4/11/2015

Tragedy and Ritual

-Precise idea of ritual will be main focus here – actual rituals – marriage, burial,
supplication, coronation, abdication, sacrifice (killing that does something) or mirror
image in Christian/non-Christian suffering (penance, atonement, purification, formal
lament)

-What are the qualities of a ritual?

Characteristics: requires repetition of a set form, subsumes the individual under the
general, invokes community, it is marked off from the ordinary (discourse, stylization, or
some other boundary marking – e.g. space, form of language), performative (it does
something as well as being representational)

-The handout has some summaries of/depictions of ritual

-Ritual has a sacramental function – it binds the gods, engages forces, particularly with
regards crossing boundaries.

-See Van Gennep on handout – ritals needed to cross from one space to another. Rituals
are rites of passage that negotiate liminality.

-Handout Soyinka – it is helpful to think of ritual and tragic drama as converging?

-Idea is that the actor in African tribal ritual/drama makes a raid on the transitional realm

-Threshold moment – think of death, mortality, act of killing, and what might make a
killing into a sacrifice – see Burkert quote for ritual as reflecting the experience of the kill

-Handout Seaford – All Greek tragic drama presides over the destruction of the family
(royal) in the name of the democratic polis. Affirmation of the new rights of democratic
audience.

-Handout Vernant – scapegoating, driving out of pollution, uncleanliness. Applicable to

some tragedies.

-Handout Girard – Communities grow more like themselves in an increasingly

intolerable set of rivalries. Violence builds up until it can be discharged on a scapegoat.
Crucial thing is that the right figure needs to be scapegoated – similar enough to
community, but not too much, or the violence rebounds into the community. Worries
about mixing of ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ violence. What happens when scapegoating goes
wrong?

-Invokes the scapegoat ritual as a dangerous one

-Handout Douglas – Ritual is a way of dealing with pollutants. All cultures need to
operate by making category distinctions between different kinds of experience. Danger
of some phenomenon mixing those categories in some improper way. This is the
pollutant for Douglas. Incest one example – mixing family relations with sexual relations.
Othello/Desdemona racial dynamic perhaps another in 16thC Venice.
-Most communities will exclude that abomination as a taboo thing, but ‘strong’ cultures
put the abominations in a ritual frame that marks it off from other experience. This
framed thing can be a source of great power. Strong pessimism, for Douglas, allows
abominations to be made a powerful cultural force.

Ritual and Tragedy

Tragic drama often contains ritual acts – burials (Ajax, Oedipus), Sacrifice (Hecuba,
Agamemnon, Euripides), scapegoat (Oedipus), Wedding (Lorca’s Blood Wedding,
Desdemona in Othello)

-Drama is itself like a ritual – could it be described as a form of ritual. Theatre is a

charged space, charged language, something happens, not just represented, performance
for the community that performs/creates a sense of community.

-Tragic drama might be thought of as rekindling ritual forms.

-Are there tragic drams that try to regenerate primal ritual energy?

E.g. Soyinka (see Handout play extract)

-p. 238 – Purification ritual. Old tired form of cultural ritual is supplanted by ‘the real
thing’.

p. 241 – old man left on stage with those that flogged him – Tiresias complains about the
flogging ‘Can’t you bastards...feel yourself any more’ – meant to be symbolic/ritual, but
turned into real violence.

p. 306 – Agave comes back with head ‘Console her Tiresias...red with it’, then blood,
Dionysian music, blood turns out to be wine. Tragic drama is a way of plugging back
into energies of ritual – note subtitle ‘A Communion Rite’

-HOWEVER
-In what ways is tragedy not ritual, does not converge on ritual form.

-Greek tragedies are not repeated forms – played once and once only.

-Is each theatrical production of Shakespeare now a unique event?

-Rituals in tragedy are often broken/perverted – in Oedipus, he is not expelled, so does

not fulfill the scapegoat role, Heracles – the sacrificer becomes the sacrificed, Medea
prepares to kill children as if for ritual act (dismisses those not supposed to be present)
but this killing does not seem to qualify as a pure sacrificial killing.

-Tragedy draws attention to its own precariousness as a ritual act.

-Shakespeare – Caesar (See handout final page) ‘purgers, not murderers’ - proper
cathartic ending. But weak cadence of this line seems unconvincing. Brutus seems to be
unsure over what to do throughout this speech.

-Blood extract – they hope that the blood will fulfill purifying role. They imagine how
theatre/theatrical repetition will turn bloody act of killing into ritual cleansing.
-Scene smeared with blood is very unstable scene – ritual ripe to break down
Othello extract – murder/sacrifice, usurpation of rite into murder (desperate self-
deception)

-Lear extract – Poignant but vulnerable attempt to see defeat/execution as a sacrifice

(meaning it gives meaning and function to death)

-We are disturbed by the failure of these deaths to achieve the status of ritual sacrifice –
they strive towards it, but are derailed.

-Death is not easily made sacred, most evident in Hamlet. Almost impossible to get a
decent burial – ‘maimèd rights’

-Handout – ghost – technical terms from Eucharist, final rights. These ar ethe proper
rituals of death

-These ritual aspects much more evident in Catholic rights than in protestant. A Catholic
burial would be a ‘proper’ rite, but all this abolished in the Reformation. Something
about the instability of ritual acts relatable to uneasy sense of Shakespeare’s drama in a
recently Reformation world. Theatre is now forbidden from engaging with religious
topics.

-Reformation theatre haunted by its past as a sacred form but that this is no longer
possible for it – Old Hamlet can’t get himself properly buried. Polonius buried in
‘hugger-mugger’, Ophelia buried with ‘maimèd rights’, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern no
‘shriving time’

-Handout last page – bits on legal regulations that remove sacramental status from the
catholic sacraments. Severely restrict ceremonies around the dead. Brought into force in
Civil War, but steady pressure throughout Shakespeare’s life.

-Sacrament of penance also no longer allowed post-Reformation. Penance changed to

‘repentance’, and inward act is the only one that can cleanse you. Leads to a crisis in
drama, as theatre can only do outward displays, not inward processes. Only
words/outward performance is no longer a valid approach.

-Tragedy is tragic because it breaks down/departs from ritual.

-Handout last Soyinka quote. Scapegoat figure flees the ritual and so breaks the ritual,
leading to this last scene. Villagers complain that the ritual has not worked.

Conclusion
-This lecture examined both rituals within tragedy, and how tragedy itself is a ritual of
sorts. Some tragedy enters into the gap between ritual and tragedy. Most interesting are
tragedies that lament/are disturbed by the loss of ritual to which they attest.

-(Mary Douglas) Ritual is dealing with the anomalous/ambiguous, but tragedy invokes
such ritual but then breaks it down. Such tragedies are themselves unclean mixtures –
neither sacred nor profane. Tragedy disturbs/disgusts, seems contaminated by the
depravity it represents. It is itself unclean. If this uncleanliness can be well framed, it can
be a powerful force. Tragic drama strives to realise this potential, a potential that would
defeat it were it ever entirely successful.