THEATRE:

INTRODUCTION
TRAGEDY

• The term is broadly applied to literary, and specially to dramatic, representations of

serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist (the chief
character). More precise and detailed discussions of the tragic form properly begin […] with
Aristotle’s classic analysis in the Poetics (fourth century B.C.).
• Aristotle based his theory on induction from the only examples available to him, the
tragedies of Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides [and Homer].
• In the subsequent two thousand years and more, many new artistically effective types of
serious plots ending in a catastrophe have been developed -types that Aristotle had no way of
foreseeing (Abrams, 322).
• When flexibly managed, however, Aristotle’s discussions apply in some part to many
tragic plots, and his analytic concepts serve as a suggestive starting point for
identifying the differentiae of various non-Aristotelian modes of tragic construction.
• Aristotle defined tragedy as “the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as
having magnitude, complete in itself”, in the medium of poetic language and in the
manner of dramatic rather than of narrative presentation, involving “incidents
arousing pity and fear, werewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions”.
• Catharsis: in Greek signifies “purgation”, or “purification”, or both.
• Aristotle […] sets out to account for the undeniable […] fact that many tragic
representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed, but
relieved, or even exalted.
• Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the reader, which he calls “the pleasure of pity and
fear”, as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from comic or other forms, and he
regards the dramatist’s aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as the principle
that determines the choice and moral qualities of a tragic protagonist and the
organization of the tragic plot.
• Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke our pity and terror if (s)he is
neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both; and also that this
tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is “better than we are”, in the sense that (s)he is of
higher than ordinary moral worth.
• Such a [hero/heroine] is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to
misery because of his/her mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia
– his “error of judgment” or, […] his/her tragic flaw. (One common form of hamartia in
Greek tragedies was hubris, that “pride” self-confidence which leads a protagonist to
disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law.) [Oedipus King].
• The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, moves us to pity because,
since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us
also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and
fallible selves.
• Aristotle: the plot, he says, which will most effectively evoke “tragic pity and fear” is one
in which the events develop through complication to a catastrophe in which there
occurs (often by an anagnorisis, or discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero) a
sudden peripeteia, or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster (see plot).
• Authors in the Middle Ages lacked direct knowledge either of classical tragedies or of
Aristotle’s Poetics. Medieval tragedies are simply the story of a person of high status
who, whether deservedly or not, is brought from prosperity to wretchedness by an
unpredictable turn of the wheel of fortune.
• With the Elizabethan era came both the beginning and the summit of dramatic tragedy
in England.
• The tragedies of this period owed much to the native religious drama, the miracle and
morality plays, which had developed independently of classical influence, but with a
crucial contribution from the Roman writer Seneca (first century), whose dramas got
to be widely known earlier than those of the Greek tragedians.
• Senecan tragedy was written to be recited rather than acted; but to English playwrights,
who thought that these tragedies had been intended for the stage, they provided the
model for an organized five-act play with a complex plot and an elaborately formal
style of dialogue.
• Senecan drama, in the Elizabethan Age, had two main lines of development.
• Academic tragedies: written in close imitation of the Senecan model, including the use of a
chorus […] and constructed according to the rules of the three unities, which had been
elaborated by Italian critics of the XVI century.
• Revenge tragedies or tragedy of blood. It derived from Seneca’s favourite materials of
murder, revenge, ghosts.
• While Seneca relegated such matters to long reports of offstage actions by messengers, the
Elizabethan writers usually represented them on stage to satisfy the appetite of the
contemporary audience for violence and horror.
• Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1586) established this popular form; includes a
ghost, insanity, suicide, a play-within-a-play […] and a gruesomely bloody editing.
From this lively but unlikely prototype came Hamlet.
• Many tragedies between 1585 and 1625 […] deviate from the Aristotelian norm.
• Shakespeare’s Othello: accords with Aristotle’s basic concepts of the tragic hero and plot.
Not the case of Macbeth.
• Most Shakespearean tragedies [also Elizabethan tragedies] depart from Aristotle’s
paradigm: introducing humorous characters, incidents, or scenes, called comic relief.
• In this age developed the mixed mode called tragicomedy [non-Aristotelian form].
• Restoration period (s. XVII) produced the heroic tragedy (a cross between epic and
tragedy).
• XVIII century writers popularized the bourgeois or domestic tragedy: written in prose.
Presented a protagonist from the middle or lower social ranks who suffers a
commonplace or domestic disaster.
• Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House revolves around an issue of general social or political
significance.
• The protagonists of some recent tragedies are not heroic but antiheroic.
• The French mise en scène (“placing on stage”) is sometimes used in English
synonymously with “setting”; the term can be applied more broadly, as the French do, to
signify a director’s overall conception, staging, and directing of a theatrical performance.
• Three Unities
• In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, critics of the drama in Italy and France added to Aristotle’s
unity of action, which he describes in his Poetics, two other unities, to constitute one of the rules of
drama known as “the three unities”.
• On the assumption that verisimilitude -the achievement of an illusion of reality [suspension of
disbelief] in the audience of a stage play- requires that the action represented by a play approximate
the actual conditions of the staging of the play, they imposed the requirement of the “unity of place”
(that the action represented be limited to a single location) and the requirement of “the unity of
time” (that the time represented be limited to the two or three hours it takes to act the play, or at most
to a single day of either twelve or twenty-four hours).
• In large part because of the example of Shakespeare, many of whose plays represent
frequent changes of place and the passage of many years, the unities of place and
time never dominated English neoclassicism as they did criticism in Italy and France.
• Plot Aristotle termed it as mythos: in a dramatic or narrative work is constituted by its
events and actions, as these are rendered and ordered toward achieving particular artistic
and emotional effects (Abrams, 224).
• Protagonist; antagonist; conflict; villain; suspense; denouement; foil [Laertes: man
of action vs. Hamlet: dilatory character].
• The German critic Gustav Freytag, in Technique of the Drama (1863), introduced the
Freytag’s Pyramid.
• Typical plot of a five-act play as a pyramidal shape consisting of: a rising action, climax,
and falling action.
• Hamlet: rising action (Aristotle’s complication) begins after the opening scene and
exposition: the first appearance of the ghost.
• The climax is reached: with the play-within-the-play (Hamlet has got a proof of the
King’s guilt).
• Crisis: reversal or turning point of the protagonist; failure at killing Claudius.
• Falling action; Claudius the antagonist controls the course of the event, until the
catastrophe; catastrophe only for tragedies; for both tragedies and comedies we have
denouement; also resolution (outcome of a plot).
• The denouement may involve a reversal (or Aristotle’s peripety) in the protagonist’s
fortunes: failure and destruction in tragedy and success in comedy.
• The reversal depends on a discovery (Aristotle’s anagnorisis).
• Stock characters
• Character types that occur repeatedly in some literary genres. Conventional characters.
• The Old Comedy of the Greeks had three stock characters:
• Alazon or impostor and self-deceiving braggart [boastful person].
• Eiron or self-derogatory and understanding character; contest with the alazon.
• Bomolochos: buffoon
• Agroikos: rustic or easily deceived character.
• Persistence of these types in comic plots.
• Flat characters/Round characters (see E.M. Forster):
• Miles gloriosus: braggart soldier. (Roman and Renaissance comedy).
• Confidant (feminine is “confidante”): a character in a drama or novel who plays only a
minor role in the action, but serves the protagonist as a trusted friend to whom he or she
confesses intimate thoughts; e.g. Hamlet’s friend Horatio.
• Tragicomedy: A type of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama which intermingled both the
standard characters and subject matter and the standard plot-forms of tragedy and comedy.
• Important agents in tragicomedy: people of high degree and people of low degree. Only upper-
class characters were appropriate to tragedy; middle and lower classes subjects of comedy.
• Comedy: fictional work in which the materials are selected in order to amuse us.
• Comic relief: introduction of comic characters, speeches, or scenes in a serious or tragic work,
especially in dramas. They were universal in Elizabethan tragedy. They serve to alleviate
tensión; e.g. gravediggers in Hamlet (V.i.)
• Drama form of composition designed for performance in the theatre [play].
• Soliloquy In a play when a character utters a monologue that expresses his or her private
thoughts.
• Alienation Effect

In his epic theatre of the 1920s and later, the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht adapted the
Russian formalist concept of “defamiliarization” into what he called the “alienation effect”
(Verfremdungseffekt). The German term is also translated as estrangement effect or
distancing effect. […] This effect […] is used to make familiar aspects of the present social
reality seem strange, so as to prevent the emotional identification or involvement of the
audience with the characters and their actions in a play. His aim was instead to evoke a
critical distance and attitude in the spectators, in order to arouse them to take action against,
rather than simply to accept, the state of society and behaviour represented on the stage.
OTHER POETICS

• Horace: ars /ingenium, verba/res, delectare/docere.

• Victor Hugo: Preface to Cromwell (1827). Romanticism.
• Naturalism in the Theatre (1881): Emile Zola.
• Stanislavski (1863-1938).
• Bertolt Brecht’s A short Organum for the theatre (1949).
BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Abrams, M.H. & Geoffrey Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Heinle & Heinle,
1999.