Tragedy

This article is about the genre of drama based on human suffering. For the loss of life, see Tragedy (event). For other uses, see Tragedy (disambiguation).
"Tragedian" redirects here. For other uses, see Tragedian (disambiguation).

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Tragedy (from the ‹See Tfd›Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia[a]) is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character or cast of characters.[2] Traditionally, the intention of tragedy is to invoke an accompanying catharsis, or a "pain [that] awakens pleasure,” for the audience.[3][4] While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization.[3][5] That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.[6]

Romeo and Juliet, the classic tragedy by English playwright William Shakespeare
Ancient Persian tragedy of Layla and Majnun; the narrative poem of same name by Nizami Ganjavi is considered a classic example of tragedy
Heer Ranjha, classic Punjabi tragedy by Waris Shah, one of the five classic tragedies of Punjabi literature
The Bacchae, ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides

From its origins in the theatre of ancient Greece 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as many fragments from other poets, and the later Roman tragedies of Seneca; through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Jean Racine, and Friedrich Schiller to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg; Natyaguru Nurul Momen's Nemesis' tragic vengeance & Samuel Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering; Heiner Müller postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change.[7][8] A long line of philosophers—which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin,[9] Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze—have analysed, speculated upon, and criticised the genre.[10][11][12]

In the wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy). In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic, and epic theatre.[12][13][14] Drama, in the narrow sense, cuts across the traditional division between comedy and tragedy in an anti- or a-generic deterritorialisation from the mid-19th century onwards. Both Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal define their epic theatre projects (non-Aristotelian drama and Theatre of the Oppressed, respectively) against models of tragedy. Taxidou, however, reads epic theatre as an incorporation of tragic functions and its treatments of mourning and speculation.[8]

  1. ^ Klein, E (1967). "Tragedy". A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Vol. II L–Z. Elsevier. p. 1637.
  2. ^ Conversi, Leonard W. (2019). "Tragedy". Encyclopædia Britannica.
  3. ^ a b Banham 1998, p. 1118.
  4. ^ Nietzsche 1999, p. 21, §2: 'two-fold mood[…] the strange mixture and duality in the effects of the Dionysiac enthusiasts, that phenomenon whereby pain awakens pleasure while rejoicing wrings cries of agony from the breast. From highest joy there comes a cry of horror or a yearning lament at some irredeemable loss. In those Greek festivals there erupts what one might call a sentimental tendency in nature, as if it had cause to sigh over its dismemberment into individuals'.
  5. ^ Williams 1966, pp. 14–16.
  6. ^ Williams 1966, p. 16.
  7. ^ Williams 1966, pp. 13–84.
  8. ^ a b Taxidou 2004, pp. 193–209.
  9. ^ Benjamin 1998.
  10. ^ Felski 2008, p. 1.
  11. ^ Dukore 1974: primary material.
  12. ^ a b Carlson 1993: analysis.
  13. ^ Pfister 1988.
  14. ^ Elam, Keir (1980). The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. Methuen. ISBN 9780416720501.


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