Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example
by Adrian Poole
Everyone assumes that they know what tragedy means; the problem comes in trying to define it. One thing is certain: it is a uniquely Western phenomenon. None of the drama produced by the great cultures of India, China, or Japan has ever been remotely "tragic" in the most commonly accepted (if simplistic) sense of "sad stories of the death of kings." There is even a 15th-century No drama that presents the precise dilemma of Shakespeare's Hamlet—except that all ends well for the avenger, and he never has pangs of conscience or self-doubt.
Even the origin of the word "tragedy" is enigmatic. The Greek literally means "goat song." There have been three major theories as to what this originally meant. The first argues that in the dramatic (or pre-dramatic bardic) competition the animal itself, of no small value in ancient Greece, was the prize. The second explanation (endorsed by Aristotle) was that the genre evolved from the dithyrambic poets whose choruses were dressed in goat skins, an indication of its ultimate ancestry in fertility rites. (We know of a seventh-century poet named Arion, he of the dolphin's back, whose chorus sang "in the tragic mode.")
More recently, scholars such as Walter Burkert have argued that "tragedy" emerged from a tradition of goat sacrifices, which had an even earlier precedent with human victims. Though he has been able to distinguish the vestiges of the ritual in the dramas themselves, Burkert warns against seeking too literal an evolution: "The greatest poets only provide sublime expression for what already existed at the most primitive stages of human development. Human existence face-to-face with death—that is the kernel of tragoidia."
Thus we accept that the Greeks were the first to produce something called tragoidia, but we have no real idea what the term signified for Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides. Indeed, it seems to have meant something different to each of them. For in the Golden Age of Athens, there were countless dramatists, but they were too busy writing plays to concern themselves with theory, mercifully.
To be sure, many of the extant plays present heroic agony and death, but there is strong evidence that this was not an obligatory criterion. In fact some of their most famous works—Philodeks and Alcestis to name but two—end on harmonious (or at least optimistic) notes. Indeed, one scholar has likened the triumphal parade that concludes Aeschylus's Oresteia to the joyous finales of Aristophanic comedy. Moreover, there is the famous example of the tragedian Phrynicus, who, in 494 B.C., produced The Fall of Miletus. Its horrific ending evoked such sorrow in the audience that the author was fined and forbidden ever to produce the play again.
There is another popular misconception that "tragedies" end on a note of horrific calamity. A careful examination of some of the masterpieces shows that more often the catastrophe is followed by a sense of calm. The messenger in Oedipus at Colonus describes how the suffering king is translated into heaven: "No more sobs were heard, then there was silence." At the end of King Lear yet another suffering king is mercifully released from "the rack of this tough world." And we should also recall the epilogue to Samson Agonistes, which assures us that "nothing is here for tears."
A little more than a century later, Aristotle bestowed on the world the mixed blessing of explicit definition: the purpose of Tragedy was to provide a catharsis for the pity and the fear that it evoked. Centuries of subsequent critics have taken up, or taken issue with, various aspects of his formulation, but almost all agree with Aristotle's description of the tragic hero as one who endures nearly superhuman inner torment. Aristotle implied that Euripides killed tragedy.
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