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Tragedy: Difference between revisions
→Views on Tragedy
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=== Shakespearean === | === Shakespearean === | ||
* First, the hero. The Shakespearean tragic hero, as everyone knows, is an overstater. His individual accent will vary with his personality, but there is always a residue of hyperbole. This, it would seem, is for Shakespeare the authentic tragic music, mark of a world where a man’s reach must always exceed his grasp and everything costs not less than everything. | * First, the hero. The Shakespearean tragic hero, as everyone knows, is an overstater. His individual accent will vary with his personality, but there is always a residue of hyperbole. This, it would seem, is for Shakespeare the authentic tragic music, mark of a world where a man’s reach must always exceed his grasp and everything costs not less than everything. I think most of us believe that tragic drama is in one way or other a record of man’s affair with transcendence. —Maynard Mack, “Tragic Form and the Jacobean Tragedies” (1970)<ref>Heilman, Robert Bechtold. Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience. Seattle: U of Washington, 1968.</ref> | ||
* Tragedy should be used to describe the situation in which a divided human being faces basic conflicts, perhaps rationally insolvable, of obligations and passion; makes choices, for good or for evil; errs knowingly or involuntarily; accepts consequences; comes to a new, larger awareness; suffers or dies, yet with a larger wisdom. —R.B. Heilman, “Tragedy and Melodrama”<ref>Lerner, Laurence. Shakespeare's Tragedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968.</ref> | * Tragedy should be used to describe the situation in which a divided human being faces basic conflicts, perhaps rationally insolvable, of obligations and passion; makes choices, for good or for evil; errs knowingly or involuntarily; accepts consequences; comes to a new, larger awareness; suffers or dies, yet with a larger wisdom. —R.B. Heilman, “Tragedy and Melodrama”<ref>Lerner, Laurence. Shakespeare's Tragedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968.</ref> | ||
* A tragedy is a story of human actions producing exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man of high estate. | * A tragedy is a story of human actions producing exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man of high estate. In almost all [of Shakespeare’s] tragic heroes we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction, a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind. This it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait. . . . It is a fatal gift, but it comes with it a touch of greatness, and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or genius, or immense force, we realize the full power and reach of the soul and the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe. The central feeling [in a Shakespearean tragedy] is one of waste. [At the end of a Shakespearean tragedy] we remain confronted with a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with glorious good, evil which it is able to over-come or by self-torture and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy. —A.C. Bradley “The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy” (1904)<ref>Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy; Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. London: Macmillan, 1929.</ref> | ||
* Thus the equilibrium of tragedy consists in a balancing of Terror with Pride. On the one hand, we are impelled to withdraw from the spectacle, to try to forget the revelation of evil methodized; on the other, we are aroused to withstand destiny, to strive to meet it with the fortitude and the clear eyes of the tragic figure. This feeling of Pride comes into full existence when the hero knows his fate and contemplates it: it is essentially distinct from the [[hubris]] which he may display, but which we cannot share in, before his eyes are opened. —Clifford Leach, “The Implications of Tragedy” (1950)<ref>Leech, Clifford. Shakespeare: The Tragedies; a Collection of Critical Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1965</ref> | * Thus the equilibrium of tragedy consists in a balancing of Terror with Pride. On the one hand, we are impelled to withdraw from the spectacle, to try to forget the revelation of evil methodized; on the other, we are aroused to withstand destiny, to strive to meet it with the fortitude and the clear eyes of the tragic figure. This feeling of Pride comes into full existence when the hero knows his fate and contemplates it: it is essentially distinct from the [[hubris]] which he may display, but which we cannot share in, before his eyes are opened. —Clifford Leach, “The Implications of Tragedy” (1950)<ref>Leech, Clifford. Shakespeare: The Tragedies; a Collection of Critical Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1965</ref> | ||
* Suffering beyond solace, beyond any moral palliation, and suffering because of human greatness which is great because [it is] great in passion: that, above everything else, is central to Shakespeare’s conception of tragedy. | * Suffering beyond solace, beyond any moral palliation, and suffering because of human greatness which is great because [it is] great in passion: that, above everything else, is central to Shakespeare’s conception of tragedy. But this is not the whole picture. Not only is the vulnerability to fortune of human distinction Shakespeare’s theme; its special liability to intense suffering and destruction. He also emphasizes the precariousness of its very quality of greatness. —A.P. Rossiter, “Shakespearean Tragedy” (1961)<ref>Rossiter, A. P. English Drama from Early times to the Elizabethans; Its Background, Origins and Developments. London: Hutchinson's U Library, 1950.</ref> | ||
* Courage and inevitable defeat: when we confront the great literature of tragedy from our everyday world, it is perhaps these two qualities that strike us most forcible, for the first in any society is rare and the second is a prospect most men find intolerable. Without courage or endurance, the exceptional action or commitment which characterize tragedy would not be undertaken or sustained; without defeat, it would not be placed in the perspective of the ordinary world. . . . Courage without an overpowering challenge can be mere bravado or foolishness (and thus comic). Defeat without a great attempt can be mere pathos. —G.B. Harrison, “Shakespearean Tragedy” (1968)<ref>Rossiter, A. P. English Drama from Early times to the Elizabethans; Its Background, Origins and Developments. London: Hutchinson's U Library, 1950.</ref> | * Courage and inevitable defeat: when we confront the great literature of tragedy from our everyday world, it is perhaps these two qualities that strike us most forcible, for the first in any society is rare and the second is a prospect most men find intolerable. Without courage or endurance, the exceptional action or commitment which characterize tragedy would not be undertaken or sustained; without defeat, it would not be placed in the perspective of the ordinary world. . . . Courage without an overpowering challenge can be mere bravado or foolishness (and thus comic). Defeat without a great attempt can be mere pathos. —G.B. Harrison, “Shakespearean Tragedy” (1968)<ref>Rossiter, A. P. English Drama from Early times to the Elizabethans; Its Background, Origins and Developments. London: Hutchinson's U Library, 1950.</ref> | ||