what is heroic tragedy essay

History of English Literature

Restoration heroic tragedy.

Characterized by highly stylized poetic dialogue, larger-than-life heroes and idealized heroines, and sensationalistic action often played out in exotic locales, heroic tragedy is a genre of English drama that flourished in the years of the Restoration. John Dryden, the dominant playwright and dramatic theorist of his time, wrote extensively in support of the heroic genre, citing its lineage in the classical theater as well as the French drama of Pierre Corneille. However, unlike other dramatic forms of the period, such as the comedy manners, heroic drama seems to have been uniquely suited to Restoration audiences and never became a mainstay of the English theatrical repertoire.

Although Dryden is generally considered the master of the genre—particularly for his Conquest of Granada (1670-71)—heroic drama was established as a popular and well-defined theatrical style by earlier authors. William Davenant, a playwright during the reign of Charles I wrote what is considered the first heroic drama, The Siege of Rhodes. Dryden, who worked with Davenant throughout much of his career, acknowledged The Siege of Rhodes as an important model for his own heroic plays. While Davenant provided the stylistic features of melodramatic rhetoric and adventure-filled storylines, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, is often credited with introducing the political tone that is also associated with heroic drama. Orrery's heroic plays, from The Generall in 1661 to Tryphon in 1668, continually address the problems of loyalty, usurpation, and regicide, and ultimately assert that political order must derive from monarchical authority.

Dryden's first heroic drama, The Indian Queen (1664), was a joint effort with Robert Howard. In both The Indian Queen and its sequel, The Indian Emperor (1665), tyrannical Indian rulers contend with warring tribes on the one hand and the invasion of the Spanish on the other. In these and his next heroic play, Tyrannick Love (1669), Dryden developed the heroic drama along a slightly different course from that of Orrery. As in his other writings, Dryden's heroic plays demonstrate a unique insight into sexual and gender politics in both the public and private realm. Perhaps the most memorable of Dryden's heroic characters appear in his most significant heroic play, The Conquest of Granada, which appeared in two parts. Dryden's final heroic drama, Aureng-Zebe (1675), presages the changes in taste that signaled the decline of heroic drama during the late 1670s.

After Dryden ceased to write heroic drama, a new generation of playwrights began experimenting with the form, most prominently Nathaniel Lee and Thomas Otway. Both Lee and Otway would eventually develop a more emotionally affective and tragic style of drama—Lee with his violent plots of regicide and Otway with his passionate feelings on the stage. Lee and Otway's early efforts in the heroic manner are generally considered transitional plays hinting at these developments. Lee's first heroic drama, Sophonisba (1675), was a popular success, though his next effort, Gloriana (1676), was widely disparaged. Otway's first heroic drama, Alcibiades (1675), has the dubious distinction of being considered among the worst efforts in the genre. Nevertheless, his subsequent work, Don Carlos Prince of Spain (1676), was significantly more successful, embracing the tradition of The Conquest of Granada while also displaying a gift for restrained passion and the evocation of pity. While Otway, Lee, and Dryden were responsible for the rise of heroic drama, their talents led beyond the conventions of the genre, bringing its dominance in the English theater to an end. The move toward more emotionally introspective and less outwardly dramatic tragedies produced such masterworks as Otway's Venice Preserved (1682) and Dryden's All for Love (1678), plays that suited their audience's changing tastes.

Since its inception, heroic drama has attracted sharp criticism: nothing about the genre was subtle, and the grandiloquent dialogue and characters were obvious targets for witty deflation. Scholars have also noted the influence of French literature on heroic drama. No longer viewed as a form of escapism, the heroic drama of the early Restoration is today regarded as a significant phase in the development of the English stage and the evolution of English cultural ideology.

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Are you interested in delving into the world of English literature and exploring the intriguing genre of heroic drama ? From its definition and characteristics to fascinating examples, this article will provide you with everything you need to know about this captivating genre. Discover the heart-wrenching tales of heroes, their ultimate downfall, and the complexities of human nature through the lens of heroic drama or heroic tragedy dramas.

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Heroic drama: definition

Heroic drama in literature is a term created by English poet John Dryden to describe a type of play popular during the 1660s, referring to both its subject matter and its verse form.

The heroic drama , sometimes called heroic tragedy , is a dramatic genre that involves epic stories of grandeur with noble heroes, lavish, exotic settings, themes of courage, duty, love, war, and usually, a tragic ending.

'Heroic' does not only refer to the genre's favoured subject matter, it also refers to its form. Heroic dramas were written using heroic verse , used typically in epic poems.

Heroic verse , also known as heroic couplets , is a verse form that uses rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter (five metrical feet per line, each with an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed syllable).

In adopting this verse form, writers attempted to emulate the great scale of epic poems, lending heroic dramas an impressive sense of gravity, importance and extravagance by association.

Heroic tragedy

The heroic tragedy is a form of drama in which a noble and virtuous character faces a downfall due to their tragic flaw. The story revolves around a hero who is larger than life, but ultimately meets their demise. These plays often explore themes such as fate, justice, and morality. For example, in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, the protagonist is a noble prince who is consumed by his desire for revenge, leading to his eventual downfall and tragic end.

Heroic drama and heroic tragedy are two genres of literature that share similarities but also have distinct differences. While both forms focus on the heroic figure and their journey, the major difference between the two is the ending. In heroic tragedy, the hero ultimately faces a tragic ending, often resulting in their death or downfall. On the other hand, the heroic drama ends on a more positive note, with the hero achieving some level of success or victory.

Heroic drama: characteristics

The term 'heroic drama' was coined by John Dryden in 1670 to describe his play from that year, titled The Conquest of Granada .

In its preface, Dryden notes that the heroic drama serves as an adaptation of epic poetry designed for the stage and, importantly, created a set of rules to classify works of the genre.

Epic poems were long, narrative poems that followed extraordinary characters on lengthy journeys characterised by exceptional deeds and circumstances, usually involving divine or supernatural forces. Important examples include Homer's the Odyssey and the Illiad (c. 8th century BCE).

These rules state that the main characteristics of a heroic drama in literature are:

Heroic couplets. Heroic dramas should be composed using the heroic verse form (couplets in iambic pentameter).

Epic stories . Subject matter should concern grand, important matters, focusing on themes of valour, romance and glory.

A noble hero. The protagonist should be honourable, powerful and decisive, usually a decorated warrior with the fate of an empire in his hands. Often, these characters possess superhuman abilities or qualities. Heroic dramas tended to show this hero as he is faced with an impassioned conflict between romantic love and the demands of patriotic duty.

Dryden, when classifying the genre, took much inspiration from early 17th-century French classical dramatists like Pierre Corneille and Jean-Baptiste Racine.

French classical tragedy was a dramatic genre that attempted to re-popularise the classic Greek dramatic forms, particularly as informed by Aristotle's theories and models about tragedy.

Heroic dramas were an English attempt to similarly bring back classical tragedies, striving to recreate such grand stories as were seen in antiquity.

Heroic drama in English Literature

The heroic drama became popular during the Restoration period when the monarchical rule was re-instated in Britain.

The Restoration period (1660-85) occurred in 1660 when Charles II ascended the throne after 20 years of Republican rule under Oliver Cromwell.

During this time, a period in English literary history called Restoration literature emerged, in which most literary works were produced in celebration or as a reaction to Charles II's court and the re-introduction of the monarchy.

The heroic drama saw its largest period of popularity during the years between 1664 and 1678, as contended by historians, emerging as an immediate response to the country's previous political turmoil.

During Cromwell's Puritan reign, public theatre was banned, so with the return of the monarchy came the return of dramatic performance. Audiences during this time sought uplifting moral messages after years of divisive civil wars, finding comfort in powerful heroes with stories that enshrined strong, exalted ideals. Nobility, honour and courage had long been associated with royalty, helping to rouse support through public celebration of the newly restored King.

Heroic drama: examples

Examples of heroic dramas include John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, The Indian Emperour, and The Black Prince.

John Dryden's heroic dramas

John Dryden was a dominant literary figure during the Restoration, writing celebrated pieces of drama, poetry and prose . His influence cannot be understated, marking his works as some of the most significant in English literature.

Of course, he was the pioneer of the heroic drama, with plays like The Indian Emperour (1665) and The Conquest of Granada (1672) serving to define and establish the genre.

The Indian Emperour

John Dryden's The Indian Emperour was a notable work for the genre, cementing the heroic drama on the Restoration stage, even before the term was coined.

It was first performed during the Spring of 1665 with lavish costumes, set pieces and a star cast with leading actors of the period.

Its full title was The Indian Emperour, or the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, being the Sequel of The Indian Queen . As this might suggest, the story follows the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire during the early 16th century.

Primary characters included the conquistador Hérnan Cortés, who led the expedition, and Montezuma, the Emperor of the Aztec Empire.

The Conquest of Granada

Dryden's 1672 play, titled The Conquest of Granada, was originally performed in two parts, the first in 1670 and the second in 1671. It was then published in 1672.

In the preface to the play, Dryden coins the term 'heroic drama', proposing his theories and rules for his new genre.

The Conquest of Granada concerns the Battle of Granada, and its subsequent fall, ending the almost decade-long Granada War (1482-1491) between the Moors and the Spanish. Its lead characters were the hero, Almanzor and his love, Almahide.

The play reached exceptional levels of fame and success. However, for critics, it came to reveal flaws in Dryden's neoclassical heroic genre.

Detractors noted its convoluted plot and ostentatious, bombastic language, ridiculing the superficiality and self-importance of its blundering military heroes in stories that seemed to lack moral depth and nuance.

The philosophy of the heroic drama, as laid out in the Preface to The Conquest of Granada, was even more contentious. Dryden's insistence on the need to remember 'pure drama' seemed to some pretentious and elitist, denigrating contemporary theatre as inferior and unimportant. In reaction, various writers satirised Dryden and his new genre.

In one famous example, the play The Rehearsal (1761), written by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, pointedly mocks Dryden's self-importance through its main character, Bayes, a hubristic playwright who laboriously lectures his actors about the importance of the play they are putting on.

The Black Prince

Another important example of a heroic drama was The Black Prince (1667), written by Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery.

The story chronicles the life of Edward, the eponymous Black Prince, the eldest son of King Edward III. It particularly focuses on the Battle of Poitiers (1356), at which the Prince leads his forces to victory, defeating and capturing the French King John II.

The play premiered at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, with King Charles II in attendance, as well as other members of the royal court. It was received with great esteem and was lauded by other members of the aristocracy.

Heroic Drama - Key takeaways

• Heroic drama was a genre of play popularised in the 1660s which told stories of epic grandeur.
• Heroic dramas were written exclusively using heroic couplets.
• Other important characteristics of heroic dramas include a noble hero and themes of love, honour and courage.
• John Dryden coined the term in 1670.
• Examples of the heroic drama include: Dryden's The Indian Emperour (1665) and Boyle's The Black Prince (1667).

Frequently Asked Questions about Heroic Drama

--> what is the purpose of heroic tragedy.

Heroic tragedy creates a powerful emotional response in audiences as they witness a noble hero experience heartbreaking tragedy on a grand scale.

--> What are the features of heroic drama?

The key features of heroic drama include the heroic verse form, epic stories and a noble hero.

--> What is the difference between heroic drama and domestic drama?

Heroic dramas involve larger than life stories and figures, operating on an epic scale. Domestic tragedies, however, follow ordinary characters from the middle or lower classes that have commonplace struggles and experiences.

--> What is meant by heroic drama?

The heroic drama is a dramatic genre that involved epic stories of grandeur.

--> What is an example of heroic drama?

John Dryden's The Indian Emperour (1665) is an example of heroic drama.

What is heroic drama?

Heroic drama is a dramatic genre concerned with epic stories and larger than life figures.

What is heroic verse?

Rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter

Who coined the term 'heroic drama'?

John Dryden

For which play was the term coined?

The Conquest of Granada  (1670)

During which period of English history did the heroic drama emerge?

The Restoration   (1660-85)

Which King ascended the throne in 1660?

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Article contents

• Alberto Toscano Alberto Toscano Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1100
• Published online: 22 November 2019

From Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics onward, tragedy has loomed large in the genealogy of literary theory. But this prominence is in many regards paradoxical. The original object of that theory, the Attic tragedies performed at the Dionysian festivals in 5th- century bce Athens, are, notwithstanding their ubiquitous representation on the modern stage, only a small fraction of the tragedies produced in Athens, and are themselves torn from their context of performance. The Poetics and the plays that served as its objects of analysis would long vanish from the purview of European culture. Yet, when they returned in the Renaissance as cultural monuments to be appropriated and repeated, it was in a context largely incommensurable with their existence in Ancient Greece. While the early moderns created their own poetics (and politics) of tragedy and enlisted their image of the Ancients in the invention of exquisitely modern literary and artistic forms (not least, opera), it was in the crucible of German Idealism and Romanticism, arguably the matrix of modern literary theory, that certain Ancient Greek tragedies were transmuted into models of “the tragic,” an idea that played a formative part in the emergence of philosophical modernity, accompanying a battle of the giants between dialectical (Hegelian) and antidialectical (Nietzschean) currents that continues to shape our theoretical present. The gap between a philosophy of the tragic and the poetics and history of tragedy as a dramatic genre is the site of much rich and provocative debate, in which the definition of literary theory itself is frequently at stake. Tragedy is in this sense usefully defined as a genre in conflict. It is also a genre of conflict, in the sense that ethical conflicts, historical transitions, and political revolutions have all come to define its literary forms, something that is particularly evident in the place of both tragedy and the tragic in the dramas of decolonization.

• decolonization

Between Ethics and Poetics

The entrance of tragedy into the purview of Ancient Greek philosophy took two very distinct modalities that would leave an important mark on its afterlives as an object of literary theory. Following Jacques Rancière’s account of the different regimes for the identification of art, we can refer to these as ethical and poetic theorizations of tragedy, respectively consolidated in Book III of Plato’s Republic and in the first and only extant half of Aristotle’s Poetics . Both philosophers interrogated tragedy in terms of the concept of mimesis (roughly: imitation), but Plato’s preoccupation was principally with the compatibility of imitative practices with the constitution of a just city ( polis ) whereas Aristotle sought to locate tragedy within a broader classification, analysis, and normative criticism of the varieties or genres of poetry.

The question of genre emerges in the Republic in the prescriptive context of a dialogue centering on the pedagogical suitability, for the raising of the city’s ruling class (the “guardians”), of different imitative practices. As Socrates declares to his interlocutor Adeimantus: “One kind of poetry and story-telling employs only imitation—tragedy and comedy, as you say. Another kind employs only narration by the poet himself—you find this most of all in dithyrambs. A third kind uses both—as in epic poetry and many other places.” 1 Now, while this tripartition originates in Plato’s doctrine of ideas and his dialectical method, it is also grounded in a political anthropology (or political psychology) of mimesis , in which what we could call a principle of specialization reigns supreme and for which certain varieties of imitation can divert or weaken a capacity for just action. 2

Foreshadowing later castigations of actors and comedians for corrupting the ethos of citizens, Plato sees imitation as a dangerous source of inconstancy and diversity. Given the principle that an individual can only carry out a single occupation with excellence, an imitator should not imitate multiple kinds of action. This is why no one, according to Socrates, can be at one and the same time a good tragic and comic actor. If imitation is to be allowed, it is only to be directed at civically appropriate models, namely “people who are courageous, self-controlled, pious, and free, and their actions”; the maturing rulers of a just city “mustn’t be clever at doing or imitating slavish or shameful actions, lest from enjoying the imitation, they come to enjoy the reality.” 3 This striving after a stringent civic pedagogy, capable of blocking any fount of mutability or strife, is accompanied by the prescription of particular modes of imitation, narrative and music—down to the identification of proper rhythms and modes of music. So, just as tragedies are destabilizing, along with Homeric epics, by their depiction of amoral or metamorphic deities, so they are objectionable because of the centrality of mourning in their plots, which are antithetical to the education of courageous citizens and soldiers. As Socrates declares, “we no longer need dirges and lamentations among our words.” 4 In Book X, Socrates makes an incisive comparison between the different standards of value that his contemporaries apply, on the one hand, to lamentation over one’s own fate, which is to be curtailed and is viewed as a sign of unmanliness, and, on other, to the pleasure taken in the poetic imitation of the weeping and wailing of others. He notes that the risk of such a twofold criterion is that the absence of shame “in praising and pitying another man who, in spite of his claim to goodness, grieves excessively” leads to a potential loss of control over one’s own lamenting part. Mimesis is here potentially contagious and disruptive, and the pleasures of representation can always foreshadow a slackening of one’s capacity for just action: “enjoyment of other people’s sufferings is necessarily transferred to our own and . . . the pitying part, if it is nourished and strengthened on the sufferings of others, won’t be easily held in check when we ourselves suffer.” 5

The primacy of the ethical (and the political) over aesthetics or criticism in Plato’s account of tragedy is evident in how the intention to banish the tragedians from the city is accompanied by repeated acknowledgments of tragedy’s artistic excellence, in keeping with contemporary Athenian taste. In Book VII of the Laws , Plato also scripts an ironic provocation into the dialogue, namely that the tragedians cannot be let into the philosopher’s city because its legislators are in direct competition with them: “we are poets like yourselves, composing in the same genre, and your competitors as artists and actors in the finest drama, which true law alone has the natural powers to “produce” to perfection.” 6 It is precisely because tragedy, as another dialogue of Plato has it, “is that form of poetry which most delights the populace and most seduces the soul,” that a philosophically grounded political psychology, an alternative normative and pedagogic nexus of polis and psyche , must ultimately clash with it. 7 As Rancière has observed, the “arts” as such do not exist for Plato, only different ways of doing and making, together with a discriminating distinction between true arts that produce knowledge by imitating a model (an idea) and arts that imitate mere appearances. In choosing among the latter, the criterion is not epistemic (do they provide us with correct knowledge?) but pedagogical and ethical (do they contribute to shaping a good character?). In Plato’s ethical regime, therefore, “it is a matter of knowing in what ways images’ [and spectacles’ and texts’] mode of being affects the ethos , the mode of being of individuals and communities.” 8

The shift from this ethical regime to a “poetic” or “representative” one in the Poetics —by some lights the first treatise of literary theory, and one almost entirely devoted to tragedy in its surviving half—is underscored by Aristotle’s explicit distinction between criteria of correctness in the poetic and civic domains. 9 The privilege of tragic action to Aristotle’s poetics, as Rancière notes, shifts the issue from one having to do with the ethicopolitical adequacy of a copy to a model (and its associated communal pedagogy) to the pragmatic classification of different modalities of imitation and their effects. Or, in the French philosopher’s interpretation, from the “ essence of the image” to the “ substance of the poem, the fabrication of a plot arranging actions that represent the activities of men.” 10 This understanding of a shift in regimes chimes with the perception of the Poetics as a treatise in which the polis is palpably absent, a feature that some attribute to Aristotle’s effort to depart from the particularities of Attic tragedy in order to produce a universal theory of a poetic genre independent of its ritual or political context. 11

Whereas the origin of poetic genres in Plato is expeditiously dealt with, and entirely oriented toward political prescription, the Poetics advances a set of principles of rational classification among forms of mimesis , many of which continue to underwrite contemporary approaches to literary theory. Above all, genres of imitation can be distinguished in terms of their media , their objects , and their mode (or manner ). 12 What is imitated are not objects or things, but rather agents . In Aristotle’s enormously influential definition: “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotion.” 13 The definition incorporates the six hierarchically ordered components of tragedy, which, as much of the Poetics detail, must be considered in judging the quality of a particular tragedy (demonstrating the continuity here between poetic analysis and the normative judgment of literary criticism). These components are “plot, character, diction, reasoning, spectacle and lyric poetry.” 14

Crucial to what could be seen as Aristotle’s intellectualistic bias for action, plot ( mythos ) has primacy over all other components and is characterized as the soul of tragedy. This primacy of plot, critical to Aristotle’s inauguration of a poetic or representative regime, also has its own “ethical” rationale. It is because “the goal of life is an activity, not a quality,” that tragedy concerns the mimesis of actions and not character, which is subordinate to the former. In tragedy, what characters do takes precedence over who they are , and character is “the kind of thing which discloses the nature of a choice.” 15 This predominance of plot is directly linked to key dimensions of Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy, namely what we could call, on the one hand, its textualism , on the other, its antimusical, antispectacular, and antiritualistic bias. In a manner which, as is explored later, jars with the deeply ritualized place of tragic performances in the agonistic and religious-political context of the Dionysia, for Aristotle the quality of a tragedy is “clear from reading,” and its central affective dimension is fundamentally carried by plot alone. 16 If the latter is properly constructed—as Aristotle’s model, the Oedipus Tyrannos , testifies—“even without seeing it, anyone who hears the events which occur shudders and feels pity at what happens.” Conversely, spectacle “is attractive, but is very inartistic and is least germane to the art of poetry.” 17 It is on this basis that Aristotle parries the view of tragedy as a plebeian genre inferior to epic, arguing that such considerations are merely a matter of performance, not poetry. 18

Though the classical or dramatic unities of time, place, and action are a retrospective projection onto the Poetics —ascribed to the Italian dramaturg Gian Giorgio Trissino, whose Sofonisba ( 1524 ) is taken to mark the beginning of early modern tragedy—a normative concern with unity and wholeness does govern Aristotle’s evaluation of tragedies. 19 This preoccupation with what we could term organic form is both spatial and temporal. For a play to be beautiful its parts must be arranged in the right order and within the proper magnitude. Neither instantaneity nor sprawl will do. Rather, and in keeping with the demands of the plot, a beautiful drama will imitate a great and unified action “up to the limits of simultaneous perspicuity.” 20 A synthetic overview of the tragedy and its plot is necessary. While grounding his poetics in a conception of organic form, Aristotle is deeply sensitive to the temporal unfolding of the action, which is marked by change of fortune ( metabasis, metabole ), preceded by the plot’s complication ( desis ) and followed by its resolution ( lusis ). 21 It is the metabasis or metabole , which in itself is the bearer of that key philosophical affect, “astonishment,” which arises “when things come about contrary to expectation but because of one another,” and with the retrospective seal of necessity. 22 The wonder at change sought in the production of tragic drama can occur through reversal ( peripeteia ), recognition ( anagnorisis ), or suffering ( pathos ). It is the presence of at least two of these qualitative elements of tragedy together that make a tragedy “complex.” Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos is a model tragedy for Aristotle because of the way it masterfully combines peripeteia (e.g., the messenger triggers a doomed series of events in the very act of allaying Oedipus’s fears), anagnorisis (in the devastating passage from ignorance to knowledge), and pathos understood as an action (and not just a state of body or mind) involving destruction or pain—most memorably, Oedipus’s gouging out of his own eyes. The complexity of Oedipus Tyrannos can be compared to the simplicity of tragedies solely articulated around suffering (Sophocles’s Ajax ) and devoid of dramatic movement (Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound ). It is in the complex plots of tragedy that the superiority of poetry over history is also attested, in that—developing categories central to Aristotle’s own metaphysics—tragedies unfold actions according to their probability and necessity , rather than their mere factuality, thus attaining a superior universality. And yet tragedy is not to be prized for its philosophical lessons but rather for its specific affective operation, for the way in which, by eliciting pity ( phobos ) and fear ( eleos ) through its plots, it makes possible the catharsis of those emotions. Catharsis has been the subject of fierce and complex centuries-long debate, made all the more intense by the combination of its centrality to the definition of tragedy in the Poetics and its under-determination. Physiological purgation, religious purification, and psychoanalytic sublimation have all been advanced as ways of lending it theoretical solidity. 23 If the purpose of catharsis were viewed to be civic edification or conformity, we would of course be returned to Plato’s ethical terrain, though it is not by any means evident that this was a primary concern for Aristotle, who some commentators see as minimizing the collective or even democratic dimension of tragedy. 24

Dividing the City

If Plato suppressed tragedies in an ideal city, and Aristotle absented the city from his analysis of tragic poetry, how are we to approach the formative nexus of politics and tragedy in Ancient Athens? Many historians of Ancient Greece have underscored the role of tragedy as a form of collective self-reflection for a polity undergoing an epochal transition marked by the rise of democratic institutions of citizenship, a crisis of traditional belief systems, and recurrent violent conflicts—in the guise of both internecine stasis and “international” polemos . For Christian Meier, among the salient functions of tragedy was to represent the new through the old. 25 This meant both framing the unsettling transformations faced by Athenian citizens through familiar myths and legends and making room for ancient doubts as well as the more opaque or archaic aspects of social reality. The radical novelties of democratization, secularization, imperial power, and citizenship—innovations that could lead to fear about one’s own power—were thus filtered through the topoi of traditional myth or legend and presented on the collective and ritualized stage of the festivals, themselves organized as civic competitions ( agon ). This allowed tragedy to carry out a singular work of mediation and reflection on the “intellectual structure of politics,” with a nuance and complexity not available to formal civic discourse. Among its overriding concerns was the haunting of the polis by forms of limitless opposition and accumulation of power and wealth. In staging and giving form to these “unlimits,” tragedy could make manifest “the interdependence of progressive democracy and conservatism”; it could aid in “making visible the terrifyingly disruptive invisible powers of an interconnected universe,” while also showing how they could be integrated within the limits of a politically cohesive whole. 26

In other words, if tragedy is the art of Athenian democracy, it is so not in the mode of mere celebration or legitimation but in how it provides a collective and aesthetic form through which the polis can treat itself as a new and problematic subject—albeit through the anachronism of legendary struggles. The space of democracy can here be envisaged as one animated or haunted by conflict. This conflict not only operates between different citizens, or between citizens and their others (metics, barbarians, women, slaves), but between the city and its past. The world of tragedy is a world in transition, rent by ambiguity and beset by crisis. One of these transitions can be regarded as that between myth and logos—though the linearity of a passage from one to the other has been amply questioned. In Jean-Pierre Vernant’s view, tragedy emerges when myth comes to be interrogated from the standpoint of the citizen. Or, when the civic order enters into shearing tension with archaic or predemocratic standards of ethics and justice. Notwithstanding his criticisms of the philosophy of the tragic emerging from German Idealism and Romanticism, Vernant here echoes Hegel’s view of the Antigone as the exemplary representation of the clash between ethical orders with equal if incompatible claims to legitimacy. He also presents this as a clash between ethos (character) and daimon (religious power), or between agency and fate. Most significant in terms of the poetics of tragedy is the way in which its language registers contradictoriness. Attic tragedy stages the ethical equivocity of crucial words in the lexicon of the polis, above all nomos (law). As Vernant puts it in an incisive formulation: “the function of words used on stage is not so much to establish communication between the various characters as to indicate the blockages and barriers between them and the impermeability of their minds, to locate the points of conflict.” 27 This observation chimes with Friedrich Hölderlin’s encapsulation of tragic drama as “speech against speech,” or Alexandre Kojève’s observation, from his 1930s lecture courses on Hegel, according to which: “In Epic, it is necessary to know what happens; in Tragedy—what is said. In foreign wars (epic), no need to speak; in (tragic) civil war—discourse.” 28 The Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano, writing in her Roman exile about Antigone , would refer to the play’s concern as “the labyrinth of civil war and subsequent tyranny . . . the double labyrinth of family and history.” 29

Tragedy, which is envisaged from this perspective not merely as a dramatic or literary genre but as a “total social fact,” explores an ethical (which is also to say a social, political, and religious) “border zone” in a “universe of conflict.” 30 Its worldview is not dogmatic but problematizing . As Vernant’s collaborator Pierre Vidal-Naquet suggests, tragedy proceeds with regard to the city like Freudian dreamwork in the face of reality, deforming, renewing, interrogating, and interrupting the civic continuity that Athens prized so highly. If tragedy is a mirror of the city, then it is a broken mirror, staging and refracting the polis ’s multiple tensions and the clashing codes of conduct that threaten its dissolution. This interrupting and questioning of the city is above all a questioning of the very possibility of action. If, following Aristotle, action is the object of mimesis , then, as Vernant suggests, that action is split between, on the one hand, the deliberative rational agency of protagonists, and, “on the other, placing one’s stake on what is unknown and incomprehensible, risking oneself on the terrain that remains impenetrable, entering into a game with supernatural forces, not knowing whether, as they join with one, they will bring success or doom.” 31 The apparent clarity of choice is persistently shadowed by an opaque necessity.

In her important contribution to the study of Attic tragedy, The Mourning Voice , Nicole Loraux pushes the approach of her erstwhile teachers Vernant and Vidal-Naquet even further to explore an unpolitical or impolitical tendency within tragedy itself. 32 Loraux questions a habit, especially evident in its 20th-century resurrections and repetitions (her example is Jean-Paul Sartre’s adaptation of Euripides’s The Trojan Women ) to over-value the political import and intention of Greek tragedy. 33 The theatre of Dionysus, as she quips, was not located in the agora, and tragedy is not just a reflection of the political but also or especially a way of taking on what the assembly of citizens pushes away. As her work on Greek political rhetoric and funeral orations had also explored, the self-image, legitimation, and reproduction of the polis is predicated on an effort to limit the divisive effects of practices not just of revenge and retribution, but of lamentation and mourning—practices that are, as Plato’s own objection to tragic mimesis remind us, associated with femininity. 34 Tragedy is the bearer of an antipolitical element to the extent that it challenges the Athenian ideology of the city , whereby the city must above all be united and peaceful. 35 This ideology, which turns the polis into an anti-tragic machine, requires a practice of forgetting against what Claudius in Hamlet calls “obstinate condolement.” The voicing of pain, especially women’s pain, interrupts the city’s orchestration of amnesia. If the city disavows death in the rhetorical invocation of its continuity, its “forever” ( aeí ), then tragedies force the city to face suffering in the interjection of female pain, emblematically expressed in the exclamation, recurrent throughout tragedies, aiaî . The voicing of pain also reminds us that tragedy is accompanied by a verbalized topography of the body, structured around the places of violent death. 36 What Athenian political discourse tries to hold apart, namely the spheres of civic speech and individual suffering, are mixed together in tragedy; this is reflected in its very dramatic structure, in the alternation of speeches, and in the alteration of speech. 37 This is why for Loraux, tragedy is a genre in conflict —not just in terms of its themes or contents, as Hegel, Vernant, and many others would agree—but in its very form . 38 To think with tragedy would then be to think it as a dramatic form of contradiction, making simultaneously present an insistent reference to politics with the staging of “anti-political behaviours,” a politics that prescribes forgetting with a mourning that revives divisive memory.

Were Greek Tragedies Tragic?

In our forgoing discussion, we have considered approaches, whether philosophical or historical, that treat tragedy as a more or less familiar genre of dramatic performance and an analyzable literary text. But what if there is something in Ancient tragedies that is ultimately refractory to treating them as “literature”? What if our approach to Aeschylus or Sophocles or Euripides is ultimately skewed by anachronism, by the projection of a philosophical concept of “the tragic” born in late 18th-century Germany onto 5th-century bce Athens? This argument—which resonates with but is not reducible to earlier arguments for the foreignness of tragic ritual to modern aesthetics—has been forcefully advanced in the past few years by a number of French authors. Drawing on an ethnopoetic approach, the classicist Florence Dupont has argued against the comprehensive neglect, beginning with Aristotle’s own Poetics , of the musical and ritual performance to which the tragic text is destined. 39 She makes this point with particular force in an iconoclastic study of the theatre of Aeschylus, widely hailed as the “father” of Attic tragedy. Rather than making our misrecognition of tragedy’s musical and dramatic singularity a matter of modern anachronism, for Dupont, the Aeschylus who we think we know, read, and perform, was born about a century after his death, with the canonization of the Greek tragedians. It was with the decree promulgated by the rhetorician and legislator Lycurgus—stipulating that the city produce monuments to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, along with official versions of their dramatic texts, allowing for repeat performances as part of the city’s cultural patrimony—that the ground was laid for the great misunderstanding that still structures our relation to the genre. 40 Lycurgus’s decree, by “fixing the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as paradigmatic and first texts . . . contributed to blocking the normal process of their diffusion and scattering towards other aesthetic forms, as well as their own mutation and osmosis with other musical genres.” 41 Before Lycurgus, the texts of the tragedies were neither to be read nor conserved. With him, we have a monumentalization and nationalization of Attic tragedy, which is also crucially a textualization—a political precondition for Aristotle’s own largely “apolitical” poetics. Tragedy is no longer a matter of agon , festival, acting, or music, as much as it is one of texts, of works. Its idealization is a de-dramatization.

Dupont reminds us that Aeschylus, along with other tragedians, was not a poet or writer in the modern sense. He was not an author but a director of sorts, a chorodidaskalos —someone who put on spectacles rather than produced texts. The few written plays we retain from Aeschylus are but mute, immobile archaeological traces of what living tragedies were. And even then, we now experience them without their extant musical notation, structured into acts and scenes that are externally imposed upon them. 42 In antiquity, writing was not a mode of expression but a technique at the service of practices; contra Aristotle, mise-en-scène had primacy over text. This is an archaeology that seeks to abandon our ideological search for origins and authors, a search elicited by Lycurgus’s “symbolic revolution” and his “identitarian patrimonalisation,” establishing a singularly Athenian birth of tragedy. 43 It also means abandoning the idea of an essence of tragedy. Notwithstanding her dismissal of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as an “ontological narrative with no historical relevance,” Dupont’s anti-Aristotelianism shares with the German philosopher an emphasis on the centrality of festival, music, and suffering to Attic tragedies. 44

The music of tragedy is played by the aulos , the flute-like instrument that accompanies death laments, threnodies. Aeschylian tragedy is thus presented by Dupont “as the sonic spectacle of violence, murder and misery”; the competitions in which tragedies were performed were “festivals of tears” whose choruses were fictionally composed of cultural groups suited for mourning and weeping (women, the old, barbarians, captives). The redefinition of tragedy breaks with Aristotle’s Poetics as much as with philosophical conceptions of the tragic, whether in German Romanticism or Nietzsche: “Tragedy is a pathetic and aesthetic variation with its basis in the music of the aulos offered up to Dionysus.” 45 Though much more strongly articulated around the aural dimension, this perspective is comparable to the philological assault on philosophical definitions of tragedy advanced by Nietzsche’s great adversary, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who, in his 1907 “Introduction to Attic Tragedy,” first published in his 1889 edition of Euripides’s Hercules , declared that:

An Attic tragedy is a self-enclosed piece of heroic legend [ Heldensage ], poetically adapted in elevated style [ in erhabenem Stile ] for presentation by an Attic citizen chorus and two or three actors, and intended to be performed as part of public worship in the sanctuary of Dionysus.” 46

Crucially, however, for Dupont tragedy is fundamentally not a narrative, not even of a legend. The concatenation of events in the scenario that serves as the pretext for performance has neither necessity nor verisimilitude, drawing tragedy closer to oratorio than drama. Against an anachronistic backward projection of the structure of modern Western theatre on Attic tragedy, in Aeschylus there is “no plot, no psychology, no coherent character, no ideas, no representation”; without its musical mise-en-scène, the text is unreadable . Moreover, tragic speech is performative not representative . 47

Arguing against the hegemony of a philosophical conception of the tragic over our access to Greek tragedy, the French historian of literature William Marx—drawing partial inspiration from Wilamowitz’s 19th-century polemic against Nietzsche—has particularly stressed the distorting effects imposed by the history of the transmission and canonization of Greek tragedies. The thirty-two extant tragedies by the three playwrights monumentalized by Lycurgus are only a fraction of their contribution to the Dionysian contests (circa 220 plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), and an even smaller one of a minimum number of 648 tragedies performed over all. 48 This brutal selection, partly accidental and partly political, taking place across Ancient Athens, Rome, Byzantium, and Renaissance Europe, is the unfortunate condition of possibility for modeling the generic object “ancient tragedy” on a very small sample of the plays performed at the Dionysian games. This tendency was already present after Lycurgus’s “symbolic revolution” in Aristotle’s Poetics , but became especially marked after the Romantic-Idealist birth of the tragic, which leads in its turn to a smattering even of the surviving tragedies becoming paradigmatic—namely Aeschylus’s Eumenides , and Sophocles’s Antigone and Oedipus Rex . Marx notes how the survival of Euripides’s “alphabetical” tragedies—named as such because of the organization of the volume in which they were compiled—allows us to see how a less loaded “sample” of tragic texts might make our extant models far less viable. To the filtering effects of Lycurgus, Aristotle, and the vagaries of transmission, Marx adds another striking element, namely the suggestion that our identification of tragedies with the question of fate or destiny is a by-product of how the selection of the tragic canon was consolidated in Rome in the 2nd century , in an ideological climate shaped by Stoic doctrines of fatum . Awareness of the historical contingencies attendant on the formation of our understanding of tragedy as a genre makes possible the conclusion that there “isn’t a tragic: there are almost as many as there are tragedies and just a few less than there are philosophies.” 49

Marx’s argument about the transformation of a partial and partisan sample of plays into tragedy as an “ideal literary object” over-determined by a philosophy of the tragic is a powerful one. So is his reminder that the rooting of tragedies in particular loci (e.g., Colonus) is something we cannot retrieve. For Marx, we risk acting like archaeologists who, faced with the Venus of Samothrace, would project back a world of headless, armless human beings. Yet this critique of the collusion of idealism and our modern notion of “literature” in eclipsing tragedy behind the tragic risks a kind of exoticism, a vision of tragedy as irremediably foreign and other, a lost practice that can only be reconstructed via negativa or by analogy with other domains of ritualized performance. As Marx concludes: “We must look for the truth of tragedy neither in the tragic nor in what the theatre is today—but elsewhere, sometimes very far away: in the Noh play, psychoanalysis, the mass.” 50

From the Ancients to the Moderns and Back Again

The effort to suspend the domination of a philosophy of the tragic over the reception of tragedies has also been advanced in the context of a re-evaluation of early modern dramaturgy and poetics. In a capacious recovery of the “lost” world of tragedy between the mid- 16th century and the close of the 18th, Blair Hoxby reminds us that in the vast span of time between the 7th and 15th centuries , tragedy largely vanished from the purview of European culture, with Euripides misrecognized as a philosopher and the very adjective “tragic” taking on an uncertain reference. 51 After Giorgio Valla’s translation of the Poetics in 1498 , the circulation in printed editions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca from circa 1520s, and Francesco Robortello and Vincenzo Maggi’s lectures on Aristotle’s poetics, this situation changed drastically. But the poetics and literature arising from this renaissance of tragedy was not pedantically Aristotelian, nor did it anticipate the Romantic invention of the tragic. Early modern theorists of tragedy drew on an ample set of Ancient Greek and Roman sources, from Apuleius to Vitruvius, Horace to Plutarch. Their theories shaped and were in turn shaped by a tragic repertoire that cannot be boiled down to any univocal theory—including classical and baroque tragedies in Italy and France, the early operas of Monteverdi and Cavalli, Lully’s tragedies en musique , Jesuit solemn tragedies, and so forth. 52

Like challenges to our received notions of Attic tragedy, this revisionist perspective on the theory and practice of early modern tragedy takes an anti-idealist cast, putting the spectacle of suffering at the heart of the genre. In terms of the elements of tragedy enumerated in the Poetics , in early modern tragedy the construction of complex plots prescribed by Aristotle takes second stage to “pure displays of pathos [that] were in themselves the primary goal and justification of tragedy.” 53 Greek pathos came to be translated in Latin as affectus, perturbatio, passio , giving rise to a whole dramaturgical rhetoric of the passions. Scanning the variegated landscape of this forgotten repertoire, Hoxby proposes that we bracket our Romantic idea of the tragic and allow ourselves to be guided by five counterintuitive postulates, which systematically undermine the building blocks of that idea: great drama need not be national ; beautiful design need not be subordinated to organic form; tragedy is primarily a matter of theatre not poetry; we need to valorize the “modern” aspects of ancient tragedy, transcending the contempt for Euripides which marks the philosophies of the tragic; finally, the passions—and not just time, space or the emplotment of action—are the crucial dramatic unities of early modern tragedy. 54

It is striking how much Dupont’s or Marx’s objections to an understanding of tragedy articulated around the categories of freedom and necessity resonate with Hoxby’s conclusions. He encapsulates these in his reading of two tragedies that bookend the “lost world” of early modern tragedy, Trissino’s Sofonisba and Giambattista Varesco’s libretto for Mozart’s opera Idomeneo . As he notes:

Like a great deal of tragic drama written from 1515 to 1795 , Sofonisba offers its audience this pleasure: it dilates the brutal change from life to death into a rite of passage whose middle terms (dying and mourning) are ritualized, and in so doing it transforms the theatre into a house of mourning. 55

But this mourning is not the child of fatum ; both Trissino and Varesco are distinguished from later romantics by “their belief that tragedy is a meditation on the moral response to haphazardness in this world, not a demonstration of freedom that can succeed only if the hero is crushed by dire necessity.” 56

A reflection on early modern tragedy also requires a reconsideration of its politics. Departing in a more historical-sociological vein from Walter Benjamin’s pioneering reflections on the pathos of sovereign indecision in German baroque drama (the Trauerspiel , or mourning play), Franco Moretti interprets Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy as a radical problematization (analogous in force to the one identified by Vernant and Vidal-Naquet for Ancient Athens) of the legitimacy of political power. This conception of modern tragedy is both predicated upon the emergence of absolutism and oriented toward the “deconsecration” of sovereignty. For Moretti, this tragedy played a historically transformative role in giving rise to the kind of public that could envisage the possibility of bringing monarchs to justice. In his lapidary formulation: “Tragedy disentitled the absolute monarch to all ethical and rational legitimation. Having deconsecrated the king, tragedy made it possible to decapitate him.” 57 But the radicality of this tragedy can also issue into a kind of nihilism, as in the conclusion of King Lear , which “makes clear that no one is any longer capable of giving meaning to the tragic process; no speech is equal to it, and there precisely lies the tragedy.” 58

The agonistic dyad of tragedy and the tragic, which governs many critical theories of the genre, is directly thematized by Moretti, who tries to articulate a literary analysis of narrative structure with a historical and sociological excavation of normative orders. For him, tragedy must be grasped as “a structural concept, capable of simultaneously defining a syntagmatic axis (plot) and a paradigmatic axis (values), and of clarifying the unique relation that obtains between them in tragedy.” This involves a nominalist deflation of the metaphysics of the tragic, in which what comes to the fore instead is a genre determined by an impasse in the representation of history. There is no tragic, only tragedy, as “a particular form of representing that history: a rigorously asymmetrical structure marked by a constitutive lack. Fully realized tragedy is the parable of the degeneration of the sovereign inserted in a context that can no longer understand it .” 59 This conclusion resonates with the notion that Jacobean tragedy draws its formal coherence not from an aesthetics of harmony but from “the sharpness of definition given to metaphysical and social dislocation, not in an aesthetic, religious or didactic resolution of it.” 60 In other words, that this modern tragedy is a desperate effort to give form to the imminence of civil war, to the “idea of individuals and society being destroyed from within ,” 61 encapsulated in Albany’s lines from King Lear : “humanity must perforce prey on itself / Like monsters of the deep.” Or, as A. C. Bradley put it, in a distinctly Hegelian formulation: “the self division and intestinal warfare of the ethical substance, not so much the war of good with evil as the war of good with good.” 62

Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel had drawn critically from the writings of the jurist Carl Schmitt on sovereign exception to capture how baroque dramas exploded any notion of a trans-historical essence of the tragic. After World War II, and his own brief captivity and removal from academic positions for his National-Socialist militancy, Schmitt reopened his dialogue with Benjamin (“suicided” by Nazism at the onset of the war), precisely around the question of tragedy. Schmitt turned to Hamlet to identify modern tragedy as the form of a formless time, a period of civil war, revolution, and state-formation in which heroic drama lost its actuality. Rather than the historical-materialist method adopted by the likes of Moretti or Dollimore (or indeed Vernant and Vidal-Naquet with regard to Attic tragedy), Schmitt provides a political reading of Shakespeare pivoting around the notion of the “intrusion” of time and history into drama. As he notes:

In times of religious schisms the world and world history lose their secure forms, and a human problematic becomes visible out of which no purely aesthetic consideration could create the hero of a revenge drama. Historical reality is stronger than every aesthetic, stronger also than the most ingenious subject. 63

Whereas history had entered through the mediation of myth into Greek tragedy, in Shakespeare it does so as immediately available historical reality. 64 And yet, contra Moretti, for Schmitt grasping this intrusion still requires an idea of the tragic. As he writes: “Shakespeare’s greatness resides precisely in the fact that, in the existing chaos of his time and the quickly antiquated flotsam of daily events and reportage, he recognized and respected the tragic core.” 65 The tragic, here read through the lens of an antagonistic political realism, is a matter of the encounter with something intractable, irremediable. And therein is to be found tragedy’s “surplus value.” As Schmitt observes, it lies in the

objective reality of the tragic action, in the enigmatic concatenation and entanglement of indisputably real people in the unpredictable course of indisputably real events. . . . All participants are conscious of an ineluctable reality that no human mind has conceived—a reality externally given, imposed and unavoidable. This unalterable reality is the mute rock upon which the play founders, sending the foam of genuine tragedy rushing to the surface. 66

Births of the Tragic

It is a striking testament to the pervasiveness of the Romantic idea of the tragic that even such a sworn foe of “political romanticism” as Carl Schmitt could echo its central element, namely the encounter of human agency with adverse necessity. In his elegant and influential essay on the idea of the tragic, the German literary theorist Peter Szondi identified the 20-year-old F. W. J. Schelling’s interpretation of Oedipus Tyrannos , in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism ( 1795 ), as the ground zero of the tragic, understood in terms of the dramatic form given to “the conflict of human freedom with the power of the objective world,” and specifically by Oedipus’s willingness to undergo punishment for a crime he could not avoid. 67 This birth of the tragic must also be grasped in terms of the reciprocal determination of two problems, one political, the other philosophical. The first relates to the manner in which German Idealism and Romanticism are defined by a complex entanglement of enthusiasm and disappointment, emulation and phobia, vis-à-vis the transformative turmoil of the French Revolution, and especially the terror (and how could one, after 1793 , not read Aristotelian phobos in the shadow of the guillotine?). The second, which in its own way transcodes the political impasse of the relationship of German intellectuals without a state to the history-making violence of French liberation, has to do with the relation between a post-Kantian philosophy of autonomy (criticism) and a Spinozist understanding of necessity (dogmatism). 68 The specifically German idea of the tragic can be understood as a manner of thinking through, or repeating , the Ancient Greeks in an effort to give form to the shattering contradictions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries . The aesthetic form of the tragic then becomes inseparable from the philosophical form (or style) of the dialectic. And the dialectic can in turn be modeled by the resolution of the clash between the Furies and Orestes in The Eumenides (as it was in Hegel’s Natural Law essay of 1802 ), by the contest of ethical orders in the Antigone , or indeed by the moral and cognitive peripeteia dramatized in Oedipus Tyrannos , what Szondi regards as the “most tragic” (because most dialectical) of plays:

At every point in the hero’s fate, he is met with the unity of salvation and annihilation, a fundamental trait of everything tragic. It is not annihilation that is tragic, but the fact that salvation becomes annihilation; the tragic does not take place in the hero’s downfall, but rather in the fact that man meets his demise along the very path he took up to escape this demise. 69

One can adopt the broad outlines of Szondi’s analysis without necessarily regarding the young Schelling’s idiosyncratic reading of Oedipus’s crime of freedom as the incipit of the tragic. A number of scholars have seen in the writings of Friedrich Schiller of the early 1790s a more pertinent cornerstone, not least because of the manner in which Schiller’s poetics and aesthetics arose out of his own dramaturgical efforts. 70 Schiller’s multiple essays on the tragic are also instructive because, unlike Schelling, or indeed Hegel, they incorporate a sustained reflection on the question of the delight that may be drawn from the spectacle of tragedy. This notion of tragic pleasure allows us both to trace the mutations of catharsis and the genealogy of an idea of the sublime. Schiller’s work can also show how a reflection on the tragic articulated around the problems of writing and stagecraft can increasingly move toward a speculative idea of the tragic, itself dependent on the increasing separation of aesthetic freedom from the prospect of political emancipation. 71 It is also in Schiller’s work, perhaps better than in Schelling’s, that we can begin to grasp the way in which “the romantic philosophy of the tragic interacted with two other romantic projects: the creation of a new ideal of literary form and the formulation of a philosophy of history.” 72

A more expansive and detailed genealogy of the idea of the tragic may also serve to cultivate some skepticism regarding the suddenness of its birth. Among the preconditions for the emergence of the Idealist or Romantic conception of the tragic was a sensitivity to the difference between ancient and modern tragedy. In the late 17th century Querelle des modernes et des anciens , the difference could be the object of a largely static appraisal, in which ancient literary productions could be studied in “parallels,” much as Plutarch had once penned his Parallel Lives . It was in the context of the Querelle that André Dacier translated the Poetics into French, a feat repeated half a century later in Germany by Michael Conrad Curtius. Tellingly, the translation of the Poetics here preceded the translation of Greek plays, which in any instance existed not as scenarios to be acted but as literary monuments of sorts (it was only some while after the emergence of the tragic as an idea that the production of Greek tragedies became a staple of the European stage). As the 18th century wore on, the recognition of the difference between ancient and modern tragedies developed into a reflection on their historicity. The dis-analogies between modern and ancient drama could thus be envisaged in terms of the effort to attain a common idea (of the tragic). The emergence of bourgeois tragedies with Lessing and Diderot was predicated on the notion that repeating the tragic for the present might require jettisoning the Aristotelian frame. According to Billings, prior to the emergence of the Romantic idea of the tragic, it was in the long-neglected polemic of the French Hellenist Guillaume Dubois de Rochefort against the philosopher Charles Batteaux, and in the rejection of normative Aristotelianism in Herder’s writings on Shakespeare—produced in the context of the Sturm und Drang movement and Herder’s collaboration with Goethe—that a notion of the tragic intimately linked to the notions of historicity and historicization could be born. In this regard, the 1770s can be seen to represent as much of a periodizing rift as the 1790s. 73

A sensitivity to this temporal dislocation, as refracted in drama and poetics, is thematized in the most advanced products of the symbolic revolution that had its epicenter in Jena in the 1790s. For both Friedrich Hölderlin and G. W. F. Hegel, albeit in divergent ways, tragedy is not just a genre of conflict, it is a genre of transition —a privileged form through which to think historical temporality. 74 In Hegel, tragedy is “a representation of, and reflection on historical process . . . an inquiry into temporality itself . . . a figure for understanding historicity.” 75 For both thinkers what is at stake in tragedy—in the wake of the revolutionary rupture of 1789 and its aftermath—is the very possibility of collective ethical and political life. For Hegel, in whose work historicization is also a way of circumscribing the pertinence of the tragic to its Athenian site, tragedy allowed the Greeks to think the inadequacy of their forms of religion to their ethical life, while also revealing the one-sidedness and immediacy that beset the Greek polis , notwithstanding its dazzling achievements (by contrast with Aristotle, it is ethos not mythos which is paramount for the German philosopher). This circumscription of tragedy could allow Hegel to stress the deep discontinuity between Attic tragedy and its modern epigones, but also to assert the superiority of comedy as a genre capable of responding to the everyday life of modern spirit. For Hölderlin, instead, the formal lessons of Greek tragedy, namely what he presented as an interruptive dialectic of “caesura” and “transport,” provided a unique glimpse into how poetic form could accommodate time’s upheavals. For the German poet and playwright, the difference between the ancient and the contemporary was not a matter of sequence or progression, but demanded a kind of parallax view, in which the singularity of the Greeks could be brought into contact with the uniquely problematic character of the present. As Billings observes:

Greek tragedy for Hölderlin is the depiction of historical process itself, affording a glimpse into the way the individual exists in a changing world. Greek forms, then, ultimately teach what it is to be modern . . . the death of Greek tragedy is the birth of the tragic.” 76

The decline of classical tragedy could thus also be linked to the end of “periodic rhythm,” to the fact that in modernity, as Hölderlin had it, “beginning and end no longer let themselves be rhymed.” 77 Not the timelessness of (Greek) tragedy, but the particular and alien timeliness of its form, is what allows it to be such a resource for the present, but only as long as the transition it embodies is subjected to a practice of translation. This matter of translation in Hölderlin—whose reflections on tragedy accompanied his renderings of Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone—is intimately linked to the manner in which he foregrounds, unlike his post-Kantian peers, how the language of tragedy, the “tragic word,” is drastically performative. In his striking formulation: “The Greek tragic word is deadly-factic, because the body which it seizes really kills.” 78 By the time that A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature consolidated the idea of the tragic into a consumable and influential set of precepts, Hölderlin’s eminently elusive notion of the “national” and his treatment of specific tragedies as ideational models of sorts would congeal into the kind of doxa that the likes of William Marx and Blair Hoxby have recently sought to dislodge. 79

Later reactions to Romantic and Hegelian legacies would put different stresses on the tragic cut between the ancient and the modern. For Kierkegaard, in a critical appropriation of the Hegelian apparatus, it was the implosion, under the sign of subjectivity, of the “substantial categories” of state, family, and destiny, and the complete separation from any epic tradition, that made for the difference of modern tragedy. The disanalogy between ancient and modern tragedy is rendered particularly acute by the fact that they stage radically dissimilar kinds of guilt, as well as by dissimilarities in the modes of compassion. For the Danish philosopher, in the Ancients there is greater sorrow but lesser pain, while modern tragedy—arising in an age with a tendency towards the comedy of everyday life—is a tragedy of anxiety , which “looks at sorrow in order to desire.” 80 In deep debt to this Kierkegaardian framing, the Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist Georg Lukács, before opting for dialectical realism in a Hegelian-Marxist vein, would sound one of the most striking notes of reflexive despair over the loss of the tragic—what we could conceive as a kind of “loss of loss.” In the essay on the “Metaphysics of Tragedy” from Soul and Form ( 1908/1911 ), the modern tragic is concerned not with the contradictions of action, but with its impasse or impossibility. The contemporary condition is marked not by the clash but by the abyss or incommunicability between being and value, ontology and morality, ethics and politics. For the young Lukács, historical existence “is the most unreal and unliving of all conceivable modes of being; one can describe it only negatively—by saying that something always comes to disturb the flow . . . Real life is always unreal, always impossible, in the midst of empirical life.” 81 Paradoxically, modernity is properly tragic to the extent it is refractory to tragic form , understood in clear contrast with the ancients. 82

Four decades earlier, as a university lecturer in philology at Basel, and prior to composing, under the dual influence of Wagner and Schopenhauer, his first book, The Birth of Tragedy , Friedrich Nietzsche would underscore the obstacles to the experience of Ancient tragedy—or rather to its imaginative as well as textual reconstruction—spawned by the Romantic idea of the tragic, establishing in the process the bases for a modern metaphysics of the tragic distinct from those of Schiller, Schelling, or Hegel. 83 As in Lukács, it was the form of tragedy, not its subject matter, that was key. Anticipating some of the themes encountered in Florence Dupont’s and William Marx’s iconoclastic critiques, Nietzsche’s lessons on Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos would stress the “irreducibility of the tragic to the moral scheme guilt-punishment” and polemicize against the moralist-rationalist interpretation of tragedy as a display of immanent poetic justice, anticipating his later assault on Christianity and its juridical imagination. 84 For Nietzsche too, like critics of the tragic that followed him, it was pathos , or more precisely the “transfiguration of suffering,” which makes for the singularity of tragedy’s form, with catharsis here understood, in a musical vein, as “a necessary consonance in the world of dissonances.” 85 Perhaps more unique, also with regard to Nietzsche’s antidemocratic animus (some of which has been traced to the trauma of the Paris Commune), is the way in which his Basel courses do not just chastise the moralist-rationalist figure of tragedy, but repeatedly stress the collective, mass mysticism that lies at the heart of Greek tragedy. 86 Tragic action is subordinated to the lyrical and pathetic lament of the chorus. The widely disputed idea of an emergence of tragedy from the cult of Dionysus, in the dissolution of individuation within a cosmic order and the initiation to transcendence through extreme fright, is here bound to the fusional-democratic character of the Dionysian games, which Nietzsche calls “a great festival of freedom and equality in which the servile classes recovered their original right.” 87 Tragedy draws on “popular mass poetry” which the dithyramb masters. 88 As the young Nietzsche declared: “The dithyramb is a popular chant, even one principally issuing from the lower classes. Tragedy has always conserved a democratic character; just as it was born from the people.” 89 Modern tragedy is modeled after the law court and was never really able to recover its popular base, which is a precondition of the truly tragic. While ancient tragedy is a “dramatised hymn,” modern tragedy is a “dramatised novel.” 90

It is noteworthy that Nietzsche’s excavation of a tragedy beyond the moral-rationalist vision could serve as a resource for thinking the tragic outside of a Eurocentric ambit. For the Nigerian playwright and theorist Wole Soyinka, the nexus between ritual loss of individuation and an aesthetic of communal immersion is also paramount. Writing of the God Ogun in Yoruba tragedy, Soyinka describes how he “surrender[s] his individuation once again . . . to the fragmenting process; to be resorbed within universal Oneness, the Unconscious, the deep black whirlpool of mythopoietic forces.” 91 Tragic drama is incomprehensible without a cosmic orientation, without a “communal compact whose choric essence supplies the collective energy for the challenger of chthonic realms.” 92 Note how this Nietzschean inspiration is explicitly bound up in Soyinka with a rejection of historicism and an affirmation of an unabashedly metaphysical conception of the tragic, which shows

man’s recognition of certain areas of depth-experience which are not satisfactorily explained by general aesthetic theories; and, of all subjective unease that is aroused by man’s creative insights, that wrench within the human psyche which we vaguely define as ‘tragedy’ is the most insistent voice that bids us return to our own sources. There, illusively, hovers the key to the human paradox, to man’s experience of being and non-being, his dubiousness as essence and matter, intimations of transience and eternity, and the harrowing drives between uniqueness and Oneness. 93

The Italian philosopher Gianni Carchia, investigating the relations between Greek Orphic cults and the development of theories of tragedy, criticized the Nietzschean perspective on the tragic for dissolving its specific literary and artistic form too quickly into the de-individuating element of ritual. Echoing Hölderlin’s “caesura,” for Carchia tragedy is an aesthetic arresting of, and differentiating, from life. It is neither a progressive obliteration of myth nor its repetition. Rather,

the specific aesthetic physiognomy of tragedy can be grasped only in the oscillating space of its blocked agonistic dialectic, in the unresolved tension in which there face off myth and reality, visible and invisible, chthonic underground realities and Olympian surface, matriarchy and patriarchy. In philosophical-historical terms, tragedy thus seems to configure itself as the first autonomous work of art in the history of Western aesthetics precisely in the way it posits itself as a kind of ineffective, suspended ritual, idling, turning in the void. In between sacred rituality and fully secularised politics, it thus realizes in aesthetic-juridical terms the same exit from the alternative between myth and logos that orphism realised instead in aesthetic-religious terms. 94

The Form of Transition: Tragedies of Revolution and Decolonization

Declarations of the end or decline of tragedy have accompanied the genre ever since the 4th century bce , recurring in the early modern period as well, when, for instance, Thomas Rymer wrote A Short View of Tragedy: Its Original Excellence and Corruption ( 1693 ). 95 But, as we noted with reference to the young Lukács, the 20th century brought with it a particularly intense reflection on the supposed impossibility of tragic form under contemporary conditions. In the domain of literary theory, George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy provided an eloquent if contestable case for the genre’s modern decline. For Steiner, tragedy is radically incompatible with Christian narratives of salvation or the rational hope borne by Marxism, neither of which can truly grasp the “irreparable.” As he declares: “Tragedy can occur only where reality has not been harnessed by reason and social consciousness.” 96 There is a certain irony in Steiner’s contention—belied by most historical studies of the context of democracy and dissensus in which Attic tragedy emerged—that the genre depends on a landscape of social stability, only emerging in situations where “the hierarchies of worldly power were stable and manifest.” 97 Like any theory that hitches the mutation in literary forms to a linear tale of secularization, Steiner’s is beset with methodological and historical problems, but the arc of tragedy’s demise could also be treated in a more persuasive vein—in terms of the difficulty of replicating the figure of tragic action in a modernity increasingly dominated by the deeply anti-tragic models of agencies promulgated by political economy. 98

Tragedy need not be an impossible or failing representation of the contemporary criteria for action for the genre to be in question. We’ve already noted Hegel’s valorization of comedy. But we could also recall the “deliberate unseating of the supremacy of tragedy and tragic inevitability” effected by Brecht as both dramaturg and theorist. 99 As Benjamin noted about his friend and collaborator’s momentous contribution to European drama:

in the secular drama of the West, too, the search for the untragic hero has never ceased. Often in conflict with its theoreticians, such drama has deviated time and again, always in new ways, from the authentic form of tragedy–that is, from Greek tragedy. This important but badly marked road (which may serve here as the image of a tradition) ran, in the Middle Ages, via Hroswitha and the Mysteries; in the age of the baroque, via Gryphius and Calderon. Later we find it in Lenz and Grabbe, and finally in Strindberg. Shakespearian scenes stand as monuments at its edge, and Goethe crossed it in the second part of Faust. It is a European road, but it is a German one too. If, that is, one can speak of a road rather than a stalking-path along which the legacy of medieval and baroque drama has crept down to us. This stalking-path, rough and overgrown though it may be, is visible again today in the plays of Brecht. 100

Tragedy, from this vantage point, could be repulsed for its ideological function. As Roland Barthes quipped: “Tragedy is only a way of assembling human misfortune, of subsuming it, and thus of justifying it by putting it into the form of a necessity, of a kind of wisdom, or of a purification.” 101

But where a radical political orientation could counsel abandoning the tragic, it can also lie behind the effort to recover and repeat it in a contemporary frame. If we can justifiably view tragic poetry as “synonymous with the organic crisis of a political and cultural order,” as “genre of transition,” then we are in a position to understand how the organic crises that birthed forth communist revolutions and decolonizing movements could serve as ferment for powerful re-imaginings of tragic theory and practice. 102 Raymond Williams’s incisive corrective to Steiner’s essay, Modern Tragedy , revisited 19th- and 20th-century dramaturgy on the basis of the conviction that:

Tragic experience, because of its central importance, commonly attracts the fundamental beliefs and tensions of a period, and tragic theory is interesting mainly in this sense, that through it the shape and set of a particular culture is often deeply realized . . . Tragedy is not a single and permanent kind of fact, but a series of experiences and conventions and institutions. 103

This supple and capacious approach to the question of tragedy was intended both to do justice to its literary history and to link this history to the “common sense” or “structures of feeling” that made tragedy a matter of everyday life, not just high theatre, or high theory. To capture the nature of that experience, as manifest in the structure of contemporary culture, was perforce to think the tragic dimension of contemporary revolutions too. Against those who would see an age of revolutions as an anti-tragic age, one whose belief in the possibility of progress makes it hostile to the irreparable, Williams argues that “the revolution is an inevitable working through of a deep and tragic disorder, to which we can respond in varying ways but which will in any case, in one way or another, work its way through our world, as a consequence of any of our actions. I see revolution, that is to say, in a tragic perspective.” 104 It is pertinent to note in this regard, that the concept of tragedy was part of the discourse of the Bolshevik Revolution, and that figures as diverse as Leon Trotsky and the novelist Andrei Platonov envisaged the possibility of a rebirth of tragedy in the context of a revolutionary socialist culture. 105

But if we can argue about a real rebirth and mutation of the tragic, understood both as a dramatic genre and, with Williams, as “a series of experiences and conventions and institutions,” it is in the long arc of decolonization more than in the furnace of socialist revolution that we may want to look for it. David Scott, in critical dialogue with C. L. R. James’s seminal history of the Haitian Revolution, has argued that it is to tragedy that we should turn if we want to shift from the “romance” of the anticolonial to a postcolonial predicament inimical to progressive heroics. 106 Scott’s recovery of a tragic perspective on decolonization, and especially of C. L. R. James’s contribution to it, is of great significance. It is James in fact who provides one of the most compact and incisive characterizations of tragedy as the contemporary “genre of transition.” For James, tragic form has an anticipatory quality, it registers the blockage of an idea of emancipation before a necessary mutation in objective possibility, in actuality: “Form is the conflict complete, the contradictions tearing away—but before the stage of actuality, of the revolution. It carries through the possibilities to the limit, but objective condition, purpose and activity have not yet all come together.” 107 For James, an avid reader of Aeschylus and Shakespeare alike (as was Marx before him), the struggles of the masses of Saint Domingue/Haiti against slavery and colonial capitalism brought together many of the elements of tragedy we’ve touched on hitherto: the relation between the individual leader and the masses as an analogue of the dialectic of hero and chorus; the historical peripeteia that temporarily turns a struggle for emancipation into its seeming opposite (namely with Toussaint Louverture’s partial reinstatement of the plantation regime); the inhibiting weight of the old on the chances of the new; and, perhaps above all, the notion of tragedy as the form through which to think and dramatize an organic crisis. 108

But the case of anticolonial and decolonial tragedy embodies a phenomenon that could be applied to the vast and discontinuous history of the genre, namely that much of its theory is elaborated through dramaturgical practice. The Haitian revolution and the figure of Toussaint were not just the object of an effort to emplot history “tragically” in The Black Jacobins , it was also the object of multiple efforts to stage it in tragedies. James himself wrote a play, Toussaint Louverture , which was produced starring the great African American actor and communist militant Paul Robeson. We can find James’s own dialectical thinking of the place of collective action as crucial to a modern tragedy of the revolution against racial slavery inscribed in his own stage directions: “they, the Negro slaves, are the most important character in the play. Toussaint did not make the revolt. It was the revolt that made Toussaint.” James’s whole political thinking could also be captured through his dramaturgical slogan: “bringing in the chorus.” In the second edition of The Black Jacobins , James saluted the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire as “the architect of this [Caribbean] civilization, a commissioner of its blood, a guardian of its refusal to accept.” 109 Césaire himself wrote a compelling if relatively conventional biography of Toussaint but his response as a dramaturg to the Haitian revolution was truly innovative. In And the Dogs Were Silent , first produced as a “lyrical oratorio” in 1946 and in a “theatrical arrangement” as a “tragedy” in 1956 , Césaire radically revised tragic form, exploding the juxtaposition of protagonist and chorus into a poetic allegory in which the agon between characters (the “rebel-builder,” the “architect”) is inhabited by a multiplicity of pasts, and channels a plurality of voices. Not so much a Hölderlinian “speech against speech” or a clash between ethical orders, but an effort to translate in verse Césaire’s vision of the nexus between Black anti-colonial liberation and the legacies of Marxism and communism—the one which had led him, in his letter of resignation from the French Communist Party, to write about the need for a “a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.” 110

But a sustained theoretical reflection on the (im)possibility of postcolonial tragedy would have to wait for another Martinican writer, Édouard Glissant. Glissant also penned a tragedy of the Haitian revolution, Monsieur Toussaint , but it was in his critical and theoretical essays, namely L’intention poétique ( 1969 ) and Le discours antillais ( 1981 ) that he broached the issue of tragic form. In brief, we could argue that for Glissant it was the shape of Caribbean history, the ever-deferred transition out of a colonial condition, which made the idea and practice of tragedy as the form given to contradiction particularly challenging to attain, or simply unavailable. Glissant presents tragedy as an art that plays with the relation between unveiling and opacity, with what he poetically captures as the “re-solution of the dissolved,” the search for and resignification of a broken or menaced community. By contrast with the notion of tragedy as a matter of organic crisis, or the product of a hierarchically organized social stability, for Glissant the great moments of tragedy are not ones of crisis. Rather, tragedy requires a sense of social ferment and collective advance. Like Vernant, the tragic is here a matter of group self-reflection: “In the tragic act a community begins to meditate its own action. It is the sign of a shared possibility of action.” 111 Taking the “national” focus of the Romantic philosophy of the tragic into the context of decolonization and postcoloniality, Glissant notes that a people incapable of action does not yet know the tragic “crystallisation,” while conversely those who act already don’t need it. It is on this basis that he envisages the possibility of a new tragic cycle that would be driven by what he calls “denied fighting peoples,” a cycle that would no longer require “national unanimity” but move toward a “planetary” poetic.

In the essays collected in Le discours Antillais , this expansive anticolonial horizon mutates into a sui generis argument for the decline or undesirability of the tragic. 112 Glissant anatomizes the Martinican “Toussaint complex,” elicited by the island’s paralyzing absence of iconic heroes, the desubjectivating effects of the 1848 abolition of slavery by the French metropole, and the sequence of sterile revolts that pepper its history. A tragic hero for Martinique would need to be drawn from the unwritten history of the fugitives, of the maroons, but in the absence of this figure, as Glissant muses, others’ heroes cannot be our own, while our heroes are perforce the heroes of others (here referring explicitly to Frantz Fanon). But if tragic form is bound up with historical heroism as its content, and if it moreover hankers after totality (“the cosmo-metaphysical question of legitimacy”) in a collective adventure aimed at resolving multiple conflicts, what is to be done in a situation where History appears to be happening elsewhere? 113 As he comes to abandon the possibility of repeating tragedy in the Caribbean, Glissant turns, by way of contrast and flight, to a minor genre, that of the Caribbean tale. The structure, temporality and form of the tale undo the tragic imperative. In the tale there is no trajectory from the obscure to the clear, there is no dating or chronology, and time is not the fundamental dimension of the human. And, perhaps most importantly, given the enduring association of tragic agon with the juridical, there is neither the law, nor its writing. For Glissant then, the “Caribbean tale delimits a non-possessed landscape. It is anti-history.” 114 It allows the cross-pollination of multiple histories, what Glissant terms the infinite dissemination of Relation, without making concessions to the fascination of a sublime History, with its formative obsession with filiation, genealogy, and, one might add, guilt. In thinking Glissant’s flight from tragedy with and against C. L. R. James’s efforts to give tragic form to the struggles for decolonization—of the former’s injunction not to try and recommence the Greek miracle and the latter’s call to bring in the chorus—we can grow more sensitive to the enduring stakes of how we theorize a literary genre that continues to exceed, for good and ill, its restriction to particular histories, geographies, or even literary forms.

Discussion of the Literature

Cutting as it does across so many different disciplines—from classics to philosophy, history to comparative literature, theatre studies to ethnopoetics—and ranging across such a welter of textual and institutional objects, literature on tragedy defies synopsis. What’s more, and as some of the most illuminating recent studies have detailed, the categories of our literary and theoretical modernity are largely shaped by successive engagements with tragedy and crystallizations of “the tragic,” potentially leading to a mise en abyme of sorts. 115 Indeed, modern European philosophy and literary theory are largely unintelligible if we neglect how interpretations of tragedy and ideologies of the tragic determined their trajectory. As suggested throughout this article, it is nevertheless possible to broadly classify theoretical reflections on the genre in terms of whether their emphasis is primarily on the histories, forms, and performances of tragedies, or on more universal, or even trans-historical, ideas of the tragic or tragedy. Contemporary discussions are still indebted not just to the Romantic and Idealist genealogy of the tragic, but to the dialectical and historical-materialist theories that were in a sense an immanent critique of that tragic vision formed in and around Jena between the early 1790s and the end of the 19th century ’s first decade. The works of Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, but also Vincenzo Di Benedetto, Diego Lanza, and others for the Ancients, and Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams for the early modern period onward, remain largely unsurpassed in their totalizing grasp, though serious advances have been made, for instance, in the study of the relation between monetized exchange, sacrifice, and Ancient tragedy. 116 The vital if ambivalent nexus between tragedy and revolution as categories of modernity has also been the object of concerted treatment, while the hitherto largely neglected connections between tragedy, slavery (both ancient and modern), and revolutions against racial capitalism—intercut by the thematization of gender and sex difference—have also come to the fore as critical foci of research. 117 While the death or decline of tragedy may still be a widespread conviction, albeit one that has been compellingly countered, there are few signs that the theory of tragedy is nearing expiry. 118

Further Reading

• Beistegui, Miguel de , and Simon Sparks , eds. Philosophy and Tragedy . London: Routledge, 2000.
• Benjamin, Walter . Origin of the German Trauerspiel . Translated by Howard Eiland . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
• Billings, Joshua , and Miriam Leonard , eds. Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Blanchot, Maurice . The Infinite Conversation . Translated by Susan Hanson . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
• Butler, Judith . Antigone’s Claim . New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
• Cave, Terence . Recognitions: A Study in Poetics . Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988.
• Cavell, Stanley . Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare . Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Clark, T. J. “Picasso and Tragedy.” In Pity and Terror: Picasso’s Path to Guernica , edited by T. J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner . Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2017.
• Deleuze, Gilles . Nietzsche and Philosophy . Translated by Hugh Tomlinson . New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
• Eagleton, Terry . Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.
• Glick, Jeremy Matthew . The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution . New York: New York University Press, 2016.
• Goldmann, Lucien . The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine . London: Verso, 2016.
• Höfele, Andreas . No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Honig, Bonnie . Antigone, Interrupted . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Hoxby, Blair . What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Leonard, Miriam . Tragic Modernities . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
• Menke, Christoph . Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett . Translated by James Phillips . New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
• Porter, James I. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
• Scott, David . Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
• Seaford, Richard . Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece: Selected Essays . Edited by Richard Bostock . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Winkler, John J. , and Froma I. Zeitlin . Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

1. Plato, Republic III, in Complete Works , trans. G. M. A. Grube; rev. C.D.C. Reeve, and ed. John M. Cooper with D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 394c, 1032.

2. Enzo Melandri, I generi letterari e la loro origine [Literary genres and their origin], pref. Giorgio Agamben (1980; repr. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2014).

3. Republic III, 395c, 1033.

4. Republic III, 398d, 1035.

5. Republic X, 606b, 1210.

6. Plato, Laws VII, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin, 1970), 817c, 1484. See also Republic VIII, 568a, 1178.

7. Plato, Minos , trans. Malcolm Schofield), in Complete Works , 321a, 1317.

8. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics , trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 21. On the difference between Plato and Aristotle as concerns the notion of the tragic, and their afterlives, see also Evina Sistakou, Tragic Failures: Alexandrian Responses to Tragedy and the Tragic (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 1–9.

9. Aristotle, Poetics , ed. and trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), 42.

10. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics , 21.

11. See Edith Hall, “Is There a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics ?” in M. S. Silk, ed., Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 295–309; and the helpful discussion of the debate generated by Hall’s thesis in Johanna Hanink, Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 215–220. Hanink is especially interesting on the ways in which, by the time of Aristotle, tragedy had become a pan-Hellenic rather than restrictedly Athenian phenomenon. She also helpfully reminds us that elsewhere in his vast corpus, Aristotle dealt with the history of Athenian tragic performance as well as with the biographies of tragedians. Among lost works attested to in commentaries are a Victories at the Dionysia , an On Tragedies , a Didascaliae (an annotated list of victors and competitors at tragic competitions), as well as On Poets . Malcolm Heath, “Should There Have Been a Polis in the Poetics?” Classical Quarterly 59 (2009): 468–485.

12. Aristotle, Poetics , 3.

13. Aristotle, Poetics , 10.

14. Aristotle, Poetics , 11.

15. Aristotle, Poetics , 12.

16. Aristotle, Poetics , 47.

17. Aristotle, 13. On the centrality of dramaturgy to any understanding of Greek tragedy, see Karl Reinhardt’s classic treatment: Aischylos als Regisseur und Theologe (Bern: Francke, 1949). For a less theologically-oriented and more philological reconstruction of tragedies as visual performances, see Vincenzo Di Benedetto and Enrico Medda, La tragedia sulla scena. La tragedia greca in quanto spettacolo teatrale [Tragedy on the stage: Greek tragedy as a theatrical spectacle] (Turin: Einaudi, 1997).

18. Aristotle, Poetics , 47.

19. Edwin Simpson-Baikie, The Dramatic Unities (London: Trübner, 1878).

20. Aristotle, Poetics , 14.

21. Later theoreticians of tragedy will associate this change of fortune to the notion of catastrophe . While the latter is present in Aristotle’s work, it is not a component of his own poetics.

22. Aristotle, Poetics , 17.

23. See Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics . 2nd rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jacob Bernays, “On Catharsis: From Fundamentals of Aristotle’s Lost Essay on the ‘Effect of Tragedy’ (1857)”, Peter L. Rudnytsky, American Imago 61, no. 3 (2004): 319–341; Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (London: Profile, 2019), 187–195; and Peter Thomas, “Catharsis (Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism),” Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 259–264.

24. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed , trans. Charles A. McBrie, Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, and Emily Fryer (1974; repr. London: Pluto, 2008), 28; and Page duBois, “The Death of Character,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 21, no. 3 (2014): 301–308.

25. Christian Meier, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1993). For a Marxist perspective on tragedy as the foremost artistic reflection of the Athenian transition to democracy, see George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (1941; repr. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980).

26. Richard Seaford, “Introduction,” in Aeschylus, The Oresteia , trans. George Thomson (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2004), xxvi–xxvii.

27. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece , trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 42. For a critique of this perspective from within a Marxist framework, see Vincenzo Di Benedetto and Alessandro Lami, Filologia e marxismo. Contro le mistificazioni [Philology and Marxism: Against mystifications] (Napoli: Liguori, 1981).

28. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel , ed. Raymond Queneau (1947; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 296.

29. Maria Zambrano, La tumba de Antígona [Antigone’s grave], ed. Virginia Trueba Mira (Madrid: Cátedra, 2015), 151.

30. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Le miroir brisé: Tragédie athénienne et politique [The broken mirror: Athenian tragedy and politics] (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002), 9.

31. Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” 45.

32. I use this term, which originated in Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man , in a theoretical acceptation broadly drawn from contemporary Italian political theories attuned to the problem of tragedy. See Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impolitical , trans. Connal Parsley (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Massimo Cacciari, The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason , ed. Alessandro Carrera, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

33. See also Miriam Leonard, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

34. See Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens , trans. Corinne Pacht with Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2006); and Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

35. Loraux draws the notion of an ideology of the city from Diego Lanza and Mario Vegetti, ‘L’ideologia della città’, in Diego Lanza et al., L’ideologia della città (Napoli: Liguori, 1977).

36. Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman , trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 49. On the question of the body in tragedy, see also William Marx, Le tombeau d’Oedipe: Pour une tragédie sans tragique [The tomb of Oedipus: For a tragedy without the tragic] (Paris: Minuit, 2012).

37. This mixing should not be regarded as a neat transgression or revolution, especially in the domain of sexual difference. As Loraux notes: “whatever freedom the tragic discourse of the Greeks offered to women it did not allow them ultimately to transgress the frontier that divided and opposed the sexes. Tragedy certainly does transgress and mix things up—this is its rule, its nature—but never to the point of irrevocably overturning the civic order of values.” Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman , 60.

38. Nicole Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy , trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 81.

39. Florence Dupont, The Invention of Literature: From Greek Intoxication to the Latin Book , trans. Janet Lloyd (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); L’insignifiance tragique [Tragic insignificance] (Paris: Gallimard/Le promeneur, 2001); and Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidental [Aristotle, or the vampire of Western theatre] (Paris: Aubier, 2007).

40. On Lycurgus’s decree, see also Hanink, Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy , and Jean Bollack, “An Act of Cultural Restoration: The Status Accorded to the Classical Tragedians by the Decree of Lycurgus,” in The Art of Reading: From Homer to Celan , trans. Catherine Porter and Susan Tarrow, with Bruce King, ed. Christoph Koenig, Leonard Muellner, Gregory Nagy, and Sheldon Pollock (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2016).

41. Florence Dupont, Eschyle (Lausanne: Ides et Calendes, 2015), 29.

42. Dupont, Eschyle , 44.

43. Dupont, Eschyle , 44.

44. Dupont, Eschyle , 28.

45. Dupont, Eschyle , 44.

46. Quoted in Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 230.

47. Dupont, Eschyle , 60, 69.

48. For an intense and idiosyncratic reflection on the loss of tragic texts, see the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadaré’s essay on Aeschylus, Eschyle ou le grand perdant [Aeschylus, or the great loser], trans. Jusuf Vrioni and Alexandre Zotos (1988; repr. Paris: Fayard, 1995).

49. Marx, Le tombeau d’Oedipe , 87.

50. Marx, 159. The mention of psychoanalysis is somewhat awkward here, given how much the symbolic revolution that gave birth to “the tragic” in the 1790s is a condition of possibility for the Freudian appropriation of the myth of Oedipus. The literature on psychoanalysis, tragedy, and Oedipus is vast, but see especially Jean Bollack, “Le fils de l’homme: Le mythe Freudien d’Oedipe,” [The son of man: The Freudian myth of Oedipus] in La naissance d’Oedipe: Traduction et commentaires d’Oedipe roi [The birth of Oedipus: Translation and commentaries on Oedipus Rex] (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); and Suzanne Gearhart, The Interrupted Dialectic: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and their Tragic Other (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

51. Blair Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy? The World We Have Lost, 1550–1795,” Comparative Literature 64, no. 1 (2012): 1–32. On the theory of tragedy among sixteenth century Italian humanists, including Lodovico Castelvetro and Piero Vettori, see also the Italian Marxist philosopher Galvano Della Volpe’s Poetica del Cinquecento [Poetics of the Sixteenth Century] (Bari: Laterza, 1954).

52. On the part played by the effort to create an aesthetic and civic form to match Ancient tragedy in the genesis of opera, see Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera (London: Penguin, 2015), 43. The Attic reference was crucial to the genesis and theory of Wagnerian opera. See Sandra Mansutti, “Wagner e la tragedia greca,” [Wagner and Greek tragedy] in Metamorfosi del tragico fra classico e moderno [Metamorphoses of the tragic between the classic and the modern], ed. Umberto Curi (Rome: Laterza, 1991).

53. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 5.

54. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 15–22.

55. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 26.

56. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 28.

57. Franco Moretti, “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms , trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1988), 42. See also Moretti’s more recent effort to bring the digital humanities to bear on the (Hegelian) theory of tragedy: “‘Operationalizing’: Or, the Function of Measurement in Literary Theory,” New Left Review 84 (2013), 116–119.

58. Moretti, “Great Eclipse,” 53. Early modern discussions of Ancient Greek tragedy and its poetics faced some embarrassment when having to confront its connections to democracy. See Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 28.

59. Moretti, “Great Eclipse,” 55.

60. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1984), 39. See also Victor Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare (London: Verso, 1996).

61. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy , 21.

62. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), cited in Dollimore, Radical Tragedy , 54.

63. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play , trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2009), 30.

64. This can be contrasted with Vidal-Naquet’s observation that political history does indeed “intrude” directly into Attic tragedy too, for instance in the way that Ephialtes’s political reform of 462 bce was the direct referent for Aeschylus’s Oresteia . See Vidal-Naquet, Le miroir brisé . As Billings notes vis-à-vis the post-1790s reception of Attic tragedy, “The belief that Greek tragedy was fundamentally about political events transformed the early modern trope of history-as-tragedy into the modern notion of tragedy as a meaningful representation of historical process.” Genealogy of the Tragic , 11.

65. Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba , 51.

66. Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba , 45.

67. Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic , trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 7. Contrast this sublime figure of moral criminality with Ernst Bloch’s irreverent presentation of Oedipus Tyrannos as a forerunner of the detective novel. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays , trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 256–257.

68. See also Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 8–11.

69. Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic , 59. See Alberto Toscano, “Taming the Furies: Badiou and Hegel on The Eumenides,” in Badiou and Hegel: Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity , ed. Antonio Calcagno and Jim Vernon (Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books, 2015).

70. Bernhard Zimmerman, Europa und die grieschische Tragödie: Vom kultischen Spiel zum Theater der Gegenwart [Europe and Greek tragedy: From cultic play to the theatre of the present] (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), ch. 8; Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 113–122.

71. Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Tragic Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 30–36.

72. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 10.

73. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 45–71.

74. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 167, 193. On Hölderlin’s poetics of tragedy, and the way in which it cuts into and across the emergence from the tragic of a speculative dialectic, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” in Typographies: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics , ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

75. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 162, 164.

76. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 221.

77. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 2.

78. Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters , ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), 330; and Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 207.

79. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 225; and Hölderlin, Essays and Letters , 330.

80. Søren Kierkegaard, “Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern,” in Either/Or: A Fragment of Life , ed. Victor Eremita and trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1992), 153.

81. Georg Lukács, “The Metaphysics of Tragedy,” in Soul and Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 176.

82. For the place of tragedy between the epic and philosophy in the young Lukács, see Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature , trans. A. Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 29. For Lukács’s views on the possibility of modern tragedy as a dramatic form, see his précis of his Hungarian study on the subject from 1909: “The Sociology of Modern Drama,” trans. Lee Baxandall, Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 4 (1965): 146–170.

83. On Nietzsche’s thinking of the tragic beyond his early writings, see Nuno Nabais, Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of the Tragic , trans. Martin Earl (London: Continuum, 2006). In the early 1960s, the Nietzschean conception of the tragic was revived in an antidialectical vein by Michel Foucault, in his History of Madness (1961) and Gilles Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). See the astute comments in Warrant Montag, “ Foucault and the Problematic of Origins: Althusser’s Reading of Folie et déraison , ” Borderlands 4, no. 2 (2005). See also Andrew Cutrofello, “Foucault on Tragedy,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (2005): 573–584.

84. Friedrich Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons sur l’Oedipe-Roi de Sophocle/Introduction aux études de philologie classique [Introduction to the lectures on Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex / Introduction to the study of classical philology], trans. Françoise Dastur and Michel Haar, ed. Michel Haar (Fougères: Encre Marine, 1994), 15.

85. Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons , 71.

86. Peter Thomas, “Over-Man and the Commune,” New Left Review 31 (2005), 139.

87. Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons , 37.

88. Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons , 40.

89. Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons , 43.

90. Nietzsche, 47. Contrast with Giorgio Agamben’s recent suggestion of tragedy’s origination in the satyr play. Reminding us of the fact that the latter capped the performance of tragic trilogies at the Dionysian festivals, Agamben states that “satyrs are more ancient than the heroes of tragedy, and in replacing—or pairing—human protagonists with satyrs, satyric drama [ saturikon drama ] reconnects itself with the non-human origin of all theatre.” Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella, or, Entertainment for Kids in Four Scenes , trans. Kevin Attell (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2018), 38.

91. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976; repr. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 153.

92. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World , 37.

93. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World , 140.

94. Gianni Carchia, Orfismo e tragedia. Il mito trasfigurato [Orphism and tragedy: Myth transfigured] (1979; repr. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), 55–56. On the juridical dimension of tragedy, it is interesting to recall Walter Benjamin’s observation, in his Trauerspiel book, that the unity of place, time and action closely matches the unity of the tribunal, the court day, and the trial. Benjamin was here in dialogue with his friend Florens Christian Rang’s observations on theatre and agon . Carchia’s criticism of Nietzsche is also modeled largely after Benjamin.

95. Richard Halpern, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1.

96. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961)

97. Steiner, The Death of Tragedy , 194.

98. Halpern, Eclipse of Action .

99. Stanley Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht , ed. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), xii.

100. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht , 17–18.

101. Cited as an epigram to Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Nature, Humanism and Tragedy,” New Left Review 31 (1965), which unpacks the consequences of Barthes’s Brechtian position, by way of a critical engagement with the “tragified universe” of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea .

102. Moretti, “The Great Eclipse,” 71.

103. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy , ed. Pamela McCallum (1966; repr. Toronto: Broadview Encore, 2006), 69.

104. Williams, Modern Tragedy , 100.

105. Lars T. Lih, “‘Our Position Is in the Highest Degree Tragic’: Bolshevik ‘Euphoria’ in 1920,” in Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys, eds., History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism (London: Verso, 2007); Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution , ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Strunsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005); Andrei Platonov, “On the First Socialist Tragedy,” New Left Review 69 (2011): 30–32. For a discussion of these questions see Toscano, “ The Broken Music of the Revolution: Trotsky and Blok ,” Crisis and Critique 4, no. 2 (2017): 404–426.

106. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004). For further discussion of Scott’s interpretation of the “tragic” James, as well as for how it relates to the broader debate on the politics of tragedy, see Toscano, “Politics in a Tragic Key,” Radical Philosophy 180 (2013): 25–34.

107. C. L. R. James, “Rough Notes from Discussion for Melville Book,” 3. Quoted in Aaron Love, The Caribbean Novel and the Realization of History in the Era of Decolonization , PhD diss., New York University, May 2011.

108. As James wrote in his great historical narrative, “it is the tragedy of mass movements that they need and can only too rarely find adequate leadership.” C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution , 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989), 25.

109. James, Black Jacobins , 400.

110. Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” trans. Chike Jeffers, Social Text 103, vol. 28, no. 2 (2010 [1956]), 152.

111. Édouard Glissant, L’intention poétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 197.

112. In English, see the partial translation in Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays , trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989).

113. Édouard Glissant, Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 247.

114. Glissant, Discours antillais , 263.

115. Joshua Billings and Miriam Leonard, eds., Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Szondi, Essay on the Tragic ; Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic ; R. Jahan Ramazani, “Heidegger and the Theory of Tragedy,” The Centennial Review 32, no. 2 (1988): 103-129; and Jacques Taminiaux, Le théâtre des philosophes: La tragédie, l’être, l’action [The theatre of the philosophers: Tragedy, being, action] (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995).

116. Richard Seaford, Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece: Selected Essays , ed. Richard Bostock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) .

117. See Miriam Leonard, Tragic Modernities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) ; Tina Chanter, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011); Jeremy Matthew Glick, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2016) ; and David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) .

118. Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett , trans. James Phillips (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) .

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Sophocles’ Antigone

Analysis of Sophocles’ Antigone

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 29, 2020 • ( 0 )

Within this single drama—in great part, a harsh critique of Athenian society and the Greek city-state in general—Sophocles tells of the eternal struggle between the state and the individual, human and natural law, and the enormous gulf between what we attempt here on earth and what fate has in store for us all. In this magnificent dramatic work, almost incidentally so, we find nearly every reason why we are now what we are.

—Victor D. Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom

With Antigone Sophocles forcibly demonstrates that the power of tragedy derives not from the conflict between right and wrong but from the confrontation between right and right. As the play opens the succession battle between the sons of Oedipus—Polynices and Eteocles—over control of Thebes has resulted in both of their deaths. Their uncle Creon, who has now assumed the throne, asserts his authority to end a destructive civil war and decrees that only Eteocles, the city’s defender, should receive honorable burial. Polynices, who has led a foreign army against Thebes, is branded a traitor. His corpse is to be left on the battlefield “to be chewed up by birds and dogs and violated,” with death the penalty for anyone who attempts to bury him and supply the rites necessary for the dead to reach the underworld. Antigone, Polynices’ sister, is determined to defy Creon’s order, setting in motion a tragic collision between opposed laws and duties: between natural and divine commands that dictate the burial of the dead and the secular edicts of a ruler determined to restore civic order, between family allegiance and private conscience and public duty and the rule of law that restricts personal liberty for the common good. Like the proverbial immovable object meeting an irresistible force, Antigone arranges the impact of seemingly irreconcilable conceptions of rights and responsibilities, producing one of drama’s enduring illuminations of human nature and the human condition.

Antigone is one of Sophocles’ greatest achievements and one of the most influential dramas ever staged. “Between 1790 and 1905,” critic George Steiner reports, “it was widely held by European poets, philosophers, [and] scholars that Sophocles’ Antigone was not only the fi nest of Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit.” Its theme of the opposition between the individual and authority has resonated through the centuries, with numerous playwrights, most notably Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, and Athol Fugard grafting contemporary concerns and values onto the moral and political dramatic framework that Sophocles established. The play has elicited paradoxical responses reflecting changing cultural and moral imperatives. Antigone, who has been described as “the first heroine of Western drama,” has been interpreted both as a heroic martyr to conscience and as a willfully stubborn fanatic who causes her own death and that of two other innocent people, forsaking her duty to the living on behalf of the dead. Creon has similarly divided critics between censure and sympathy. Despite the play’s title, some have suggested that the tragedy is Creon’s, not Antigone’s, and it is his abuse of authority and his violations of personal, family, and divine obligations that center the drama’s tragedy. The brilliance of Sophocles’ play rests in the complexity of motive and the competing absolute claims that the drama displays. As novelist George Eliot observed,

It is a very superficial criticism which interprets the character of Creon as that of hypocritical tyrant, and regards Antigone as a blameless victim. Coarse contrasts like this are not the materials handled by great dramatists. The exquisite art of Sophocles is shown in the touches by which he makes us feel that Creon, as well as Antigone, is contending for what he believes to be the right, while both are also conscious that, in following out one principle, they are laying themselves open to just blame for transgressing another.

Eliot would call the play’s focus the “antagonism of valid principles,” demonstrating a point of universal significance that “Wherever the strength of a man’s intellect, or moral sense, or affection brings him into opposition with the rules which society has sanctioned, there is renewed conflict between Antigone and Creon; such a man must not only dare to be right, he must also dare to be wrong—to shake faith, to wound friendship, perhaps, to hem in his own powers.” Sophocles’ Antigone is less a play about the pathetic end of a victim of tyranny or the corruption of authority than about the inevitable cost and con-sequence between competing imperatives that define the human condition. From opposite and opposed positions, both Antigone and Creon ultimately meet at the shared suffering each has caused. They have destroyed each other and themselves by who they are and what they believe. They are both right and wrong in a world that lacks moral certainty and simple choices. The Chorus summarizes what Antigone will vividly enact: “The powerful words of the proud are paid in full with mighty blows of fate, and at long last those blows will teach us wisdom.”

As the play opens Antigone declares her intention to her sister Ismene to defy Creon’s impious and inhumane order and enlists her sister’s aid to bury their brother. Ismene responds that as women they must not oppose the will of men or the authority of the city and invite death. Ismene’s timidity and deference underscores Antigone’s courage and defiance. Antigone asserts a greater allegiance to blood kinship and divine law declaring that the burial is a “holy crime,” justified even by death. Ismene responds by calling her sister “a lover of the impossible,” an accurate description of the tragic hero, who, according to scholar Bernard Knox, is Sophocles’ most important contribution to drama: “Sophocles presents us for the first time with what we recognize as a ‘tragic hero’: one who, unsupported by the gods and in the face of human opposition, makes a decision which springs from the deepest layer of his individual nature, his physis , and then blindly, ferociously, heroically maintains that decision even to the point of self-destruction.” Antigone exactly conforms to Knox’s description, choosing her conception of duty over sensible self-preservation and gender-prescribed submission to male authority, turning on her sister and all who oppose her. Certain in her decision and self-sufficient, Antigone rejects both her sister’s practical advice and kinship. Ironically Antigone denies to her sister, when Ismene resists her will, the same blood kinship that claims Antigone’s supreme allegiance in burying her brother. For Antigone the demands of the dead overpower duty to the living, and she does not hesitate in claiming both to know and act for the divine will. As critic Gilbert Norwood observes, “It is Antigone’s splendid though perverse valor which creates the drama.”

Before the apprehended Antigone, who has been taken in the act of scattering dust on her brother’s corpse, lamenting, and pouring libations, is brought before Creon and the dramatic crux of the play, the Chorus of The-ban elders delivers what has been called the fi nest song in all Greek tragedy, the so-called Ode to Man, that begins “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.” This magnificent celebration of human power over nature and resourcefulness in reason and invention ends with a stark recognition of humanity’s ultimate helplessness—“Only against Death shall he call for aid in vain.” Death will test the resolve and principles of both Antigone and Creon, while, as critic Edouard Schuré asserts, “It brings before us the most extraordinary psychological evolution that has ever been represented on stage.”

When Antigone is brought in judgment before Creon, obstinacy meets its match. Both stand on principle, but both reveal the human source of their actions. Creon betrays himself as a paranoid autocrat; Antigone as an individual whose powerful hatred outstrips her capacity for love. She defiantly and proudly admits that she is guilty of disobeying Creon’s decree and that he has no power to override divine law. Nor does Antigone concede any mitigation of her personal obligation in the competing claims of a niece, a sister, or a citizen. Creon is maddened by what he perceives to be Antigone’s insolence in justifying her crime by diminishing his authority, provoking him to ignore all moderating claims of family, natural, or divine extenuation. When Ismene is brought in as a co-conspirator, she accepts her share of guilt in solidarity with her sister, but again Antigone spurns her, calling her “a friend who loves in words,” denying Ismene’s selfless act of loyalty and sympathy with a cold dismissal and self-sufficiency, stating, “Never share my dying, / don’t lay claim to what you never touched.” However, Ismene raises the ante for both Antigone and Creon by asking her uncle whether by condemning Antigone he will kill his own son’s betrothed. Creon remains adamant, and his judgment on Antigone and Ismene, along with his subsequent argument with his son, Haemon, reveals that Creon’s principles are self-centered, contradictory, and compromised by his own pride, fears, and anxieties. Antigone’s challenge to his authority, coming from a woman, is demeaning. If she goes free in defiance of his authority, Creon declares, “I am not the man, she is.” To the urging of Haemon that Creon should show mercy, tempering his judgment to the will of Theban opinion that sympathizes with Antigone, Creon asserts that he cares nothing for the will of the town, whose welfare Creon’s original edict against Polynices was meant to serve. Creon, moreover, resents being schooled in expediency by his son. Inflamed by his son’s advocacy on behalf of Antigone, Creon brands Haemon a “woman’s slave,” and after vacillating between stoning Antigone and executing her and her sister in front of Haemon, Creon rules that Antigone alone is to perish by being buried alive. Having begun the drama with a decree that a dead man should remain unburied, Creon reverses himself, ironically, by ordering the premature burial of a living woman.

Antigone, being led to her entombment, is shown stripped of her former confidence and defiance, searching for the justification that can steel her acceptance of the fate that her actions have caused. Contemplating her living descent into the underworld and the death that awaits her, Antigone regrets dying without marriage and children. Gone is her reliance on divine and natural law to justify her act as she equivocates to find the emotional source to sustain her. A husband and children could be replaced, she rationalizes, but since her mother and father are dead, no brother can ever replace Polynices. Antigone’s tortured logic here, so different from the former woman of principle, has been rejected by some editors as spurious. Others have judged this emotionally wrought speech essential for humanizing Antigone, revealing her capacity to suffer and her painful search for some consolation.

The drama concludes with the emphasis shifted back to Creon and the consequences of his judgment. The blind prophet Teiresias comes to warn Creon that Polynices’ unburied body has offended the gods and that Creon is responsible for the sickness that has descended on Thebes. Creon has kept from Hades one who belongs there and is sending to Hades another who does not. The gods confirm the rightness of Antigone’s action, but justice evades the working out of the drama’s climax. The release of Antigone comes too late; she has hung herself. Haemon commits suicide, and Eurydice, Creon’s wife, kills herself after cursing Creon for the death of their son. Having denied the obligation of family, Creon loses his own. Creon’s rule, marked by ignoring or transgressing cosmic and family law, is shown as ultimately inadequate and destructive. Creon is made to realize that he has been rash and foolish, that “Whatever I have touched has come to nothing.” Both Creon and Antigone have been pushed to terrifying ends in which what truly matters to both are made starkly clear. Antigone’s moral imperatives have been affirmed but also their immense cost in suffering has been exposed. Antigone explores a fundamental rift between public and private worlds. The central opposition in the play between Antigone and Creon, between duty to self and duty to state, dramatizes critical antimonies in the human condition. Sophocles’ genius is his resistance of easy and consoling simplifications to resolve the oppositions. Both sides are ultimately tested; both reveal the potential for greatness and destruction.

24 lectures on Greek Tragedy by Dr. Elizabeth Vandiver.

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A Short Summary of Arthur Miller’s ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

As we mention in our collection of interesting facts about Arthur Miller (1915-2005), the noted US playwright’s family had been relatively prosperous, but during the Great Depression of the 1930s, as with many other families, their economic situation became very precarious.

This experience had a profound impact on Miller’s political standpoint, and this can be seen time and time again in his work for the theatre. He aligned himself with the leftist politics of the 1930s, namely socialism. His early successes as a playwright were in the genre of social drama. That is, a social problem or issue in contemporary society is explored on stage. More specifically, the dramatic conflict arises usually from a moral dilemma faced by the individual that is related to some kind of flaw or corruption in the social order.

Death of a Salesman (1949), his most famous play, bears some resemblance to Miller’s earlier social drama: that is, the play represents the commodification of people in modern capitalist society (people become things with a financial value – or, too often, no financial value). Willy Loman, the protagonist of the play (and ‘salesman’ of the title), and his sons must find the courage to resist the temptation to act immorally in order to achieve ‘the American Dream’ (an ideal where anyone could be a self-made man in the world of capitalism and commerce).

Miller becomes known in the post-war period not just as a dramatist but as a noted theorist of drama: witness his essay ‘ Tragedy and the Common Man ’ (1949), which appeared in the New York Times shortly after the premiere of Death of a Salesman . Miller wrote ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’ in order to defend Willy Loman against the critics, and to argue that Loman is a suitable subject for tragedy. It was published just two weeks after Death of a Salesman opened in the theatre.

Since that is the case, what’s interesting is that not once in his essay does Miller mention his own play, or Willy Loman the character. In other words, he’s trying to argue that this idea of the common man being a fitting subject for tragedy – that ordinary people can be just as ‘noble’ as kings – is universal, and not limited to his own plays.

Miller starts by pointing out that the modern world has grown increasingly sceptical, and is less inclined to believe in the idea of heroes. There are many reasons for this: the twentieth century had seen the two bloodiest conflicts in known history in the form of two World Wars, and Nazi Germany and fascism in Italy – in many ways informed by the idea of the hero or great leader, had shown that it was in many ways dangerous to believe in the idea of the great hero.

So, the modern view is that people no longer believe in the possibility of heroes. As a result, they don’t see how tragedy, with its tragic hero, can be relevant to the modern world. Miller argues, on the contrary, that the world is full of heroes. A hero is anybody who is willing to lay down his life in order to secure his ‘sense of personal dignity’. It doesn’t matter what your social status or background is.

The late novelist David Gemmell, author of popular heroic fantasy novels, was once asked what his definition of a hero was. He was known for creating brooding, charismatic figures who were troubled killers and yet capable of goodness. When asked what he thought a hero was, Gemmell replied : ‘Anyone who does something heroic.’ That’s it.

So the age-old perception of a ‘hero’ as being someone like Oedipus, or Odysseus, or Hercules, or Superman, is a narrowing of the idea of heroism. All you have to do to qualify as a hero, even in dramatic terms, is do something which can be deemed heroic – noble, brave, dignified, courageous, morally right.

But there’s still the problem of tragedy for a modern audience. Is tragedy still relevant, or even appropriate? After the massacre on a massive scale that the two World Wars had borne witness to, wasn’t it pointless, and even slightly perverse, to emphasise the death of one individual to such an extent? Miller said it was ‘simply presumptuous – this making so much out of one death when we know it is meaningless.’

So we have a problem here. Tragedy is, by its very nature, about the individual, the tragic hero. But isn’t this out of proportion with the mass real-life tragedies that the twentieth century had seen? Not just the Holocaust, but the millions of Russians who’d died as a result of Stalin’s actions. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Thus some commentators came to see tragedy as self-indulgent, and the happy plaything of the privileged few who could afford to sit around and feel pity for one man’s death on stage. It becomes the entertainment for a kind of new aristocracy.

Miller is aware of this danger, and so this is where it becomes of central importance that his tragic figures, such as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman , are ordinary guys – just some American man trying to make a living, for instance – rather than something special. Tragedy becomes a critique on society, on some aspect of society that is perceived as evil or destructive, not just to this individual, but to thousands like him.

In many ways this is a peculiarly American invention. Because the United States is classless – or at least perceives itself to be such, which is really the key point – you can have an Average Joe as your hero, and virtually everyone will be able to relate to him as the quintessential American. He’s just ‘this guy’ or ‘some bloke’. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the dominant medium of the twentieth century, the cinema, and films.

This even transcends race: Samuel L. Jackson can play an ordinary guy, or Bruce Willis, or Tom Cruise. Such is the American system that you can have such a thing as a true ‘Average Joe’. In films of the 1950s – and ever since – you see actors like James Dean portraying just your ordinary guy, the common man that Miller had highlighted as the centre of modern tragedy.

For Miller, tragedy is driven by ‘Man’s total compunction to evaluate himself justly’. In the process of doing this, and attaining his dignity, the tragic hero often loses his life. Society destroys him.

But there is something affirmative about this for Miller, because the audience will be driven to evaluate what is wrong with society that it could destroy a man unjustly like that. Thus we as a society will gain a greater understanding of what is wrong with society, and will be able to improve society. Thus the hero’s death offers hope.

More than this, Miller sees tragedy as inherently optimistic. This is because it’s about what he calls man’s ‘thrust for freedom’. The hero will be destroyed at the end of the play, but there must always be the possibility that he could have succeeded and won out against society. If the hero is fighting a battle that cannot possibly be won, then that’s no good – that is not true tragedy, because the hero cuts a pathetic figure fighting an impossible battle.

But if there is a fine balance between what is possible and what is impossible, this is when you have a great tragedy, because tragedy can then teach us about what he calls the ‘perfectibility of man’.

For Miller, the tragic flaw, what Aristotle had called the hamartia , is redefined in modern terms as the hero’s inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity and rightful status in society. As you may have gathered by now, the flaw is not within the individual or hero, but within society itself . Miller shifts the hamartia onto society, and the individual is a victim of this flaw.

This is a liberal conception of the individual and his/her relation to the social order. The end or culmination of modern tragedy is that it ends with a man’s destruction that results from his challenge to the status quo . This is what demonstrates that the wrong or ‘evil’ resides not in the individual but in his society. The social wrong: conditions which suppress man, pervert his creative instinct, and stifle his freedom.

‘Tragedy and the Common Man’ is observational rather than prescriptive in its approach. It doesn’t lay down tenets of modern tragedy but merely note down a few elements which Miller believes make up much of modern tragedy in the theatre.

Miller’s argument is based not only on his own artistic perspective about what constitutes good tragedy, but also about what he notes other modern playwrights are making out of the classical form. It describes an emerging dramatic form. But it gives a new lease of life to the genre that must end with death: the theatrical tragedy.

Continue to explore the world of tragedy with our brief history of the genre and our discussion of Sophocles’ great tragedy about Oedipus .

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Tragic Hero

Tragic Hero Definition

What is a tragic hero? Here’s a quick and simple definition:

A tragic hero is a type of character in a tragedy , and is usually the protagonist . Tragic heroes typically have heroic traits that earn them the sympathy of the audience, but also have flaws or make mistakes that ultimately lead to their own downfall. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet , Romeo is a tragic hero. His reckless passion in love, which makes him a compelling character, also leads directly to the tragedy of his death.

Some additional key details about tragic heroes:

• The idea of the tragic hero was first defined by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle based on his study of Greek drama.
• Despite the term "tragic hero," it's sometimes the case that tragic heroes are not really heroes at all in the typical sense—and in a few cases, antagonists may even be described as tragic heroes.

Tragic Hero Pronunciation

Here's how to pronounce tragic hero: tra -jik hee -roh

The Evolution of the Tragic Hero

Tragic heroes are the key ingredient that make tragedies, well, tragic. That said, the idea of the characteristics that make a tragic hero have changed over time.

Aristotle and the Tragic Hero

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first to define a "tragic hero." He believed that a good tragedy must evoke feelings of fear and pity in the audience, since he saw these two emotions as being fundamental to the experience of catharsis (the process of releasing strong or pent-up emotions through art). As Aristotle puts it, when the tragic hero meets his demise, "pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves."

Aristotle strictly defined the characteristics that a tragic hero must have in order to evoke these feelings in an audience. According to Aristotle, a tragic hero must:

• Be virtuous: In Aristotle's time, this meant that the character should be a noble. It also meant that the character should be both capable and powerful (i.e. "heroic"), and also feel responsible to the rules of honor and morality that guided Greek culture. These traits make the hero attractive and compelling, and gain the audience's sympathy.
• Be flawed: While being heroic, the character must also have a tragic flaw (also called hamartia ) or more generally be subject to human error, and the flaw must lead to the character's downfall. On the one hand, these flaws make the character "relatable," someone with whom the audience can identify. Just as important, the tragic flaw makes the tragedy more powerful because it means that the source of the tragedy is internal to the character, not merely some outside force. In the most successful tragedies, the tragic hero's flaw is not just a characteristic they have in addition to their heroic qualities, but one that emerges from their heroic qualities—for instance, a righteous quest for justice or truth that leads to terrible conclusions, or hubris (the arrogance that often accompanies greatness). In such cases, it is as if the character is fated to destruction by his or her own nature.
• Suffer a reversal of fortune: The character should suffer a terrible reversal of fortune, from good to bad. Such a reversal does not merely mean a loss of money or status. It means that the work should end with the character dead or in immense suffering, and to a degree that outweighs what it seems like the character deserved.

To sum up: Aristotle defined a tragic hero rather strictly as a man of noble birth with heroic qualities whose fortunes change due to a tragic flaw or mistake (often emerging from the character's own heroic qualities) that ultimately brings about the tragic hero's terrible, excessive downfall.

The Modern Tragic Hero

Over time, the definition of a tragic hero has relaxed considerably. It can now include

• Characters of all genders and class backgrounds. Tragic heroes no longer have to be only nobles, or only men.
• Characters who don't fit the conventional definition of a hero. This might mean that a tragic hero could be regular person who lacks typical heroic qualities, or perhaps even a villainous or or semi-villainous person.

Nevertheless, the essence of a tragic hero in modern times maintains two key aspects from Aristotle's day:

• The tragic hero must have the sympathy of the audience.
• The tragic hero must, despite their best efforts or intentions, come to ruin because of some tragic flaw in their own character.

Tragic Hero, Antihero, and Byronic Hero

There are two terms that are often confused with tragic hero: antihero and Byronic hero.

• Antihero : An antihero is a protagonist who lacks many of the conventional qualities associated with heroes, such as courage, honesty, and integrity, but still has the audience's sympathy. An antihero may do the right thing for the wrong reason. Clint Eastwood's character in the western film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly , is fundamentally selfish. He digs up graves to look for gold and kills anyone who gets in his way, so he's definitely a bad guy. But as an antihero, he's not completely rotten: he also shows a little sympathy for dying soldiers in the bloody war going on around him, and at the end of the film he acts mercifully in choosing not to kill a man who previously tried to kill him. He does a few good things, but only as long as it suits him—so he's a classic antihero.
• Byronic hero : A Byronic hero is a variant of the antihero. Named after the characters in the poetry of Lord Byron, the Byronic hero is usually a man who is an intelligent, emotionally sensitive, introspective, and cynical character. While Byronic heroes tend to be very charismatic, they're deeply flawed individuals, who might do things that are generally thought of as socially unacceptable because they are at odds with mainstream society. A Byronic hero has his own set of beliefs and will not yield for anyone. While it might not be initially apparent, deep down, the Byronic hero is also quite selfish.

According to the modern conception of a tragic hero, both an antihero and a Byronic hero could also be tragic heroes. But in order for a tragic hero to exist, he or she has to be part of a tragedy with a story that ends in death or ruin. Antiheroes and Byronic heroes can exist in all sorts of different genres, however, not just tragedies. An antihero in an action movie—for instance Deadpool, in the first Deadpool movie—is not a tragic hero because his story ends generally happily. But you could argue that Macbeth is a kind of antihero (or at least an initial hero who over time becomes an antihero), and he is very definitely also a tragic hero.

Tragic Hero Examples

Tragic heroes in drama.

The tragic hero originated in ancient Greek theater, and can still be seen in contemporary tragedies. Even though the definition has expanded since Aristotle first defined the archetype, the tragic hero's defining characteristics have remained—for example, eliciting sympathy from the audience, and bringing about their own downfall.

Oedipus as Tragic Hero in Oedipus Rex

The most common tragic flaw (or hamartia ) for a tragic hero to have is hubris , or excessive pride and self-confidence. Sophocles' tragic play Oedipus Rex contains what is perhaps the most well-known example of Aristotle's definition of the tragic hero—and it's also a good example of hubris. The play centers around King Oedipus, who seeks to rid the city he leads of a terrible plague. At the start of the play, Oedipus is told by a prophet that the only way to banish the plague is to punish the man who killed the previous king, Laius. But the same prophet also reports that Oedipus has murdered his own father and married his mother. Oedipus refuses to believe the second half of the prophecy—the part pertaining to him—but nonetheless sets out to find and punish Laius's murderer. Eventually, Oedipus discovers that Laius had been his father, and that he had, in fact, unwittingly killed him years earlier, and that the fateful event had led directly to him marrying his own mother. Consequently, Oedipus learns that he himself is the cause of the plague, and upon realizing all this he gouges his eyes out in misery (his wife/mother also kills herself).

Oedipus has all the important features of a classical tragic hero. Throughout the drama, he tries to do what is right and just, but because of his tragic flaw (hubris) he believes he can avoid the fate given to him by the prophet, and as a result he brings about his own downfall.

Willy Loman as Tragic Hero in Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller wrote his play Death of a Salesman with the intent of creating a tragedy about a man who was not a noble or powerful man, but rather a regular working person, a salesman.

The protagonist of Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, desperately tries to provide for his family and maintain his pride. Willy has high expectations for himself and for his children. He wants the American Dream, which for him means financial prosperity, happiness, and good social standing. Yet as he ages he finds himself having to struggle to hold onto the traveling salesman job at the company to which he has devoted himself for decades. Meanwhile, the prospects for his sons, Biff and Happy, who seemed in high school to have held such promise, have similarly fizzled. Willy cannot let go of his idea of the American Dream nor his connected belief that he must as an American man be a good provider for his family. Ultimately, this leads him to see himself as more valuable dead than alive, and he commits suicide so his family can get the insurance money.

Willy is a modern tragic hero. He's a good person who means well, but he's also deeply flawed, and his obsession with a certain idea of success, as well as his determination to provide for his family, ultimately lead to his tragic death.

Tragic Heroes in Literature

Tragic heroes appear all over important literary works. With time, Aristotle's strict definition for what makes a tragic hero has changed, but the tragic hero's fundamental ability to elicit sympathy from an audience has remained.

Jay Gatsby as Tragic Hero in The Great Gatsby

The protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , is Jay Gatsby, a young and mysterious millionaire who longs to reunite with a woman whom he loved when he was a young man before leaving to fight in World War I. This woman, Daisy, is married, however, to a man named Tom Buchanan from a wealthy old money family. Gatsby organizes his entire life around regaining Daisy: he makes himself rich (through dubious means), he rents a house directly across a bay from hers, he throws lavish parties in the hopes that she will come. The two finally meet again and do begin an affair, but the affair ends in disaster—with Gatsby taking responsibility for driving a car that Daisy was in fact driving when she accidentally hit and killed Tom's mistress (named Myrtle), Daisy abandoning Gatsby and returning to Tom, and Gatsby getting killed by Myrtle's husband.

Gatsby's downfall is his unrelenting pursuit of a certain ideal—the American Dream—and a specific woman who he thinks fits within this dream. His blind determination makes him unable to see both that Daisy doesn't fit the ideal and that the ideal itself is unachievable. As a result he endangers himself to protect someone who likely wouldn't do the same in return. Gatsby is not a conventional hero (it's strongly implied that he made his money through gambling and other underworld activities), but for the most part his intentions are noble: he seeks love and self-fulfillment, and he doesn't intend to hurt anyone. So, Gatsby would be a modernized version of Aristotle's tragic hero—he still elicits the audience's sympathy—even if he is a slightly more flawed version of the archetype.

Javert as Tragic Hero in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables

Javert is a police detective, obsessed with law and order, and Les Misérables' primary antagonist. The novel contains various subplots but for the most part follows a character named Jean Valjean, a good and moral person who cannot escape his past as an ex-convict. (He originally goes to prison for stealing a loaf of bread to help feed his sister's seven children.) After Valjean escapes from prison, he changes his name and ends up leading a moral and prosperous life, becoming well-known for the ways in which he helps the poor.

Javert, known for his absolute respect for authority and the law, spends many years trying to find the escaped convict and return him to prison. After Javert's lifelong pursuit leads him to Valjean, though, Valjean ends up saving Javert's life. Javert, in turn, finds himself unable to arrest the man who showed him such mercy, but also cannot give up his devotion to justice and the law. In despair, he commits suicide. In other words: Javert's strength and righteous morality lead him to his destruction.

While Javert fits the model of a tragic hero in many ways, he's an unconventional tragic hero because he's an antagonist rather than the protagonist of the novel (Valjean is the protagonist). One might then argue that Javert is a "tragic figure" or "tragic character" rather than a "tragic hero" because he's not actually the "hero" of the novel at all. He's a useful example, though, because he shows just how flexible the idea of a "tragic hero" can be, and how writers play with those ideas to create new sorts of characters.

Additional Examples of Tragic Heroes

• Macbeth: In Shakespeare's Macbeth , the main character Macbeth allows his (and his wife's) ambition to push him to murder his king in order to fulfill a prophecy and become king himself. Macbeth commits his murder early in the play, and from then on his actions become bloodier and bloodier, and he becomes more a villain than a hero. Nonetheless, he ends in death, with his wife also dead, and fully realizing the emptiness of his life. Macbeth is a tragic hero, but the play is interesting in that his fatal flaw or mistake occurs relatively early in the play, and the rest of the play shows his decline into tragedy even as he initially seems to get what he seeks (the throne).
• Michael Corleone: The main character of the Godfather films, Michael Corleone can be said to experience a tragic arc over the course of the three Godfather movies. Ambition and family loyalty push him to take over his mafia family when he had originally been molded by his father to instead "go clean." Michael's devotion to his family then leads him to murder his enemies, kills his betraying brother, and indirectly leads to the deaths of essentially all of his loved ones. He dies, alone, thinking of his lost loves , a tragic antihero.
• Okonkwo: In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart , Okonkwo is a man of great strength and will, and these heroic traits make him powerful and wealthy in his tribe. But his devotion to always appearing strong and powerful also lead him to alienate his son, break tribal tradition in a way that leads to his exile from the tribe, and to directly confront white missionaries in a way that ultimately leads him to commit suicide. Okonkwo's devotion to strength and power leads to his own destruction.
• Anakin Skywalker: The three prequel Star Wars movies (episodes I, II, and III) can be seen as an attempt to frame Anakin Skywalker into a tragic hero. Anakin is both powerful in the force and a prophesied "chosen one," but his ambition and desire for order and control lead him to abandon and kill fellow Jedi, inadvertently kill his own wife, and to join the dark side of the force and become a kind of enforcer for the Emperor. Anakin, as Darth Vader, is alone and full of such shame and self-hatred that he can see no other option but to continue on his path of evil. This makes him a tragic hero. Having said all that, some would argue that the first three Star Wars movies aren't well written or well acted enough to truly make Anakin a tragic hero (does Anakin really ever have the audience's sympathy given his bratty whininess?), but it's clear that he was meant to be a tragic hero.

What's the Function of a Tragic Hero in Literature?

Above all, tragic heroes put the tragedy in tragedies—it is the tragic hero's downfall that emotionally engages the audience or reader and invokes their pity and fear. Writers therefore use tragic heroes for many of the same reasons they write tragedies—to illustrate a moral conundrum with depth, emotion, and complexity.

Besides this, tragic heroes serve many functions in the stories in which they appear. Their tragic flaws make them more relatable to an audience, especially as compared to a more conventional hero, who might appear too perfect to actually resemble real people or draw an emotional response from the audience. Aristotle believed that by watching a tragic hero's downfall, an audience would become wiser when making choices in their own lives. Furthermore, tragic heroes can illustrate moral ambiguity, since a seemingly desirable trait (such as innocence or ambition) can suddenly become a character's greatest weakness, bringing about grave misfortune or even death.

Other Helpful Tragic Hero Resources

• The Wikipedia Page for Tragic Hero : A helpful overview that mostly focuses on the history of term.
• The Dictionary Definition of Tragic Hero : A brief and basic definition.
• A one-minute, animated explanation of the tragic hero.
• Is Macbeth a Tragic Hero? This video explains what a tragic hero is, using Macbeth as an example .

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Heroic Tragedy

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Literary criticism implies the intellectual capacity to evaluate and understand the literary text, the analysis of particular works being the main aim of literary criticism, but, though achieved by most of the critics prior to the twentieth century, in English background criticism has started with some purposes which are alien to the nature of critical act. For instance, Sydney defends, Dryden prescribes, Pope reflects and prescribes, Fielding introduces a new genre and Wordsworth a new type of poetry, etc. English criticism during the neoclassical period was a complex and multi-voiced phenomenon, represented by a large number of critics and writer-critics who developed a reflexive but above all normative and prescriptive critical discourse. John Dryden and his Of Dramatic Poesie, An Essay would better show the condition of English criticism in Restoration. The first half of the eighteenth century was dominated by the neoclassical ideas expressed by Alexander Pope in An Essay on Cri...

Literary criticism implies the intellectual capacity to evaluate and understand the literary text, the analysis of particular works being the main aim of literary criticism, but, though achieved by most of the critics prior to the twentieth century, in English background criticism has started with some purposes which are alien to the nature of critical act. For instance, Sydney defends, Dryden prescribes, Pope reflects and prescribes, Fielding introduces a new genre and Wordsworth a new type of poetry, etc. English criticism during the neoclassical period was a complex and multi-voiced phenomenon, represented by a large number of critics and writer-critics who developed a reflexive but above all normative and prescriptive critical discourse. John Dryden and his Of Dramatic Poesie, An Essay would better show the condition of English criticism in Restoration. The first half of the eighteenth century was dominated by the neoclassical ideas expressed by Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man; the second half of the century was governed by the personality of Dr Samuel Johnson and his influential Lives of the Poets and Dictionary of the English Language. The most prescriptive critical voice in English literature belonging to the neoclassical period is that of John Dryden, as to be equalled perhaps only by Alexander Pope. To reveal the essence of prescriptive criticism as explaining and giving rules as well as showing the direction for literary production with regards to the critical discourse of Dryden and that of Pope represents the purpose of this study.

Kian Pishkar Assistant Professor

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What is Tragedy — Definition, Examples & Types Explained

W hy do we find ourselves drawn to tales steeped in sorrow, where heroes crumble and hopes are dashed? This magnetic pull is the work of tragedy, a narrative mechanism that mirrors our own struggles against fate and the human condition. 

In this article, we’ll peel back the layers of tragedy in storytelling, journeying from its ancient Greek roots to its modern-day manifestations. Prepare to delve into the heart of darkness, as we analyze the profound beauty that lies within the tragic narrative.

What is Tragedy in Storytelling?

First, let’s define tragedy.

Before we delve deeper into the intricate layers of tragedy, let's first anchor our exploration by looking at the tragedy definition.

TRAGEDY DEFINITION

What is tragedy in storytelling.

A tragedy in storytelling is a form of drama that depicts the downfall or destruction of a noble or heroic character. This downfall often results from a personal flaw, a twist of fate, or a combination of both. The narrative usually involves intense emotions and leads to a cathartic release for the audience. 

Tragedy underscores the vulnerability of humanity, our susceptibility to failure, and the inevitable suffering that comes with existence. It serves as a mirror reflecting the harsh realities of life, while simultaneously exploring profound themes of morality, responsibility, and the human condition.

Characteristics of Tragedy:

• Heroic or Noble Protagonist
• Inevitable Downfall

Tragedy History

Historical background of tragedy.

The tragedy genre boasts a rich and complex history that dates back to ancient times. Let’s take a look through time at tragedy history starting from the birth of tragedy in ancient Greek drama, moving through its evolution during the Renaissance, and finally exploring its transformation in the modern era.

Origin in Greek Drama

The concept of tragedy traces its roots back to ancient Greece, specifically to the city-state of Athens in the 5th century BC. The term "tragedy" itself originates from the Greek word "tragoidia," which translates to "goat song." 

It's theorized this may refer to the ritualistic sacrifices that took place during the Dionysian festivals, where tragedies were initially performed.  To better understand the role tragedy played in Greek drama, check out this great video breakdown by Crash Course.

Thespis, Athens, and The Origins of Greek Drama

Three prominent Greek tragedians – Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides – played pivotal roles in shaping the genre. Aeschylus, often hailed as the father of tragedy, introduced a second actor into the plays, transforming them from monologues to dialogues. 

Sophocles further enriched the format by adding a third actor and placing more emphasis on individual characters rather than the chorus. 

Euripides pushed the boundaries even further, infusing psychological elements and challenging traditional moral values in his works.

Evolution During Renaissance

Fast forward to the Renaissance, tragedy found new life and depth in the works of William Shakespeare. His tragedies, such as Hamlet and Macbeth , are renowned for their complex protagonists whose tragic flaws inevitably led to their downfall. Shakespeare's tragedies explored profound themes of ambition, guilt, and the devastating power of unchecked authority.

Shakespeare's Tragedies  •  Tragedy examples

Tragedy in the modern era.

In the 20th century, the tragedy genre was redefined yet again, this time by playwrights like Arthur Miller. In works such as Death of a Salesman , Miller shifted the focus of tragedy from the nobility to the common people, reflecting the struggles and failures of everyday individuals.

From its inception in ancient Greece to its contemporary interpretations, the tragedy genre has continuously evolved, mirroring the changing societal norms and human experiences throughout different historical periods.

Related Posts

• What is Hamartia? →
• What is a Tragic Hero? →
• The Role of Catharsis in Storytelling →

Characteristics of Tragedy

Elements of a tragedy in storytelling.

Delving into the realm of tragedy in storytelling offers a profound exploration of human nature, moral dilemmas, and the emotional depth that can be achieved through narrative. 

Let’s looks at the elements of tragedy in storytelling that make tragic stories so accessible to readers and viewers. 

Tragic Hero

A tragic hero is a protagonist who is generally characterized by noble qualities, but is flawed in a way that leads to their downfall. One of the most famous examples is Shakespeare's Hamlet from the play Hamlet . Hamlet is a prince, intelligent and morally upright, but his indecisiveness and obsession with revenge lead to his tragic end.

In cinema, Michael Corleone from Francis Ford Coppola’s immortal film The Godfather is a classic tragic hero. His transition from an innocent man to a mafia boss, driven by a desire to protect his family, results in his downfall. His quest for power isolates him, ultimately leading to regret and loneliness, marking him a tragic figure in film history.

Michael Corleone: The Tragic Hero  •  Tragedy examples

Tragic flaw (hamartia).

The tragic flaw, or hamartia , is a personal failing in the hero that drives them towards their downfall. It could be an excess of a virtue, a misjudgment, or lack of self-awareness. Oedipus from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex provides a clear example. His tragic flaw is his hubris, or excessive pride, which leads him to defy prophecies and ultimately fulfills them, causing his own ruin.

Hamartia and The Tragic Figure (Aristotle's Poetics)  •  Tragedy examples

In a tragedy, the downfall of the hero is inevitable and usually the result of their own actions, often spurred by their tragic flaw. Macbeth, in Shakespeare's Macbeth , is a classic example. His ambition leads him to commit regicide, setting off a series of events that eventually lead to his death.

Catharsis is the emotional release experienced by the audience after witnessing the tragic hero's downfall. It's a purging of emotions, particularly of fear and pity. 

A powerful example can be found in the film Titanic . The tragic fate of the characters Jack and Rose induces a cathartic release for the viewers, as they empathize with the characters' struggles and share in their sorrow.

what is tragedy

The role of tragedy in storytelling.

The power of tragedy in storytelling lies not just in its ability to evoke profound emotions, but also in its capacity to provoke thought and reflection. It uncovers the vulnerabilities and complexities inherent in human nature, revealing the consequences of our flaws and decisions.

This Ted-ed video breaks down the allure to tragic stories through key elements of tragedy. 

Why tragedies are alluring  •  David E. Rivas

Tragedy holds up a mirror to society, forcing us to confront our own moral dilemmas and fears. It's not merely about crafting narratives that tug at the heartstrings; it's about creating stories that resonate on a profoundly human level, stories that challenge us, make us question, and ultimately, make us feel deeply.

What is a Tragic Hero? 

Having explored the multifaceted concept of tragedy and its integral role in storytelling, let's now delve deeper into one of its most compelling components - the tragic hero, a character whose complexities and inevitable downfall captivate audiences and drive the narrative.

Up Next: What is a Tragic Hero? →

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Tragic Hero

Definition of tragic hero.

Tragic hero is a literary device utilized to create a protagonist for a tragic work of literature. A tragic hero is a character that represents the consequences that come from possessing one or more personal flaws or being doomed by a particular fate. Traditionally, the purpose of tragic hero as a literary device is to evoke pity and/or fear in an audience through the protagonist’s flaw and consequential downfall.

Aristotle categorized the characteristics of classic tragic hero in Greek drama as, in general, a male character of noble birth who experiences a reversal of fortune due to a tragic flaw . In addition, the realization of this flaw evokes sympathy from an audience. For example, Oedipus Rex, the title character of Sophocles’ tragedy , is considered a classic tragic hero. Oedipus experiences a terrible downfall due to hubris as his tragic flaw. As a result, the audience is left to sympathize with his tragic fate.

Familiar or Well-Known Examples of Tragic Hero

In contemporary society, examples of tragic heroes are often found among politicians, celebrities, athletes, and other famous public figures. Of course, actual people are far more complex in their motives and experiences than literary characters. Therefore, they can’t literally be considered tragic heroes. However, what we know of their stories can be similar to that of a modern tragic hero. Here are some examples:

• Lori Loughlin (“Aunt Becky”)
• Anthony Weiner
• Lance Armstrong
• Michael Richards
• Richard Nixon
• Michael Vick
• Tonya Harding
• Woody Allen
• Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker
• Paul Reubens (“Pee Wee Herman”)
• Martha Stewart
• Jimmy Swaggart
• Tiger Woods
• J.K. Rowling
• Roseanne Barr
• Charlie Sheen
• Lindsay Lohan

Classic Examples of Tragic Hero in Shakespeare

William Shakespeare made great use of tragic hero as a literary device in his Shakespearean tragedies. Shakespeare’s tragic heroes demonstrate the presence of fatal flaws within the powerful. Yet, the protagonists in his tragedies often experience moments of realization or redemption that result in compassion from the audience. Here are some classic examples of Shakespearean tragic heroes:

• Romeo Montague
• Richard III

Modern Examples of Tragic Hero in Fiction

The modern usage of tragic hero as a literary device has evolved from the classical characteristics established by Aristotle. For example, most modern tragic heroes are not limited by class or background, and they are not exclusively male protagonists. Here are some modern examples of tragic hero in works of fiction :

• Scarlett O’Hara ( Gone with the Wind )
• Don Draper ( Mad Men )
• Captain Ahab ( moby dick )
• Detective Sergeant Alonzo Harris ( Training Day )
• Kurtz ( Heart of Darkness )
• Blanche DuBois ( A Streetcar Named Desire )
• Andy Dufresne ( Shawshank Redemption )
• Bigger Thomas ( Native Son )
• Emma Bovary ( Madame Bovary )
• Jay Gatsby ( The Great Gatsby )

Difference Between Tragic Hero and Anti-Hero

It can be difficult to distinguish between tragic hero and anti-hero in literary works. Essentially, for a character to be a tragic hero, they must have some initial virtue that makes them powerful, charismatic, or heroic in the minds of the audience. In addition, tragic heroes must possess some sort of tragic flaw as part of their internal make-up or nature that makes them at least partially responsible for their own destruction. Finally, a tragic hero should suffer a reversal of fortune from good to bad, often leading to death or punishment that appears to be greater than deserved. As a result, these elements work together to generate a sympathetic response from the audience for tragic heroes.

An anti-hero is also a protagonist in fiction. However, unlike a tragic hero, an anti-hero is lacking in virtues associated with heroism. The anti-hero may be deficient in characteristics such as courage or integrity. However, as a character, the anti-hero still has an audience’s sympathy. Though anti-heroes may do good things for wrong reasons, they are fundamentally flawed and their actions serve only themselves. Therefore, their downfall is deserved and due entirely to their choices and devices.

Writing Tragic Hero

Overall, as a literary device, the tragic hero functions as the main character or protagonist of a tragedy. The characteristics of the tragic hero have evolved since Aristotle’s time in the sense that they are not limited to nobility or the male gender. In addition, a modern tragic hero may not necessarily possess typical or conventional heroic qualities. They may even be somewhat villainous in nature.

However, all tragic heroes must have sympathy from the audience for their circumstances. Additionally, all tragic heroes must experience a downfall leading to some form of ruin as a result of a tragic flaw in their character.

Here are some ways that writers carefully incorporate tragic hero into their work:

Hamartia , sometimes known as tragic flaw, is a fault or failing withing a character that leads to their downfall. For example, hubris is a common tragic flaw in that its nature is excessive pride and even defiance of the gods in Greek tragedy. Overall, a tragic hero must possess hamartia .

Peripeteia refers to a sudden turning point , as in a reversal of fortune or negative change of circumstances. Therefore, a tragic hero must experience peripeteia for their downfall.

Catharsis is the necessary pity and fear that the audience feels for tragic heroes and their inescapable fate. As a result, this sympathetic feeling indicates a purge of pent-up emotions in the audience, released through the journey of tragic heroes.

Examples of Tragic Hero in Literature

Many great works of literature feature tragic hero as a literary device. Here are some examples of tragic hero in literature:

Example 1: Hester Prynne ( The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne)

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness … Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods… The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

This passage from Hawthorne’s novel indicates the hamartia and peripeteia experienced by the protagonist Hester Prynne. Hester Prynne has been convicted of adultery in a Puritan community . She remains loyal to her lover by refusing to reveal the paternity of her daughter Pearl. This results in Hester’s isolation from society and a punishment of wearing a scarlet “A” on her chest, indicating her crime and shame.

Hester Prynne is a tragic heroine due to her tragic flaw of fidelity outside her marriage to a weak man who doesn’t grant her the same sense of loyalty. For this, she suffers a consequential reversal of circumstances through imprisonment and public ridicule. Additionally, she is a tragic heroine in that her journey as a protagonist generates catharsis in readers. As Hawthorne’s novel progresses, readers feel both pity and fear for Hester. By the novel’s end, reader sympathy for her character results in a release of pent-up sadness and despair, mirroring Hester’s own experience.

Example 2: Victor Frankenstein ( Frankenstein by Mary Shelley)

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical , or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.

Victor Frankenstein is the tragic hero of Mary Shelley ’s novel. Frankenstein’s statements regarding learning the physical secrets of the world demonstrate his character’s hamartia in the form of hubris. Frankenstein succumbs to blind ambition, believing that he can conquer death with science. Therefore, by recklessly playing the role of creator and ignoring natural order, Frankenstein feels he has unlocked the mysteries of nature and defeated death. This results in over-confidence and pride to the point that Frankenstein does not believe his actions will have detrimental consequences. However, he only believes this until the “monster” begins killing people.

The audience is witness to this hubris as Frankenstein’s tragic flaw. Therefore, because of this hubris, Frankenstein’s fate is tied to the monster and his promising life and career are ruined. His downfall is clear in the novel, yet the audience retains their pity for this tragic hero.

Example 3: Othello ( Othello by William Shakespeare)

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am . Nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely, but too well. Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme. Of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe

Related posts:

• 10 Hero Archetypes with Examples  
• Anti-Hero Archetype
• Tragic Flaw

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• Tragedy and the Common Man

Read below our complete study guide on Tragedy and the Common Man by Arthur Miller. Our study guide covers Tragedy and the Common Man summary and detailed analysis.

Tragedy and the Common Man by Arthur Miller Summary

Tragedy and the Common Man is Miller’s analysis of a new form of theater. Miller starts the essay by pointing out the theatre of the 20th century that the number of tragedies written down is very few as compared to the comedies, which are relatively high in number. For such a difference in number, one reason which includes, according to Miller, is the scarcity of the heroes among modern society.

Secondly, the skepticism or doubtfulness of the modern man by science results in thinning of his blood. And the people don’t believe in heroes anymore. He claims that the modern man has become reserved, highly careful and attentive and one cannot have a heroic life with this attitude.

The tragedy that is written on an account heroic life have criteria or some merits while the modern man seems to be below that criteria or vice versa. Millers himself draws the conclusion for the above facts. Firstly he claims the tragic or heroic mode of life to archaic. As this is a modern world of the 20th century and the modern man no more believes in heroism. Secondly, the tragic and heroic mode is only suitable and applicable for the king and the kingly (i.e. people living like kings).

Despite his argument regarding the scarcity of heroes in the modern world; Miller believes that the common man of the modern world is a highly suitable subject for the tragedy just as the kings were. Moreover, he argues, whenever the question of tragedy comes, the people never hesitates in attributing this to the high-rank people as if the heroic mode of life is only ‘property of high-bred character alone’. Rather the ordinary people should cherish the tragedy from any other class.

Arthur Miller sets the general rules for the one to have a tragic life. Firstly, a hero is the person, according to Miller, who willingly laid down his life to for the sake of securing ‘his sense of personal dignity’. Secondly, they think that they are not given a rightful place in the society so the struggle ‘to gain a “rightful” place” in their society.

According to Miller, tragedy is motivated via ‘man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly’. In the course of attaining his rightful place in society and attaining his dignity, a hero sometimes loses his life. But for Miller, there is a window of opportunity in this. By such an act, the spectators will get obsessed with the inexactness of the society that might abolish the man unreasonably and will evaluate the cause. Hence, an ordinary man will be in a better position to understand the unfairness of society, and will try to develop the social order. Thus, the death of a hero bids optimism. For Miller, tragedy is intrinsically optimistic.

Miller argues about “the tragic flaw”, Aristotle’s hamartia, in a modern world is called as “inherit unwillingness” of a hero to continue passive to what he considers as a test to his self-esteem and “rightful” place in society. But this flaw, as mentioned, is not in the hero but is in the society. While the hero is the prey of that flawed society

Millers says that we do not have the scarcity of individuals among us who act against the social order that irritate them. The ordinary person accepts the conventions of society out of fear while the tragic hero who sees the flaw within “unchangeable society” and leads to the course of actions that shakes the basic foundations of society and from there “comes the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy”.

Miller further argues that the kings and kingly are often interrelated with tragedy as their characters are much bigger and have more to be defeated. But despite this, in the fiction of Job, around was an instant when an ordinary men challenge the scheme of things and stand against them to defend themselves. The willingness to lose everything for the sake of one’s dignity makes an ordinary common man to achieve a height of a king.

According to Miller, the quality in tragic plays that jiggles the spectators lies in the fear of being displaced and to be dragged away from our chosen image in the world. The common man in the modern world is most than ever scared to lose his rightful place in the society.

The tragedy is not all about the person to evaluate himself justly or to eradicate all the illness and evil from society. Similarly, the detection of some moral law is not the detection of some philosophical or abstract quantity. But the tragic mode of life requires a condition with which a person recognizes himself and is able to develop his insight. And this insight further enlightens and this enlightenment further helps him to finger out his enemy, the evils in the society.

Miller accounts the modern literature for the lack of tragedy in our environment. To him, modern literature purely represents the psychotic and sociological view of life. All it deals is with mind and make the actions impossible.

Miller says that the very delusion of tragedy is that it is directly associated with pessimism. But on the other hand, tragedy implies optimism. It is owing to the circumstances that tragedies reveal men’s persistence to the unmatchable probabilities and frantic however everlasting struggle for humankind. The fact that upsurges the tragedy is that this struggle for humankind has a possibility. According to him, probable achievements should be presented in tragedies. An equilibrium between what is conceivable and what is inconceivable, makes success appear promising and consequently stimulating downfall to a complex level. It appears that Miller’s hypothesis is correct, i.e. the nastiest of tragedies be able to occur to either a King or a common man.

Tragedy and the Common Man Literary Analysis

Tragedy and the Common Man is an argumentative essay by Arthur Miller about the new form of theater in the 20th century.

Tragedy and the Common Man Critical Appreciation:

Arthur Miller turns out to be popular after the 2nd world war not only because of his dramas but also as the theoretician of drama. Tragedy and the Common man get published in the New York Times shortly after his most famous work The Death of Salesman. In this essay, Miller supports Willy Lowman, a character in the Death of Salesman, regarding the suitability for the subject of tragedy. He presents the idea that a common man is also “noble” as kings and the idea of tragedy is no more limited to the nobility.

Miller begins the essay by figuring out that the modern man has become highly skeptical and their faith in heroes has declined. The twentieth century has encountered the two goriest world wars of the history and this makes the people disbelieve in tragedy and tragic mode of life. Consequently, the relevancy of a tragic hero to the modern world is disregarded by the modern man. Miller says that despite disbelieve in a heroism, the modern world is not having any scarcity of heroes. In fact, the modern world has plenty of heroes in the form of a common man.

Miller argues that there are no specific criteria for being a tragic hero, but a hero is a person who willingly laid down his life for the “sake of personal dignity”. Heroism has nothing to do with your social status or social background. Moreover, he argues, whenever the question of tragedy comes, the people never hesitates in attributing this to the high-rank people as if the heroic mode of life is only ‘property of high-bred character alone’. But the common man is also capable to exercise the tragedy to a greater extent just as kings.

Moreover, Miller argues that an ordinary person is perfectly suitable for the character of a tragic hero. He claims that the submissive ones, the one who agree to take their surroundings without vengeance, are “flawless.” But the common man, on the other hand perfectly fits into the character as maximum individuals do not partake this characteristic, in addition, they do not become trapped in the deteriorating of the “tragic flaw”.

For Miller, the “tragic flaw” in the hero is the reason that causes a “fall” of a tragic hero. And this flaw is not certainly a fault. The flaw exists to be nil, however, is the tragic hero’s reluctance to be passive in a challenge to his self-esteem which roots a fall of every tragic hero. The flaw in the personality of a tragic hero is the cause of his unwillingness to accept the flawed conventions of the society.

Throughout the essay, it is mentioned that the common man is a suitable subject for the tragedy and the whole essays centers around this idea. Now, the question is why the common man or the modern world is suitable for the tragedy as the tragedies are supposed to be ‘property of high-bred character alone’. Miller rejects this idea of tragedy to be characteristics of high-breed and claims that the common man’s willingness to lose everything for the sake of one’s dignity makes an ordinary common man to achieve a height of a king. Moreover, the common man is always in fear to be displaced from his rightful place in the society which makes him stand against the society and lead to actions which are best for the tragic mode of life.

According to Miller, the very delusion of tragedy is that it is directly associated with pessimism. But on the other hand, tragedy implies optimism. It is owing to the circumstances that tragedies reveal men’s persistence to the unmatchable probabilities and frantic however everlasting struggle for humankind. The fact that upsurges the tragedy is that this struggle for humankind has a possibility. According to him, probable achievements should be presented in tragedies. An equilibrium between what is conceivable and what is inconceivable, makes success appear promising and consequently stimulating downfall to a complex level. It appears that Miller’s hypothesis is correct, i.e. the nastiest of tragedies be able to occur to either a King or a common man.

Tragedy and the Common Man Themes:

Following the only theme of Miller’s essay Tragedy and the Common Man;

The Common Man is Suitable Subject for Tragedy:

In Tragedy and the Common Man, Arthur Miller argues in the world devoid of kings and kingly, the common man of this modern world fits perfectly for a tragic mode of life. The inherit unwillingness of a man to the flawed conventions of the society made him as superior as kings. The common always think that he is not given the rightful status in the society so he fights with society to gain his status. Moreover, the common man is always scared to be displaced from his position and this fear makes him fight for his rights. Those who go against the conventions of the society in the modern world are called are tragic heroes and the common man of the modern world are tragic heroes.

More From Arthur Miller

• Death of a Salesman

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Oedipus — Oedipus the King: Analysis of Tragic Hero and Themes

Oedipus The King: Analysis of Tragic Hero and Themes

• Categories: Oedipus

About this sample

Words: 861 |

Published: Jan 31, 2024

Words: 861 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Table of contents

Background information, analysis of the tragic hero, examination of fate and free will, exploration of the theme of blindness, examination of the themes of knowledge and ignorance.

• Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Penguin Classics, 1967.
• McAuley, Karen. “Themes in Greek Tragedy : Oedipus the King.” English Tutor, 11 Mar. 2021, englishtutorlessons.com/gcse/greek-myths-and-tragedies/oedipus-the-king/.
• Segal, Charles. “Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Freud's Oedipus Complex.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis , vol. 70, no. 1, 1989, pp. 1–13.

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The Story of Oedipus as a Tragic Hero Essay

The story of oedipus.

• Oedipus and Jack from Lord of the Flies
• Oedipus and Octave Parango from 99 Francs

The whole story of Oedipus is a chain of actions and circumstances resulting in unfortunate consequences, which is represented by a special term. Hamartia in a tragedy represents a flaw in the hero character or behavior, which invariably leads to tragic events (Beye, 2019). With regard to this concept, it is difficult to determine what hamartia really is for Oedipus. His intellect may be such a flaw since, due to it, Oedipus became king and married his mother. Anger can also be hamartia because it caused the king to kill his father. His hubris, which is self-confidence and pride in tragedy, can also be hamartia since he tried to avoid the fate which the oracle had prophesied to him. As a result of his actions, Oedipus comes to anagnorisis when he learns that he married his mother and killed his father. This discovery leads him to catastrophe in the form of his mother’s suicide, after which Oedipus stabs his eyes and asks for exile. In turn, such an act of self-torture serves as a catharsis for him since it allows him to punish himself and free from guilt.

Oedipus and Jack from “Lord of the Flies”

The hero of Oedipus can be compared with the hero of William Golding’s book “Lord of the Flies” Jack. Jack’s hamartia is his hubris, as he was excessively self-confident and convinced that the boys would never return home. Due to his violent actions, Jack soon comes to anagnorisis when he learns that the other boys no longer want to obey him. A catastrophe for him is rescuing and returning home, as he will not be able to be who he was on the island anymore. Catharsis occurs when, after the salvation, Jack realizes the wrong and cruelty of his behavior. Thus, Jack is represented as a character who faces personal tragedy as a result of his actions and flaws.

Oedipus and Octave Parango from “99 Francs”

The tragic hero and his story are shaped by the elements, which together create a special formula. In relation to Oedipus, he is the archetype of such a hero, illustrating all the necessary concepts. Oedipus, as the protagonist of Sophocles’ story, fits perfectly into the formula. The hero is presented at the beginning of the narrative as a respected person with noble qualities. However, over the course of the story, its negative traits are revealed, which are hubris and hamartia. These qualities lead him to dawnfall, which is the essence of the tragedy. Rocco (2021) notes that “the play presents Oedipus as supremely confident, a man of native intelligence, skill, and wit willing to abandon all inherent custom, tradition, and limits in his single-minded search for the truth” (p. 19). Thus, the subsequent anagnorisis, catharsis, and catastrophe of the hero occur from his sincere personal striving for enlightenment and knowledge. At the same time, for him, the discovery of the truth becomes both a curse and a blessing.

Oedipus’s hamartia is his main hubris, as he is stubborn and overconfident even before the gods. It is noteworthy that he brags about his eyes and the ability to see the truth around. However, it appears that he is completely blind, which he proves through the subsequent self-punishment and catharsis. Oedipus’s hubris is emphasized by his constant criticism of the society around him and his contempt for people. Thus, he opposes himself to the whole world, and rises above it and does not hesitate to express it. However, the subsequent anagnorisis, which is the discovery of the truth, changes his life,it is his downfall. He is no longer confident, Oedipus is depressed and shocked at how tragic the event hubris and hfmfrtia have led him to. Thus, his tragedy is based on individual search and delusion, for which the hero had to pay a high price.

As Oedipus, the hero of the film “99 Francs” Octave Parengo is a self-confident person who exalts himself above everyone else. He is smart and cunning, just as a classic tragic hero, but his hubris and hamartia also lead him to misfortune. The plot of the film tells about an extremely successful marketing expert who is rich and influential. However, over time, under the pressure of various factors, he begins to realize how much the world around him is corrupt and hypocritical. This discovery is a shock to him, but he continues to struggle with himself. One day an innocent girl dies by his fault and the police come looking for him. Everything happens in front of his colleagues, which makes him feel ashamed, he is blamed, the hero is in despair. In the end, Octave decides to commit suicide in order to complete the chain of tragic events.

Although the film is a satire, the story of the protagonist is a real tragedy. Octave demonstrates the presence of all the elements necessary for the classic tragic nerve. Primarily he possesses hubris, which leads him to a sad end. His qualities as intelligence, cruelty, indifference, and self-confidence ensure his downfall. He also possesses hamartia, which is his main trait, as he considers himself to be better than everyone else. Anagnorisis for him is the realization of how insignificant and worthless his life is. This discovery leads him to catastrophe, as he kills a woman in despair and a desire to escape from awareness. Suicide is presented as catharsis, since he sees no other way to ease his fate.

Thus, Octave Parango is similar to Oedipus with his hubris and hamartia, which led the character to oppose himself to the whole world. Apparently, the paths of the two heroes are different, but the structure of their tragic fate is the same. Octave Parango is a modern variation of Oedipus, who wanted to escape the established order. He, as Oedipus, felt unique and able to do what he wanted, which gave him a false idea of ​​his position in the world. Thus, the desire to prove that the established rules have no power over him Octave, as Oedipus paid for his hamartia. Moreover, at the end of the story, Oedipus returns to Thebes, where he accepts his punishment. Octave also comes to catharsis in his company building, where his long journey began.

Although the characters are similar in general, they also have a number of differences in details. Oedipus, being a king and of noble birth, expressed his dissatisfaction with the surrounding world openly. Thus, he fought the world and tried to prove his superiority to him. Octave, in contrast, mostly struggled with himself not being able to criticize everyone, as he was part of this big lie and was afraid. Another fundamental difference between the heroes is that Octave is aware of his hubris. He understands that despite opposing himself to the world, he is a part of it and carries the same qualities. Thus, the main antagonist, as well as the protagonist of his story, is himself, who is trying to fight these traits. Oedipus is completely ignorant, his antagonist is the fate he is trying to avoid. The character is not aware of his vices, which lead him to dawnfall. Thus, Oedipus is a classic tragic hero, while Octave is more psychologically and emotionally complex, but still follows a traditional tragic path.

Beye, C. R. (2019). Ancient Greek literature and society . Cornell University Press.

Rocco, C. (2021). Tragedy and enlightenment: Athenian political thought and the dilemmas of modernity . University of California Press.

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IvyPanda. (2024, January 8). The Story of Oedipus as a Tragic Hero. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-story-of-oedipus-as-a-tragic-hero/

"The Story of Oedipus as a Tragic Hero." IvyPanda , 8 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/the-story-of-oedipus-as-a-tragic-hero/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'The Story of Oedipus as a Tragic Hero'. 8 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "The Story of Oedipus as a Tragic Hero." January 8, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-story-of-oedipus-as-a-tragic-hero/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Story of Oedipus as a Tragic Hero." January 8, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-story-of-oedipus-as-a-tragic-hero/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Story of Oedipus as a Tragic Hero." January 8, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-story-of-oedipus-as-a-tragic-hero/.

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Follow our news, recent searches, nicoll highway collapse: 20 years on, colleagues remember 'hero heng' who lost his life saving others, advertisement.

Foreman Heng Yeow Pheow was one of four people killed in the tragedy, when a temporary retaining wall of the tunnel at the Nicoll Highway Circle Line MRT station construction site caved in.

Former colleagues of Mr Heng Yeow Pheow, who lost his life saving his workers during the Nicoll Highway collapse in 2004, pay tribute to him during an annual memorial event.

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Darrelle Ng

SINGAPORE: Twenty years may have passed, but former colleagues still remember their foreman, whom they affectionately call Hero Heng.

Every Apr 20, they gather at a memorial service with fruits and joss sticks to honour Mr Heng Yeow Pheow, who lost his life saving his workers during the Nicoll Highway collapse in 2004.

His body was never found but his legacy remains close to the hearts of many.

“My heart (is) very sad. I cannot say anything. (It has been a) long time but I still remember. I won't forget,” said Mr Phornamdaeng Thiticha. 

Mr Thiticha, along with seven others, were pulled to safety by Mr Heng as their worksite crumbled during the incident.

In face of life-threatening danger, the foreman stayed behind to ensure his men were safe.

His ex-colleagues from construction company KORI Holdings described him as a selfless man who always ensured others were taken care of.

“Every year we come to pray for him. To remember him. All the times when I come to this place, I remember him. My friend is here. It is very sad when I come here,” Mr Suphathip Sanya, another former colleague, told CNA during this year's tribute.

The annual event is held at the incident site, where a commemorative structure to honour him is located.

Among the items laid out during the annual event is a pair of gloves which Mr Heng's close friend and colleague Hooi Yu Koh used to indicate where he last saw the foreman.

“I was accompanying DART (Disaster Assistance and Rescue Team) to go inside to the collapsed area,” he recalled.

“The area was completely flooded and we could only use our bare hands. One of the civil defence officers extended this pair of gloves to me. I used it to try to find Mr Heng but I couldn’t locate him. I’ve always kept this pair of gloves with me through this 20 years.”

Mr Heng was one of four people killed in the tragedy, when a temporary retaining wall of the tunnel at the Nicoll Highway Circle Line MRT station construction site caved in.

Mr Hooi said his friend's death was not in vain, for the incident has triggered massive changes in the construction industry.

“After this tragedy, there has been a lot of improvements in the industry, and has made the entire sector more safety conscious. From this incident, we learned a lot of things,” he said.

“His effort to save others has had a great impact on all of us. This memory and fondness we have of him carry us through to the future.”

His valour is remembered in other ways.

Ten years ago, a bench in Tampines Tree Park was dedicated to Mr Heng for his brave effort in saving his colleagues.

His widow Sally Heng, and two children Daniel and Joann, chose the location because it is close to their home and they used to make frequent trips to the park with him.

His colleagues said they plan to continue honouring their life-saver for years to come.

Lessons from Nicoll Highway collapse: How SCDF made advancements in training, equipment in last 20 years

20 years after Nicoll Highway collapse, construction industry stresses regular updates on safety protocols

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Man who confronted attacker with bollard and other bystanders praised for heroic acts during Bondi stabbings

Heroic tales of bystanders confronting an armed man and guiding shoppers to safety have emerged in the aftermath of the tragedy at Westfield Bondi Junction where six victims were killed.

Warning: Some readers may find the following details of the attack, witness accounts and footage of the incident distressing.

New South Wales Police has named the offender as 40-year-old Joel Cauchi, who recently came to Sydney from Queensland.

Police said the attack did not appear to be terrorism related.

The senior police officer who confronted and shot Cauchi dead at the scene has been identified as Inspector Amy Scott.

Follow live updates on the stabbing at Westfield Bondi Junction in our blog

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, NSW Premier Chris Minns and countless others have commended Inspector Scott for acting quickly under pressure to put a stop to the violence.

Mr Minns also praised the bystanders who committed heroic acts in the face of the danger.

"If I could point and highlight some of that strength in the last 24 hours ... to the ordinary members of the public that cornered and confronted a murderer in the Westfield Shopping Centre, showing what I would call instinctive bravery under terrible circumstances," he said.

"It has been incredible to see complete strangers jump in, run towards the danger, put their own lives in harm's way to save someone that they've never met before."

Man confronts attacker with bollard

Videos have circulated online of a man, armed with what appears to be a bollard, holding back the attacker.

The vision shows Cauchi carrying a knife and attempting to walk up an escalator, while the bystander holds his ground at the top, slowing Cauchi down.

When asked about the actions of the man with the bollard at a press conference on Sunday, NSW Police Assistant Commissioner Anthony Cooke said bystanders at the shopping centre had shown extreme bravery.

"People do things in times of stress, people do some very very brave things in these circumstances," he said.

Witnesses provide medical assistance to injured

One of the victims who died following the attack has been identified as 38-year-old Ashlee Good, who was stabbed along with her nine-month-old baby.

Ms Good's daughter is currently in hospital, after undergoing surgery at the Sydney Children's Hospital on Saturday.

A statement from Ms Good's family thanked two men who looked after her baby following the attack.

"To the two men who held and cared for our baby when Ashlee could not — words cannot express our gratitude," the statement reads.

"We can report that after hours of surgery yesterday our baby is currently doing well."

Bondi Rescue Lifeguard Andrew Reid was at the scene when the attack unfolded, and assisted paramedics with treating victims.

He said he left the safety of a shop to help a woman who had been stabbed.

"A guy stopped me and said 'you can't go' and I said 'mate, I'm a lifeguard I need to go and help that lady, she's bleeding pretty badly,'" he said.

"So he lifted the shutter up and let me out, and I went around the corner and what I saw was just crazy, it was just victim after victim spread out about every 50 metres.

"I started treating the first lady I saw and helped with a couple of other members of the public."

Shop attendants steer customers to safety

Stories also emerged of shop attendants locking their store doors and taking customers to safety in back rooms.

ABC sound engineer Roi Huberman said yesterday he was inside a shop when he heard gunshots.

"And suddenly we heard a shot or maybe two shots and we didn't know what to do," he said.

"Then the very capable person in the store took us to the back where it can be locked.

"She then locked the store and then she let us through the back and now we are out."

Lauren Michael was inside Myer when the store's gates closed and alarms started ringing.

When she heard gunshots from inside the shopping centre, she ran for cover inside the store.

She thanked the staff for ensuring the safety of her and the other customers.

"I really have to credit the Myer staff, all the retail assistants were amazing and making sure everyone could get to safety," she said.

Hair salon provided refuge to those fleeing Westfield

Leanne Devine, who owns a hair salon next to Westfield, said her salon filled up with people fleeing the shopping centre.

"It was 3:30 and we've just seen hundreds and hundreds of people running out of Westfield," she said yesterday.

"We've had the older women come into the salon who were in Westfield and who were traumatised."

While Ms Devine was meant to be finished work for the day, she said she would remain at the salon until everyone could get home safely.

An older woman waited in the salon to get picked up, as her car was in the Westfield car park.

"She's sitting in here with her bags from Woolworths, and her legs are so sore from obviously being elderly and running with fear for her life," she said.

"Hopefully we'll get her home safe now soon."

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