversion come the figures of Pozzo and
Lucky, the one driving the other on purposefully. The relationship
between Pozzo and Lucky is that of master and slave, although Pozzo’s
rationale for Lucky remaining with him appears to be hegemonic as well
as coercive. Lucky’s violent reaction to Estragon’s offer to wipe away his
tears prompts a philosophical observation of the balance of the world’s
suffering from Pozzo that is a key to the play’s tone:

The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins
to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the
laugh. [He laughs.] Let us not speak ill of our generation, it is not
unhappier than its predecessors. [Pause.] Let us not speak well of it
either. [Pause.] Let us not speak of it at all. [Pause. Judiciously.] It is true
the population has increased.
(Beckett (1990), p. 33)

This debilitating relativism pervades the play and deprives it of any

anchoring in essential meaning. Lucky’s performance of ‘thinking’
makes a mockery of logos, just as Pozzo’s mastery of his slave, and his
reliance on superficial courtesies, makes a mockery of society and of
relationships. The interlude, however much we may extract from it
some allegorical meaning, is a means of passing the time (p. 46) but at
the end of Act 1 we are left with the overwhelming feeling of “uncer­
tainty” as Vladimir and Estragon express the desire to go, but remain.
This pattern is repeated in Act 2 only on the second appearance of
Lucky and Pozzo the pair have become mutually dependent and the
rope between them is shorter. Vladimir and Estragon’s uncertainty
about Pozzo’s identity and their violence towards him in the face of his
cries for help resurrect another Old Testament narrative of fratricidal
violence as Estragon experiments with the names ‘Abel’ and ‘Cain’ and
comes to the conclusion that Pozzo is “all humanity.” (p. 78) In the
second encounter Valdimir and Estragon try to piece together the
experience of the first and they are puzzled by the deterioration in the
relationship between Lucky and Pozzo, by their loss of faculties, but also
by Pozzo’s pathetic demand that he continue onwards. Pozzo and Lucky
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 155
allegorically represent ‘change’ but it is change within the confines of a
relentless temporal continuity:

Have you not done tormenting me with you accursed time! It’s
abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one
day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind,
one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the
same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? [Calmer.]
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s
night once more. [He jerks the rope.] On!
(p. 83)

There is little that is positive in this version of the human condition and
there is little in the way of compensation for suffering. The relationship
between Vladimir and Estragon is one of persistent attraction and
repulsion, while the mutual dependency of Pozzo and Lucky is, in their
first appearance, disguised as a form of exploitation, and in their
second appearance that exploitation becomes a relationship of neces­
sity. Underneath this is a violence that has been present from time
immemorial, and beneath that is a rhythm of permanent contingency
without respite. Here the recollection of broken images offers no
respite or compensation for suffering, since human survival can only
cope with horror and catastrophe through a laughter that is wholly
without power to compensate. In the bourgeois world of an exploita­
tive individualism all humankind can do is wait for a death that is
wholly without meaning. Here tragedy resides in the fact of human
suffering aggravated further by a flickering memory resembling a
bomb site that even the shards of a Christian narrative that remain
cannot rebuild.

SARAH KANE: PHAEDRA’S LOVE

The traditional view of tragedy is that it is exhilarating. In the words of
Eagleton, this view

[begins] accordingly to sound just the thing to lift one’s spirits after a
bankruptcy or a bereavement, a tonic solution to one’s ills. In this
liberal humanist caricaturing of tragedy’s undoubtedly creative
156 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN

powers, the fact that it deals in blasted hopes and broken lives is
quickly forgotten.
(Eagleton (2003), p. 25)

Sarah Kane’s play Blasted (1995) deals directly with a fragmented and
broken urban life lacking in any ethical or moral restraint and where vio­
lence can explode at any moment. A year later Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (1996)
appeared, a play that we might expect to hark back to Euripides’ Hyppoly­
tus, although Seneca’s Phaedra may provide a more recent link. The long
history of this play charts various shifts in emphasis, beginning with the
focus on Hippolytus and upon Phaedra’s compulsive behaviour generated
by the goddess Aphrodite who reveals in a prologue that she will use
Phaedra as a means of punishing Hippolytus for his misogyny:

I shall this day punish Hippolytus. I have long since come far with my
plans, and I need a little further effort. One day when he came from
Pittheus’s house to the land of Pandion to witness and perform the
august Mysteries, his father’s high-born wife Phaedra saw him, and
her heart was seized with a dreadful longing: this was my devising.
(Euripides (2008), p.127)

Seneca’s version of the play retitles it Phaedra and quickly formulates the
action as a conflict between ‘reason’ and ‘unreason’ and makes of the
goddess Venus, as the Nurse formulates it, a “vile fiction of unbridled
lust”); the resulting “sickness” only “strikes where life is soft” and the
Nurse asks:

Why is pure love found under lowly roofs,

And why do common people generally
Have wholesome appetites where modest means
Teach self-control – while wealth, propped up by power,
Always asks more than its fair share of things?
(Seneca (1966), p. 106)

Thomas Newton’s Elizabethan translation retains Euripides’ title, but

blackens Phaedra’s character considerably with the observation that she
informs her husband Theseus that Hippolytus has raped her; this is how
“The Argument” puts it:
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 157
In the absence of Theseus his Father, it chaunced that his Stepmother
Phaedra ardently enamored with his beawty and lusty age, enveigled
him by all meanes shee coulde, to commit with her filthy, and mon­
strous adultery. Whych her beastly, unchaste, and undutiful practise,
he dutifully loathinge, shee turned hir former love into extreame
hatred, and told her husband Theseus. At his returne home that his
Sonne Hippolytus woulde have unlawfully layne with her.
(Seneca (1927), p. 136)

While the burden of Seneca’s play rests upon the decadent perversions
of historical Rome, and on a misogyny that dates back to Hesiod’s Theo­
gyny, the interference of the gods is not entirely absent, as the narrative of
Hippolytus’s death as the result of the action of the god of the sea, Aegeus,
makes clear. Racine’s Phèdre (1677) places the eponymous tragic heroine at
the centre of the play, and in a preface to the play he noted that she “is
neither entirely guilty nor altogether innocent.” (Racine (1963), p. 145)
Here the lie about Hippolytus’s adultery is transferred to the Nurse
(Oenone) and the play ends with Phaedra’s death and Theseus’s admission
of his mistaken action in relation to his son.
All of this receives very little attention in Kane’s Phaedra’s Love. The
Aristotelian framework which persists in earlier versions of the Hippo­
lytus narrative is almost entirely dispensed with in Kane’s play. Here
the Theseus-Hippolyta-Phaedra narrative is reduced to the occasionally
violent perversions of a radically dysfunctional aristocratic family for
whom instant gratification is the norm. The first sight we have of
Hippolytus is of a depressive who alleviates his boredom by watching
violent films on television, eating junk food and engaging in pleasure­
less masturbation. There is nothing here beyond the immediate present
and it is clear that disfunctionality is a feature of this royal household.
The occupants seem both to revile each other but also to need each
other in gestures that echo Beckett; an early scene between Phaedra and
her daughter Strophe begins by rehearsing a motif of repulsion-attrac­
tion: “Go away, fuck off don’t touch me don’t talk to me stay with me.”
(Kane (2001), p. 69) By scene 5 Phaedra has committed suicide and
Hippolytus is ready to turn himself in for allegedly having raped her.
There are no gods in this play although while in prison there is a dis­
cussion between Hippolytus and a priest. The discussion revolves
around sin, confession, repentance and forgiveness, but as the
158 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN

conversation develops the priest’s position becomes more uncertain.

Hippolytus rejects God, but the priest appeals to his sense of public
moral and ethical responsibility to accept a disturbing distinction
between public and private behaviour:

Your sexual indiscretions are of no interest to anyone. But the stability of

the nation’s morals is. You are a guardian of those morals. You will
answer to God for the collapse of the country you and your family lead.
(Kane (2001), p. 94)

The discussion ends with Hippolytus rejecting God and monarchy:

“Fuck God. Fuck the monarchy,” (p. 95) and in turning the tables on
the priest who has come to hear his confession.
Hippolytus’s appeal to “free will” leads directly to a sexual perversion
that directly contradicts his claim that his behaviour is human rather
than animal:

Hippolytus Last line of defence for the honest man.

Free will is what distinguishes us from the animals.
He undoes his trousers.
And I have no intention of behaving like a fucking animal.
Priest Performs oral sex on Hippolytus.
Hippolytus Leave that to you.
He comes.
He rests his hand on top of the Priest’s head.
Go
Confess.
Before you burn.
(p. 97)

Everything that Hippolytus touches in the play appears to be tainted,

and he taints all of those he comes into contact with. Earlier, in scene 4,
Phaedra prefers to talk to Hippolytus rather than talk to her daughter
Strophe because, she says: “I love you.” Hippolytus asks, “Why?,” and
her response exposes the contradictory ‘illogical’ nature of her love:

You’re difficult. Moody, cynical, bitter, fat, decadent, spoilt. You stay in
bed all day then watch TV all night, you crash around this house with
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 159
sleep in your eyes and not a thought for anyone. You’re in pain. I
adore you.
(p. 79)

Phaedra is not torn between two equally substantial alternatives here,

nor is she the victim of some metaphysical strategy. Like Hippolytus,
she lives for and in the moment without any thought of the ethics or
indeed of the morality of what she is doing. Phaedra’s “love” then is as
destructive as Hippolytus’s, and the play contains no positive vision of a
society, but only momentary fragments that don’t cohere. Phaedra’s
death is, therefore, meaningless, and the play ends at her funeral with
an anonymous crowd baying for the death of Hippolytus. In the com­
pletely wild outbreak of violence that follows Theseus, caught up in the
frenzy, rapes the Woman and kills his daughter, Strophe, who dies
uttering their names:

Woman 1 What sort of a woman are you?

Theseus Defending a rapist.
Theseus pulls Strophe away from Woman 2 who she is attacking.
He rapes her.
The crowd watch and cheer.
When Theseus has finished he cuts her throat.
Strophe Theseus.
Hippolytus.
Innocent.
Mother.
Oh, Mother.
(p. 101)

This orgy of violence is a cruel parody of a sacrificial ritual, with

Woman 2 castrating Hippolytus, and Theseus disembowelling him.
Only after this orgy of violence is complete does Theseus realise the
horror of what he has done, regretting both the rape and the murder of
Strophe. The last words of the play are uttered by the dying Hippolytus
as Theseus commits suicide:

Theseus cuts his own throat and bleeds to death.

The three bodies lie completely still.
160 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN

Eventually Hippolytus opens his eyes and looks at the sky.

Hippolytus Vultures.
He manages a smile.
If there could have been more moments like this.
Hippolytus dies.
A vulture descends and begins to eat his body.
(p. 103)

These horrifying events are merely “moments” in an otherwise

meaningless life. Here mutilation and death are not really elements in
some larger pattern of punishment and justice; in fact the play opposes
itself to the tragic pattern that, given the evolution of Euripides’ play,
we might have come to expect. There is no humanism nor, indeed,
humanity in evidence here, and the play is literally post-human but in a
thoroughly negative sense. Beckett’s characters seek to alleviate the
boredom by diverting attention from it. In Kane’s play there is a resi­
dual Beckettian logic of dependency, but the diversions are the horrific
results of an aristocracy bored with its excesses and completely lacking
in restraint. If there is tragedy here, then it is the tragedy of a class,
pampered and decadent, that perverts everything it touches, even the
rituals that in their original form are designed to encourage growth and
renewal. Death only affords masochistic pleasure, and the moment of
death is possibly the only time when the castrated and eviscerated
Hippolytus “manages a smile.”

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY TRAGEDY? TOM STOPPARD’S

LEOPOLDSTADT
Kane’s disturbing play rings a series of changes on what we might
normally describe as tragedy, as much by its association with content as
with dramatic form. Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt (2020), has been
described as a ‘tragedy,’ although he appears to have both accepted and
rejected the appellation; in 2020 he seems to have resisted it on the
grounds that he finds genre labels inaccurate and constraining, even
though the play’s subject matter, stretching from 1899 to 1955, is
tragic in the sense that we experience vicariously the devastation that a
Jewish family experiences within the larger historical context of the first
half of the twentieth century. The distinction between the description of
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 161
tragedy as a distinct methodology with a formal structure, on the one
hand, and the subject matter of tragedy dealing with serious matters,
including death on the other, is an important one that allows Stoppard
to depart from what he calls methodology, while emphasising the play’s
content. When, in a recent interview he said, “I don’t write tragedy,” he
did not reject the serious tone of his play, which he described as ‘dra­
matic;’ rather he was resisting the traditional view of tragedy which, as
we have seen, critics such as George Steiner have championed. If we
accept that the content of tragedy is constantly subject to historical
change, and that it does not need to replicate the formal structure of
tragedy, then Stoppard’s play is as avant garde as Sarah Kane’s despite
their differences.
Kane’s play modernises the Phaedra story from Euripides and Seneca
onwards, and heavily revises the tone of the originals, although it retains
their scope. Stoppard discards the residually Aristotelian preoccupation
with the unity of time, although he sets his play in one place, an
apartment in the Viennese district of Leopoldstadt between 1899 and
1955, and he traces the fortunes of a particular Jewish family and their
relatives. Although the dialogue is naturalistic we are offered snapshots
of the lives of the various members of “two intermarried Jewish famil­
ies” (Stoppard (2020), p. 3), whom we encounter initially as members of
“the prosperous end of Viennese bourgeoisie.” (p. 3) Interspersed with
the different generations of family chatter, Ludwig and Hermann dis­
cuss the professional fortunes of a professional psychologist (Freud),
Jewish family traditions, anti-Semitic prejudice and the Christian tra­
dition of Christmas. None of these issues are systematically explored,
but they figure as current preoccupations as the families gather together
in 1899 in order to give us an impression of the anxieties of this
extended family at a particular moment in time. Those anxieties will
alter significantly as the family’s fortunes change through two world
wars and their devastating consequences. The horror of those con­
sequences reaches a climax in scene 8 when in 1938, a “Civilian”
bureaucrat enters the Jewish matriarch’s flat that is now “cold” with its
occupants “wearing extra clothes, shawls etc.” (p. 64) What in the pre­
vious six scenes were recurring topics of conversation now take on a
much more threatening tone as the explicit consequences of the spread
of German fascism are now made explicit. This then becomes the tra­
gedy of a family and of a race that has no power to control its own
162 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN

destiny. Stoppard allows us to glimpse the elements of a fate that is

beginning to take the shape of what we recognise retrospectively as the
Holocaust.
However, the seriousness of the situation is initially mitigated by the
family’s resilient acceptance of a fate whose future we know but they
don’t. The mathematical logic of that fate is encapsulated in the image
of the “cat’s cradle” initially, and, in the hands of Ludwig’s grandson
Leo, a children’s game with string, but is symbolically possessed of a
much deeper meaning. It is a symbol of the irrepressible human capacity
for play, and for the mathematical order that underpins human society. As
Ludwig explains to his nephew Nathan,

Ludwig If you didn’t know it was cat’s cradle, there seems to be no

rhyme or reason to the way the knots change their address. And if I
wrote down the addresses for you, how could you find the rule that
turns one set of three numbers into another set? You might as well
look for the rule that makes a fly go this way and then that way. But,
as it happens, we do know, like God, that everything unfolded from
our game of cat’s cradle. Each state came out of the previous one.
So there is order underneath. Mathematical order. But how can we
discover it?
(pp. 67–8)

This image and the questions it provokes encapsulate the fate of this
Jewish family: they enact only the order and the rituals that they know
in the face of an ‘order’ whose details are beyond their comprehension.
Unlike in the case of classical tragedy, they are in no position to respond
to an order that they cannot understand. Indeed, they respond to their
fate by keeping alive the very domestic rituals that identify them as
members of a persecuted race, and they harbour dreams about future
stability that, as audience, we know will culminate in the Holocaust.
Many of the ingredients of tragedy are present in Stoppard’s play,
although not necessarily in the order that we have become accustomed
to. Death is a pervasive threat, with the play ending in scene 9 with a
flashback to the year 1900. The event of the Passover seder is recalled by
Gretl, as a “search party” looks for the affikomen (the largest piece broken
from a portion of unleavened bread or matzos) and also the first days of
the Anschlus in 1938 are relived. Grandma Merz (1899), her daughter
 TRAGEDY, THE POST-MODERN AND THE POST-HUMAN 163
Eva (1938) and Rosa, twin daughter of Ernst and Wilma (sister of
Ludwig who is son-in-law of Grandma Merz) recall pre-World War II
days and what remains in their collective and suppressed memory: in
particular in relation to the whereabouts of “Great Aunt Gretl’s por­
trait” recalled by Nathan who is the grandson of Ernst and Wilma. This
complicated family tree is not important for our purposes, but the
memories, real and fabricated, and the various fates of members of the
extended family, are. These narrative remnants of social, religious and
cultural institutions act as counters to the ‘reality’ of power, which in
Nazi ideology “the concentration camp is nowadays the secret para­
digm.” (Supiot (2021), p. 127) Stoppard’s play explores, among other
things, the means of acquiring knowledge but it firmly resists a brutal
quasi-scientific model of power that seeks to classify, record and, in
extreme cases, exterminate. This is the tragedy of a representative
extended and intermarried family faced with responding to a catastrophe
whose outcome they are unable to control. Inside the general tragedy of
war, persecution and the Holocaust there are individual tragedies, of
lives cut short, of oppression, all bound together by the preservation and
repetition of domestic religious rituals and by memories. There is no
recompense for suffering in this play, or, indeed, no ultimate balance
achieved, although the result is not, as in Sarah Kane’s play, a sardonic
delight in pain and the act of suffering itself. If Kane’s response is one
that jettisons any form of humanism, Stoppard wants to preserve it as a
means of survival. The final irony of Leopoldstadt is that no balance or
catharsis is achieved. Memory recedes and is filed away as Leo folds the
paper family tree, even though the survivors simply replicate the places
onstage of their deceased elders just as Hanna’s piano playing fades.
 CONCLUSION

In his conclusion to Tragedy, The Greeks, and Us Simon Critchley sug­

gests that “Tragedy is defined by the quasi-dialectical rhythm of uni­
fication and division, where the unity with the divine gives way to the
disunity of the self from itself.” (Critchley (2019), p. 173) Elsewhere I
have put the matter a little differently with the suggestion that “tragedy
retains its ambivalence in that it uncovers the very contradictions that it
sets out aesthetically to domesticate, and those contradictions are located
at both the personal and public levels of communal experience.” (Dra­
kakis (1992), p. 18, emphasis in original) While both these positions
reflect aspects of the history of tragedy, the variations that we have been
charting in earlier chapters reflect a problem that is endemic to the
practice of history itself. This is what Michel Foucault has to say about
the relation between history and what he labels (following Nietzsche)
“genealogy”:

History is the concrete body of a development, with its moments of

intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its
fainting spells; and only a metaphysician would seek its soul in the
distant ideality of the origin.
(Foucault (1977), p. 145)
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 CONCLUSION 165
In resisting what he calls “the solemnities of the origin” (p. 143) he opts
for “[a] genealogy of values, morality, asceticism” that “will never con­
fuse itself with a quest for their ‘origins’, will never neglect as inacces­
sible the vicissitudes of history.” (p. 144)
The shifts of emphasis evident in previous chapters have attempted to
respond to some of these “vicissitudes,” but there has always been a
tension between a master narrative of tragedy and the conditions under
which it is claimed to thrive, and those substantive deviations that, in
various ways, are resistant to the model inscribed in Aristotle. The
opposition has been between the nostalgic and elitist view of tragedy as
exemplified in Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy (1961) and cultural critics
and practitioners such as Raymond Williams, Bertolt Brecht and
Augusto Boal (to name but a few) who have paid far more attention to
‘the vicissitudes of history’. Even when, in his Antigones (1986) Steiner
charts “the Antigone myth in Western literature and thought,” his
concern is with its persistence through time and to a thematising of a
Sophoclean original. As we saw in the last chapter, it would have been
impossible to take this approach in relation to Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s
Love, or indeed to Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt since these plays resist
categorically, though in different ways, any sense of a unifying narrative
rooted in the exemplary actions of a protagonist, and it is doubtful
whether in Kane’s case particularly, it might elicit pleasure from an
audience. Indeed, if, as Terry Eagleton suggests, a significant feature of
tragedy is its provision and production of “sweet violence,” there can be
little doubt that in Kane’s play all there is is violence and it is anything
but “sweet.” Even in gruesome death Hippolytus longs for “more
moments like this” (Kane (2001), p. 103) and we are left with no sense
of a “quasi-dialectical rhythm of unification and division,” but with the
actual dismemberment of a human body, a sparagmos without meaning,
and a masochistic longing for more such “moments.” In the case of
Stoppard we are looking at the tragedy of a race and the history that
cultural memory keeps the past alive.
One other issue concerns the association of tragedy with humanism
and the various debates about its history. Since Aristotle the human
subject has been at the centre of tragedy and his (usually his) suffering
has led to a conclusion in which some compensation is made for it. Of
course, not all the ancient Greek tragedians are unanimous in their
focus, but as the human subject has come to be defined differently, so
166 CONCLUSION

have the mechanics of tragedy and its focus. The transportability of its
claimed essence, from drama into fiction and poetry, as well as its per­
sistence in drama encourage an essentialist viewpoint and force a con­
nection between, say, tragedy and the novel, or even between the events
of tragedy and everyday occurrences. We saw how Brecht exposed some
of the ways in which tragedy could become enlisted by the agencies of
commercial power, and as I write the recent deposition of two British
prime ministers is being narrativised by their spin doctors as ‘tragedies’.
It would appear that both incompetence and lying are now ‘fatal flaws’
and that we are expected to show sympathy for a spectacular downfall.
The distinction between hamartia, incompetence and political stupidity
has all but been elided. The model for this debacle would, of course, be
Shakespeare’s Richard III and it is surprising that up to now the con­
nection has not been made. The point is that it is far too easy to model
actual events along the lines of a narrative that we might call tragic. At
the same time, there are many events in the world over which human
beings have no control and that often lead to human death. We often
think of such deaths as ‘senseless,’ that is, events that have neither
rhyme nor reason and that are, at the end of the day, meaningless. A
metaphorical death of a national leader caught in the act of lying and
lawbreaking has no philosophical depth to it, nor can we bend it to
yield one. Apparently, those who served in Boris Johnson’s cabinet now
appeal to his ‘humanity’ since all human beings are, apparently, flawed,
even though the evidence suggests that this humanity is of a very spe­
cific kind and should be distinguished from ‘humanism.’ The same case
is now being made for the hapless Liz Truss in the UK, and for Donald
Trump in the US. However, we usually think of the actions of a tragic
hero as being of the kind that cannot be reduced to matters of selfish
desire. Tragedy involves actions that extend beyond the self-satisfaction
of the protagonist, and it is this that attracts the terms ‘humanism’ and
‘essentialism.’
But these terms should not be regarded as irreducible. Materialist
approaches to tragedy have shown us that histories are much more
complex and contradictory, and that since the challenging of the efficacy
of grand narratives there can be no single or exclusive meaning. For
example, the recent fall of two British prime ministers (and the idea of a
‘fall’ already introduces part of the vocabulary of tragedy) is thought by
their supporters to be ‘tragic,’ but to their political opponents it is
 CONCLUSION 167
simply a comic farce irrespective of the serious consequences. Indeed,
the discourse of tragedy, its narrative coherence, has so saturated our
everyday lives that it is difficult not to think about events and con­
tingencies as elements of existing aesthetic structures (tragic or comic,
or even tragi-comic). Even so, writers can still insist that tragedy only
occurs in certain circumstances. This is the position that Albert Camus
adopted in a 1955 essay on ‘The Future of Tragedy’ when he said that:

Tragedy occurs when man, through pride (or even through stupidity,
as in the case of Ajax) enters into conflict with the divine order, per­
sonified by a god or incarnated in society. The more justified this
revolt, and the more necessary this order, then the greater the tragedy
which stems from the conflict.
(Camus (1990) p. 197)

This is of a piece with Georg Lukács’ observation in “The Metaphysics

of Tragedy” that tragedy and democracy are uneasy bedfellows. It is
worth reminding ourselves of the way in which Lukács puts it:

In vain has our democratic age claimed an equal right for all to be
tragic; all attempts to open this kingdom of heaven to the poor in
spirit have proved fruitless. And those democrats who are consistent
about their demand for equal rights for all men have always disputed
tragedy’s right to existence.
(Lukács (1974), p. 173)

As a response to this we need to ask whether tragedy needs to have a

metaphysical dimension. Despite the fact that he occasionally resorted to
a traditional vocabulary of tragedy, the North American playwright
Arthur Miller did not think so, nor did Brecht or Augusto Boal.
Moreover, as soon as we contemplate the prospect of meaningless or
senseless death we are thrown back onto a contemplation of the material
forces that oppress the individual human life. And where the political
formation extols individualism and freedom of individual action then
either everybody is potentially capable of tragic action or nobody is. Or,
to put the matter a little differently, tragedy becomes a social rather than
a metaphysical problem. Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love and Tom Stop­
pard’s Leopoldstadt with which we ended the last chapter both expose
168 CONCLUSION

what happens in a society where even the ‘order’ to which the play’s
title might appeal in an historical sense is absent, so that we are left
with nothing more than an utterly perverse recurring desire, an inhu­
man brutality and an absolute contempt for the human. In Kane’s play,
even a philosophy of redemption, such as the Priest’s declaration of
Christian principles, is treated as ineffectual by one who succumbs to
the very animality which Hippolytus claims (although perhaps entirely
sardonically) to oppose. The occasion is worth repeating:

Hippolytus Last line of defense for the honest man.

Free will is what distinguishes us from the animals.
He undoes his trousers.
And I have no intention of behaving like a fucking animal.
Priest Performs oral sex on Hippolytus
Hippolytus Leave that to you.
He comes.
He rests his hand on top of the Priest’s head.
Go.
Confess.
Before you burn.
(Kane (2001) p. 97)

Perhaps we need hardly point out that the act of oral sex is little more than
an acknowledgement of guilt for which confession is wholly inadequate in
the circumstances. Christianity itself as it appears in this play is just another
broken narrative, wholly without continuity. We are left, therefore, with this
question: aside from the reference to Euripides, is this tragedy?
In the case of Stoppard’s play, we live daily with the memory of the
Holocaust even though its survivors are dwindling in number. While
Leopoldstadt is concerned with questions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth,’ it is
also more persistently concerned with the family as the microcosm of a
society in which power and victimhood are the issues and where a
complex culture and its annual rituals can be swept away through
inhuman violence. Stoppard’s is one approach to ‘tragedy’ and Kane’s
may be another, but in the previous chapters we have been concerned
with the various ways in which tragedy has emerged and become sus­
ceptible to particular historical, philosophical, cultural and, indeed,
psychological pressures. Old patterns of form have been repeated, or
 CONCLUSION 169
have been the subject of innovation, or, indeed, have been thoroughly
dismantled. In the post-modern (and, some think, the post-human)
world the last vestige of tragedy, the figure of the isolated suffering and
active protagonist has all but disappeared. In their place are the plea­
sures of deadly perversion, or the fates of entire cultures who are at the
mercy of forces that borrow a traditional vocabulary in order to mask
barbarism. In the Jacobean period Elizabethan high tragedy gave way to
what might be called ‘tragical satire.’ Kane’s Phaedra’s Love fits easily
into this category, while the wit of Stoppard’s doomed family is an
inadequate protection against forces of sickening barbarism. Perhaps the
singularity of tragedy has had its day and in the post-modern post-
human world it is a strand of experience that cannot be separated from
others.
 GLOSSARY

action the primary concern of tragedy for Aristotle, elevated

above ‘character.’ The elements of ‘action’ collectively
comprise the ‘plot’ and, for Aristotle, this proceeds
along a clearly defined path.
aesthetic the philosophical study of artistic beauty, made popular
by Hegel and Kant, as a separate and independent area
of study.
anagnorisis a point in the plot at which there is a moment of recog­
nition that extends beyond what the protagonist may
intend. It is a point where new knowledge and its con­
sequences are finally recognised.
anti-humanism a train of philosophical thought that resists the
emphasis on the ‘human’ as an essential category of
being. It is linked usually with ‘post-humanism’ which
emphasises a reversal of the posture that places ’the
human’ at the centre of things as the measure of all
things. This also leads on to ‘individualism’ which
posits the autonomy and freedom of the human subject.
catharsis a term used in Aristotle’s The Poetics that is usually
associated with the purgation of the particular emotions

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178408-10
 GLOSSARY 171
of ‘pity’ and ‘fear.’ It describes the effects of tragedy on
an audience who are returned at the end of a tragedy to
a situation in which their emotions are in balance.
chorus on the Greek stage a group of actors who comment on
the action through a combination of song, dance and
recitation. As drama developed the role of the chorus
could be taken by a single actor.
dialectic a mode of philosophical thinking that proposes a thesis,
an antithesis and a synthesis as a means of obtaining
access to knowledge. It became popular in the eight­
eenth century with Hegel and was later associated by
Marx with dialectical materialism as a primary means
of defining the nature of things and of the interaction
between classes in human society.
dithyramb a choral song sung to the accompaniment of a flute,
originally to the god Dionysus, but later performed at
other seasonal rituals.
Enlightenment the term used to signal the birth of rational thought,
which began in Britain and on the continent of Europe
in the eighteenth century.
epic a narrative that recounted the actions and adventures of
heroic figures. Some of these narratives were adapted to
form part of the material of early tragedy.
fatalism the philosophy that all things are determined by fate
and therefore are beyond human control.
Fortune designates the categories that are wholly beyond human
control. A secular force that in religious societies can
sometimes be associated with the power of a divinity.
hamartia usually translated as ‘tragic flaw,’ referring to errors
that the tragic protagonist makes. The privileging of
‘action’ over ‘character,’ however, directs us away from
the character’s psychology and towards the impossi­
bility of the choices that the protagonist is forced to
make.
ideology a complex term that has different meanings. It can be a
collection of ideas, but more recently it is regarded as
the collective term for a system of beliefs that operates
beneath the level of consciousness. The French Marxist
172 GLOSSARY

Louis Althusser described it as the natural way in

which human beings live their real relations of pro­
duction. This interpretation presupposes that there is
such a thing as a political unconscious. Marx used the
term, but to describe the illusions that underpinned
human behaviour.
logos a Greek word used to refer to human reason, but also in
Christian thought to divine rationality as the principle
governing the universe.
materialism a complex term that is usually associated with the
emphasis on the primacy of material conditions in the
shaping or determining of human affairs. Radical phi­
losophies, such as Marxism, hold that it is possible to
change the material conditions of existence and thereby
interfere politically in order to do so.
metalanguage a language that comments on language itself but from
an exalted position that transcends it.
metaphysics the branch of philosophy that deals with what trans­
cends the physical or natural world.
mimesis a fictional imitation designed to narrate or dramatise an
‘action.’ In Aristotle this is a particular function of
tragic art.
Moira a synonym for ‘fate’ that was also the means of demar­
cating the boundaries between different categories of
experience including that between life and death.
myth a fictional narrative that seeks to explain natural phe­
nomena. Usually associated with religion but also asso­
ciated in secular society with ideology.
mythos a system of beliefs that expresses, sometimes in sym­
bolic terms and through a range of narratives, the
dominant attitudes of a community and culture.
neo-classicism a branch of aesthetics which resurrected and imitated
the example of the Classics in art and literature, and
which became popular during the eighteenth century.
ontology an area of scientific knowledge within the field of
metaphysics concerned with being or the essence of
things.
 GLOSSARY 173
peripeteia a reversal of the progress of the plot in which a situa­
tion is changed into its opposite.
pharmakos identified by ethnologists as a figure who embodied
both ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Traced back to Plato but now
used to describe a focus of the co-existence of ‘good’
and ‘evil,’ but also identified as a figure endowed with
the power to both harm and cure.
poetic justice when virtue is rewarded and vice punished. A moralistic
account of tragedy in which justice is meted out accord­
ing to the predilections of the dramatic characters.
post- technically ‘post-humanism’ extends and expands the
humanism challenge to singular meaning by attacking the
‘humanism’ and the ‘human’ that provides the founda­
tion for classical accounts of tragedy. The aim is to
foreground issues such as gender, race and class as
defining characteristics and to challenge the essential­
ism upon which humanism depends.
post-modern that which succeeds the ‘modern,’ but also the state of
knowledge that follows on from the ‘linguistic turn,’
and that challenges singular and organic meaning in
favour of pluralism and the co-existence of multiple
truths. To be distinguished from scepticism which
doubts the existence of any truth.
protagonist the central figure in a tragedy around whom the action
revolves.
Providence a divine force that determines human actions, and
whose operations were never openly disclosed.
Renaissance a term that denotes the emphasis on what is human that
humanism came to the fore during the Renaissance with the redis­
covery of classical texts. To be distinguished from
the term ‘Enlightenment’ which denotes the eighteenth-
century shift from superstition to rationality.
ressentiment hostility towards an object or a person that can be
identified as the cause of one's own frustration and the
apportioning blame as a result. Tragedy can be read as
a form that articulates blame, usually in the form of
projecting onto the tragic protagonist faults with which
the spectator can both identify vicariously and resent.
174 GLOSSARY

ritual usually associated with religious practices and actions

designed to bind societies together.
Schadenfreude the pleasure that can be derived from the suffering of
others. This is something that can be attributed to the
experience of classical tragedy where the spectator can
take pleasure in the suffering of the tragic protagonist.
scepticism originally the term associated with the followers of the
Greek philosopher Pyrrhon (376–270 B.C.) who doub­
ted that it was possible to ascertain truth of any kind.
This became the basis of philosophical scepticism
which maintained that knowledge of existence could
not be obtained with certainty.
sparagmos the Greek term used to describe ritual dismemberment
(usually of the human body or of an animal) as part of a
Dionysiac rite. Associated also with the death of the
tragic hero.
subjectivity the assembly of all that goes into making the human
subject. This is different from the autonomous figure
that is usually referred to as ‘character’ since it pre­
supposes that the subject is both the determining ele­
ment of a grammatical sentence, but also, ambiguously,
that the ‘subject’ is subjected to forces (external, poli­
tical, social, cultural, sexual and psychological) that
determine its shape and being. In the post-human
world the subject becomes ‘non-unitary’ comprising
connections between ‘self’ and ‘other,’ including non­
human ‘others.’ In this modified version the subject
becomes ‘nomadic’ and mobile, exposing concepts such
as ‘autonomy’ as illusory.
sublime in art and nature, designed to inspire awe, reverence or
aesthetic beauty and associated with grandeur or
vastness.
thargelia a harvest festival that was celebrated in May, and that
was dedicated to the god Apollo.
tradition elements of past culture handed down from generation
to generation, which offer models that help to establish
continuity between past and present. Radical chal­
lenges to the concept of tradition propose that it
 GLOSSARY 175
represents an interpretation of the past which suggests
that it is neither singular nor neutral.
Trauerspiel translated in English as ‘mourning play.’ Walter Ben­
jamin links it with tragedy, but distinguishes it from
ancient Greek tragedy.
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 INDEX

action, shift from 100–104 Barker, F. 49

actors 10, 27 Barker, P. 100–101
Adorno, T. 118–119, 123 Barthes, R. 5–7, 18
adversity 1 beauty 77
Aeschylus 1, 15, 27, 60–61; Agamemnon Beckett, S.
12–14, 29; The Choephori 8, 13, 17–18; Beckett, S. 148, 160; Waiting for Godot
The Eumenides 13–14; Oresteia 94 59, 150, 152–155
aesthetic didacticism 45 being 48–49
aestheticisation 126 Belsey, K. 109
aesthetics 68, 121–123 Benjamin, W. 92–94, 101, 118, 119
affect 109 Bentley, E. 138
Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 12–14, 29 Billings, J. 74
agency 33–34, 123 biological anatomy 59
All For Love (Dryden) 64–66 Blasted (Kane) 156
All My Sons (Miller) 131 Boal, A. 130, 141–143, 147, 165, 167
anagnorisis 32, 83 boredom 156–157
An Apology for Poetry (Sidney) 59, 61–63 Bourdieu, P. 123
Anderson, P. 25–26 Bradley, A.C. 84–87, 91, 102
Antigone (Sophocles) 79, 82, 110–112, Braidotti, R. 149–150, 151–152
121–122, 126 Brecht, B. 19, 130, 133–135, 142–143, 165,
anti-humanism 149–150 166, 167; The Life of Galileo 139–141;
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) Mother Courage and Her Children
64, 116 138–139, 140–141; St. Joan of the
Apollo 88, 89, 112–113, 117 Stockyards 121, 136–138, 139, 140–141,
Aristotle 6, 11, 15, 16, 35, 60, 62, 67, 71, 147–148
72, 83, 87, 107, 122, 123, 141, 145, 165, Burke, E. 71–72, 72–73, 75–76
165–166; Eudemian Ethics 14–15; Poe­ Burkert, W. 8, 34
tics 14, 18–19, 26–33, 41, 60, 93
Armstrong, I. 109, 116 Calvinism 51, 56, 101
Athens 10–11, 23, 24–26 Cambridge Ritualists 9
audience 10, 21, 29–30, 76, 83 Camus, A. 129, 167
audience experience 78–80, 91–92 catharsis 6, 30–31, 70–71, 107, 135, 147, 163
audience identification 134 causality 41–42, 136, 149
Augustine, St 39 Cavell, S. 97, 100
autonomous selfhood, challenge of 128 censorship 45
chance 17
Bacchae, The (Euripides) 47, 89, Chapman, G. 44
112–113, 119–121 character 27, 40, 81–82, 84, 91, 99;
Baillie, J. 100 heroes 31–32; intention 101;
184 INDEX

motivation 33–34, 101–104, 104–108; Deleuze, G. 91–92

shift to 100–104, 147–148 della Mirandola, P. 145
Chaucer, G. 38–39 democracy 124
Chekhov, A. 125 dependency 160
Childs, P. 148 Derrida, J. 9
Choephori, The (Aeschylus) 8, 13, 17–18 de St. Croix, G.E.M 26
choice 95 determination 34
Chorus 21, 32–33, 46, 90, 122 didactic function 59–60
Christian framework 40 Dionysus 21–22, 24–25, 27, 47, 88–91,
Christianity 39–41, 94–97, 125, 129, 112–113, 117, 119
130, 168 dithyramb 21, 27, 89
Christian theology 69 divine power 24, 46–47, 52–53
Cicero 11, 69 Dollimore, J. 44–45, 146
City of God, The (Augustine) 39 Donne, J. 48
classical tragedy, singularity of 134 Drakakis, J. 9, 164
Clastres, Pierre 22–23 dramatic action, definition 80
Cocktail Party, The (Eliot) 129–130 dramatic personality 82
coercion, failure of 142 dramatic structure 38–39
comedy 2–3, 27, 93, 125 Dryden, J. 61–66
common man, the 130–133, 135, 147 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster) 54–59,
confession 157–158 115–116, 145–146
conflict 79, 82, 84–85, 96, 110–111, 112 Durkheim, E. 119
conscience 58 dynamic tragedy 96
consolation 123
context 20, 76 Eagleton, T. 1, 2–3, 75, 82, 97, 117–118,
contingency 36–37, 96, 155 121, 129, 155–156, 165
Cooper, Tommy, death of 2–3 early modern tragedy 59–66
Counter-Reformation 93 Easterling, P. 21–22
Coupe, L. 6 economic pressures 121
courage 138–139 Eliot, T.S. 24, 46, 59, 73, 128–130, 153
Critchley, S. 68, 164 Elizabethan tragedy 37
critical engagement 134–135 Elyot, T. 41
crucifixion, the 40, 95, 97, 129 emergent individualism 33–34
culture, levels of 127 emotional effect 28–29, 32
Cyclops (Euripides) 22 emotional engagement 135
emotional life 126–127
Davies, T. 145, 147, 148 emotions 59
death 2–3, 84–85, 85, 87, 93–94, empathy 142
160, 162 empirical experience 67
death drive 107 endurance 53–54
Death of a Salesman, The (Miller) English Civil War 60
131–132, 151 epic poetry 27
death of tragedy 90–91, 125–127, epistemology 98–99
141–142, 147, 165 Erasmus 41
decline and fall narrative 39–40, 41 Eros 107
 INDEX 185
eschatology 97 Great Dionysia, the 10
ethical substance 83 Greek culture 4–5
ethics 68, 150 Greek religion 5, 8, 34–36
Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle) 14–15 Greek tragedy 11, 60, 81–82, 84, 87,
Eumenides, The (Aeschylus) 13–14 118–119, 122, 126; appropriation
Euripides 1, 44, 56, 90–91, 151, 168; The 100–101; archaeology of violence
Bacchae 47, 89, 112–113, 119–121; 22–24; Aristotle on see Poetics
Cyclops 22; Heracles 23–24; Hyppolytus (Aristotle); audience 10, 21, 29–30;
156; The Suppliant Women 8 catharsis 30–31; character 27, 31–32;
character motivation 101–102, 102;
Fall of Princes, The (Lydgate) 39–40 conflict 96; cultural context 127; and
Family Reunion, The (Eliot) 129–130 divine power 24; emotional effect
fatalism 138–139 28–29, 32; focus 35; heroes 31–32;
fate 37, 132–133, 142, 162 improvisations 27; means of repre­
feeling, structure of 126–127 sentation 26–27; mimetic rite 8; mod­
female desire 56 ernized form 100–101; morality 11–18;
female protagonists, role of 115–117 motivations 33–34; origins and devel­
feminine power 111 opment 20–26; parts 27–28; plot 27,
feminism 117, 118, 120–121 32; polytheism 34–36; radical reread­
final sacrifice 93–94 ings 44; religious ceremony 20–21;
Ford, J. 48 return of 41; and ritual 8–9; soul
forgiveness 157–158 28–29; structure 28, 32–33; the tragic
formalism, retreat into 125 flaw 31–32; translations 100; use of
form, Miller on 131 myth 35
Fortune 32, 35 Green, A. 107–108, 109, 112–113
Foucault, M. 25, 164–165 Greenblatt, S. 45
fragmentation 151 Greville, F. 47–48
freedom 34, 76, 77, 85, 95, 96, 167
free will 34, 158 Hall, E. 22, 23, 25–26, 90
French tragedy 62, 62–63 hamartia 29–30, 74, 141, 166
Freud, S. 19, 103, 104–108, 108, 110 Hamilton-Fyfe, W. 32–33
Hamlet problem, the 105–106
Gadamer, H.-G. 43, 121–122 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 36–37, 40, 44,
gender 104, 115–117 48–52, 53, 56, 73, 83, 86, 91, 94, 101,
German Enlightenment 75 102, 105–106, 108–109, 125
Girard, R. 8–9, 10, 119–120 Hardy, T. 95, 102–103, 117, 147
God 39, 51, 101 Hawkes, T. 7
gods 34 Hazlitt, W. 102
Goldhill, S. 10 Hegel, G. W. F. 80–87, 87–88, 90, 100,
Goldmann, L. 62 110, 112, 121, 151
good and evil 34, 51–52, 95 Hegelian dialectic 80, 84–87, 89
Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Henry IV (Shakespeare) 102
The (film) 129 Heracles (Euripides) 23–24
Grady, H. 146–147, 151 heroes 31–32, 74
Granville, G. 61, 63–64 Hesiod 30, 34
186 INDEX

Hillman, R. 40 Kane, S.: Blasted 156; Phaedra’s Love

historical contingency 96 150, 155–160, 161, 163, 165, 167–169
history, and narrative 122 Kant, I. 73–74, 98, 123, 151
Holland, N. 107 Keynesian economics 150
Hooker, R. 41 Kierkegaard, S. 88
hope 152–153 King Lear (Shakespeare) 19, 37, 52–54,
Horace 60–61, 62 56, 57, 66, 79, 86, 95–96, 151
Hughes, T. 100 Kitto, H.D.F. 5, 6, 7, 12, 34–35, 35–36
human behaviour 12 Kojève, A. 80–81
human condition 69, 98, 130, 134, Kyd, T. 40; The Spanish Tragedy
144–148, 155 42–44, 46
humanism 37, 47, 48, 132, 146, 148,
149, 165–166 Lacan, J. 105, 108–112, 121
humanity, dilemma of 47–48 language 61
human nature 74 law 117–118
human spirit 54–55 Lawrence, D.H. 106
Hume, D. 11, 69–70, 71 Leopoldstadt (Stoppard) 160–163, 165,
Hyppolytus (Euripides) 156 167–169
Lessing, G. E. 75
Ibsen, H. 103, 125 Levi-Strauss, C. 6
Ibsen, H., The Wild Duck Life of Galileo, The (Brecht) 139–141
95–96, 151 linguistic turn 108–114
idealism 96 Loraux, N. 10–11, 116–117
ideology 135, 136, 148, 163 love 158–159
imagination 70, 79 Love’s Labours Lost (Shakespeare) 2–3
imitations 122 Lukács, G. 41–42, 45, 124, 126, 128, 167
impact 90 Lydgate, J. 39–40
improvisations 27 Lyotard, J.-F. 113–114, 149–150, 151–152
inarticulate experience 2
individualism 81, 89, 150, 167; assertion Machiavelli, N. 35, 41
of 37; crisis of 148; exploitative 155; Man 144–149
growth of 62 Marlowe, C. 40, 46–47, 145, 151
integrity 59 Marston, J. 44
intellectual and political tension Marxism 97
dialectic 63–66 materialist analysis 44–45
interiority 49 medieval period 38–41
irony 30 metalanguage 113
metaphysical order 44, 52, 54, 56–58,
Jacobean tragedy 37, 44–45, 54 68–69, 72
Jameson, F. 137 metaphysics 41–42, 52, 55
Johnson, S. 66, 68–69, 102 methodology 160–161
Jones, E. 102, 105–106, 108 Middleton, T. 44
Jonson, B. 60, 63, 145 Miller, A. 87, 133, 134, 136, 139, 167; All
justice 7, 12–13, 14, 57–58, 66, 117–118, My Sons (Miller) 131; Death of a
123, 160 Salesman, The (Miller) 131–132, 151
 INDEX 187
Milton, J. 60 Orestes complex 131
mimetic rite 8 origins and development 20–26
misogyny 156–157 Ornstein, R. 54
modernity 153 Othello (Shakespeare) 86, 98–99, 116
Moira 34, 36 Ovid 41
moral capacity 78
morality 7, 11–18, 30–31, 36, 39, 68, Paine, T. 69
86, 146 Passolini, P. 129
moral vision 54 Paulin, T. 100
Morgann, M. 102 Paul, St 99
Mother Courage and Her Children Peisistratos 25
(Brecht) 138–139, 140–141 personal autonomy 29–30
motivation 33–34, 101–104, 104–108 Phaedra (Seneca) 156–157
Much Ado About Nothing Phaedra’s Love (Kane) 150, 155–160, 161,
(Shakespeare) 65 163, 165, 167–169
Mullaney, S. 45 pharmakos, the 9, 125–127, 141–142,
Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot) 128–129 147, 165
Mustapha (Greville) 47–48 philosophy 67–72; audience experience
myth 4–7, 7–8, 126, 135; primacy of 78–80; Benjamin 92–94; Bradley
92–93; use of 35 84–87, 91; Burke 71–72, 72–73,
mythologisation 5–6 75–76; Cavell 97–99; epistemology
98–99; Hegel 80–87, 87–88, 90;
narrative, and history 122 Hume 69–70, 71; Kant 73–74, 98;
Nature 52–53, 71, 73, 77 Niebuhr 94–97; Nietzsche 87–92;
Neill, M. 46–47, 59 scepticism 97–99; Schiller 76–80;
New Historicism 45 secularisation 74–76; the sublime 71,
Newton, T. 156–157 72–74, 77–78
Niebuhr, R. 94–97 Pickard-Cambridge, A.W. 21–22,
Nietzsche, F. 11–12, 17, 19, 87–92, 94, 24–25, 89
95, 97, 117 Plato 9, 10–11, 67
nomadic subjectivity 149, 150 pleasure 18–19, 83, 118–119
nostalgia 151 plot 27–28, 32, 103
Nuttall, A.D. 18–19, 31, 107 plurality 151–152
poetic justice 66
Oedipus 9, 15–17, 31–32, 83, 104, 106, Poetics (Aristotle) 14, 18–19, 26–33, 41,
115, 116, 135 60, 93
Oedipus (Sophocles) 30, 32, 33, 94, 108 poetry 59–60, 61–62, 84–87, 93, 131
Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles) 83–84 polytheism 34–36
Oedipus complex 104–108, 108, 131 post-humanism 149–152; Leopoldstadt
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 15–17, 29 (Stoppard) 160–163, 165, 167–169;
“Of Dramatic Poesy: An Essay” Phaedra’s Love (Kane) 155–160, 161,
(Dryden) 61–62 163, 165, 167–169; Waiting for Godot
Opitz, M. 92–93 (Beckett) 152–155
order 17 post-modern condition, the 113–114
Oresteia (Aeschylus) 94 power 163
188 INDEX

prescriptive behaviour 12 satyr drama 21–22, 27

projection, acts of 150 scepticism 97–99
protagonist, flaw 40–41 Schechner, R. 10
Protestantism 36–37, 93, 94 Schiller, F. 76–80
Providence 36–37, 50–51, 106 Schopenhauer, A. 88
psychic discharge 19 Seaford, R. 21
psychology 50, 98–99 secularisation 74, 74–76
punishment 39, 123, 160 secularism 36
selfhood: critical exposure of 41–42;
Racine 157 Renaissance concentration on 42–44
radical tragedy 44–59 Seneca 1, 24, 41, 42, 56, 60, 156–157;
Raleigh, W. 145 Phaedra (Seneca) 156–157; Thyestes
Rancière, J. 122, 126 (Seneca) 42
rationalism 125 sexual identity 104, 151
rationality 85 Shakespeare, W. 3, 35, 63, 63–66, 75,
Read, H. 138 145; Antony and Cleopatra 64, 116;
realism 95, 122, 148 Bradley’s reading 84, 87, 91; Cavell’s
reason 67, 68, 69, 85 reading 97–99; Hamlet 36–37, 40,
reason and passion dialectic 64–66 44, 48–52, 53, 56, 73, 83, 86, 91, 94,
reason/myth dualism 68 101, 102, 105–106, 108–109, 125;
redemption 94, 168 Henry IV 102; King Lear 19, 37, 52–54,
religious belief 46 56, 57, 66, 79, 86, 95–96, 151; Love’s
religious experience 89 Labours Lost 2–3; Much Ado About
Renaissance tragedy 40, 42, 68, 74–75, Nothing 65; Othello 86, 98–99, 116;
101, 145–147 Richard II 40; Richard III 166; Romeo
repentance 157–158 and Juliet 116
representation 26–27 Shelley, P. 100
repressive function 141 Sidney, P. 59–60, 61
resilience 138–139, 162 signifiers 109
revenge tradition 48 sin 58, 90, 96, 157–158
revenge tragedy 43–44 Smith, T. 41
rewards 39 social class 121
rhetorical elements 122 social pressures 121, 131–133, 136–141
Richard II (Shakespeare) 40 social reality 4
Richard III (Shakespeare) 166 Sophocles 1, 27, 91; Antigone 79, 82,
Ricoeur, P. 4–5, 6 110–112, 121–122, 126; Oedipus 30,
ritual 7–11, 119–120, 135, 153–154, 32, 33, 94, 108; Oedipus at Colonus
159–160 83–84; Oedipus Rex 15–17, 29
Romantic movement 75 Soyinka, W. 100
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 116 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd) 42–44, 46
Spingarn, J. 61
sacrifice 93–94, 130, 138 Sprat, T. 61
St. Joan of the Stockyards (Brecht) 121, Steiner, G. 68, 110, 111–112, 124–125,
136–138, 139, 140–141, 147–148 126, 127, 135, 141–142, 143, 161, 165
Samson Agonistes (Milton) 60 stoic acceptance 37, 138–139
 INDEX 189
Stoppard, T., Leopoldstadt (Stoppard) tragic resolution 91
160–163, 165, 167–169 trans-historical values 44–45
Storm, W. 41–42 Trauerspiel 92–94
Strindberg, A. 103–104, 125, 131 Trump, D. 166
structure 28 Truss, L. 166
structure of feeling 1–2, 126–127 truth 122, 123, 168
struggle 152 Turner, V. 9–10
sublime, the 71, 72–74, 77–78
suffering 40, 43–44, 49, 52–54, 72, 79, unhappiness 84–85
85, 94, 133, 154, 163, 169
suicide 131–132, 157 Vernant, J.-P. 4, 20, 33–34, 89
supernatural forces 43 Vesalius 59
Suppliant Women, The (Euripides) 8 violations 8
sweet violence 60 violence 8–9, 18, 117–121, 155, 159–160;
Szondi, Peter 74–75 archaeology of 22–24, 119–120; and
law 117–118; pleasurable effect of
taste 75–76 118–119
Tate, N. 66 Virgil 41
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy) virtue 14, 69, 141
102–103, 117
Thompson, G. 7–8, 25, 90 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 59, 150,
Thyestes (Seneca) 42 152–155
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford) 48 Weber, M. 36
Tobín, C. 100–101 Webster, J. 44; The Duchess of Malfi
totalitarianism, threat of 151 54–59, 115–116, 145–146; The White
Tourneur, C. 44 Devil 54, 115, 145
tradition 126 White Devil, The (Webster) 54, 115, 145
tragedy: definition 38–39, 111, 164; Wild Duck, The (Ibsen) 95–96, 151
essence of 122; etymology 21; Williams, R. 1–2, 74, 74–75, 125,
traditional view 155–156, 161; 126–130, 133, 142, 147, 148, 150, 165
understanding 1–4, 164–169 women, role of 115–117
Tragedy of Irene, The (Johnson) 68–69 Wordsworth, W. 71
Tragical History of the Life and Death of world view 125
Doctor Faustus, The (Marlowe)
46–47 Young, J. 67, 69
tragical satire 169
tragic death 93–94 Zeus 34, 36
tragic flaw, the 31–32 Žižek, S. 118–119