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The term dramatic
literature implies a
contradiction in that "literature" originally meant something written
and "drama" meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much
of the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this
contradiction. Even though a play may be appreciated solely for its qualities as
writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those who remain alert to the
volatility of the play as a whole. (see also
theatrical production)
In order to appreciate this complexity
in drama, however, each of its elements--acting, directing, staging,
etc.--should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this section to study drama with particular
attention to what the playwright sets down. A similar approach is taken in the
following sections on the two main types of dramatic literature, Tragedy
, and Comedy
. The history of
dramatic literature is discussed in the articles THEATRE,
THE HISTORY OF WESTERN ; and ISLAMIC
ARTS: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Dance and theatre ;
and in the regional studies EAST
ASIAN ARTS: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Dance and theatre ,
SOUTH ASIAN ARTS: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Dance
and theatre , SOUTHEAST
ASIAN ARTS: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The performing arts ,
and AFRICAN ARTS: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Literature
and theatre .
From the inception of a play in the mind
of its author to the image of it that an audience takes away from the theatre,
many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life. Questions
therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what
its author thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in
which those words are intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by
a director and his actors on a particular stage? Is a play in part the
expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response to
what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication,
its study and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general
agreement by all participants--author, actors, and audience--to accept the
operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as players and
spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity,
which can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the
fascination of its study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the
spectator beyond his own immediate reality and to what use this imaginative
release can be put. But the student of drama must know the rules with which the
players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment. These rules may
be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of
the experience is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be
seen for what it is: the combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a
good audience who have come together in the best possible physical
circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost
every society, primitive and civilized, and has served a wide variety of
functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred drama in
Egypt 2,000 years before Christ, and Thespis in the 6th century BC in ancient
Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements
of drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the
introduction of words and the literary sophistication now associated with a
play. Moreover, such basic elements were not superseded by words, merely
enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a playscript assumes a
disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama
gains measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then
can dramatic literature be discussed as such. (see also
Egyptian arts and
architecture, ancient)
The texts of plays indicate the
different functions they served at different times. Some plays embraced nearly
the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods; or when
the annual Feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval
Christian mystery cycles. On the other hand, the ceremonious temple ritual
of the early No drama of Japan was performed at religious festivals only
for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly
didactic purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some
19th-century melodramas, and the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard
Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize society, or they can gently
illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the limitations of
man in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe his mind. Drama is
the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a
way of seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Dr. Samuel
Johnson's contention that there can be no certain limit to the modes of
composition open to the dramatist.
Despite the immense diversity of drama
as a cultural activity, all plays have certain elements in common. For one
thing, drama can never become a "private" statement--in the way a
novel or a poem may be--without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters
may be superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and
ridiculous, perhaps even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely
recognizable human ways the spectator can understand them. Only if they are too
abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre. Thus, the figure of Death in
medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek tragedy or in
Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation
of human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real
life of the audience can importantly affect the response of that audience: it
may be in awe of what it sees, or it may laugh with detached superiority at
clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of alienation or
empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the
spectator's experience of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the
first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully symbolic on a stage as in
a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-important
control of the audience's responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one
recognizable and believable to a degree, which will animate the figures as it
would in life. Some argue that action is the primary factor in drama, and that
character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists without a situation, it
appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in which
he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole
play. Whether the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice
versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are the scope and scale of the
character-in-situation--whether, for example, it is man confronting God or man
confronting his wife--for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play
is offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment,
for it may be that the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting
than the teasing vision of human madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style.
Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by the
traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is
not something imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it
superficial to the business of the play. Rather, it is self-evident that a play
will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful play has style and
little else. By "style," therefore, is implied the whole mood and
spirit of the play, its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism
or illusion, and the way in which these qualities are signalled by the
directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer detail,
a play's style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well
as his tone of speech, its pace and inflexion. In this way the attitude of the
audience is prepared also: nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into
expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and to find the opposite, although some
great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By means of signals of
style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known paths,
and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the
auditorium. Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if
the rules are constantly broken.
By presenting animate characters in a
situation with a certain style and according to a given pattern, a playwright
will endeavour to communicate his thoughts and feelings and have his audience
consider his ideas or reproduce the emotion that drove him to write as he did.
In theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent
participants. In the process of performance, an actor has the duty of
interpreting his author for the people watching him, and will expect to receive
"feedback" in turn. The author must reckon with this in his writing.
Ideas will not be accepted, perhaps, if they are offered forthrightly; and great
dramatists who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as
Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods
of having the spectator reason the ideas for himself as part of his response to
the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if overstatement of feeling
("sentimentality") is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare
and Chekhov are two outstanding examples in Western drama of writers who
achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to ensure the
affective function of their plays.
The language of drama can range between
great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely theatrical and ritualistic manner;
and on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the kind commonly
associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse,
and it may be assumed that their actors rendered this in an incantatory speech
halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie drama of the
Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical
dialogue accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such
rhythmical delivery of the words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto
the level of religious worship. Verse is employed in other drama that is
conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle Ages, the
tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of
17th-century France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism
of Goethe and Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre
like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed, plays written in prose dialogue were at one
time comparatively rare, and then associated essentially with the comic stage.
Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism became the mode,
were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
(see also prosody)
Elevation is not the whole rationale
behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics maintain that a playwright can
exercise better control both over the speech and movement of his actors and over
the responses of his audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of good
poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it is argued,
give both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response.
Certainly, the aural, kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct
than prose, though, in the hands of a master of prose dialogue like Shaw or
Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more certain, the
"aesthetic distance" of the stage, or the degree of unreality and
make-believe required to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if
the play uses elements of verse, like rhythm and rhyme, not found in ordinary
speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide variety of nonrealistic aural and
visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a philosophical commentary
upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically into the
mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors'
highly stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a
harmonious whole. The tragic soliloquy
in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with his audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy
was not a stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama
when the spectator's mind could leap forward. (see also
Ancient Greek literature)
The elements of a play do not combine
naturally to create a dramatic experience but, rather, are made to work together
through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total impact of the
experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to
the conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage
an audience's interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their
seats? Is the audience sitting in one place for the duration of performance, or
is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as in some medieval festivals?
Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to be
dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from
a religious cycle, which may portray the whole history of mankind from the
Creation to the Last Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of
exposition of the backgrounds and memories of the characters, while in a
chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story episodically from its
beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must
be long enough to supply the information an audience needs to be interested and
to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and imagination.
(see also plot)
In the majority of plays it is necessary
to establish a conventional code of place and time. In a play in which the stage
must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be precisely
identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In
such a play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if
the drama is broken into three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect
each change of scene to adjust the clock or the calendar. But the theatre has
rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary freedom to
the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Dr. Samuel Johnson
observed in his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always
allow the play to manipulate the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches
in Macbeth to remark their "heath" with its "fog and
filthy air" for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery;
and when Lady Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without
hesitation understood to be in surroundings appropriate to the wife of a
Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism
may assist the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre
of the Greek orchestra, a strip of red
cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which
the Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of
fantasy, it is no wonder that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing
from the past to the future, from this world to the next, and from reality to
dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether
the notion of "action" in a play describes what happens on the stage
or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges
forward the audience's image of the play and encourages the growth of its
imagination is a valid part of the play's action. Thus, it was sufficient for
the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus
to have only two speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex,
age, class, and facial expression. In the Italian 16th- and 17th-century
commedia dell'arte, the standard characters Pantalone
and Arlecchino, each wearing
his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of
the grasping old merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a
speech that in reading seems to contribute nothing to the action of the play can
provide in performance a striking stimulus to the audience's sense of the
action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to "do" nothing, but
their intimate speeches of evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how
to think and feel about the action of the main stage and lend great weight to
the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving constantly in time,
and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious time
is of immeasurable value.
In spite of the wide divergencies in
purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the popular kabuki of Japan and
the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese puppet play and a
modern social drama by the contemporary American dramatist Arthur Miller, all
forms of dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between
plays arise from differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions,
in the purpose of theatre within the community, and in cultural history. Of
these, the cultural background is the most important, if the most elusive. It is
cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately distinguishable
from that of the West.
Oriental drama consists chiefly of the
classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in Malaya and of Burma,
Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at its peak during the period
known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable and
conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Oriental culture showed
little of the interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and
placed little emphasis on authors and their individual achievements. Thus the
origins of the drama of the Orient are lost in time, although its themes and
characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The slow-paced, self-contained civilizations of the East have only recently been
affected by Western theatre, just as the West has only recently become conscious
of the theatrical wealth of the East and what it could do to fertilize the
modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of William Butler
Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Bertolt Brecht in German). (see also South Asian arts)
In its representation of life, classical
Oriental drama is the most conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre.
Performed over the centuries by actors devoted selflessly to the profession of a
traditional art, conventions of performance became highly stylized, and
traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point
of exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In Oriental drama all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection:
dance and mime, speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied
gestures of the actors, their refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive
instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the players and the action of the
play, suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet with opera, in
which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of
Elizabethan dramatists, the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent
of the "flashback" of the modern cinema, and events could be
telescoped with the abandon of modern expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent an imaginative freedom to its artists and audiences upon which great
theatre could thrive. Significantly, most Oriental cultures also nourished a
puppet theatre, in which stylization of character, action, and staging were
particularly suitable to marionettes. In the classical puppet theatre of Japan,
the bunrakuthe elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill with
the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the
17th-century master Chikamatsu, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for
puppets rather than for the actors of the Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama
during and after the Renaissance has offered increasing realism, not only in
decor and costume but also in the treatment of character and situation. (see
also puppetry, Japanese
literature)
It is generally thought that Oriental
drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in religious festivals.
Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational
quality. This was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists
sometimes used: Eastern invention is merely a variation on what is already
familiar, so that the slightest changes of emphasis could give pleasure to the
cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in the repeatedly
depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Oriental drama is
that restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the
West, religious questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual
vision combined finally with commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid
changes. None of the moral probing of Greek tragedy, the character psychology of
Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual criticism of Ibsen and
Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is imaginable in
the classical drama of the East.
The form and style of ancient Greek tragedy,
which flowered in the 5th century BC in Athens, was dictated by its ritual
origins and by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus.
Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows what to expect.
Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a
reassessment of the meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious
exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek tragedy played an important part in
conveying the dramatist's intention. The chorus not only provided a commentary
on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and emotion of the
audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BC) and Sophocles
(c. 496-406 BC) it might be said that
the chorus was
the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480-406
BC) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also
controlled the dramatist in the form and style he could use in these plays: in
particular, the great size of the Greek arena demanded that the players make
grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never approach modern
conversational dialogue. Today, the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem
unreal, for they display little "characterization" in the modern sense
and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless, these great operatic tableaux, built,
as one critic has said, for weight and not speed, were evidently able to carry
their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of
satyr-plays and comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the
tragedies, culminating in the wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes
(c. 445-c. 385 BC.) (see also Greek
religion)
The study of Greek drama demonstrates
how the ritual function of theatre shapes both play and performance. This ritual
aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy and comedy. The Roman
comedies of Plautus (c.
254-184 BC) and Terence (c. 186/185-159
BC) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical
tragedies of Seneca (c.
4 BC-AD 65) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read
by the ruling caste. Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these
playwrights influenced the shape and content of plays of later times. The bold
prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the old miser, the
rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the
sensational content and stoical attitudes of Seneca's drama reappeared centuries
later when classical literature was rediscovered. (see also
Latin literature, Senecan
tragedy)
Western drama had a new beginning in the
medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect the ritual function of the
theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian calendar,
explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant
mystery cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the church enacted
the simple Latin liturgy of the Quem
quaeritis? (literally "Whom do you seek?"), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ's tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by
an angel. The liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the
drama of the Resurrection to be shared mutually by actor-priest and
audience-congregation. When the Feast
of Corpus Christi was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of
Biblical plays (the mystery or miracle cycles) developed rapidly, eventually
treating the whole story of man from the Creation to the Last Judgment, with the
Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence controlling
their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of
material that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was
played on its own stage in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus,
the authors of these dramas gave their audience not a mass communal experience,
as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many small and intimate dramatizations
of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they mixed awesome
events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life.
Their drama consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but
meaningful in human terms, religious and appropriately didactic in content and
yet popular in its manner of reaching its simple audiences. (see also
trope, Middle
Ages, mystery play)
In an account of dramatic literature,
the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the commedia
dell'arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of
succeeding comedy. Two
elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational
spirit of the commedia troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic
business (lazzi)
to meet the occasion of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a
spontaneity in the action that has affected the writing and playing of Western
comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play
after play. As these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could
rely on their audience to respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks
stylized the whole play and allowed the spectator freedom to laugh at the
unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia illuminates a great
deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and
Marivaux in France, and of Goldoni and Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain
provided all the conditions necessary for a drama that could rival ancient Greek
drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as well as
private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that
invited its poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies,
and a simple but flexible stage. All these factors combined to provide the
dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied and exploratory new drama of
outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in an
extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan
tragedy, from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and
tragicomedies, all before the advent of Shakespeare (1564-1616). Although
Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and the
tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a
medley of styles. With the exception of Ben Jonson (1572/73-1637) and a few
others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without regard for classical rule.
The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in character. A
host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of
the popular clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing
the parts of girls; exploring the role of the actor in and out of character;
but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible dramatic poetry. These
dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that could
stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they
selected their themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of
passion and reason, of good and evil and explored every comic attitude to people
and society with unsurpassed vigour and vision. (see also Renaissance art)
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists
embarked upon a parallel development of genres ranging from popular farce to
chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain's greatest playwright, Lope de
Vega (1562-1635), cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by
two extremes of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed
a tragedy rigidly based in form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity,
controlled by verse that is more regular than that of the Spanish or English
dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a comedy strongly
reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell'arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre
Corneille (1606-84) and Jean
Racine (1639-99), tragedies of honour using classical themes, highly
sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching deeply into character
and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly controlled
plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière
(1622-73), whose training as an actor in the masked and balletic commedia
tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more sophisticated comedy. Molière's
work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting, exquisite in
style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles
II to the throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English
drama on a new course. Wits such as William
Wycherley (1640-1716) and William
Congreve (1670-1729) wrote for the intimate playhouses of the Restoration
and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They
developed a "comedy of
manners," replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and
spectator could share--a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays
started a characteristic style of English domestic comedy still recognizable in
London comedy today. (see also Spanish
literature, French literature,
Restoration literature)
German dramatists of the later part of
the 18th century achieved stature through a quite different type of play: Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
(1759-1805), and others of the passionate, poetic Sturm
und Drang ("storm and stress") movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare's plays. Dramatists of the 19th century,
however, lacking the discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas
that varied widely in quality, often degenerating into mere sensationalism.
Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre across Europe and America.
Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief that
virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular
audiences and was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history
of the theatre. Certainly, melodrama's elements of essential theatre should not
be ignored by those interested in drama as a social phenomenon. At least
melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready for the most
recent phase in dramatic history. (see also
German literature)
The time grew ripe for a new and more
adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As novelists developed greater naturalism
in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new and more realistic
departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950); the problem plays associated with Henrik
Ibsen (1828-1906); the more lyrical social portraits of Anton
Chekhov (1860-1904); the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions
of August Strindberg
(1849-1912). These dramatists began by staging the speech and behaviour of real
life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in the symbolic and poetic
revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modelling his tightly
structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the "well
made" play, which carefully controlled the audience's interest to the final
curtain, Strindberg, a generation later, developed a free psychological and
religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As sophisticated audiences
grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with
symbolism. Thus the Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a
short but vigorous life. Its leaders freed the drama of the 20th century to
pursue every kind of style, and subsequent dramatists have been wildly
experimental. The playwright today can adopt any dramatic mode, mixing his
effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of himself, his beliefs, and
his environment.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the
dramatic literature of the East does not show such diversity, despite its
variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Oriental drama may be
seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The
simplicity of the Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace
or a courtyard, like the simplicity of the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom
to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of India's greatest
playwright, Kalidasa (probably
4th century AD), there is an exquisite refinement of detail in presentation. His
delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and mingle
courtly humour and light-hearted wit with charming sentiment and religious
piety. Quite untrammelled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling,
his fanciful love and adventure stories completely justify their function as
pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of reality, and his
characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely
appropriate to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art. (see also
Indian literature, Sanskrit
literature)
Some contrast may be felt between the
idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the broader, less courtly manner of
the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays cover a large
variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance,
as does all Oriental drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and
brilliant farces all blended spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a
sophisticated court audience as to a popular street audience. The most important
Chinese plays stem from the Yüan
dynasty (1206-1368), in which an episodic narrative is carefully
structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song whose lines have a single
rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic gestures and
intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure
mime. Chinese drama avoided both the crudity of European melodrama and the
esotericism of Western coterie drama. (see also
Chinese literature)
The drama of Japan may be said to
embrace both. There, the exquisite artistry of gesture and mime, and the
symbolism of setting and costume, took two major directions. The No
drama, emerging from religious ritual, maintained a special refinement
appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences; the Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, "singing";
bu, "dancing"; ki,
"acting") in the 17th century became Japan's popular drama. No
theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the Greeks in the
remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its
limit of two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its
style. The Kabuki, on the other hand, finds its material in domestic stories and
in popular history, and the actors, without masks, move and speak more freely,
without seeming to be realistic. The Kabuki plays are less rarefied and are
often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional as befitting their presentation
before a broader audience. The written text of the No play is highly
poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its imaginative ideas, fastidious and
restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse plotting; the text of
a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation, and
melodrama. In the Kabuki there can be moments of realism, but also whole
episodes of mime and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick, but also
moments of violent passion. In all, the words are subordinate to performance in
the Kabuki. (see also Japanese religion)
The drama that is most meaningful and
pertinent to its society is that which arises from it and is not imposed upon
it. The religious drama of
ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery cycles of
medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a
particular community. The dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of
man's life both as an individual and as a social being. The content of the
mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of the church, thus
seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church
itself. Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied
by comic or pathetic demonstration; for example, such a crucial belief as that
of the Virgin Birth of Jesus
was presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th-16th
centuries, with a nicely balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of
his age could have got Mary with child and an Angel explains what has happened;
the humour reflects the simplicity of the audience and at the same time
indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the joke. In
the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same
gift of satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual
interests present in his audience. (see also
York plays)
When the whole community shares a common
heritage, patriotic drama and drama commemorating national heroes, as are seen
almost universally in the Orient, is of this kind. Modern Western attempts at a
religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of "ideas," have had
to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen's
social drama both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the
last years of the 19th century. Plays like A
Doll's House(1879)
and Ghosts(published 1881), which challenged the sanctity of marriage and questioned
the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by storm: some
violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus
such plays may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine
their moral position; on the other hand, there were sufficient numbers of
enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new drama of ideas.
"Problem" plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated
the theatre for the 20th century. Shaw's early Ibsenite plays in London,
attacking a negative drawing-room comedy with themes of slum landlordism (Widowers'
Houses1892) and prostitution (Mrs.
Warren's Profession1902)
resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style that was more
disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the motives for middle class marriage (Candida1897), he does not affront his audiences before leading them by gentle
laughter and surprise to review their own positions. (see also
didactic literature)
The author of a play is affected,
consciously or unconsciously, by the conditions under which he conceives and
writes, by his social and economic status as a playwright, by his personal
background, by his religious or political position, by his purpose in writing.
The literary form of the play and its stylistic elements will be influenced by
tradition, a received body of theory and dramatic criticism, as well as by the
author's innovative energy. Auxiliary theatre arts such as music and design also
have their own controlling traditions and conventions, which the playwright must
respect. The size and shape of the playhouse, the nature of its stage and
equipment, and the actor-audience relationship it encourages also determine the
character of the writing. Not least, the audience's cultural assumptions, holy
or profane, local or international, social or political, may override all else
in deciding the form and content of the drama. These are large considerations
that can take the student of drama into areas of sociology, politics, social
history, religion, literary criticism, philosophy and aesthetics, and beyond.
It is difficult to assess the influence
of theory since theory usually is based on existing drama, rather than drama on
theory. Philosophers, critics, and dramatists have attempted both to describe
what happens and to prescribe what should happen in drama, but all their
theories are affected by what they have seen and read. (see also
literary criticism)
In Europe, the earliest extant work of
dramatic theory, the fragmentary Poeticsof Aristotle
(384-322 BC), chiefly reflecting his views on Greek tragedy and his favorite
dramatist, Sophocles, is still relevant to an understanding of the elements of
drama. Aristotle's elliptical way of writing, however, encouraged different ages
to place their own interpretation upon his statements and to take as
prescriptive what many believe to have been meant only to be descriptive. There
has been endless discussion of his concepts mimesis
("imitation"), the impulse behind all the arts, and katharsis("purgation," "purification of emotion"), the proper end
of tragedy, though these notions were conceived, in part, in answer to Plato's
attack on poiesis (making) as an appeal to the irrational. That "character" is
second in importance to "plot" is another of Aristotle's concepts that
may be understood with reference to the practice of the Greeks, but not more
realistic drama, in which character psychology has a dominant importance. The
concept in the Poetics that has most
affected the composition of plays in later ages has been that of the so-called unities--that
is, of time, place, and action. Aristotle was evidently describing what he
observed--that a typical Greek tragedy had a single plot and action that lasts
one day; he made no mention at all of unity of place. Neoclassical critics of
the 17th century, however, codified these discussions into rules. (see also
Aristotelian criticism,
Ancient Greek literature)
Considering the inconvenience of such
rules and their final unimportance, one wonders at the extent of their
influence. The Renaissance desire to follow the ancients and its enthusiasm for
decorum and classification may explain it in part. Happily, the other classical
work recognized at this time was Horace's
Art of Poetry (c. 24 BC), with its basic precept that poetry should offer pleasure
and profit and teach by pleasing, a notion that has general validity to this
day. Happily, too, the popular drama, which followed the tastes of its patrons,
also exerted a liberating influence. Nevertheless, discussion about the supposed
need for the unities continued throughout the 17th century (culminating in the
French critic Nicolas Boileau's Art
of Poetry, originally published in 1674), particularly in France, where a
master like Racine could translate the rules into a taut, intense theatrical
experience. Only in Spain, where Lope
de Vega published his New Art of Writing Plays(1609), written out of his experience with popular audiences, was a
commonsense voice raised against the classical rules, particularly on behalf of
the importance of comedy and its natural mixture with tragedy. In England both Sir
Philip Sidney in his Apologie
for Poetry(1595)
and Ben Jonson in Timber
(1640) merely attacked contemporary stage practice. Jonson, in certain
prefaces, however, also developed a tested theory of comic characterization (the
"humours") that was to affect English comedy for a hundred years. The
best of Neoclassical criticism in English is John
Dryden's Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay(1668). Dryden approached the rules with a refreshing honesty and argued all
sides of the question; thus he questioned the function of the unities and
accepted Shakespeare's practice of mixing comedy and tragedy. (see also
"Ars poetica," ,
"Art poétique, L' ",
"Timber: or, Discoveries," ,
humours, comedy of)
The lively imitation of nature came to
be acknowledged as the primary business of the playwright and was confirmed by
the authoritative voices of Dr. Samuel
Johnson, who said in his Preface to
Shakespeare (1765) "there is always an appeal open from criticism to
nature," and the German dramatist and critic Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, who in his Hamburgische
Dramaturgie (or Hamburg
Dramaturgy1767-69)
sought to accommodate Shakespeare to a new view of Aristotle. With the classical
straitjacket removed, there was a release of dramatic energies in new
directions. There were still local critical skirmishes, such as Jeremy Collier's
attack on the "immorality and profaneness of the English stage" in
1698; Goldoni's attacks upon the already dying Italian commedia on behalf of
greater realism; and Voltaire's reactionary wish to return to the
unities and to rhymed verse in French tragedy, which was challenged in turn by Diderot's
call for a return to nature. But the way was open for the development of the
middle class drame and the excursions
of romanticism. Victor
Hugo, in his Preface to his play Cromwell
(1827), capitalized on the new psychological romanticism of Goethe and
Schiller as well as the popularity of the sentimental drame
in France and the growing admiration for Shakespeare; Hugo advocated truth
to nature and a dramatic diversity that could yoke together the sublime and the
grotesque. This view of what drama should be received support from Émile
Zola in the preface to his play Thérèse
Raquin (1873), in which he argued a theory of naturalism that called for
the accurate observation of people controlled by their heredity and environment.
From such sources came the subsequent intellectual approach of Ibsen and Chekhov
and a new freedom for such seminal innovators of the 20th century as Luigi
Pirandello, with his teasing mixtures of absurdist laughter and
psychological shock; Bertolt Brecht
(1898-1956), deliberately breaking the illusion of the stage; and Antonin
Artaud (1896-1948), advocating a theatre that should be "cruel"
to its audience, employing all and any devices that lie to hand. The modern
dramatist may be grateful that he is no longer hidebound by theory and yet also
regret, paradoxically, that the theatre of his time lacks those artificial
limits within which an artifact of more certain efficiency can be wrought. (see
also drame
bourgeois)
The Oriental theatre has always had such
limits, but with neither the body of theory nor the pattern of rebellion and
reaction found in the West. The Sanskrit drama of India, however, throughout its
recorded existence has had the supreme authority of the Natya-shastraascribed to Bharata (c. 1st
century AD), an exhaustive compendium of rules for all the performing arts, but
particularly for the sacred art of drama with its auxiliary arts of dance and
music. Not only does the Natya-shastra identify
many varieties of gesture and movement but it also describes the multiple
patterns that drama can assume, similar to a modern treatise on musical form.
Every conceivable aspect of a play is treated, from the choice of metre in
poetry to the range of moods a play can achieve; but perhaps its primary
importance lies in its justification of the aesthetic of Indian drama as a
vehicle of religious enlightenment.
In Japan, the most celebrated of early No
writers, Zeami Motokiyo
(1363-1443), left an influential collection of essays and notes to his son about
his practice, and his deep knowledge of Zen
Buddhism infused the No drama with ideals for the art that have
persisted. Religious serenity of mind (yugen),
conveyed through an exquisite elegance in a performance of high seriousness, is
at the heart of Zeami's theory of dramatic art. Three centuries later, the
outstanding dramatist Chikamatsu
(1653-1725) built equally substantial foundations for the Japanese puppet
theatre, later known as the bunrakuHis heroic plays for this theatre established an unassailable dramatic
tradition of depicting an idealized life inspired by a rigid code of honour and
expressed with extravagant ceremony and fervent lyricism. At the same time, in
another vein, his pathetic "domestic" plays of middle class life and
the suicides of lovers established a comparatively realistic mode for Japanese
drama, which strikingly extended the range of both the bunraku and the Kabuki. Today, these forms, together with the more
aristocratic and intellectual No, constitute a classical theatre based on
practice rather than on theory. They may be superseded as a result of the recent
invasion of Western drama, but in their perfection they are unlikely to change.
The Yüan drama of China was similarly based upon a slowly evolved body of
laws and conventions derived from practice, for, like the Kabuki of Japan, this
too was essentially an actors' theatre, and practice rather than theory accounts
for its development.
The Sanskrit treatise Natya-shastra suggests that drama had its origin in the art of
dance, and any survey of Western theatre, too, must recognize a comparable debt
to music in the classical Greek drama, which is believed to have sprung from
celebratory singing to Dionysus. Similarly, the drama of the medieval church
began with the chanted liturgies of the Roman mass. In the professional
playhouses of the Renaissance and after, only rarely is music absent:
Shakespeare's plays, particularly the comedies, are rich with song, and the
skill with which he pursues dramatic ends with musical help is a study in
itself. Molière conceived most of his plays as comedy-ballets, and much
of his verbal style derives directly from the balletic qualities of the
commedia. The popularity of opera
in the 18th century led variously to John Gay's prototype for satirical
ballad-opera, The Beggar's Opera (1728),
the opera buffa in Italy, and the opéra comique in France. The
development of these forms, however, resulted in the belittling of the written
drama, with the notable exception of the parodistic wit of W.S.
Gilbert (1836-1911). It is worth noting, however, that the most
successful modern "musicals" lean heavily on their literary sources.
Today, two of the strongest influences on contemporary theatre are those of
Bertolt Brecht, who believed that a dialectical theatre should employ music not
merely as a background embellishment but as an equal voice with the actor's, and
of Antonin Artaud, who argued that the theatre experience should subordinate the
literary text to mime, music, and spectacle. Since it is evident that drama
often involves a balance of the arts, an understanding of their
interrelationships is proper to a study of dramatic literature. (see also
music, history of)
Though apparently an elementary matter,
the shape of the stage and auditorium probably offers the greatest single
control over the text of the play that can be measured and tested. Moreover, it
is arguable that the playhouse architecture dictates more than any other single
factor the style of a play, the conventions of its acting,
and the quality of dramatic
effect felt by its audience. The shape of the theatre is always changing, so
that to investigate its function is both to understand the past and to
anticipate the future. Today, Western theatre is in the process of breaking away
from the dominance of the Victorian picture-frame theatre, and therefore from
the kind of experience this produced. (see also
stage design)
The contemporary English critic John
Wain has called the difference between Victorian and Elizabethan theatre
a difference between "consumer" and "participation" art. The
difference resulted from the physical relationship between the audience and the
actor in the two periods, a relationship that determined the kind of
communication open to the playwright and the role the drama could play in
society. Three basic playhouse shapes have emerged in the history of the
theatre: the arena stage, the open stage, and the picture-frame. (see also
Victorian literature)
To the arena, or theatre-in-the-round,
belongs the excitement of the circus, the bullring, and such sports as boxing
and wrestling. Arena performance was the basis for all early forms of
theatre--the Druid ceremonies at Stonehenge, the Tibetan harvest-festival drama,
probably early Greek ritual dancing in the orchestra, the medieval rounds in 14th-century England and France,
the medieval street plays on pageant
wagons, the early No drama of Japan, the royal theatre of
Cambodia. Characteristic of all these theatres is the bringing together of whole
communities for a ritual experience; therefore, a sense of ritualistic intimacy
and involvement is common to the content of the drama, and only the size of the
audience changes the scale of the sung or spoken poetry. Clearly, the idiom of
realistic dialogue would have been inappropriate both to the occasion and the
manner of such theatre.
When more narrative forms of action
appeared in drama and particular singers or speakers needed to control the
attention of their audience by facing them, the open, "thrust," or
platform stage, with the audience on three sides of the actor, quickly developed
its versatility. Intimate and ritualistic qualities in the drama could be
combined with a new focus on the players as individual characters. The open
stage and its variants were used by the majority of great national theatres,
particularly those of China and Japan, the booths of the Italian commedia, the
Elizabethan public and private playhouses, and the Spanish corrales (i.e., the areas
between town houses) of the Renaissance. While open-stage performance
discouraged scenic elaboration, it stressed the actor and his role, his playing
to and away from the spectators, with the consequent subtleties of empathy and
alienation. It permitted high style in speech and behaviour, yet it could also
accommodate moments of the colloquial and the realistic. It encouraged a drama
of range and versatility, with rapid changes of mood and great flexibility of
tone. It is not surprising that in the 20th century the West has seen a return
to the open stage and that recent plays of Brechtian theatre and the theatre of
the absurd seem composed for open staging.
The third basic theatre form is that of
the proscenium-arch or picture-frame stage, which reached its highest
achievements in the late 19th century. Not until public theatres were roofed,
the actors withdrawn into the scene, and the stage artifically illuminated were
conditions ripe in Western theatre for a new development of spectacle and
illusion. This development had a revolutionary effect upon the literary drama.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, plays were shaped into a new structure of acts
and scenes, with intermissions to permit scene changes. Only recently has the
development of lighting techniques encouraged a return to a more flexible
episodic drama. Of more importance, the actor increasingly withdrew into the
created illusion of the play, and his character became part of it. In the
mid-19th century, when it was possible to dim the house lights, the illusion
could be made virtually complete. At its best, stage illusion could produce the
delicate naturalism of a Chekhovian family scene, into which the spectator was
drawn by understanding, sympathy, and recognition; at its worst, the magic of
spectacle and the necessary projection of the speech and acting in the largest
picture-frame theatres produced a crude drama of sensation in which literary
values had no place.
It may be that the primary influence
upon the conception and creation of a play is that of the audience. An audience
allows a play to have only the emotion and meaning it chooses, or else it
defends itself either by protest or by a closed mind. From the time the
spectator began paying for his playgoing, during the Renaissance, the audience
more and more entered into the choice of the drama's subjects and their
treatment. This is not to say that the audience was given no consideration
earlier; even in medieval plays there were popular non-biblical roles such as
Noah's wife, or Mak the sheepthief among the three shepherds, and the antic
devils of the Harrowing of Hell in the English mystery cycles. Nor, in later
times, did a good playwright always give the audience only what it expected-- Shakespeare's
King
Lear(c.
1605), for example, in the view of many the world's greatest play, had its
popular elements of folktale, intrigue, disguise, madness, clowning, blood, and
horror; but each was turned by the playwright to the advantage of his theme.
Any examination of the society an
audience represents must illuminate not only the cultural role of its theatre
but also the content, genre, and style of its plays. The exceptionally
aristocratic composition of the English Restoration audience, for example,
illuminates the social game its comedy represented, and the middle class
composition of the subsequent Georgian audience sheds light on the moralistic
elements of its "sentimental" comedy. Not unrelated is the study of
received ideas in the theatre. The widespread knowledge of simple Freudian
psychology has undoubtedly granted a contemporary playwright like Tennessee
Williams (1911-83) the license to invoke it for character motivation; and
Brecht increasingly informed his comedies with Marxist thinking on the
assumption that the audiences he wrote for would appreciate his dramatized
argument. Things go wrong when the intellectual or religious background of the
audience does not permit a shared experience, as when Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80)
could not persuade a predominantly Christian audience with an existentialist
explanation for the action of his plays, or when T.S.
Eliot (1888-1965) failed to persuade an audience accustomed to the
conventions of drawing-room comedy that The Cocktail Party(1949) was a possible setting for Christian martyrdom. Good drama persuades
before it preaches, but it can only begin where the audience begins.
A great variety of drama has been
written for special audiences. Plays have been written for children, largely in
the 20th century, though Nativity plays have always been associated with
children both as performers and as spectators. These plays tend to be fanciful
in conception, broad in characterization, and moralistic in intention.
Nevertheless, the most famous of children's plays, James
Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), implied that the young are no fools and celebrated
children in their own right. Barrie submerged his point subtly beneath the
fantasy, and his play is still regularly performed, while Maurice Maeterlinck's Blue
Bird (1908) has disappeared from the repertory because of its weighty moral
tone. (see also children's
literature, "Peter Pan,
the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up")
In the wider field of adult drama, the
social class of the audience often accounts for a play's form and style. Court
or aristocratic drama is readily distinguished from that of the popular theatre.
The veneration in which the No drama was held in Japan derived in large
part from the feudal ceremony of its presentation, and its courtly elements
ensured its survival for an upper class and intellectual elite. Although much of
it derived from the No, the flourishing of the Kabuki at the end of the
17th century is related to the rise of a new merchant and middle class audience,
which encouraged the development of less esoteric drama. The popular plays of
the Elizabethan public theatres, with their broader, more romantic subjects
liberally spiced with comedy, are similarly to be contrasted with those of the
private theatres. The boys' companies
of the private theatres of Elizabethan London played for a better paying and
more sophisticated audience, which favoured the satirical or philosophical plays
of Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), John Marston (1576-1634), and George Chapman
(1559?-1634). Similarly today, in all Western dramatic media--stage, film,
radio, and television--popular and "commercial" forms run alongside
more "cultural" and avant-garde forms, so that the drama, which in its
origins brought people together, now divides them. Whether the esoteric
influences the popular theatre, or vice versa, is not clear, and research
remains to be done on whether this dichotomy is good or bad for dramatic
literature or the people it is written for.
Dramatic literature has a remarkable
facility in bringing together elements from other performing and nonperforming
arts: design and mime, dance and music, poetry and narrative. It may be that the
dramatic impulse itself, the desire to recreate a picture of life for others
through impersonation, is at the root of all the arts. Certainly, the performing
arts continually have need of dramatic literature to support them. A common way
of describing an opera, for example, is to say that it is a play set to music.
In Wagner the music is continuous; in Verdi the music is broken into songs; in
Mozart the songs are separated by recitative, a mixture of speech and song;
while operettas and musical comedy consist of speech that breaks into song from
time to time. All forms of opera, however, essentially dramatize a plot, even if
the plot must be simplified on the operatic stage. This is because, in opera,
musical conventions dominate the dramatic conventions, and the spectator who
finds that the music spoils the play, or who finds that the play spoils the
music, is one who has not accepted the special conventions of opera. Music is
drama's natural sister; proof may be seen in the early religious music-drama of
the Dionysiac festivals of Greece and the mystères of 14th-century France, as well as in the remarkable
development of opera in 17th-century Italy spreading to the rest of the world.
The librettist who writes the text of an opera, however, must usually subserve
the composer, unless he is able to embellish his play with popular lyrics, as
John Gay did in The Beggar's Opera (1728),
or to work in exceptionally close collaboration with the composer, as Brecht did
with Kurt Weill for his Die
Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny
Opera, 1928).
Dance, with its modern, sophisticated
forms of ballet, has also been
traditionally associated with dramatic representation and has similarly changed
its purpose from religious to secular. In ballet, the music is usually central,
and the performance is conceived visually and aurally; hence, the writer does
not play a dominant role. The scenario is prepared for dance and mime by the
choreographer. The contemporary Irish writer Samuel
Beckett, trying to reduce his dramatic statement to the barest
essentials, "composed" two mimes entitled Act
Without Words I and II (1957 and
1966), but this is exceptional. (see also theatrical
dance)
In motion
pictures, the script writer has a more important but still not dominant
role. He usually provides a loose outline of dialogue, business, and camera work
on which the director, his cameramen, and the cutting editor build the finished
product. The director is usually the final artistic authority and the central
creative mind in the process, and words are usually subordinate to the dynamic
visual imagery. (This subject is developed at length in the article MOTION
PICTURES: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The art of film .)
The media of radio
and television both depend
upon words in their drama to an extent that is not characteristic of the motion
picture. Though these mass media have been dominated by commercial interests and
other economic factors, they also have developed dramatic forms from the special
nature of their medium. The writer of a radio play must acknowledge that the
listener cannot see the actors but hears them in conditions of great intimacy. A
radio script that stresses the suggestive, imaginative, or poetic quality of
words and permits a more than conventional freedom with time and place can
produce a truly poetic drama, perhaps making unobtrusive use of earlier devices
like the chorus, the narrator, and the soliloquy: the outstanding example of
radio drama is Under
Milk Wood(1953), by the Welsh poet Dylan
Thomas.
A similar kind of dramatic writing is
the so-called readers' theatre, in which actors read or recite without decor
before an audience. (This is not to be confused with "closet
drama," often a dramatic poem that assumes dialogue form; e.g.,
Milton's Samson
Agonistes1671, written without the intention of stage performance.) The
essential discipline of the circuit of communication with an audience is what
distinguishes drama as a genre, however many forms it has taken in its long
history. (J.L.S.)
The classic conception of comedy, which
began with Aristotle in
ancient Greece of the 4th century BC and persists through the present, holds
that it is primarily concerned with man as a social being, rather than as a
private person, and that its function is frankly corrective. The comic artist's
purpose is to hold a mirror up to society to reflect its follies and vices, in
the hope that they will, as a result, be mended. The 20th-century French
philosopher Henri Bergson
shared this view of the corrective purpose of laughter;
specifically, he felt, laughter is intended to bring the comic character back
into conformity with his society, whose logic and conventions he abandons when
"he slackens in the attention that is due to life." Here comedy is
considered primarily as a literary genre, but also is considered for its
manifestations in the other arts. The wellsprings of comedy are dealt with in
the article HUMOUR AND WIT .
The comic impulse in the visual arts is discussed in
CARICATURE, CARTOON, AND COMIC STRIP .
The word comedy seems to be connected by
derivation with the Greek verb meaning "to revel," and comedy arose
out of the revels associated with the rites of Dionysus,
a god of vegetation. The
origins of comedy are thus bound up with vegetation ritual.
Aristotle, in his Poeticsstates that comedy originated in phallic songs and that, like tragedy, it
began in improvisation. Though tragedy evolved by stages that can be traced, the
progress of comedy passed unnoticed because it was not taken seriously. When tragedy
and comedy arose, poets wrote one or the other, according to their natural bent.
Those of the graver sort, who might previously have been inclined to celebrate
the actions of the great in epic poetry, turned to tragedy; poets of a lower
type, who had set forth the doings of the ignoble in invectives, turned to
comedy. The distinction is basic to the Aristotelian
differentiation between tragedy and comedy: tragedy imitates men who are better
than the average, and comedy men who are worse. (see also
Ancient Greek literature,
Greek religion, phallic
symbol)
For centuries, efforts at defining
comedy were to be along the lines set down by Aristotle: the view that tragedy
deals with personages of high estate, and comedy deals with lowly types; that
tragedy treats of matters of great public import, while comedy is concerned with
the private affairs of mundane life; and that the characters and events of
tragedy are historic and so, in some sense, true, while the humbler materials of
comedy are but feigned. Implicit, too, in Aristotle is the distinction in styles
deemed appropriate to the treatment of tragic and comic story. As long as there
was at least a theoretical separation of comic and tragic styles, either genre
could, on occasion, appropriate the stylistic manner of the other to a striking
effect, which was never possible after the crossing of stylistic lines became
commonplace. The ancient Roman poet Horace,
who wrote on such stylistic differences, noted the special effects that can be
achieved when comedy lifts its voice in pseudotragic rant and when tragedy
adopts the prosaic but affecting language of comedy. Consciously combined, the
mixture of styles produces the burlesque,
in which the grand manner (epic or tragic) is applied to a trivial subject, or
the serious subject is subjected to a vulgar treatment, to ludicrous effect. The
English novelist Henry Fielding, in the preface to Joseph
Andrews(1742), was
careful to distinguish between the comic and the burlesque; the latter centres
on the monstrous and unnatural and gives pleasure through the surprising
absurdity it exhibits in appropriating the manners of the highest to the lowest,
or vice versa. Comedy, on the other hand, confines itself to the imitation of
nature, and, according to Fielding, the comic artist is not to be excused for
deviating from it. His subject is the ridiculous, not the monstrous, as with the
writer of burlesque; and the nature he is to imitate is human nature, as viewed
in the ordinary scenes of civilized society.
In dealing with man as a social being,
all great comic artists have known that they are in the presence of a
contradiction: that behind the social being lurks an animal being, whose
behaviour often accords very ill with the canons dictated by society. Comedy,
from its ritual beginnings, has celebrated creative energy. The primitive revels
out of which comedy arose frankly acknowledged man's animal nature; the animal
masquerades and the phallic processions are the obvious witnesses to it. Comedy
testifies to man's physical vitality, his delight in life, his will to go on
living. Comedy is at its merriest, its most festive, when this rhythm of life
can be affirmed within the civilized context of human society. In the absence of
this sort of harmony between creatural instincts and the dictates of
civilization, sundry strains and discontents arise, all baring witness to the
contradictory nature of man, which in the comic view is a radical dualism; his
efforts to follow the way of rational sobriety are forever being interrupted by
the infirmities of the flesh. The duality that tragedy views as a fatal
contradiction in the nature of things comedy views as one more instance of the
incongruous reality that every man must live with as best he can. "Wherever
there is life, there is contradiction," says Søren
Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish Existentialist, in the Concluding
Unscientific Postscript(1846),
"and wherever there is contradiction, the comical is present." He went
on to say that the tragic and the comic are both based on contradiction; but
"the tragic is the suffering contradiction, comical, painless
contradiction." Comedy makes the contradiction manifest along with a way
out, which is why the contradiction is painless. Tragedy, on the other hand,
despairs of a way out of the contradiction.
The incongruous is "the essence of
the laughable," said the English essayist William
Hazlitt, who also declared, in his essay "On Wit and Humour" in
English
Comic Writers(1819),
that "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only
animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they
ought to be."
Comedy's dualistic view of man as an
incongruous mixture of bodily instinct and rational intellect is an essentially
ironic view--implying the capacity to see things in a double aspect. The comic
drama takes on the features of satire
as it fixes on professions of virtue and the practices that contradict them.
Satire assumes standards against which professions and practices are judged. To
the extent that the professions prove hollow and the practices vicious, the ironic
perception darkens and deepens. The element of the incongruous points in the
direction of the grotesque,
which implies an admixture of elements that do not match. The ironic gaze
eventually penetrates to a vision of the grotesque quality of experience, marked
by the discontinuity of word and deed and the total lack of coherence between appearance
and reality. This suggests one of the extreme limits of comedy, the satiric
extreme, in which the sense of the discrepancy between things as they are and
things as they might be or ought to be has reached to the borders of tragedy.
For the tragic apprehension, as Kierkegaard states, despairs of a way out of the
contradictions that life presents.
As satire may be said to govern the
movement of comedy in one direction, romance
governs its movement in the other. Satiric comedy dramatizes the discrepancy
between the ideal and the reality and condemns the pretensions that would mask
reality's hollowness and viciousness. Romantic comedy also regularly presents
the conflict between the ideal shape of things as hero or heroine could wish
them to be and the hard realities with which they are confronted, but typically
it ends by invoking the ideal, despite whatever difficulties reality has put in
its way. This is never managed without a good deal of contrivance, and the plot
of the typical romantic comedy is a medley of clever scheming, calculated
coincidence, and wondrous discovery, all of which contribute ultimately to
making the events answer precisely to the hero's or heroine's wishes. Plotting
of this sort has had a long stage tradition and not exclusively in comedy. It is
first encountered in the tragicomedies of the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides
(e.g., Alcestis, Iphigeneia in Tauris,
Ion, Helen). Shakespeare explored the full range of dramatic possibilities
of the romantic mode of comedy. The means by which the happy ending is
accomplished in romantic comedy--the document or the bodily mark that
establishes identities to the satisfaction of all the characters of
goodwill--are part of the stock-in-trade of all comic dramatists, even such
20th-century playwrights as Jean Anouilh (in Le Voyageur sans bagage) and T.S. Eliot (in The Confidential Clerk).
There is nothing necessarily
inconsistent in the use of a calculatedly artificial dramatic design to convey a
serious dramatic statement. The contrived artifice of Shakespeare's
mature comic plots is the perfect foil against which the reality of the
characters' feelings and attitudes assumes the greater naturalness. The strange
coincidences, remarkable discoveries, and wonderful reunions are unimportant
compared with the emotions of relief and awe that they inspire. Their function,
as Shakespeare uses them, is precisely to give rise to such emotions, and the
emotions, thanks to the plangent poetry in which they are expressed, end by
transcending the circumstances that occasioned them. But when such artifices are
employed simply for the purpose of eliminating the obstacles to a happy
ending--as is the case in the sentimental
comedy of the 18th and early 19th centuries--then they stand forth as
imaginatively impoverished dramatic clichés. The dramatists of
sentimental comedy were committed to writing exemplary plays, wherein virtue
would be rewarded and vice frustrated. If hero and heroine were to be rescued
from the distresses that had encompassed them, any measures were apparently
acceptable; the important thing was that the play's action should reach an
edifying end. It is but a short step from comedy of this sort to the melodrama
that flourished in the 19th-century theatre. The distresses that the hero and
heroine suffer are, in melodrama, raised to a more than comic urgency, but the
means of deliverance have the familiar comic stamp: the secret at last made
known, the long-lost child identified, the hard heart made suddenly capable of
pity. Melodrama is a form of fantasy that proceeds according to its own childish
and somewhat egoistic logic; hero and heroine are pure, anyone who opposes them
is a villain, and the purity that has exposed them to risks must ensure their
eventual safety and happiness. What melodrama is to tragedy farce
is to comedy, and the element of fantasy is equally prominent in farce and in
melodrama. If melodrama provides a fantasy in which the protagonist suffers for
his virtues but is eventually rewarded for them, farce provides a fantasy in
which the protagonist sets about satisfying his most roguish or wanton,
mischievous or destructive, impulses and manages to do so with impunity.
The treatise that Aristotle is presumed
to have written on comedy is lost. There is, however, a fragmentary treatise on
comedy that bears an obvious relation to Aristotle's treatise on tragedy, Poetics,
and is generally taken to be either a version of a lost Aristotelian
original or an expression of the philosophical tradition to which he belonged.
This is the Tractatus
Coislinianuspreserved
in a 10th-century manuscript in the De Coislin Collection in Paris. The Tractatus
divides the substance of comedy into the same six elements that are
discussed in regard to tragedy in the Poetics:
plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. The characters of
comedy, according to the Tractatus, are
of three kinds: the impostors, the self-deprecators, and the buffoons. The
Aristotelian tradition from which the Tractatus
derives probably provided a fourth, the churl, or boor. The list of comic
characters in the Tractatus is closely
related to a passage in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethicsin which the boaster (the person who says more than the truth) is compared
with the mock-modest man (the person who says less), and the buffoon (who has
too much wit) is contrasted with the boor (who has too little). (see also
literary criticism, aesthetics)
The Tractatus
was not printed until 1839, and its influence on comic theory is thus of
relatively modern date. It is frequently cited in the studies that attempt to
combine literary criticism and anthropology, in the manner in which Sir
James George Frazer combined studies of primitive religion and culture in
The
Golden Bough(1890-1915).
In such works, comedy and tragedy alike are traced to a prehistoric
death-and-resurrection ceremonial, a seasonal pantomime in which the old year,
in the guise of an aged king (or hero or god), is killed, and the new spirit of
fertility, the resurrection or initiation of the young king, is brought in. This
rite typically featured a ritual combat, or agon, between the representatives of
the old and the new seasons, a feast in which the sacrificial body of the slain
king was devoured, a marriage between the victorious new king and his chosen
bride, and a final triumphal procession in celebration of the reincarnation or
resurrection of the slain god. Implicit in the whole ceremony is the ancient
rite of purging the tribe through the expulsion of a scapegoat,
who carries away the accumulated sins of the past year. Frazer, speaking of
scapegoats in The Golden Bough, noted
that this expulsion of devils was commonly preceded or followed by a period of
general license, an abandonment of the ordinary restraints of society during
which all offenses except the gravest go unpunished. This quality of Saturnalia
is characteristic of comedy from ancient Greece through medieval Europe. (see
also primitive
art, feast)
The seasonal rites that celebrate the
yearly cycle of birth, death, and rebirth are seen by the contemporary Canadian
critic Northrop Frye as the
basis for the generic plots of comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony and satire.
The four prefigure the fate of a hero and the society he brings into being. In
comedy (representing the season of spring), the hero appears in a society
controlled by obstructing characters and succeeds in wresting it from their
grasp. The movement of comedy of this sort typically replaces falsehood with
truth, illusion with reality. The hero, having come into possession of his new
society, sets forth upon adventures, and these are the province of romance
(summer). Tragedy (autumn) commemorates the hero's passion and death. Irony and
satire (winter) depict a world from which the hero has disappeared, a vision of
"unidealized existence." With spring, the hero is born anew.
The characters of comedy specified in
the Tractatus arrange themselves in a
familiar pattern: a clever hero is surrounded by fools of sundry varieties
(impostors, buffoons, boors). The hero is something of a trickster; he
dissimulates his own powers, while exploiting the weaknesses of those around
him. The comic pattern is a persistent one; it appears not only in ancient Greek
comedy but also in the farces of ancient Italy, in the commedia dell'arte that
came into being in 16th-century Italy, and even in the routines involving a
comedian and his straight man in the nightclub acts and the television variety
shows of the present time. Implicit here is the tendency to make folly
ridiculous, to laugh it out of countenance, which has always been a prominent
feature of comedy. (see also Italian
literature)
Renaissance critics, elaborating on the
brief and cryptic account of comedy in Aristotle's Poetics, stressed the derisive force of comedy as an adjunct to
morality. The Italian scholar Gian
Giorgio Trissino's account of comedy in his Poetica, apparently written in the 1530s, is typical: as tragedy
teaches by means of pity and fear, comedy teaches by deriding things that are
vile. Attention is directed here, as in other critical treatises of this kind,
to the source of laughter. According to Trissino, laughter is aroused by objects
that are in some way ugly and especially by that from which better qualities
were hoped. His statement suggests the relation of the comic to the incongruous.
Trissino was as aware as the French poet Charles Baudelaire was three centuries
later that laughter betokens the fallen nature of man (Baudelaire would term it
man's Satanic nature). Man laughs, says Trissino (echoing Plato's dialogue Philebus),
because he is envious and malicious and never delights in the good of others
except when he hopes for some good from it for himself. (see also
Renaissance art)
The most important English Renaissance
statement concerning comedy is that of Sir
Philip Sidney in The
Defence of Poesie(1595):
comedy is an imitation of the common
errors of our life, which [the comic dramatist] representeth in the most
ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any
beholder can be content to be such a one.
Like Trissino, Sidney notes that, while
laughter comes from delight, not all objects of delight cause laughter, and he
demonstrates the distinction as Trissino had done: "we are ravished with
delight to see a fair woman, and yet are far from being moved to laughter. We
laugh at deformed creatures, wherein certainly we cannot delight." The
element of the incongruous is prominent in Sidney's account of scornful
laughter. He cites the image of the hero of Greek legend Heracles, with his
great beard and furious countenance, in woman's attire, spinning at the command
of his beloved queen, Omphale, and declares that this arouses both delight and
laughter.
Another English poet, John
Dryden, in Of
Dramatick Poesie, an Essay(1668), makes the same point in describing the kind of laughter produced by
the ancient Greek comedy The Cloudsby Aristophanes. In it, the character of Socrates is made ridiculous by
acting very unlike the true Socrates; that is, by appearing childish and absurd
rather than with the gravity of the true Socrates. Dryden was concerned with
analyzing the laughable quality of comedy and with demonstrating the different
forms it has taken in different periods of dramatic history. Aristophanic comedy
sought its laughable quality not so much in the imitation of a man as in the
representation of "some odd conceit which had commonly somewhat of
unnatural or obscene in it." In the so-called New
Comedy, introduced by Menander late in the 4th century BC, writers sought
to express the ethos, or character, as in their tragedies they expressed the
pathos, or suffering, of mankind. This distinction goes back to Aristotle, who,
in the Rhetoricdistinguished between ethos,
a man's natural bent, disposition, or moral character, and pathos, emotion
displayed in a given situation. And the Latin rhetorician Quintilian,
in the 1st century AD, noted that ethos is akin to comedy and pathos to tragedy.
The distinction is important to Renaissance and Neoclassical assumptions
concerning the respective subject of comic and tragic representation. In terms
of emotion, ethos is viewed as a permanent condition characteristic of the
average man and relatively mild in its nature; pathos, on the other hand, is a
temporary emotional state, often violent. Comedy thus expresses the characters
of men in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life; tragedy expresses the
sufferings of a particular man in extraordinary periods of intense emotion.
In dealing with men engaged in normal
affairs, the comic dramatists tended to depict the individual in terms of some
single but overriding personal trait or habit. They adopted a method based on
the physiological concept of the four humours, or bodily fluids (blood, phlegm,
choler, melancholy), and the belief that an equal proportion of these
constituted health, while an excess or deficiency of any one of them brought
disease. Since the humours governed temperament, an irregular distribution of
them was considered to result not only in bodily sickness but also in
derangements of personality and behaviour, as well. The resultant comedy
of humours is distinctly English, as Dryden notes, and particularly
identified with the comedies of Ben Jonson.
Humour
is native to man. Folly need only be observed and imitated by the comic
dramatist to give rise to laughter. Observers as early as Quintilian, however,
have pointed out that, though folly is laughable in itself, such jests may be
improved if the writer adds something of his own; namely, wit. A form of
repartee, wit implies both a mental agility and a linguistic grace that is very
much a product of conscious art. Quintilian describes wit at some length in his Institutio
oratoriait partakes of urbanity, a certain tincture of learning, charm,
saltiness, or sharpness, and polish and elegance. In the preface (1671) to An
Evening's Love, Dryden distinguishes between the comic talents of Ben
Jonson, on the one hand, and of Shakespeare and his contemporary John Fletcher,
on the other, by virtue of their excelling, respectively, in humour and wit.
Jonson's talent lay in his ability "to make men appear pleasantly
ridiculous on the stage"; while Shakespeare and Fletcher excelled in wit,
or "the sharpness of conceit," as seen in their repartee. The
distinction is noted as well in Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay, where a comparison is made between
the character of Morose in Jonson's play Epicoene,
who is characterized by his humour (namely, his inability to abide any noise
but the sound of his own voice), and Shakespeare's Falstaff, who, according to
Dryden, represents a miscellany of humours and is singular in saying things that
are unexpected by the audience. (see also Falstaff,
Sir John)
The distinctions that Hazlitt
arrives at, then, in his essay "On Wit and Humour" are very much in
the classic tradition of comic criticism: (see also
"English Comic
Writers")
Humour is the describing the ludicrous
as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with
something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is
the product of art and fancy.
The distinctions persist into the most
sophisticated treatments of the subject. Sigmund
Freud, for example, in Wit and its
Relation to the Unconscious (1905), said that wit is made, but humour is
found. Laughter, according to Freud, is aroused at actions that appear
immoderate and inappropriate, at excessive expenditures of energy: it expresses
a pleasurable sense of the superiority felt on such occasions.
The view that laughter comes from
superiority is referred to as a commonplace by Baudelaire, who states it in his
essay "On the Essence of Laughter" (1855). Laughter, says Baudelaire,
is a consequence of man's notion of his own superiority. It is a token both of
an infinite misery, in relation to the absolute being of whom man has an
inkling, and of infinite grandeur, in relation to the beasts, and results from
the perpetual collision of these two infinities. The crucial part of
Baudelaire's essay, however, turns on his distinction between the comic and the
grotesque. The comic, he says, is an imitation mixed with a certain creative
faculty; the grotesque is a creation mixed with a certain imitative
faculty--imitative of elements found in nature. Each gives rise to laughter
expressive of an idea of superiority--in the comic, the superiority of man over
man, and, in the grotesque, the superiority of man over nature. The laughter
caused by the grotesque has about it something more profound and primitive,
something much closer to the innocent life, than has the laughter caused by the
comic in man's behaviour. In France, the great master of the grotesque was the
16th-century author François
Rabelais, while some of the plays of Molière,
in the next century, best expressed the comic.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson
(1859-1941) analyzed the dialectic of comedy in his essay "Laughter,"
which deals directly with the spirit of contradiction that is basic both to
comedy and to life. Bergson's central concern is with the opposition of the
mechanical and the living; stated in its most general terms, his thesis holds
that the comic consists of something mechanical encrusted on the living. Bergson
traces the implications of this view in the sundry elements of comedy:
situations, language, characters. Comedy expresses a lack of adaptability to
society; any individual is comic who goes his own way without troubling to get
into touch with his fellow beings. The purpose of laughter is to wake him from
his dream. Three conditions are essential for the comic: the character must be
unsociable, for that is enough to make him ludicrous; the spectator must be
insensible to the character's condition, for laughter is incompatible with
emotion; and the character must act automatically (Bergson cites the systematic
absentmindedness of Don Quixote). The essential difference between comedy and
tragedy, says Bergson, invoking a distinction that goes back to that maintained
between ethos and pathos, is that tragedy is concerned with individuals and
comedy with classes. And the reason that comedy deals with the general is bound
up with the corrective aim of laughter: the correction must reach as great a
number of persons as possible. To this end, comedy focusses on peculiarities
that are not indissolubly bound up with the individuality of a single person.
It is the business of laughter to
repress any tendency on the part of the individual to separate himself from
society. The comic character would, if left to his own devices, break away from
logic (and thus relieve himself from the strain of thinking); give over the
effort to adapt and readapt himself to society (and thus slacken in the
attention that is due to life); and abandon social convention (and thus relieve
himself from the strain of living).
The essay "On the Idea of Comedy
and the Uses of the Comic Spirit" (1877), by Bergson's English contemporary
George Meredith, is a
celebration of the civilizing power of the comic spirit. The mind, he affirms,
directs the laughter of comedy, and civilization is founded in common sense,
which equips one to hear the comic spirit when it laughs folly out of
countenance and to participate in its fellowship.
Both Bergson's and Meredith's essays
have been criticized for focussing so exclusively on comedy as a socially
corrective force and for limiting the scope of laughter to its derisive power.
The charge is more damaging to Meredith's essay than it is to Bergson's.
Whatever the limitations of the latter, it nonetheless explores the implications
of its own thesis with the utmost thoroughness, and the result is a rigorous
analysis of comic causes and effects for which any student of the subject must
be grateful. It is with farce that Bergson's remarks on comedy have the greatest
connection and on which they seem chiefly to have been founded. It is no
accident that most of his examples are drawn from Molière, in whose work
the farcical element is strong, and from the farces of Bergson's own
contemporary Eugène Labiche. The laughter of comedy is not always
derisive, however, as some of Shakespeare's greatest comedies prove; and there
are plays, such as Shakespeare's last ones, which are well within an established
tradition of comedy but in which laughter hardly sounds at all. These suggest
regions of comedy on which Bergson's analysis of the genre sheds hardly any
light at all.
Aristotle said that comedy deals with
the ridiculous, and Plato, in
the Philebusdefined the ridiculous as a failure of self-knowledge; such a
failure is there shown to be laughable in private individuals (the personages of
comedy) but terrible in persons who wield power (the personages of tragedy). In
comedy, the failure is often mirrored in a character's efforts to live up to an
ideal of self that may be perfectly worthy but the wrong ideal for him. Shakespearean
comedy is rich in examples: the King of Navarre and his courtiers, who must be
made to realize that nature meant them to be lovers, not academicians, in Love's
Labour's LostBeatrice
and Benedick, who must be made to know that nature meant them for each other,
not for the single life, in Much Ado About Nothingthe Duke Orsino in Twelfth
Nightwho is
brought to see that it is not Lady Olivia whom he loves but the disguised Viola,
and Lady Olivia herself, who, when the right man comes along, decides that she
will not dedicate herself to seven years of mourning for a dead brother, after
all; and Angelo in Measure for Measurewhose image of himself collapses when his lust for Isabella makes it clear
that he is not the ascetic type. The movement of all these plays follows a
familiar comic pattern, wherein characters are brought from a condition of
affected folly amounting to self-delusion to a plain recognition of who they are
and what they want. For the five years or so after he wrote Measure
for Measure, in 1604, Shakespeare seems to have addressed himself
exclusively to tragedy, and each play in the sequence of masterpieces he
produced during this period--Othello, King
Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus--turns in some measure on a failure of self-knowledge.
This is notably so in the case of Lear, which
is the tragedy of a man who (in the words of one of his daughters) "hath
ever but slenderly known himself," and whose fault (as the Fool suggests)
is to have grown old before he grew wise. (see also "King
Lear," )
The plots of Shakespeare's last plays (Pericles,
Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest) all contain a potential tragedy
but one that is resolved by nontragic means. They contain, as well, an element
of romance of the kind purveyed from Greek New Comedy through the plays of the
ancient Roman comic dramatists Plautus and Terence. Children lost at birth are
miraculously restored, years later, to their parents, thereby providing occasion
for a recognition scene that functions as the denouement of the plot. Characters
find themselves--they come to know themselves--in all manner of ways by the ends
of these plays. Tragic errors have been made, tragic losses have been suffered,
tragic passions--envy, jealousy, wrath--have seemed to rage unchecked, but the
miracle that these plays celebrate lies in the discovery that the errors can be
forgiven, the losses restored, and the passions mastered by man's godly spirit
of reason. The near tragedies experienced by the characters result in the
ultimate health and enlightenment of the soul. What is learned is of a profound
simplicity: the need for patience under adversity, the need to repent of one's
sins, the need to forgive the sins of others. In comedy of this high and sublime
sort, patience, repentance, and forgiveness are opposed to the viciously
circular pattern of crime, which begets vengeance, which begets more crime.
Comedy of this sort deals in regeneration and rebirth. There is always about it
something of the religious, as humankind is absolved of its guilt and reconciled
one to another and to whatever powers that be.
The 4th-century Latin grammarian Donatus
distinguished comedy from tragedy by the simplest terms: comedies begin in
trouble and end in peace, while tragedies begin in calms and end in tempest.
Such a differentiation of the two genres may be simplistic, but it provided
sufficient grounds for Dante
to call his great poem La Commedia (The
Comedy; later called The
Divine Comedy), since, as he says in his dedicatory letter, it
begins amid the horrors of hell but ends amid the pleasures of heaven. This
suggests the movement of Shakespeare's last plays, which begin amid the
distresses of the world and end in a supernal peace. Comedy conceived in this
sublime and serene mode is rare but recurrent in the history of the theatre. The
Spanish dramatist Calderón's
Vida
es sueño (1635;
"Life Is a Dream") is an example; so, on the operatic stage, is
Mozart's Magic Flute (1791), in spirit and form so like Shakespeare's Tempest,
to which it has often been compared. In later drama, Henrik Ibsen's Little
Eyolf (1894) and August Strindberg's To
Damascus (1898-1904)--both of which are among the late works of these
Scandinavian dramatists--have affinities with this type, and this is the comic
mode in which T.S. Eliot's last play, The
Elder Statesman (1958), is conceived. It may represent the most universal
mode of comedy. The American philosopher Susanne
K. Langer writes: (see also "Magic
Flute, The," )
In Asia the designation "Divine
Comedy" would fit numberless plays; especially in India triumphant gods,
divine lovers united after various trials [as in the perennially popular romance
of Rama and Sita], are the favourite themes of a theater that knows no
"tragic rhythm." The classical Sanskrit drama was heroic comedy--high
poetry, noble action, themes almost always taken from the myths--a serious,
religiously conceived drama, yet in the "comic" pattern, which is not
a complete organic development reaching a foregone, inevitable conclusion, but
is episodic, restoring a lost balance, and implying a new future. The reason for
this consistently "comic" image of life in India is obvious enough:
both Hindu and Buddhist regard
life as an episode in the much longer career of the soul which has to accomplish
many incarnations before it reaches its goal, nirvana. Its struggles in the
world do not exhaust it; in fact they are scarcely worth recording except in
entertainment theater, "comedy" in our sense--satire, farce, and
dialogue. The characters whose fortunes are seriously interesting are the
eternal gods; and for them there is no death, no limit of potentialities, hence
no fate to be fulfilled. There is only the balanced rhythm of sentience and
emotion, upholding itself amid the changes of material nature. (From Feeling
e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">and Form; Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1953.) (see also Indian
literature, Sanskrit
literature, heroic poetry,
Hinduism)
The 11 surviving plays of Aristophanes
represent the earliest extant body of comic drama; what is known of Greek Old
Comedy is derived from these plays, the earliest of which, The
Acharnianswas
produced in 425 BC. Aristophanic comedy has a distinct formal design but
displays very little plot in any conventional sense. Rather, it presents a
series of episodes aimed at illustrating, in humorous and often bawdy detail,
the implications of a deadly serious political issue: it is a blend of
invective, buffoonery, and song and dance. Old Comedy often used derision and
scurrility, and this may have proved its undoing; though praised by all, the
freedom it enjoyed degenerated into license and violence and had to be checked
by law.
In New
Comedy, which began to prevail around 336 BC, the Aristophanic depiction
of public personages and events was replaced by a representation of the private
affairs (usually amorous) of imaginary men and women. New Comedy is known only
from the fragments that have survived of the plays of Menander
(c. 342-c. 292 BC) and from plays written in imitation of the form by the
Romans Plautus (c.
254-184 BC) and Terence
(195 or 185-159 BC). A number of the stock comic characters survived from Old
Comedy into New: an old man, a young man, an old woman, a young woman, a learned
doctor or pedant, a cook, a parasite, a swaggering soldier, a comic slave. New
Comedy, on the other hand, exhibits a degree of plot articulation never achieved
in the Old. The action of New Comedy is usually about plotting; a clever
servant, for example, devises ingenious intrigues in order that his young master
may win the girl of his choice. There is satire in New Comedy: on a miser who
loses his gold from being overcareful of it (the Aulularia
of Plautus); on a father who tries so hard to win the girl from his son that
he falls into a trap set for him by his wife (Plautus' Casina);
and on an overstern father whose son turns out worse than the product of an
indulgent parent (in the Adelphiof Terence). But the satiric quality of these plays is bland by comparison
with the trenchant ridicule of Old Comedy. The emphasis in New Comic plotting is
on the conduct of a love intrigue; the love element per se is often of the
slightest, the girl whom the hero wishes to possess sometimes being no more than
an offstage presence or, if onstage, a mute. (see also
Roman Republic and Empire)
New Comedy provided the model for
European comedy through the 18th century. During the Renaissance, the plays of
Plautus and, especially, of Terence were studied for the moral instruction that
young men could find in them: lessons on the need to avoid the snares of harlots
and the company of braggarts, to govern the deceitful trickery of servants, to
behave in a seemly and modest fashion to parents. Classical comedy was brought
up to date in the plays of the "Christian Terence," imitations by
schoolmasters of the comedies of the Roman dramatist. They added a contemporary
flavour to the life portrayed and displayed a somewhat less indulgent attitude
to youthful indiscretions than did the Roman comedy. New Comedy provided the
basic conventions of plot and characterization for the commedia
eruditacomedy
performed from written texts--of 16th-century Italy, as in the plays of
Machiavelli and Ariosto. Similarly, the stock characters that persisted from Old
Comedy into New were taken over into the improvisational commedia
dell'arte, becoming such standard masked characters as Pantalone, the
Dottore, the vainglorious Capitano, the young lovers, and the servants, or zanni.
The early part of the 17th century in
England saw the rise of a realistic mode of comedy based on a satiric
observation of contemporary manners and mores. It was masterminded by Ben
Jonson, and its purpose was didactic. Comedy, said Jonson in Every
Man Out of his Humour(1599),
quoting the definition that during the Renaissance was attributed to Cicero, is
an imitation of life, a glass of custom, an image of truth. Comedy holds the
mirror up to nature and reflects things as they are, to the end that society may
recognize the extent of its shortcomings and the folly of its ways and set about
its improvement. Jonson's greatest plays--Volpone (1606), Epicoene
(1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew
Fair (1614)--offer a richly detailed contemporary account of the follies and
vices that are always with us. The setting (apart from Volpone)
is Jonson's own London, and the characters are the ingenious or the devious or
the grotesque products of the human wish to get ahead in the world. The conduct
of a Jonsonian comic plot is in the hands of a clever manipulator who is out to
make reality conform to his own desires. Sometimes he succeeds, as in the case
of the clever young gentleman who gains his uncle's inheritance in Epicoene
or the one who gains the rich Puritan widow for his wife in Bartholomew FairIn Volpone and The
Alchemist, the
schemes eventually fail, but this is the fault of the manipulators, who will
never stop when they are ahead, and not at all due to any insight on the part of
the victims. The victims are almost embarrassingly eager to be victimized. Each
has his ruling passion--his humour--and it serves to set him more or less
mechanically in the path that he will undeviatingly pursue, to his own
discomfiture. (see also "Epicoene,
or The Silent Woman", "Volpone; or, the Foxe")
English comedy of the later 17th century
is cast in the Jonsonian mold. Restoration comedy is always concerned with the
same subject--the game of love--but the subject is treated as a critique of
fashionable society. Its aim is distinctly satiric, and it is set forth in plots
of Jonsonian complexity, where the principal intriguer is the rakish hero, bent
on satisfying his sexual needs, outside the bonds of marriage, if possible. In
the greatest of these comedies--Sir George
Etherege's Man of Mode (1676), for example, or William
Wycherley's Country-Wife(1675) or William Congreve's
Way
of the World(1700)--the
premium is on the energy and the grace with which the game is played, and the
highest dramatic approval is reserved for those who take the game seriously
enough to play it with style but who have the good sense to know when it is
played out. The satiric import of Restoration comedy resides in the dramatist's
awareness of a familiar incongruity: that between the image of man in his
primitive nature and the image of man amid the artificial restraints that
society would impose upon him. The satirist in these plays is chiefly concerned
with detailing the artful dodges that ladies and gentlemen employ to satisfy
nature and to remain within the pale of social decorum. Inevitably, then,
hypocrisy is the chief satiric target. The animal nature of man is taken for
granted, and so is his social responsibility to keep up appearances; some
hypocrisy must follow, and, within limits, society will wink at indiscretions so
long as they are discreetly managed. The paradox is typical of those in which
the Restoration comic dramatists delight; and the strongly rational and
unidealistic ethos of this comedy has its affinities with the naturalistic and
skeptical cast of late-17th-century philosophical thought. (see also manners, comedy of,
Restoration literature)
The Restoration comic style collapsed
around the end of the 17th century, when the satiric vision gave place to a
sentimental one. Jeremy Collier's
Short view of the Profaneness and Immorality of
the English Stagepublished
in 1698, signalled the public opposition to the real or fancied improprieties of
plays staged during the previous three decades. "The business of plays is
to recommend Vertue, and discountenance Vice": so runs the opening sentence
of Collier's attack. No Restoration comic dramatist ever conceived of his
function in quite these terms. "It is the business of a comic poet to paint
the vices and follies of humankind," Congreve had written a few years
earlier (in the dedication to The
Double-Dealer). Though Congreve may be assumed to imply--in accordance with
the time-honoured theory concerning the didactic end of comedy--that the comic
dramatist paints the vices and follies of humankind for the purpose of
correcting them through ridicule, he is, nonetheless, silent on this point.
Collier's assumption that all plays must recommend virtue and discountenance
vice has the effect of imposing on comedy the same sort of moral levy that
critics such as Thomas Rymer were imposing on tragedy in their demand that it
satisfy poetic justice.
At the beginning of the 18th century,
there was a blending of the tragic and comic genres that, in one form or
another, had been attempted throughout the preceding century. The vogue of tragicomedy
may be said to have been launched in England with the publication of John
Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse (c.
1608), an imitation of the Pastor
fidoby the Italian
poet Battista Guarini. In his Compendium
of Tragicomic Poetry (1601), Guarini had argued the distinct nature of the
genre, maintaining it to be a third poetic kind, different from either the comic
or the tragic. Tragicomedy, he wrote, takes from tragedy its great persons but
not its great action, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of
them, its pleasure but not its sadness, its danger but not its death; from
comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive, modest amusement, feigned
difficulty, and happy reversal. Fletcher adapted this statement in the address
"To the Reader" that prefaces The Faithfull Shepheardesse.
The form quickly established itself on
the English stage, and, through the force of such examples as Beaumont
and Fletcher's Phylaster
(1610) and A King and No King (1611)
and a long sequence of Fletcher's unaided tragicomedies, it prevailed during the
20 years before the closing of the theatres in 1642. The taste for tragicomedy
continued unabated at the Restoration, and its influence was so pervasive that
during the closing decades of the century the form began to be seen in plays
that were not, at least by authorial designation, tragicomedies. Its effect on
tragedy can be seen not only in the tendency, always present on the English
stage, to mix scenes of mirth with more solemn matters but also in the practice
of providing tragedy with a double ending (a fortunate one for the virtuous, an
unfortunate one for the vicious), as in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe (1675) or Congreve's Mourning Bride (1697). The general lines separating the tragic and
comic genres began to break down, and that which is high, serious, and capable
of arousing pathos could exist in the same play with what is low, ridiculous,
and capable of arousing derision. The next step in the process came when Sir
Richard Steele, bent on reforming comedy for didactic purposes, produced The
Conscious Lovers(1722)
and provided the English stage with an occasion when the audience at a comedy
could derive its chief pleasure not from laughing but from weeping. It wept in
the delight of seeing virtue rewarded and young love come to flower after
parental opposition had been overcome. Comedy of the sort inaugurated by The
Conscious Lovers continued to represent the affairs of private life, as
comedy had always done, but with a seriousness hitherto unknown; and the
traditionally low personages of comedy now had a capacity for feeling that
bestowed on them a dignity previously reserved for the personages of tragedy.
(see also Augustan Age)
This trend in comedy was part of a wave
of egalitarianism that swept through 18th-century political and social thought.
It was matched by a corresponding trend in tragedy, which increasingly selected
its subjects from the affairs of private men and women in ordinary life, rather
than from the doings of the great. The German dramatist Gotthold
Lessing wrote that the misfortunes of those whose circumstances most
resemble those of the audience must naturally penetrate most deeply into its
heart, and his own Minna
von Barnhelm(1767)
is an example of the new serious comedy. The capacity to feel, to sympathize
with, and to be affected by the plight of a fellow human being without regard
for his rank in the world's esteem became the measure of one's humanity. It was
a bond that united the fraternity of mankind in an aesthetic revolution that
preceded the political revolutions of the 18th century. In literature, this had
the effect of hastening the movement toward a more realistic representation of
reality, whereby the familiar events of common life are treated "seriously
and problematically" (in the phrase of the critic Erich
Auerbach, who traced the process in his book Mimesis
[1946]). The results may be seen in novels such as Samuel
Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa
and in middle-class tragedies such as George
Lillo's The London Merchant (1731)
in England; in the comédie
larmoyante ("tearful comedy") in France; in Carlo
Goldoni's efforts to reform the commedia dell'arte and replace it with a
more naturalistic comedy in the Italian theatre; and in the English sentimental
comedy, exemplified in its full-blown state by plays such as Hugh
Kelly's False Delicacy (1768)
and Richard Cumberland's West
Indian (1771). Concerning the sentimental comedy it must be noted that it is
only in the matter of appropriating for the bourgeoisie a seriousness of tone
and a dignity of representational style previously considered the exclusive
property of the nobility that the form can be said to stand in any significant
relationship to the development of a more realistic mimetic mode than the
traditional tragic and comic ones. The plots of sentimental comedy are as
contrived as anything in Plautus and Terence (which with their fondness for
foundling heroes who turn out to be long-lost sons of rich merchants, they often
resemble); and with their delicate feelings and genteel moral atmosphere,
comedies of this sort seem as affected in matters of sentiment as Restoration
comedy seems in matters of wit.
Oliver
Goldsmith, in his "A Comparison Between Laughing
and Sentimental Comedy" (1773), noted the extent to which the comedy in the
England of his day had departed from its traditional purpose, the excitation of
laughter by exhibiting the follies of the lower part of mankind. He questioned
whether an exhibition of its follies would not be preferable to a detail of its
calamities. In sentimental comedy, Goldsmith continued, the virtues of private
life were exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses rather
than the faults of mankind generated interest in the piece. Characters in these
plays were almost always good; if they had faults, the spectator was expected
not only to pardon but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of
their hearts. Thus, according to Goldsmith, folly was commended instead of being
ridiculed. Goldsmith concluded by labelling sentimental comedy a "species
of bastard tragedy," "a kind of mulish
production": a designation that ironically brings to mind Guarini's
comparison of tragicomedy in its uniqueness (a product of comedy and tragedy but
different from either) to the mule (the offspring of the horse and the ass but
itself neither one nor the other). The production of Goldsmith's She
Stoops to Conquer (1773) and of Richard
Brinsley Sheridan's Rivals (1775)
and The School for Scandal (1777) briefly reintroduced comic gaiety to
the English stage; by the end of the decade, Sheridan's dramatic burlesque, The
Critic (first performed 1779), had appeared, with its parody of contemporary
dramatic fashions, the sentimental included. But this virtually concluded
Sheridan's career as a dramatist; Goldsmith had died in 1774; and the
sentimental play was to continue to govern the English comic stage for over a
century to come.
The great comic voices of the 18th
century in England were not those in the theatre. No dramatic satire of the
period can exhibit anything comparable to the furious ridicule of man's
triviality and viciousness that Jonathan Swift provided in Gulliver's
Travels (1726). His Modest Proposal(1729) is a masterpiece of comic incongruity, with its suave blend of
rational deliberation and savage conclusion. The comic artistry of Alexander Pope is equally impressive. Pope
expressed his genius in the invective of his satiric portraits and in the range
of moral and imaginative vision that was capable, at one end of his poetic
scale, of conducting that most elegant of drawing-room epics, The
Rape of the Lock(1712-14),
to its sublimely inane conclusion and, at the other, of invoking from the scene
that closes The
Dunciad(1728) an apocalyptic judgment telling what will happen when the
vulgarizers of the word have carried the day.
When the voice of comedy did sound on
the 18th-century English stage with anything approaching its full critical and
satiric resonance, the officials soon silenced it. John
Gay's Beggar's
Opera(1728)
combined hilarity with a satiric fierceness worthy of Swift (who may have
suggested the original idea for it). The officials tolerated its spectacularly
successful run, but no license from the lord chamberlain could be secured for
Gay's sequel, Polly, which was not staged until 1777. The Licensing
Act of 1737 ended the theatrical career of Henry Fielding, whose comedies
had come under constant fire from the authorities for their satire on the
government. Fielding's comic talents were perforce directed to the novel, the
form in which he parodied the sentiment and the morality of Richardson's Pamela--in
his Shamela and Joseph Andrews (1742)--as brilliantly as he had earlier burlesqued
the rant of heroic tragedy in Tom Thumb (1730).
(see also censorship)
Comedy of the sort that ridicules the
follies and vices of society to the end of laughing them out of countenance
entered the English novel with Fielding. His statement in Joseph Andrews concerning the function of satire is squarely in the
Neoclassic tradition of comedy as a corrective of manners and mores: the
satirist holds
the glass to thousands in their
closets, that they may contemplate their deformity, and endeavour to reduce it,
and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame.
Fielding's scenes of contemporary life
display the same power of social criticism as that which distinguishes the
engravings of his great fellow artist William
Hogarth, whose "Marriage
à la Mode" (1745) depicts the vacuity and the casual
wantonness of the fashionable world that Fielding treats of in the final books
of Tom Jones. Hogarth's other series,
such as "A Rake's Progress"
(1735) or "A Harlot's Progress" (1732), also make a didactic point
about the wages of sin, using realistic details heightened with grotesquerie to
expose human frailty and its sinister consequences. The grotesque is a recurrent
feature of the satiric tradition in England, where comedy serves social
criticism. Artists such as Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson worked in the tradition
of Jonson and the Restoration dramatists in the preceding century.
The novel, with its larger scope for
varied characters, scenes, and incidents, rather than the drama, afforded the
19th-century artist in comedy a literary form adequate to his role as social
critic. The spectacle of man and his society is regularly presented by the
19th-century novelist in comedic terms, as in Vanity Fair (1848), by William Makepeace Thackeray or the Comédie
humaine (1842-55) of Honoré de Balzac, and with the novels of Jane
Austen, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and George Meredith.
The best that the comic stage had to
offer in the late 19th century lay in the domain of farce. The masters of this
form were French, but it flourished in England as well; what the farces of Eugène
Labiche and Georges Feydeau and the operettas of Jacques Offenbach were to the
Parisian stage the farces of W.S. Gilbert and the young Arthur Wing Pinero and
the operettas that Gilbert wrote in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan were to
the London stage. As concerns comedy, the situation in England improved at the
end of the century, when Oscar Wilde
and George Bernard Shaw turned
their talents to it. Wilde's Importance
of Being Earnest(1895)
is farce raised to the level of high comic burlesque. Shaw's choice of the comic
form was inevitable, given his determination that the contemporary English stage
should deal seriously and responsibly with the issues that were of crucial
importance to contemporary English life. Serious subjects could not be resolved
by means of the dramatic clichés of Victorian melodrama. Rather, the
prevailing stereotypes concerning the nature of honour, courage, wisdom, and
virtue were to be subjected to a hail of paradox, to the end of making evident
their inner emptiness or the contradictions they concealed.
Shaw dealt with what, in the preface to Major
Barbara(1905), he
called "the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the
romantic imagination," and his use of the word tragicomic is a sign of the
times. The striking feature of modern art, according to the German novelist Thomas
Mann, was that it had ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and
comic or the dramatic classifications of tragedy and comedy but saw life as
tragicomedy. The sense that tragicomedy is the only adequate dramatic form for
projecting the unreconciled ironies of modern life mounted through the closing
decades of the 19th century. Ibsen
had termed The
Wild Duck(published 1884) a tragicomedy; it was an appropriate designation
for this bitter play about a young man blissfully ignorant of the lies on which
he and his family have built their happy life until an outsider who is committed
to an ideal of absolute truth exposes all their guilty secrets with disastrous
results. The plays of the Russian writer Anton
Chekhov, with their touching and often quite humorous figures leading
lives of quiet desperation, reflect precisely that mixture of inarticulate joy
and dull pain that is the essence of the tragicomic view of life.
A dramatist such as August
Strindberg produces a kind of tragicomedy peculiarly his own, one that
takes the form of bourgeois tragedy; it lacerates its principals until they
become a parody of themselves. Strindberg's Dance
of Death (1901), with its cruelty and pain dispensed with robust pleasure by
a fiercely battling husband and wife, is a significant model of the grotesque in
the modern theatre; it is reflected in such mid-20th-century examples of what
came to be called black comedy
as Eugène Ionesco's Victims of Duty
(1953) and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Almost equally influential as a
turn-of-the-century master of the grotesque is Frank
Wedekind, whose Earth Spirit(1895) and its sequel, Pandora's
Box(written
1892-1901), though both are termed tragedies by their author, are as much
burlesques of tragedy as The Dance of
Death. Their grotesquerie consists chiefly in their disturbing combination
of innocence and depravity, of farce and horror, of passionate fervour issuing
in ludicrous incident that turns deadly. Wedekind's celebration of primitive
sexuality and the varied ways in which it manifests itself in an
oversophisticated civilization distorts the tragic form to achieve its own
grotesque beauty and power.
The great artist of the grotesque and of
tragicomedy in the 20th century is the Italian Luigi
Pirandello. His drama is explicitly addressed to the contradictoriness of
experience: appearances collide and cancel out each other; the quest of the
absolute issues in a mind-reeling relativism; infinite spiritual yearnings are
brought up hard against finite physical limits; rational purpose is undermined
by irrational impulse; and with the longing for permanence in the midst of
change comes the ironic awareness that changelessness means death. Stated thus,
Pirandello's themes sound almost forbiddingly intellectual, but one of his aims
was to convert intellect into passion. Pirandello's characters suffer from
intellectual dilemmas that give rise to mental and emotional distress of the
most anguished kind, but their sufferings are placed in a satiric frame. The
incongruities that the characters are furiously seeking to reconcile attest to
the comic aspect of this drama, but there is nothing in it of the traditional
movement of comedy, from a state of illusion into the full light of reality.
Pirandello's characters dwell amid ambiguities and equivocations that those who
are wise in the tragicomic nature of life will accept without close inquiry. The
logic of comedy implies that illusions exist to be dispelled; once they are
dispelled, everyone will be better off. The logic of Pirandello's tragicomedy
demonstrates that illusions make life bearable; to destroy them is to destroy
the basis for any possible happiness.
In their highly individual ways, both Samuel
Beckett and Ionesco have employed the forms of comedy--from tragicomedy
to farce--to convey the vision of an exhausted civilization and a chaotic world.
The very endurance of life amid the grotesque circumstances that obtain in
Beckett's plays is at once a tribute to the human power of carrying on to the
end and an ironic reflection on the absurdity of doing so. Beckett's plays close
in an uneasy silence that is the more disquieting because of the uncertainty as
to just what it conceals: whether it masks sinister forces ready to spring or is
the expression of a universal indifference or issues out of nothing at all. (see
also Absurd,
Theatre of the)
Silence seldom reigns in the theatre of Ionesco,
which rings with voices raised in a usually mindless clamour. Some of Ionesco's
most telling comic effects have come from his use of dialogue overflowing with
clichés and non sequiturs, which make it clear that the characters do not
have their minds on what they are saying and, indeed, do not have their minds on
anything at all. What they say is often at grotesque variance with what they do.
Beneath the moral platitudes lurks violence, which is never far from the surface
in Ionesco's plays, and the violence tells what happens to societies in which
words and deeds have become fatally disjunct. Ionesco's comic sense is evident
as well in his depiction of human beings as automata, their movements decreed by
forces they have never questioned or sought to understand. There is something
undeniably farcical in Ionesco's spectacles of human regimentation, of men and
women at the mercy of things (e.g., the
stage full of chairs in The Chairsor the growing corpse in Amédée);
the comic quality here is one that Bergson would have appreciated. But the comic
in Ionesco's most serious work, as in so much of the contemporary theatre, has
ominous implications that give to it a distinctly grotesque aspect. In Ionesco's
Victims of Duty and The Killer
(1959), as in the works of his Swiss counterparts--Der
Besuch der alten Dame (performed 1956; The
Visit, 1958) and The Physicists (1962),
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and The
Firebugs (1958), by Max Frisch--the grotesquerie of the tragicomic vision
delineates a world in which the humane virtues are dying, and casual violence is
the order of the day.
The radical reassessment of the human
image that the 20th century has witnessed is reflected in the novel as well as
in drama. Previous assumptions about the rational and divine aspects of man have
been increasingly called into question by the evidences of man's irrationality,
his sheer animality. These are qualities of human nature that writers of
previous ages (Swift, for example) have always recognized, but hitherto they
have been typically viewed as dark possibilities that could overtake humanity if
the rule of reason did not prevail. It is only in the mid-20th century that the
savage and the irrational have come to be viewed as part of the normative
condition of humanity rather than as tragic aberrations from it. The savage and
the irrational amount to grotesque parodies of human possibility, ideally
conceived. Thus it is that 20th-century novelists as well as dramatists have
recognized the tragicomic nature of the contemporary human image and
predicament, and the principal mode of representing both is the grotesque. This
may take various forms: the apocalyptic nightmare of tyranny and terror in Kafka's
novels The
Trial(1925) and The
Castle(1926); the
tragic farce in terms of which the Austrian novelist Robert
Musil describes the slow collapse of a society into anarchy and chaos, in
The Man Without Qualities(1930-43); the brilliant irony whereby Thomas Mann represents the hero as a
confidence man in The Confessions of Felix Krull (1954); the grimly parodic account of
Germany's descent into madness in Günter
Grass's novel The
Tin Drum (1959). The English novel contains a rich vein of the
comic grotesque that extends at least back to Dickens and Thackeray and
persisted in the 20th century in such varied novels as Evelyn
Waugh's Decline and Fall (1928),
Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes (1956), and Kingsley
Amis' Lucky Jim (1954). What
novelists such as these have in common is the often disturbing combination of
hilarity and desperation. It has its parallel in a number of American novels--John
Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse Five
(1969)--in which shrill farce is the medium for grim satire. And the
grotesque is a prominent feature of modern poetry, as in some of the "Songs
and Other Musical Pieces" of W.H. Auden. (see also
"Confessions of Felix
Krull, Confidence Man, The," )
|
"Peasant Dance," oil on wood by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c.
1568; in the Kunsthistorisches. . .
SuperStock
|
The increasing use of the affairs of
common life as the subject matter of dramatic comedy through the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance is also seen in painting
of that time. Scenes from medieval mystery cycles, such as the comic episodes
involving Noah's stubborn wife, have counterparts in medieval pictures in the
glimpses of everyday realities that are caught through the windows or down the
road from the sites where the great spiritual mysteries are in progress: the
angel Gabriel may appear to the Virgin in the foreground, while a man is
chopping wood in the yard outside. Medieval artists had never neglected the
labours and the pleasures of the mundane world, but the treatment of them is
often literally marginal, as in the depiction of men and women at work or play
in the ornamental borders of an illuminated manuscript page. The seasonal round
of life, with its cycle of plowing, sowing, mowing, and reaping interspersed
with hawking, hunting, feasts, and weddings (the cycle of life, indeed, which
comedy itself celebrates), is depicted in series after series of exquisite
miniatures, such as those in the Très
Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. By the mid-16th century, however, in Pieter
Bruegel's famous painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,"
mundane reality has taken over the foreground; the plowman tills the soil, and
the shepherd attends his flock, while, unnoticed by both, the legs of Icarus
disappear inconspicuously into the sea. Bruegel is not a comic artist, but his
art bears witness to what all great comic art celebrates: the basic rhythm of
life. "Peasant Wedding" and "Peasant Dance" (see photograph)
endow their heavy men and women with an awkward grace and dignity that bear
comparison with Shakespeare's treatment of his comic characters. Paintings like
Bruegel's "Children's Games" and his "Fight Between Carnival and
Lent" are joyous representations of human energy. The series of "The
Labours of the Months"--"Hunters in the Snow" for January,
"Haymaking" for July, "Harvesters" for August, "Return
of the Herd" for November--give pictorial treatment to a favourite subject
of the medieval miniaturists. Finally, allusion must be made to Bruegel's
mastery of the grotesque, notably in "The Triumph of Death" and in the
"Dulle Griet," in which demons swarm over a devastated landscape.
It is through the art of caricature
that the spirit of comedy enters most directly into painting. The style derives
from the portraits with ludicrously exaggerated features made by the Carracci,
an Italian family of artists, early in the 17th century (Italian caricare,
"to overload"). In defiance of the theory of ideal beauty, these
portraits emphasized the features that made one man different from another. This
method of character portrayal--the singling out of one distinctive feature and
emphasizing it over all others--is not unlike the practice of characterizing the
personages of the comic stage by means of some predominant humour, which Ben
Jonson was developing at about the same time in the London theatre. The use of
exaggeration for comic effect was as evident to painters as it was to
dramatists. Its usefulness as a means of social and political satire is fully
recognized by Hogarth. Hogarth's counterpart in mid-19th-century Paris was Honoré
Daumier. His caricatures portray a human comedy as richly detailed and as
shrewdly observed as the one portrayed in fiction by his contemporary Balzac.
But Daumier's sense of the comic goes beyond caricature; his numerous treatments
of scenes from Molière's plays and, most notably, his drawings and
canvases of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza attest to the pathos that can lie
beneath the comic mask. (see also Carracci
family)
Modern art has abstracted elements of
comedy to aid it in the representation of a reality in which the mechanical is
threatening to win out over the human. Bergson's contention that the essence of
comedy consists of something mechanical encrusted on the living may be said to
have achieved a grotesque apotheosis in the French Dadaist Marcel
Duchamp's painting "Bride" (1912), in which the female figure
has been reduced to an elaborate piece of plumbing. The highly individual Swiss
Expressionist Paul Klee's
pen-and-ink drawing tinted with watercolour and titled "Twittering
Machine" (1922) represents an ingenious device for imitating the sound of
birds. The delicacy of the drawing contrasts with the sinister implications of
the mechanism, which, innocent though it may appear at first glance, is almost
certainly a trap.
The grotesque is a constant stylistic
feature of the artist's representation of reality in its brutalized or
mechanized aspects. The carnival masks worn by the figures in the painting
"Intrigue" (1890), by the Belgian James
Ensor, make manifest the depravity and the obscenity that lurk beneath
the surface of conventional appearances; Ensor's paintings make much the same
point about the persistence of the primitive and the savage into modern life as
Wedekind's plays were to do a few years later. German artists after World War I
invoked the grotesque with particular power, depicting the inhuman forces that
bear upon the individual, as in George
Grosz's savage cartoon titled "Germany, a Winter's Tale"
(1918), in which the puppet-like average citizen sits at table surrounded by
militarist, capitalist, fatuous clergyman and all the violent and dissolute
forces of a decadent society. The mutilated humanity in Max
Beckmann's "Dream" (1921) and "Departure" (1932-33)
is a further testament to human viciousness, 20th-century variety.
Rather more explicitly comic is the
element of fantasy in modern
paintings, in which seemingly unrelated objects are brought together in a fine
incongruity, as in the French primitive Henri
Rousseau's famous "Dream" (1910), with its nude woman reclining
on a red-velvet sofa amid the flora and fauna of a lush and exotic jungle. The
disparate figures that float (in defiance of all the laws of gravity) through
the paintings of the Russian Surrealist Marc
Chagall are individually set forth in a nimbus of memory and in the
landscape of dream. But fantasy can take on a grotesquerie of its own, as in
some of Chagall's work, such as the painting "I and The Village"
(1911).
The purest expression of the comic in
modern painting must surely be Henri
Matisse's "Joy of Life" (1905-06), a picture that might be
taken as a visual expression of the precept that the rhythm of comedy is the
basic rhythm of life. But Matisse's painting was not to be the last word on the
subject: "Joy of Life" produced, as a counterstatement, Pablo
Picasso's "Demoiselles
d'Avignon" (1906-07), in which the daughters of joy, in their grim
and aggressive physical tension, stand as a cruel parody of the delight in the
senses that Matisse's picture celebrates. "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"
and such a later Picasso masterpiece as the "Three Dancers" (1925)
suggest that, for the visual as well as the literary artist of the 20th century,
the joy of life tends to issue in grotesque shapes.
Given the wide range of imitative sounds
of which musical instruments and the human voice are capable, comic effects are
readily available to the composer who wants to use them. At the simplest level,
these may amount to nothing more than humorous adjuncts to a larger composition,
such as the loud noise with which the 18th-century Austrian composer Joseph
Haydn surprises his listeners in Symphony No. 94 or the sound of the ticking clock in No.
101. The scherzo, which Ludwig
van Beethoven introduced into symphonic music in the early 19th century,
may be said to have incorporated in it a musical joke but one of a highly
abstract kind; its nervous jocularity provides a contrast and a commentary (both
heavy with irony) on the surrounding splendour. A century after Beethoven, the
jocularity grew more desperate and the irony more profound in the grim humour
that rises out of the grotesque scherzos of Gustav
Mahler. A more sustained and a more explicit musical exposition of comic
themes and attitudes comes when a composer draws his inspiration directly from a
work of comic literature, as Richard
Strauss does in his orchestral variations based on Don
Quixote and on the merry pranks of Till
Eulenspiegel.
It is, however, opera
that provides the fullest form for comedy to express itself in music, and some
of the most notable achievements of comic art have been conceived for the
operatic stage. High on any list of comic masterpieces must come the four
principal operas of Mozart: The
Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don
Giovanni (1787), Così fan tutte
(1790), and The Magic Flute (1791),
and there are countless others worthy of mention. Operatic comedy has an
advantage over comedy in the spoken theatre in its ability to impose a coherent
form on the complexities of feeling and action that are often of the essence in
comedy. The complex feeling experienced by different characters must be
presented in spoken comedy seriatim; operatic comedy can present them
simultaneously. When three or four characters talk simultaneously in the spoken
theatre, the result is an incoherent babble. But the voices of three or four or
even more characters can be blended together in an operatic ensemble, and, while
most of the words may be lost, the vocal lines will serve to identify the
individual characters and the general nature of the emotions they are
expressing. The complexities of action in the spoken theatre are the chief
source of the comic effect, which increases as the confusion mounts; such
complexities of action operate to the same comic end in opera but here with the
added ingredient of music, which provides an overarching design of great formal
coherence. In the music, all is manifestly ordered and harmonious, while the
events of the plot appear random and chaotic; the contrast between the movement
of the plot and the musical progression provides a Mozart or a Rossini with some
of his wittiest and most graceful comic effects. Finally, it should be noted
that operatic comedy can probe psychological and emotional depths of character
that spoken comedy would scarcely attempt. The Countess in Mozart's Figaro
is a very much more moving figure than she is in Beaumarchais' play; the
Elvira of Don
Giovanniexhibits a fine extravagance that is little more than suggested in
Molière's comedy. (see also "Marriage
of Figaro, The," )
When comedy is dependent on the favour
of a large part of the public, as reflected in box-office receipts or the
purchase of a television
sponsor's product, it seldom achieves a high level of art. There is nothing
innocent about laughter at the whims and inconsistencies of humankind, and radio
and television and film producers have always been wary of offending their
audiences with it. On radio and television, the laughter is usually
self-directed (as in the performances of comedians such as Jack Benny or Red
Skelton), or it is safely contained within the genial confines of a family
situation (e.g., the "Fibber
McGee and Molly" radio show or "I Love Lucy" on television). Much
the same attitude has obtained with regard to comedy in the theatre in the United
States. Satire has seldom succeeded on Broadway,
which instead has offered pleasant plays about the humorous behaviour of
basically nice people, such as the eccentric family in George S. Kaufmann and
Moss Hart's You Can't Take It with You (1936)
or the lovable head of the household in Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse's Life
with Father (1939) or the indefatigable Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder's Matchmaker (1954) and in her later reincarnation in the musical Hello,
Dolly!
The American public has never been quite
comfortable in the presence of comedy. The calculated ridicule and the
relentless exposure often seem cruel or unfair to a democratic public. If all
men are created equal, then it ill becomes anyone to laugh at the follies of his
fellows, especially when they are follies that are likely to be shared, given
the common background of social opportunity and experience of the general
public. There is an insecurity in the mass audience that is not compatible with
the high self-assurance of comedy as it judges between the wise and the foolish
of the world. The critical spirit of comedy has never been welcome in American
literature; in both fiction and drama, humour, not comedy, has raised the
laughter. American literature can boast an honorable tradition of humorists,
from Mark Twain to James Thurber, but has produced no genuinely comic writer. As
American social and moral tenets were subjected to increasing critical scrutiny
from the late 1950s onward, however, there were some striking achievements in
comedy in various media: Edward Albee's American
Dream (1961) and Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (1962), on the stage; novels such as those of Saul Bellow
and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961);
and films such as Dr. Strangelove (1964).
(see also "Doctor
Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb")
This last example is remarkable, because
comedy in the medium of film, in America, had been conceived as entertainment
and not much more. This is not to say that American film comedies lacked style.
The best of them always displayed verve and poise and a thoroughly professional
knowledge of how to amuse the public without troubling it. Their shortcoming has
always been that the amusement they provide lacks resonance.
If films have seldom explored comedy
with great profundity, they have, nonetheless, produced it in great variety.
There have been comedies of high sophistication, the work of directors such as
Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, Frank Capra, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Billy
Wilder and of actors and actresses such as Greta Garbo (in Lubitsch's Ninotchka, 1939), Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant (in Cukor's Philadelphia
Story, 1940), Bette Davis (in Mankiewicz' All
About Eve, 1950), Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert (in Capra's It Happened One Night, 1934), Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur (in
Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936),
and Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon (in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, 1959). There have been comedies with music, built
around the talents of singers and dancers such as Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell
and Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire; there are the classic farces of Charlie
Chaplin and Buster Keaton and, later, of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers and
Laurel and Hardy; and there is a vast, undistinguished field of comedies dealing
with the humours of domestic life. The varieties of comedy in Hollywood films
have always been replicas of those on the New York stage; as often as not, they
were products of the same talents: in the 1930s, of dramatists such as Philip
Barry or S.N. Behrman and composers such as Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and
Irving Berlin; in the 1960s, of the dramatist Neil Simon and the composer Burt
Bacharach.
European film makers, with an older and
more intellectual tradition of comedy available to them, produced comedies of
more considerable stature. Among French directors, Jean
Renoir, in his The
Rules of the Game(1939),
conveyed a moving human drama and a profoundly serious vision of French life on
the eve of World War II in a form, deriving from the theatre, that blends the
comic and the tragic. His disciple François
Truffaut, in Jules
and Jim(1961),
directed a witty and tender but utterly clear-sighted account of how gaiety and
love turn deadly. Though not generally regarded as a comic artist, the Swedish
film maker Ingmar Bergman
produced a masterpiece of film comedy in Smiles of a Summer Night(1955), a wise, wry account of the indignities that must sometimes be
endured by those who have exaggerated notions of their wisdom or virtue. The
films of the Italian director and writer Federico
Fellini represent a comic vision worthy of Pirandello. La
strada(1954), with
its Chaplinesque waif (played by Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina) as central
figure, is a disturbing compound of pathos and brutality. Comedy's affirmation
of the will to go on living has had no finer portrayal than in Giulietta
Masina's performance in the closing scene of Nights
of Cabiria(1956). La
dolce vita(1960) is a luridly satiric vision of modern decadence, where
ideals are travestied by reality, and everything is illusion and
disillusionment; the vision is carried to even more bizarre lengths in Fellini's
e="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Satyricon (1969), in which the decadence of the modern world
is grotesquely mirrored in the ancient one. 8
e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">1/2 (1963) and Juliet
of the Spirits(1965) are Fellini's most brilliantly inventive films, but their
technical exuberance is controlled by a profoundly serious comic purpose. The
principals in both films are seeking--through the phantasmagoria of their past
and present, of their dreams and their delusions, all of which seem hopelessly
mixed with their real aspirations--to know themselves. (C.H.Ho.)
Although the word tragedy is often used
loosely to describe any sort of disaster or misfortune, it more precisely refers
to a work of art, usually a play or novel, that probes with high seriousness
questions concerning the role of man in the universe. The Greeks of Attica,
the ancient state whose chief city was Athens,
first used the word in the 5th century BC to describe a specific kind of play,
which was presented at festivals
in Greece. Sponsored by the local governments, these plays were attended by the
entire community, a small admission fee being provided by the state for those
who could not afford it themselves. The atmosphere surrounding the performances
was more like that of a religious ceremony than entertainment. There were altars
to the gods, with priests in attendance, and the subjects of the tragedies were
the misfortunes of the heroes of legend, religious myth, and history. Most of
the material was derived from the works of Homer and was common knowledge in the
Greek communities. So powerful were the achievements of the three greatest Greek
dramatists--Aeschylus (525-456 BC), Sophocles (c. 496-406 BC), and Euripides (c.
480-406 BC)--that the word they first used for their plays survived and came
to describe a literary genre that, in spite of many transformations and lapses,
has proved its viability through 25 centuries. (see also
Ancient Greek literature,
Greek religion)
Historically, tragedy of a high order
has been created in only four periods and locales: Attica, in Greece, in the 5th
century BC; England in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, from 1558 to 1625;
17th-century France; and Europe and America during the second half of the 19th
century and the first half of the 20th. Each period saw the development of a
special orientation and emphasis, a characteristic style of theatre. In the
modern period, roughly from the middle of the 19th century, the idea of tragedy
found embodiment in the collateral form of the novel.
This section focusses primarily on the
development of tragedy as a literary genre. Further information on the
relationship of tragedy to other types of drama will be found in the section
above on Dramatic
literature .
The role of tragedy in the growth of theatre is discussed in THEATRE,
THE HISTORY OF WESTERN .
The questions of how and why tragedy
came into being and of the bearing of its origins on its development in
subsequent ages and cultures have been investigated by historians, philologists,
archaeologists, and anthropologists with results that are suggestive but
conjectural. Even the etymology of the world tragedy is far from established.
The most generally accepted source is the Greek tragoidia, or "goat-song," from tragos ("goat")
and aeidein ("to sing"). The
word could have referred either to the prize, a goat, that was awarded to the
dramatists whose plays won the earliest competitions or to the dress (goat
skins) of the performers, or to the goat that was sacrificed in the primitive rituals
from which tragedy developed.
In these communal celebrations, a choric
dance may have been the first formal element and perhaps for centuries was the
principal element. A speaker was later introduced into the ritual, in all
likelihood as an extension of the role of the priest, and dialogue
was established between him and the dancers, who became the chorus
in the Athenian drama. Aeschylus is usually regarded as the one who, realizing
the dramatic possibilities of the dialogue, first added a second speaker and
thus invented the form of tragedy. That so sophisticated a form could have been
fully developed by a single artist, however, is scarcely credible. Hundreds of
early tragedies have been lost, including some by Aeschylus himself. Of some 90
plays attributed to him, only seven have survived.
Four Dionysia,
or feasts of the Greek God Dionysus,
were held annually in Athens. Since Dionysus once held place as the god of
vegetation and the vine, and the goat was believed sacred to him, it has been
conjectured that tragedy originated in fertility feasts to commemorate the
harvest and the vintage and the associated ideas of the death and renewal of
life. The purpose of such rituals is to exercise some influence over these vital
forces. Whatever the original religious connections of tragedy may have been,
two elements have never entirely been lost: (1) its high seriousness, befitting
matters in which survival is at issue and (2) its involvement of the entire
community in matters of ultimate and common concern. When either of these
elements diminishes, when the form is overmixed with satiric, comic, or
sentimental elements, or when the theatre of concern succumbs to the theatre of
entertainment, then tragedy falls from its high estate and is on its way to
becoming something else. (see also Great
Dionysia, agriculture, fertility
cult)
As the Greeks developed it, the tragic
form, more than any other, raised questions about man's existence. Why must man
suffer? Why must man be forever torn between the seeming irreconcilables of good
and evil, freedom and necessity, truth and deceit? Are the causes of his
suffering outside himself, in blind chance, in the evil designs of others, in
the malice of the gods? Are its causes within him, and does he bring suffering
upon himself through arrogance, infatuation, or the tendency to overreach
himself? Why is justice so elusive?
It is this last question that Aeschylus
asks most insistently in his two most famous works, the Oresteia(a trilogy comprising Agamemnon,
Choephoroi, and Eumenides) and Prometheus Bound (the first part of a trilogy of which the last two
parts have been lost): is it right that Orestes, a young man in no way
responsible for his situation, should be commanded by a god, in the name of
justice, to avenge his father by murdering his mother? Is there no other way out
of his dilemma than through the ancient code of blood revenge, which will only
compound the dilemma? Again: was it right that in befriending mankind with the
gifts of fire and the arts, Prometheus should offend the presiding god Zeus and
himself be horribly punished? Aeschylus opened questions whose answers in the
Homeric stories had been taken for granted. In Homer,
Orestes' patricide is regarded as an act of filial piety, and Prometheus'
punishment is merely the inevitable consequence of defying the reigning deity.
All of the materials of tragedy, all of its cruelty, loss, and suffering, are
present in Homer and the ancient myths but are dealt with as
absolutes--self-sufficient and without the questioning spirit that was necessary
to raise them to the level of tragedy. It remained for Aeschylus and his fellow
tragedians first to treat these "absolutes" critically and creatively
in sustained dramatic form. They were true explorers of the human spirit. (see
also Greek
mythology, humanism)
In addition to their remarkable probing
into the nature of existence, their achievements included a degree of
psychological insight for which they are not generally given credit. Though such
praise is usually reserved for Shakespeare and the moderns, the Athenian
dramatists conveyed a vivid sense of the living reality of their characters'
experience: of what it felt like to be caught, like Orestes, in desperately
conflicting loyalties or to be subjected, like Prometheus, to prolonged and
unjust punishment. The mood of the audience as it witnessed the acting out of
these climactic experiences has been described as one of impassioned
contemplation. From their myths and epics and from their history in the 6th
century, the people of Athens learned that they could extend an empire and lay
the foundations of a great culture. From their tragedies of the 5th century,
they learned who they were, something of the possibilities and limitations of
the spirit, and of what it meant, not merely what it felt like, to be alive in a
world both beautiful and terrible.
Aeschylus has been called the most
theological of the Greek tragedians. His Prometheus
has been compared to the Book of Job of the Bible both in its structure (i.e.,
the immobilized heroic figure maintaining his cause in dialogues with
visitors) and in its preoccupation with the problem of suffering at the hands of
a seemingly unjust deity. Aeschylus tended to resolve the dramatic problem into
some degree of harmony, as scattered evidence suggests he did in the last two
parts of the Promethiad and as he
certainly did in the conclusion of the Oresteia.
This tendency would conceivably lead him out of the realm of tragedy and
into religious assurance. But his harmonies are never complete. In his plays
evil is inescapable, loss is irretrievable, suffering is inevitable. What the
plays say positively is that man can learn through suffering. The chorus in Agamemnon,
the first play of the Oresteia, says
this twice. The capacity to learn through suffering is a distinguishing
characteristic of the tragic hero, preeminently of the Greek tragic hero.
He has not merely courage, tenacity, and endurance but also the ability to grow,
by means of these qualities, into an understanding of himself, of his fellows,
and of the conditions of existence. Suffering, says Aeschylus, need not be
embittering but can be a source of knowledge. The moral force of his plays and
those of his fellow tragedians can hardly be exaggerated. They were shaping
agents in the Greek notion of education. It has been said that from Homer the
Greeks learned how to be good Greeks; from the tragedies they learned an
enlarged humanity. If it cannot be proved that Aeschylus "invented"
tragedy, it is clear that he at least set its tone and established a model that
is still operative. Even in the 20th century, the Oresteia
has been acclaimed as the greatest spiritual work of man, and dramatists
such as T.S. Eliot, in The
Family Reunion(1939), and Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Flies (1943), found modern relevance in its archetypal
characters, situations, and themes. (see also
Job, The Book of)
Sophocles' life spanned almost the whole
of the 5th century. He is said to have written his last play, Oedipus at Colonus, at the age of 90. Only seven of his plays, of
some 125 attributed to him, survive. He won the prize in the tragic competitions
20 times and never placed lower than second.
Sophocles has been called the great
mediating figure between Aeschylus and Euripides. Of the three, it might be said
that Aeschylus tended to resolve tragic tensions into higher truth, to look
beyond, or above, tragedy; that Euripides' irony and bitterness led him the
other way to fix on the disintegration of the individual; and that Sophocles,
who is often called the "purest" artist of the three, was truest to
the actual state of human experience. Unlike the others, Sophocles seems never
to insinuate himself into his characters or situations, never to manipulate them
into preconceived patterns. He sets them free on a course seemingly of their own
choosing. He neither preaches nor rails. If life is hard and often destructive,
the question Sophocles asks is not how did this come to be or why did such a
misfortune have to happen but rather, given the circumstances, how must a man
conduct himself, how should he act, what must he do?
His greatest play, Oedipus
the Kingmay serve
as a model of his total dramatic achievement. Embodied in it, and suggested with
extraordinary dramatic tact, are all the basic questions of tragedy, which are
presented in such a way as almost to define the form itself. It is not
surprising that Aristotle, a century later, analyzed it for his definition of
tragedy in the Poetics. It is the
nuclear Greek tragedy, setting the norm in a way that cannot be claimed for any
other work, not even the Oresteia.
In Oedipus,
as in Sophocles' other plays, the chorus is much less prominent than in
Aeschylus' works. The action is swifter and more highly articulated; the
dialogue is sharper, more staccato, and bears more of the meaning of the play.
Though much has been made of the influence of fate on the action of the play,
later critics emphasize the freedom with which Oedipus acts throughout. Even
before the action of the play begins, the oracle's prediction that Oedipus was
doomed to kill his father and marry his mother had long since come true, though
he did not realize it. Though he was fated, he was also free throughout the
course of the play--free to make decision after decision, to carry out his
freely purposed action to its completion. In him, Sophocles achieved one of the
enduring definitions of the tragic hero--that of a man for whom the liberation
of the self is a necessity. The action of the play, the purpose of which is to
discover the murderer of Oedipus' father and thereby to free the city from its
curse, leads inevitably to Oedipus' suffering--the loss of his wife, his
kingdom, his sight. The messenger who reports Oedipus' self-blinding might well
have summarized the play with "All ills that there are names for, all are
here." And the chorus' final summation deepens the note of despair:
"Count no man happy," they say in essence, "until he is
dead."
But these were not Sophocles' ultimate
verdicts. The action is so presented that the final impression is not of human
helplessness at the hands of maligning gods nor of man as the pawn of fate.
Steering his own course, with great courage, Oedipus has ferreted out the truth
of his identity and administered his own punishment, and, in his suffering,
learned a new humanity. The final impression of the Oedipus, far from being one of unmixed evil and nihilism, is of
massive integrity, powerful will, and magnanimous acceptance of a horribly
altered existence.
Some 50 years later, Sophocles wrote a
sequel to Oedipus the King. In Oedipus
at Colonusthe old
Oedipus, further schooled in suffering, is seen during his last day on earth. He
is still the same Oedipus in many ways: hot-tempered, hating his enemies,
contentious. Though he admits his "pollution" in the murder of his
father and the marriage to his mother, he denies that he had sinned, since he
had done both deeds unwittingly. Throughout the play, the theme of which has
been described as the "heroization" of Oedipus, he grows steadily in
nobility and awesomeness. Finally, sensing the approach of the end, he leaves
the scene, to be elevated in death to a demigod, as the messenger describes the
miraculous event. In such manner Sophocles leads his tragedy toward an ultimate
assertion of values. His position has been described as "heroic
humanism," as making a statement of belief in the human capacity to
transcend evils, within and without, by means of the human condition itself.
Tragedy must maintain a balance between
the higher optimisms of religion or philosophy,
or any other beliefs that tend to explain away the enigmas and afflictions of
existence, on the one hand, and the pessimism that would reject the whole human
experiment as valueless and futile on the other. Thus the opposite of tragedy is
not comedy but the literature of cynicism and despair, and the opposite of the
tragic artist's stance, which is one of compassion and involvement, is that of
the detached and cynical ironist. (see also
irony)
The tragedies of Euripides test the
Sophoclean norm in this direction. His plays present in gruelling detail the
wreck of human lives under the stresses that the gods often seem willfully to
place upon them. Or, if the gods are not willfully involved through jealousy or
spite, they sit idly by while man wrecks himself through passion or
heedlessness. No Euripidean hero approaches Oedipus in stature. The margin of
freedom is narrower, and the question of justice, so central and absolute an
ideal for Aeschylus, becomes a subject for irony. In Hippolytus
for example, the goddess Artemis never thinks of justice as she takes revenge on
the young Hippolytus for neglecting her worship; she acts solely out of personal
spite. In MedeaMedea's revenge on Jason through the slaughter of their children is so
hideously unjust as to mock the very question. In the Bacchaewhen the frenzied Agave tears her son, Pentheus, to pieces and marches into
town with his head on a pike, the god Dionysus, who had engineered the
situation, says merely that Pentheus should not have scorned him. The Euripidean
gods, in short, cannot be appealed to in the name of justice. Euripides'
tendency toward moral neutrality, his cool tacking between sides (e.g., between Pentheus versus Dionysus and the bacchantes) leave the
audience virtually unable to make a moral decision. In Aeschylus' Eumenides
(the last play of the Oresteia),
the morals of the gods improve. Athena is there, on the stage, helping to solve
the problem of justice. In Sophocles, while the gods are distant, their moral
governance is not questioned. Oedipus ends
as if with a mighty "So be it." In Euripides, the gods are
destructive, wreaking their capricious wills on defenseless man. Aristotle
called Euripides the most tragic of the three dramatists; surely his depiction
of the arena of human life is the grimmest. (see also "Oresteia")
Many qualities, however, keep his
tragedies from becoming literature of protest, of cynicism, or of despair. He
reveals profound psychological insight, as in the delineation of such antipodal
characters as Jason and Medea, or of the forces, often subconscious, at work in
the group frenzy of the Bacchae. His
Bacchic odes reveal remarkable lyric power. And he has a deep sense of human
values, however external and self-conscious. Medea, even in the fury of her
hatred for Jason and her lust for revenge, must steel herself to the murder of
her children, realizing the evil of what she is about to do. In this
realization, Euripides suggests a saving hope: here is a great nature gone
wrong--but still a great nature.
After Euripides, Greek drama reveals
little that is significant to the history of tragedy. Performances were given
during the remainder of the pre-Christian era in theatres throughout the
Mediterranean world, but, with the decline of Athens as a city-state, the
tradition of tragedy eroded. As external affairs deteriorated, the high
idealism, the exalted sense of human capacities depicted in tragedy at its
height yielded more and more to the complaints of the skeptics. The Euripidean
assault on the gods ended in the debasement of the original lofty conceptions. A
20th-century British classical scholar, Gilbert
Murray, used the phrase "the failure of nerve" to describe the
late Greek world. It may, indeed, provide a clue to what happened. On the other
hand, according to the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872),
a quite different influence may have spelled the end of Greek tragedy: the
so-called Socratic optimism, the notion underlying the dialogues of Plato that
man could "know himself" through the exercise of his reason in
patient, careful dialectic--a notion that diverted questions of man's existence
away from drama and into philosophy. In any case, the balance for tragedy was
upset, and the theatre of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides gave way to what
seems to have been a theatre of diatribe, spectacle, and entertainment. (see
also "Birth
of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, The," )
The Roman world failed to revive
tragedy. Seneca (4 BC-AD 65)
wrote at least eight tragedies, mostly adaptations of Greek materials, such as
the stories of Oedipus, Hippolytus, and Agamemnon, but with little of the Greek
tragic feeling for character and theme. The emphasis is on sensation and
rhetoric, tending toward melodrama and bombast. The plays are of interest in
this context mainly as the not entirely healthy inspiration for the precursors
of Elizabethan tragedy in England. (see also
Latin literature, Senecan
tragedy)
The long hiatus in the history of
tragedy between the Greeks and the Elizabethans has been variously explained. In
the Golden Age of Roman literature, roughly from the birth of Virgil in 70 BC to
the death of Ovid in AD 17, the Roman poets followed the example of Greek
literature; although they produced great lyric and epic verse, their tragic
drama lacked the probing freshness and directness fundamental to tragedy. (see
also Augustan
Age)
With the collapse of the Roman world and
the invasions of the barbarians came the beginnings of the long, slow
development of the Christian Church. Churchmen and philosophers gradually forged
a system, based on the Christian revelation, of the nature and destiny of man.
The mass, with its daily
reenactment of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, its music, and its dramatic
structure, may have provided something comparable to tragic drama in the lives
of the people. (see also Middle
Ages)
With the coming of the Renaissance, the
visual arts more and more came to represent the afflictive aspects of life, and
the word tragedy again came into currency. Chaucer
(1340-1400) used the word in Troilus and
Criseyde, and in The
Canterbury Talesit
is applied to a series of stories in the medieval style of de casibus virorum illustrium, meaning "the downfalls"
(more or less inevitable) "of princes." Chaucer used the word to
signify little more than the turn of the wheel of fortune, against whose force
no meaningful effort of man is possible. It remained for the Elizabethans to
develop a theatre and a dramatic literature that reinstated the term on a level
comparable to that of the Greeks. (see also
Middle English literature,
Renaissance art)
The long beginning of the Elizabethan
popular theatre, like that of
the Greek theatre, lay in religious ceremonials, probably in the drama in the
liturgy of the two greatest events in the Christian year, Christmas and Easter.
In the Early Church, exchanges between two groups of choristers, or between the
choir and a solo voice, led to the idea of dialogue, just as it had in the
development of Greek tragedy. The parts became increasingly elaborate, and
costumes were introduced to individualize the characters. Dramatic gestures and
actions were a natural development. More and more of the biblical stories were
dramatized, much as the material of Homer was used by the Greek tragedians,
although piously in this instance, with none of the tragic skepticism of the
Greeks. In the course of generations, the popularity of the performances grew to
such an extent that, to accommodate the crowds, they were moved, from inside the
church to the porch, or square, in front of the church. The next step was the
secularization of the management of the productions, as the towns and cities
took them over. Day-long festivals were instituted, involving, as in the Greek
theatre, the whole community. Cycles of plays were performed at York, Chester,
and other English religious centres, depicting in sequences of short dramatic
episodes the whole human story, from the Fall of Lucifer and the Creation to the
Day of Doom. Each play was assigned to an appropriate trade guild
(the story of Noah and the Ark, for example, went to the shipwrights), which
took over complete responsibility for the production. Hundreds of actors and
long preparation went into the festivals. These "miracle" and "mystery"
plays, however crude they may now seem, dealt with the loftiest of
subjects in simple but often powerful eloquence. Although the audience must have
been a motley throng, it may well have been as involved and concerned as those
of the Greek theatre. (see also Elizabethan
literature, liturgical drama,
miracle play)
Once the drama became a part of the
secular life of the communities, popular tastes affected its religious
orientation. Comic scenes, like those involving Noah's nagging wife, a purely
secular creation who does not appear in the Bible, became broader. The
"tragic" scenes--anything involving the Devil or Doomsday--became more
and more melodramatic. With the Renaissance came the rediscovery of the Greek
and Roman cultures and the consequent development of a world view that led away
from moral and spiritual absolutes and toward an increasingly skeptical
individualism. The high poetic spirits of the mid-16th century began to turn the
old medieval forms of the miracles and mysteries to new uses and to look to the
ancient plays, particularly the lurid tragedies of Seneca, for their models. A
bloody play, Gorboducby Thomas Sackville
and Thomas Norton, first acted in 1561, is now known as the first formal tragedy
in English, though it is far from fulfilling the high offices of the form in
tone, characterization, and theme. Thomas
Kyd's Spanish
Tragedie(c.
1589) continued the Senecan tradition of the "tragedy
of blood" with somewhat more sophistication than Gorboduc
but even more bloodletting. Elizabethan tragedy never freed itself
completely from certain melodramatic
aspects of the influence of Seneca.
The first tragedian worthy of the
tradition of the Greeks was Christopher Marlowe (1564-93). Of Marlowe's
tragedies, Tamburlaine (1587), Doctor Faustus (c. 1588), The
Jew of Malta (1589), and Edward II (c. 1593), the first two are the most famous and most significant. In
Tamburlaine, the material was highly
melodramatic -- Tamburlaine's popular image was that of the most ruthless and
bloody of conquerors. In a verse prologue, when Marlowe invites the audience to
"View but his [Tamburlaine's] picture in this tragic glass," he had in
mind little more, perhaps, than the trappings and tone of tragedy: "the
stately tent of war," which is to be his scene, and "the high
astounding terms," which will be his rhetoric. But he brought such
imaginative vigour and sensitivity to bear that melodrama is transcended, in
terms reminiscent of high tragedy. Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd of the 14th
century, becomes the spokesman, curiously enough, for the new world of the
Renaissance--iconoclastic, independent, stridently ambitious. Just as the Greek
tragedians challenged tradition, Tamburlaine shouts defiance at all the norms,
religious and moral, that Marlowe's generation inherited. But Tamburlaine,
although he is an iconoclast, is also a poet. No one before him on the English
stage had talked with such magnificent lyric power as he does, whether it be on
the glories of conquest or on the beauties of Zenocrate, his beloved. When,
still unconquered by any enemy, he sickens and dies, he leaves the feeling that
something great, however ruthless, has gone. Here once again is the ambiguity
that was so much a part of the Greek tragic imagination -- the combination of
awe, pity, and fear that Aristotle defined. (see also
"Tamburlaine the
Great")
In Doctor
Faustus the sense of conflict between the tradition and the new Renaissance
individualism is much greater. The claims of revealed Christianity are presented
in the orthodox spirit of the morality and mystery plays, but Faustus' yearnings
for power over space and time are also presented with a sympathy that cannot be
denied. Here is modern man, tragic modern man, torn between the faith of
tradition and faith in himself. Faustus takes the risk in the end and is bundled
off to hell in true mystery-play fashion. But the final scene does not convey
that justice has been done, even though Faustus admits that his fate is just.
Rather, the scene suggests that the transcendent human individual has been
caught in the consequences of a dilemma that he might have avoided but that no
imaginative man could have avoided.
The sense of the interplay of fate and freedom is not unlike that of Oedipus.
The sense of tragic ambiguity is more poignant in Faustus than in Oedipus or Tamburlaine because
Faustus is far more introspective than either of the other heroes. The conflict
is inner; the battle is for Faustus' soul, a kind of conflict that neither the
Greeks nor Tamburlaine had to contend with. For this reason, and not because it
advocates Christian doctrine, the play has been called the first Christian
tragedy. (see also "Tragicall
History of Doctor Faustus, The")
Shakespeare was a long time coming to
his tragic phase, the six or seven years that produced his five greatest
tragedies, Hamlet (c. 1601), Othello (c.
1602), King Lear (c. 1605), Macbeth
(c. 1605), and Antony and
Cleopatra (c. 1606). These were
not the only plays written during those years. Troilus and Cressida may have come about the same time as Hamlet;
All's Well That Ends Well, shortly after Othello;
and Measure for Measure, shortly
before King Lear. But the
concentration of tragedies is sufficient to distinguish this period from that of
the comedies and history plays before and of the so-called romances afterward.
Although the tragic period cannot entirely be accounted for in terms of
biography, social history, or current stage fashions, all of which have been
adduced as causes, certain questions should be answered, at least tentatively:
What is Shakespeare's major tragic theme and method? How do they relate to
classical, medieval, and Renaissance traditions? In attempting to answer these
questions, this proviso must be kept in mind: the degree to which he was
consciously working in these traditions, consciously shaping his plays on early
models, adapting Greek and Roman themes to his own purpose, or following the
precepts of Aristotle must always remain conjectural. On the one hand, there is
the comment by Ben Jonson that
Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek," and Milton in
"L'Allegro" speaks of him as "fancy's child" warbling
"his native wood-notes wild," as if he were unique, a sport of nature.
On the other hand, Shakespeare knew Jonson (who knew a great deal of Latin and
Greek) and is said to have acted in Jonson's Sejanus in 1603, a very classical play, published in 1605 with a
learned essay on Aristotle as preface. It can be assumed that Shakespeare knew
the tradition. Certainly the Elizabethan theatre could not have existed without
the Greek and Roman prototype. For all of its mixed nature--with comic and
melodramatic elements jostling the tragic--the Elizabethan theatre retained some
of the high concern, the sense of involvement, and even the ceremonial
atmosphere of the Greek theatre. When tragedies were performed, the stage was
draped in black. Modern studies have shown that the Elizabethan theatre retained
many ties with both the Middle Ages and the tradition of the Greeks.
Shakespeare's earliest and most
lighthearted plays reveal a sense of the individual, his innerness, his reality,
his difference from every other individual, and, at times, his plight.
Certain stock characters, to be sure, appear in the early comedies. Even
Falstaff, that triumphant individual, has a prototype in the braggadocio of
Roman comedy, and even Falstaff has his tragic side. As Shakespeare's art
developed, his concern for the plight or predicament or dilemma seems to have
grown. His earliest history plays, for instance (Henry
VI, Parts I, II, III), are little more than chronicles of the great pageant
figures--kingship in all its colour and potency. Richard IIIwhich follows them, focusses with an intensity traditionally reserved for
the tragic hero on one man and on the sinister forces, within and without, that
bring him to destruction. From kingship, that is, Shakespeare turned to the
king, the symbolic individual, the focal man, to whom whole societies look for
their values and meanings. Thus Richard III is almost wholly sinister, though
there exists a fascination about him, an all but tragic ambiguity. (see also
Falstaff, Sir John)
Although Shakespeare's developing sense
of the tragic cannot be summed up adequately in any formula, one might hazard
the following: he progressed from the individual
of the early comedies; to the burdened
individual, such as, in Henry IV, Prince
Hal, the future Henry V, who manipulates, rather than suffers, the tragic
ambiguities of the world; and, finally, in the great tragedies, to (in one
critic's phrase) the overburdened individual,
Lear being generally regarded as the greatest example. In these last plays, man
is at the limits of his sovereignty as a human being, where everything that he
has lived by, stood for, or loved is put to the test. Like Prometheus on the
crag, or Oedipus as he learns who he is, or Medea deserted by Jason, the
Shakespearean tragic heroes are at the extremities of their natures. Hamlet
and Macbeth are thrust to the
very edge of sanity; Lear and, momentarily, Othello are thrust beyond it. In
every case, as in the Greek plays, the destructive forces seem to combine inner
inadequacies or evils, such as Lear's temper or Macbeth's ambition, with
external pressures, such as Lear's "tiger daughters," the witches in Macbeth,
or Lady Macbeth's importunity. Once the destructive course is set going,
these forces operate with the relentlessness the Greeks called Moira,
or Fate. (see also "King
Lear," )
At the height of his powers,
Shakespeare's tragic vision comprehended the totality of possibilities for good
and evil as nearly as the human imagination ever has. His heroes are the
vehicles of psychological, societal, and cosmic forces that tend to ennoble and
glorify humanity or infect it and destroy it. The logic of tragedy that
possessed him demanded an insistence upon the latter. Initially, his heroes make
free choices and are free time after time to turn back, but they move toward
their doom as relentlessly as did Oedipus. The total tragic statement, however,
is not limited to the fate of the hero. He is but the centre of an action that
takes place in a context involving many other characters, each contributing a
point of view, a set of values or antivalues to the complex dialectic of the
play. In Macbeth's demon-ridden Scotland, where weird things happen to men and
horses turn cannibal, there is the virtuous Malcolm, and society survives.
Hamlet had the trustworthy friend Horatio, and, for all the bloodletting, what
was "rotten" was purged. In the tragedies, most notably Lear,
the Aeschylean notion of "knowledge through suffering" is
powerfully dramatized; it is most obvious in the hero, but it is also shared by
the society of which he is the focal figure. The flaw in the hero may be a moral
failing or, sometimes, an excess of virtue; the flaw in society may be the
rottenness of the Danish court in Hamlet or
the corruption of the Roman world in Antony and Cleopatrathe flaw or fault or dislocation may be in the very universe itself, as
dramatized by Lear's raving at the heavens or the ghosts that walk the plays or
the witches that prophesy. All these faults, Shakespeare seems to be saying, are
inevitabilities of the human condition. But they do not spell rejection,
nihilsm, or despair. The hero may die, but in the words of the novelist E.M.
Forster to describe the redeeming power of tragedy, "he has given us
life."
Such is the precarious balance a
tragedian must maintain: the cold, clear vision that sees the evil but is not
maddened by it, a sense of the good that is equally clear but refuses the
blandishments of optimism or sentimentalism. Few have ever sustained the balance
for long. Aeschylus tended to slide off to the right, Euripides to the left, and
even Sophocles had his hero transfigured at Colonus. Marlowe's early death
should perhaps spare him the criticism his first plays warrant. Shakespeare's
last two tragedies, Macbeth and Antony
and Cleopatra, are close to the edge of a valueless void. The atmosphere of Macbeth
is murky with evil; the action moves with almost melodramatic speed from
horror to horror. The forces for good rally at last, but Macbeth himself
steadily deteriorates into the most nihilistic of all Shakespeare's tragic
heroes, saved in nothing except the sense of a great nature, like Medea, gone
wrong. Antony, in its ambiguities and
irony, has been considered close to the Euripidean line of bitterness and
detachment. Shakespeare himself soon modulated into another mood in his last
plays, Cymbeline (c.
1609), The Winter's Tale (c. 1610),
and The Tempest (c. 1611). Each is based on a situation that could have been
developed into major tragedy had Shakespeare followed out its logic as he had
done with earlier plays. For whatever reason, however, he chose not to. The
great tragic questions are not pressed. The
Tempest, especially, for all Prospero's charm and magnanimity, gives a sense
of brooding melancholy over the ineradicable evil in mankind, a patient but sad
acquiescence. All of these plays end in varying degrees of harmony and
reconciliation. Shakespeare willed it so.
From Shakespeare's tragedies to the
closing of the theatres in England by the Puritans in 1642, the quality of
tragedy is steadily worse, if the best of the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies
are taken as a standard. Among the leading dramatists of the period--John
Webster, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Cyril Tourneur, and
John Ford--there were some excellent craftsmen and brilliant poets. Though each
of them has a rightful place in the history of English drama, tragedy suffered a
transmutation in their hands.
The Jacobean dramatists--those who
flourished in England during the reign of James I--failed to transcend the
negative tendencies they inherited from Elizabethan tragedy: a sense of defeat,
a mood of spiritual despair implicit in Marlowe's tragic thought; in the
nihilistic broodings of some of Shakespeare's characters in their worst
moods--Hamlet, Gloucester in Lear, Macbeth;
in the metaphoric implication of the theme of insanity, of man pressed beyond
the limit of endurance, that runs through many of these tragedies; most
importantly, perhaps, in the moral confusion ("fair is foul and foul is
fair") that threatens to unbalance even the staunchest of Shakespeare's
tragic heroes. This sinister tendency came to a climax about 1605 and was in
part a consequence of the anxiety surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth I and
the accession of James I. Despite their negative tendencies, the Elizabethans,
in general, had affirmed life and celebrated it; Shakespeare's moral balance,
throughout even his darkest plays, remained firm. The Jacobeans, on the other
hand, were possessed by death. They became superb analysts of moral confusion
and of the darkened vision of humanity at cross purposes, preying upon itself;
of lust, hate, and intrigue engulfing what is left of beauty, love, and
integrity. There is little that is redemptive or that suggests, as had
Aeschylus, that evil might be resolved by the enlightenment gained from
suffering. As in the tragedies of Euripides, the protagonist's margin of freedom
grows ever smaller. "You are the deed's creature," cries a murderer to
his unwitting lady accomplice in Middleton's
Changeling (1622), and a prisoner of her deed she remains. Many of
the plays maintained a pose of ironic, detached reportage, without the sense of
sympathetic involvement that the greatest tragedians have conveyed from the
beginning. (see also Jacobean
literature, "Changeling,
The")
Some of the qualities of the highest
tragedians have been claimed for John
Webster. One critic points to his search for a moral order as a link to
Shakespeare and sees in his moral vision a basis for renewal. Webster's Duchess
of Malfi(c. 1613) has been
interpreted as a final triumph of life over death. Overwhelmed by final
unleashed terror, the Duchess affirms the essential dignity of man. Despite such
vestiges of greatness, however, the trend of tragedy was downward. High moral
sensitivity and steady conviction are required to resist the temptation to
resolve the intolerable tensions of tragedy into either the comfort of optimism
or the relaxed apathy of despair. Periods of the creation of high tragedy are
therefore few and shortlived. The demands on artist and audience alike are very
great. Forms wear out, and public taste seems destined to go through inevitable
cycles of health and disease. What is to one generation powerful and persuasive
rhetoric becomes bombast and bathos to the next. The inevitable materials of
tragedy--violence, madness, hate, and lust--soon lose their symbolic role and
become perverted to the uses of melodrama and sensationalism, mixed, for relief,
with the broadest comedy or farce. (see also
aesthetics)
These corruptions had gone too far when John
Milton, 29 years after the closing of the theatres, attempted to bring
back the true spirit and tone of tragedy, which he called "the gravest,
moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems." His Samson
Agonistes(1671),
however, is magnificent "closet
tragedy"--drama more suitable for reading than for popular
performance. Modelled on the Prometheus, it
recalls Aeschylus' tragedy both in its form, in which the immobilized hero
receives a sequence of visitors, and in its theme, in which there is a
resurgence of the hero's spirit under stress. With Restoration comedy in full
swing, however, and with the "heroic play" (an overly moralized
version of tragedy) about to reach its crowning achievement in John Dryden's All
for Love only seven years later (published 1678), Samson Agonistes was an anachronism.
Another attempt to bring back the
ancient form had been going on for some time across the English Channel, in
France. The French Classical tragedy,
whose monuments are Pierre
Corneille's Cid (1637) and Jean
Racine's Bérénice (1670)
and Phèdre (1677), made no attempt to be popular in the way of
the Elizabethan theatre. The plays were written by and for intellectual
aristocrats, who came together in an elite theatre, patronized by royalty and
nobility. Gone were the bustle and pageantry of the Elizabethan tragedies, with
their admixtures of whatever modes and moods the dramatists thought would work.
The French playwrights submitted themselves to the severe discipline they
derived from the Greek models and especially the "rules," as they
interpreted them, laid down by Aristotle. The unities
of place, time, and action were strictly observed. One theme, the conflict
between Passion and Reason, was uppermost. The path of Reason was the path of
Duty and Obligation (noblesse oblige), and that path had been clearly plotted by
moralists and philosophers, both ancient and modern. In this sense there was
nothing exploratory in the French tragedy; existing moral and spiritual norms
were insisted upon. The norms are never criticized or tested as Aeschylus
challenged the Olympians or as Marlowe presented, with startling sympathy, the
Renaissance overreacher. Corneille's Cid shows
Duty triumphant over Passion, and, as a reward, hero and heroine are happily
united. By the time of Phèdre, Corneille's proud affirmation of the power of the will and the reason over
passion had given way to what Racine called "stately sorrow," with
which he asks the audience to contemplate Phèdre's heroic, but losing,
moral struggle. Her passion for her stepson, Hippolyte, bears her down
relentlessly. Her fine principles and heroic will are of no avail. Both she and
Hippolyte are destroyed. The action is limited to one terrible day; there is no
change of scene; there is neither comic digression nor relief--the focus on the
process by which a great nature goes down is sharp and intense. Such is the
power of Racine's poetry (it is untranslatable), his conception of character,
and his penetrating analysis of it, that it suggests the presence of Sophoclean
"heroic humanism." In this sense it could be said that Racine tested
the norms, that he uncovered a cruel injustice in the nature of a code that
could destroy such a person as Phèdre. Once again, here is a world of
tragic ambiguity, in which no precept or prescription can answer complicated
human questions. (see also French
literature)
This ambiguity was all but eliminated in
the "heroic play" that vied with the comedy of the Restoration stage
in England in the latter part of the 17th century. After the vicissitudes of the
Civil War, the age was hungry for heroism. An English philosopher of the time, Thomas
Hobbes, defined the purpose of the type: "The work of an heroic poem
is to raise admiration, principally for three virtues, valor, beauty, and
love." Moral concern, beginning with Aeschylus, has always been central in
tragedy, but in the works of the great tragedians this concern was exploratory
and inductive. The moral concern of the heroic play is the reverse. It is
deductive and dogmatic. The first rule, writes Dryden
(following the contemporary French critic, René Le Bossu) in his preface
to his Troilus and Cressida (1679), is
"to make the moral of the work; that is, to lay down to yourself what that
precept of morality shall be, which you would insinuate into the people . . .
." In All
for Lovethe moral is all too clear: Antony must choose between the path of
honour and his illicit passion for Cleopatra. He chooses Cleopatra, and they are
both destroyed. Only Dryden's poetry, with its air of emotional argumentation,
manages to convey human complexities in spite of his moral bias and saves the
play from artificiality--makes it, in fact, the finest near-tragic production of
its age.
Although the annals of the drama from
Dryden onward are filled with plays called tragedies by their authors, the form
as it has been defined here went into an eclipse during the late 17th, the 18th,
and the early 19th centuries. Reasons that have been suggested for the decline
include the politics of the Restoration in England; the rise of science and,
with it, the optimism of the Enlightenment throughout Europe; the developing
middle class economy; the trend toward reassuring deism in theology; and, in
literature, the rise of the novel and the vogue of satire. The genius of the age
was discursive and rationalistic. In France and later in England, belief in Evil
was reduced to the perception of evils, which were looked upon as institutional
and therefore remediable. The nature of man was no longer the problem; rather,
it was the better organization and management of men. The old haunting fear and
mystery, the sense of ambiguity at the centre of man's nature and of dark forces
working against him in the universe, were replaced by a new and confident dogma.
Tragedy never lost its high prestige in the minds of the leading spirits.
Theorizing upon it were men of letters as diverse as Dr. Samuel Johnson, David
Hume, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy
Bysshe Shelley and German philosophers from Gotthold Lessing in the 18th
century to Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th. Revivals of Shakespeare's tragedies
were often bowdlerized or altered, as in the happy ending for Lear
in a production of 1681. Those who felt themselves called upon to write
tragedies produced little but weak imitations. Shelley tried it once, in The
Cenci(1819), but,
as his wife wrote, "the bent of his mind went the other way"--which
way may be seen in his Prometheus Unbound(1820), in which Zeus is overthrown and man enters upon a golden age, ruled
by the power of love. Goethe
had the sense to stay away from tragedy: "The mere attempt to write
tragedy," he said, "might be my undoing." He concluded his
two-part Faust (1808, 1832) in the spirit of the 19th-century optimistic
humanitarianism. It was not until the latter part of the 19th century, with the
plays of a Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, a Russian, Anton Chekhov, a Swede, August
Strindberg, and, later, an American, Eugene O'Neill, that something of the
original vision returned to inspire the tragic theatre.
The theme and spirit of tragedy,
meanwhile, found a new vehicle in the novel. This development is important,
however far afield it may seem from the work of the formal dramatists. The
English novelist Emily Brontë's
Wuthering
Heights(1847), in
its grim Yorkshire setting, reflects the original concerns of tragedy: i.e.,
the terrifying divisions in nature and human nature, love that creates and
destroys, character at once fierce and pitiable, destructive actions that are
willed yet seemingly destined, as if by a malicious fate, yet the whole
controlled by an imagination that learns as it goes. Another English novelist, Thomas
Hardy, in the preface to his Woodlanders
(1887), speaks of the rural setting of this and other of his novels as being
comparable to the stark and simple setting of the Greek theatre, giving his
novels something of that drama's intensity and sharpness of focus. His grimly
pessimistic view of man's nature and destiny and of the futility of human
striving, as reflected in his novels The
Return of the Native (1878), Tess of
the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the
Obscure (1895), is barely redeemed for tragedy by his sense of the beauty of
nature and of the beauty and dignity of human character and effort, however
unavailing.
The work of the Polish-born English
novelist Joseph Conrad
(1857-1924) provides another kind of setting for novels used as vehicles of the
tragic sense. Lord
Jim(1900), originally conceived as a short story, grew to a
full-length novel as Conrad found himself exploring in ever greater depth the
perplexing, ambiguous problem of lost honour and guilt, expiation and heroism.
Darkness and doubt brood over the tale, as they do over his long story "Heart
of Darkness" (1899), in which Conrad's narrator, Marlow, again leads
his listeners into the shadowy recesses of the human heart, with its forever
unresolved and unpredictable capacities for good and evil.
In Russia, the novels of Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, particularly Crime and Punishment(1866) and The
Brothers Karamazov(1880),
revealed a world of paradox, alienation, and loss of identity, prophetic of the
major tragic themes of the 20th century. More than any earlier novelist,
Dostoyevsky appropriated to his fictions the realm of the subconscious and
explored in depth its shocking antinomies and discontinuities. Sigmund
Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, frequently acknowledged his
indebtedness to Dostoyevsky's psychological insights. Dostoyevsky's protagonists
are reminiscent of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, caught between the old world of
orthodox belief and the new world of intense individualism, each with its
insistent claims and justifications. The battleground is once more the soul of
man, and the stakes are survival. Each of his major heroes--Raskolnikov in Crime
and Punishment and the three Karamazovs--wins a victory, but it is in each
case morally qualified, partial, or transient. The harmonious resolutions of the
novels seem forced and are neither decisive of the action nor definitive of
Dostoyevsky's total tragic view. (see also
psychological novel)
In America, Nathaniel
Hawthorne's novel The
Scarlet Letter(1850)
and Herman Melville's Moby
Dick(1851) are surprisingly complete embodiments of the tragic form,
written as they were at a time of booming American optimism, materialistic
expansion, and sentimentalism in fiction--and no tragic theatre whatever. In The
Scarlet Letter, a story of adultery set in colonial New England, the
heroine's sense of sin is incomplete; her spirited individualism insists (as she
tells her lover) that "what we did had a consecration of its own." The
resulting conflict in her heart and mind is never resolved, and, although it
does not destroy her, she lives out her life in gray and tragic isolation.
Melville said that he was encouraged by Hawthorne's exploration of "a
certain tragic phase of humanity," by his deep broodings and by the
"blackness of darkness" in him, to proceed with similar explorations
of his own in Moby Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne. Its protagonist, Captain
Ahab, represents a return to what Melville called (defending Ahab's status as
tragic hero) a "mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies,"
whose "ponderous heart," "globular brain," and "nervous
lofty language" prove that even an old Nantucket sea captain can take his
place with kings and princes of the ancient drama. Shakespearean echoes abound
in the novel; some of its chapters are written in dramatic form. Its theme and
central figure, reminiscent of Job and Lear in their search for justice and of
Oedipus in his search for the truth, all show what Melville might have been--a
great tragic dramatist had there been a tragic theatre in America. (see also
American literature)
Some American novelists of the 20th
century carried on, however partially, the tragic tradition. Theodore
Dreiser's American
Tragedy(1925) is
typical of the naturalistic novel, which is also represented by the work of
Stephen Crane, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck. Though showing great
sensitivity to environmental or sociological evils, such works fail to embody
the high conception of character (as Melville describes it above) and are
concerned mainly with externals, or reportage. The protagonists are generally
"good" (or weak) and beaten down by society. The novels of Henry
James, which span the period from 1876 to 1904, are concerned with what
has been called the tragedy of manners. The society James projects is
sophisticated, subtle, and sinister. The innocent and the good are destroyed,
like Milly Theale in The
Wings of the Dove(1902), who in the end "turns her face to the wall" and
dies but in her death brings new vision and new values to those whose betrayals
had driven her to her death.
The trend in American fiction, as in the
drama, continued in the 20th century, toward the pathos of the victim--the
somehow inadequate, the sometimes insignificant figure destroyed by such vastly
unequal forces that the struggle is scarcely significant. F.
Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby in his novel The
Great Gatsby(1925) is betrayed by his own meretricious dream, nurtured by a
meretricious society. The hero of Ernest Hemingway's novel A
Farewell to Arms(1929),
disillusioned by war, makes a separate peace, deserts, and joins his beloved in
neutral Switzerland. When she dies in childbirth, he sees it as still another
example of how "they"--society, the politicians who run the war, or
the mysterious forces destroying Catherine--get you in the end. The tone is
lyric and pathetic rather than tragic (though Hemingway called the novel his Romeo and Juliet). Grief turns the hero away from, rather than
toward, a deeper examination of life.
Only the novels of William
Faulkner, in their range and depth and in their powerful assault on the
basic tragic themes, recall unmistakably the values of the tragic tradition. His
"saga of the South," as recounted in a series of novels (notably Sartoris,
1929; The Sound and the Fury, 1929;
As I Lay Dying, 1930; Sanctuary,
1931; Light in August, 1932; Absalom,
Absalom! 1936; Intruder in the Dust, 1948;
Requiem for a Nun, 1951), incorporates
some 300 years of Southern history from Indian days to the present. At first
regarded as a mere exploiter of decadence, he can now be seen as gradually
working beyond reportage and toward meaning. His sociology became more and more
the "sin" of the South--the rape of the land, slavery, the catastrophe
of the Civil War and its legacy of a cynical and devitalized materialism.
Increasingly he saw the conflict as internal. The subject of art, Faulkner said
in his 1949 Nobel Prize speech, is "the human heart in conflict with
itself." His insistence is on guilt as the evidence of man's fate, and on
the possibility of expiation as the assertion of man's freedom. Compassion,
endurance, and the capacity to learn are seen to be increasingly effective in
his characters. In the veiled analogies to Christ as outcast and redeemer in Light
in August and in the more explicit Christology of A
Fable (1954), in the pastoral serenity following the anguish and horror in Light
in August, and in the high comedy of the last scene of Intruder
in the Dust, Faulkner puts into tragic fiction the belief he stated in his
Nobel speech: "I decline to accept the end of man."
The movement toward naturalism
in fiction in the latter decades of the 19th century did much to purge both the
novel and the drama of the sentimentality and evasiveness that had so long
emasculated them. In Norway Henrik
Ibsen incorporated in his plays the smug and narrow ambitiousness of his
society. The hypocrisy of overbearing men and women replace, in their fashion,
the higher powers of the old tragedy. His major tragic theme is the futility,
leading to catastrophe, of the idealist's effort to create a new and better
social order. The "Problem
play"--one devoted to a particular social issue--is saved in his
hand from the flatness of a sociological treatise by a sense of doom, a pattern
of retribution, reminiscent of the ancient Greeks. In Pillars
of Society (1877), The Wild Duck (published
1884), Rosmersholm (published 1886),
and The Master Builder (published
1892), for example, one sacrifice is expiated by another.
In Sweden, August
Strindberg, influenced by Ibsen, was a powerful force in the movement. The
Father (1887) and Miss Julie (published
1888) recall Ibsen's attacks on religious, moral, and political orthodoxies.
Strindberg's main concern, however, is with the destructive effects of sexual
maladjustment and psychic imbalance. Not since Euripides' Medea or Racine's Phèdre
had the tragic aspects of sex come under such powerful analysis. In this
respect, his plays look forward to O'Neill's.
Anton
Chekhov, the most prominent Russian dramatist of the
period, wrote plays about the humdrum life of inconspicuous, sensitive people (Uncle
Vanya, 1899; The Three Sisters, 1901;
and The Cherry Orchard, 1904, are
typical), whose lives fall prey to the hollowness and tedium of a disintegrating
social order. They are a brood of lesser Hamlets without his compensating vision
of a potential greatness. As in the plays of the Scandinavian dramatists,
Chekhov's vision of this social evil is penetrating and acute, but the powerful,
resistant counterthrust that makes for tragedy is lacking. It is a world of
victims.
In little of the formal drama between
the time of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov and the present are the full
dimensions of tragedy presented. Some critics suggested that it was too late for
tragedy, that modern man no longer valued himself highly enough, that too many
sociological and ideological factors were working against the tragic
temperament. The long and successful career of Eugene
O'Neill may be a partial answer to this criticism. He has been called the
first American to succeed in writing tragedy for the theatre, a fulfillment of
his avowed purpose, for he had declared that in the tragic, alone, lay the
meaning of life--and the hope. He sought in Freud's concept of the subconscious
the equivalent of the Greek idea of fate and modelled his great trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra(1931), on Aeschylus' Oresteia.
Although the hovering sense of an ancient evil is powerful, the psychological
conditioning controls the characters too nakedly. They themselves declare forces
that determine their behaviour, so that they seem almost to connive in their own
manipulation. Desire
Under the Elms(1924)
presents a harsh analysis of decadence in the sexual and avaricious intrigues of
a New England farmer's family, unrelieved by manifestations of the transcendent
human spirit. The Great God Brown (1926)
and Long
Day's Journey into Night(1939-41; first performance, 1956) come closer to true tragedy. In the
latter, the capacity for self-knowledge is demonstrated by each member of the
wrangling Tyrone family (actually, O'Neill's own; the play is frankly
autobiographical). The insistent theme of the "death wish" (another
example of Freud's influence), however, indicates too radical a pessimism for
tragedy; even the character of Edmund Tyrone, O'Neill's own counterpart,
confesses that he has always been a little in love with death, and in another
late play, The
Iceman Cometh(1939),
the death wish is more strongly expressed. Although he never succeeded in
establishing a tragic theatre comparable to the great theatres of the past,
O'Neill made a significant contribution in his sustained concentration on
subjects at least worthy of such a theatre. He made possible the significant, if
slighter, contributions of Arthur
Miller, whose Death of a Salesman (1949)
and A View from the Bridge (1955)
contain material of tragic potential that is not fully realized. Tennessee
Williams' Streetcar
Named Desire(1947)
is a sensitive study of the breakdown of a character under social and
psychological stress. As with Miller's plays, however, it remains in the area of
pathos rather than tragedy.
The 20th century has produced much
serious and excellent drama, which, though not in the main line of the tragic
tradition, deserves mention. In British theatre, George
Bernard Shaw's Saint
Joan(1923) and T.S.
Eliot's Murder
in the Cathedral(1935)
dramatized with great power both doubt and affirmation, the ambiguity of human
motives, and the possibility of fruitless suffering that are true of the human
condition as reflected by tragedy. During the Irish
literary revival, the work of J.M.
Synge (Riders to the Sea, 1904)
and Sean O'Casey (Shadow of a Gunman, 1923),
like Faulkner's work, sought a tragic theme in the destiny of a whole people.
The masterpiece of this movement, however, is not a tragedy but a comic
inversion of the ancient tragedy of Oedipus--Synge's
Playboy
of the Western World(1907).
The drama of social protest--exemplified
in such works as the Russian Maksim Gorky's Lower
Depths (1902), the German Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera (1928) and Mother
Courage (1941), and the American Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty (1935)--shares the tragedians' concern for evils
that frustrate or destroy human values. The evils, however, are largely
external, identifiable, and, with certain recommended changes in the social
order, remediable. The type shows how vulnerable tragedy is to dogma or programs
of any sort. A British author, George
Orwell, suggested in Nineteen
Eighty-e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">four
that tragedy would cease to exist under pure Marxist statism. Brecht's
fine sense of irony and moral paradox redeem him from absolute dogmatism but
give his work a hard satiric thrust that is inimical to tragedy. Traditional
values and moral imperatives are all but neutralized in the existentialist
worlds of the dramas and novels of Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus,
two outstanding philosopher-dramatists of the post World War II era. In their
works, the protagonist is called upon to forge his own values, if he can, in a
world in which the disparity between the ideal (what man longs for) and the real
(what he gets) is so great as to reduce the human condition to incoherence and
absurdity. Plays that led to the coinage of the term the theatre
of the absurd are exemplified by Waiting
for Godot (1952) and The Killer (1959),
respectively by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett and the Romanian Eugène
Ionesco, both of whom pursued their careers in Paris. Here, the theme of
victimization is at its extreme, the despair and defeat almost absolute.
A coherent and affirmative view of man,
society, and the cosmos is vital to tragedy--however tentative the affirmation
may be. Unresolved questions remain at the end of every tragedy. There is always
an irrational factor, disturbing, foreboding, not to be resolved by the sometime
consolations of philosophy and religion or by any science of the mind or body;
there is irretrievable loss, usually though not necessarily symbolized by the
death of the hero. In the course of the action, however, in the development of
character, theme, and situation and in the conceptual suggestiveness of
language, tragedy presents the positive terms in which these questions might be
answered. The human qualities are manifest, however limited; man's freedom is
real, however marginal. The forces that bear him down may be mysterious but
actual--fate, the gods, chance, the power of his own or the race's past working
through his soul. Though never mastered, they can be contended with, defied,
and, at least in spirit, transcended. The process is cognitive; man can learn.
In no way can the importance of a
conceptual basis for tragedy be better illustrated than by a look at other
drama-producing cultures with radically different ideas of the individual, his
nature, and his destiny. While the cultures of India, China, and Japan have
produced significant and highly artistic drama, there is little here to compare
in magnitude, intensity, and freedom of form to the tragedies of the West.
In Buddhist
teaching, the aim of the individual is to suppress and regulate all those
questioning, recalcitrant, rebellious impulses that first impel the Western hero
toward his tragic course. The goal of Nirvana is the extinction of those
impulses, the quieting of the passions, a kind of quietus
in which worldly existence ceases. Western tragedy celebrates life, and the
tragic hero clings to it: to him, it is never "sweet to die" for his
country or for anything else, and the fascination for Western audiences is to
follow the hero--as it were, from the
inside--as he struggles to assert himself and his values against whatever
would deny them. In Oriental drama, there is no such intense focus on the
individual. In the Japanese No plays, for instance, the hero may be seen
in moments of weariness and despair, of anger or confusion, but the mood is
lyric, and the structure of the plays is ritualistic, with a great deal of
choral intoning, dancing, and stylized action. Although a number of No
plays can be produced together to fill a day's performance, the individual plays
are very short, hardly the length of a Western one-act play. No plays
affirm orthodoxy, rather than probing and questioning it, as Western tragedies
do. (see also no
theatre)
The drama in India has a long history,
but there too the individual is subordinated to the mood of the idyll or romance
or epic adventure. Perhaps one reason why the drama of India never developed the
tragic orientation of the West is its removal from the people; it has never
known the communal involvement of the Greek and Elizabethan theatres. Produced
mainly for court audiences, an upper class elite, it never reflected the
sufferings of common (or uncommon) humanity. Only recently has the drama in
China embraced the vigour and realism of the common people, but the drama is in
the service not of the individual but of a political ideology, which replaces
the traditional themes of ancestor worship and filial piety. In all this, the
mighty pageant figure--Oedipus, Prometheus, Lear, or Ahab standing for the
individual as he alone sees and feels the workings of an unjust universe--is
absent. (see also Indian
literature, Chinese literature)
An example from the No plays will
illustrate these generalizations. In The
Hoka Priests, by Zenchiku Ujinobu (1414-99), a son is confronted with
Hamlet's problem--i.e., that of
avenging the death of his father. He is uncertain how to proceed, since his
father's murderer has many bold fellows to stand by him, while he is all alone.
He persuades his brother, a priest, to help him, and disguising themselves as
priests, they concoct a little plot to engage the murderer in religious
conversation. There are a few words of lament--"Oh why,/ Why back to the
bitter World/ Are we borne by our intent?"--and the Chorus sings lyrically
about the uncertainties of life. The theme of the conversation is the unreality
of the World and the reality of Thought. At an appropriate moment, the brothers
cry, "Enough! Why longer hide our plot?" The murderer places his hat
on the floor and exits. The brothers mime the killing of the murderer in a
stylized attack upon the hat, while the Chorus describes and comments on the
action: "So when the hour was come/ Did these two brothers/ By sudden
resolution/ Destroy their father's foe./ For valour and piety are their names
remembered/ Even in this aftertime" (translated by Arthur Waley, The
No Plays of Japan, 1921).
Thus the No avoids directly
involving the audience in the emotions implicit in the events portrayed on the
stage. It gives only a slight hint of the spiritual struggle in the heart of the
protagonist--a struggle that is always speedily resolved in favour of
traditional teaching. In play after play the action does not take place before
our eyes but is reenacted by the ghost of one of the participants. Thus, the
events presented are tinged with memory or longing--hardly the primary emotions
that surge through and invigorate Western tragedy at its best.
The absence, even in the West, of a
great tragic theatre in the 20th century may be explained by the pantheon of
panaceas to which modern man has subscribed. Politics, psychology, social
sciences, physical sciences, nationalism, the occult--each offered a context in
terms of which he might act out his destiny, were it not crowded out by the
others. Modern man is not tested but harried and not by gods but, too often, by
demons. In the dramas of Athens and England, tragedy was born of the
impossibility of a clear-cut victory in man's struggle with powers greater than
himself. In the modern drama, the struggle itself seems impossible.
The would-be hero is saved from a
meaningful death by being condemned to a meaningless life. This, too, however,
has its tragic dimension, in its illustration of the power of evil to survive
from millennium to millennium in the presence or the absence of the gods.
Tragedy is a means of coming to terms
with that evil. To assume that tragedy has lost viability is to forget that this
viability was seriously questioned by the first Western philosopher to address
himself to the problem. An account of the development of the theory of tragedy
will reveal a resourcefulness in man's critical powers that can help to
compensate, or occasionally even supersede, his lapsing creative powers. (R.B.S.)
As the great period of Athenian drama
drew to an end at the beginning of the 4th century BC, Athenian philosophers
began to analyze its content and formulate its structure. In the thought of
Plato (c. 427-347 BC), the history of
the criticism of tragedy began with speculation on the role of censorship.
To Plato (in the dialogue on
the Laws)
the state was the noblest work of art, a representation (mimesis) of the fairest and
best life. He feared the tragedians' command of the expressive resources of
language, which might be used to the detriment of worthwhile institutions. He
feared, too, the emotive effect of poetry, the Dionysian element that is at the
very basis of tragedy. Therefore, he recommended that the tragedians submit
their works to the rulers, for approval, without which they could not be
performed. It is clear that tragedy, by nature exploratory, critical,
independent, could not live under such a regimen. (see also
literary criticism)
Plato is answered, in effect and perhaps
intentionally, by Aristotle's PoeticsAristotle (384-322 BC) defends the purgative power of tragedy and, in direct
contradiction to Plato, makes moral ambiguity the essence of tragedy. The tragic
hero must be neither a villain nor a virtuous man but a "character between
these two extremes, . . . a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose
misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or
frailty [e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">hamartia]."
The effect on the audience will be similarly ambiguous. A perfect tragedy, he
says, should imitate actions that excite "pity and fear." He uses
Sophocles' Oedipus
the Kingas a paradigm. Near the beginning of the play, Oedipus asks how his
stricken city (the counterpart of Plato's state) may cleanse itself, and the
world he uses for the purifying action is a form of the word catharsis.
The concept of catharsis provides Aristotle with his reconciliation with Plato,
a means by which to satisfy the claims of both ethics and art.
"Tragedy," says Aristotle, "is an imitation [mimesis]
of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude . . . through
pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these
emotions." Ambiguous means may be employed, Aristotle maintains in contrast
to Plato, to a virtuous and purifying end. (see also
Aristotelian criticism)
To establish the basis for a
reconciliation between ethical and artistic demands, Aristotle insists that the
principal element in the structure of tragedy is not character but plot.
Since the erring protagonist is always in at least partial opposition to the
state, the importance of tragedy lies not in him but in the enlightening event.
"Most important of all," Aristotle said, "is the structure of the
incidents. For tragedy is an imitation not of men but of an action and of life,
and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality . .
. ." Aristotle considered the plot to be the soul of a tragedy, with character
in second place. The goal of tragedy is not suffering but the knowledge that
issues from it, as the denouement issues from a plot. The most powerful elements
of emotional interest in tragedy, according to Aristotle, are reversal of
intention or situation (peripeteia)
and recognition scenes (anagnorisis), and each is
most effective when it is coincident with the other. In Oedipus, for example, the messenger who brings Oedipus news of his
real parentage, intending to allay his fears, brings about a sudden reversal of
his fortune, from happiness to misery, by compelling him to recognize that his
wife is also his mother.
Later critics found justification for
their own predilections in the authority of Greek drama and Aristotle. For
example, the Roman poet Horace
(65-8 BC), in his Ars
poetica(Art of Poetry),
elaborated the Greek tradition of extensively narrating offstage events into a
dictum on decorum forbidding
events such as Medea's butchering of her boys from being performed on stage. And
where Aristotle had discussed tragedy as a separate genre, superior to epic
poetry, Horace discussed it as a genre with a separate style, again with
considerations of decorum foremost. A theme for comedy may not be set forth in
verses of tragedy; each style must keep to the place alloted it.
On the basis of this kind of stylistic
distinction, the Aeneidthe epic poem of Virgil, Horace's contemporary, is called a tragedy by the
fictional Virgil in Dante's Divine
Comedyon the grounds that the Aeneid
treats only of lofty things. Dante (1265-1321) calls his own poem a comedy
partly because he includes "low" subjects in it. He makes this
distinction in his De
vulgari eloquentia(1304-05; "Of Eloquence in the Vulgar") in which he also
declares the subjects fit for the high, tragic style to be salvation, love, and
virtue. Despite the presence of these subjects in this poem, he calls it a
comedy because his style of language is "careless and humble" and
because it is in the vernacular tongue rather than Latin. Dante makes a further
distinction:
Comedy . . . differs from tragedy in
its subject matter, in this way, that tragedy in its beginning is admirable and
quiet, in its ending or catastrophe fould and horrible . . . From this it is
evident why the present work is called a comedy.
Dante's emphasis on the outcome of the
struggle rather than on the nature of the struggle is repeated by Chaucer
and for the same reason: their belief in the providential nature of human
destiny. Like Dante, he was under the influence of De
consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy),
the work of the 6th-century Roman philosopher Boethius
(c. 480-524) that he translated into
English. Chaucer considered Fortune to be beyond the influence of the human
will. In his Canterbury Tales, he
introduces "The Monk's Tale" by defining tragedy as "a certeyn
storie . . . / of him that stood in greet prosperitee,/ And is y-fallen out of
heigh degree/ Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly." Again, he calls his Troilus
and Criseydea
tragedy because, in the words of Troilus, "all that comth, comth by
necessitee . . . / That forsight of divine purveyaunce/ Hath seyn alwey me to
forgon Criseyde."
The critical tradition of separating the
tragic and comic styles is continued by the Elizabethan English poet Sir
Philip Sidney, whose Defence
of Poesie(also published as An
Apologie for Poetrie) has the distinction of containing the most extended
statement on tragedy in the English Renaissance and the misfortune of having
been written in the early 1580s (published 1595), before the first plays of
Shakespeare, or even of Marlowe. Nevertheless, Sidney wrote eloquently of
"high and excellent tragedy, that . . . with stirring the affects of
admiration and commiseration teacheth the uncertainty of this world and upon how
weak foundations gilden roofs are builded."
Since the word admiration here means
awe, Sidney's "admiration and commiseration" are similar to
Aristotle's "pity and fear." He differs from Aristotle, however, in
preferring epic to tragic
poetry. The Renaissance was almost as concerned as Plato with the need to
justify poetry on ethical grounds, and Sidney ranks epic higher than tragedy
because it provides morally superior models of behaviour.
Sidney goes further than mere agreement
with Aristotle, however, in championing the unities of time and place. Aristotle
had asserted the need for a unity of time: "Tragedy endeavors, as far as
possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly
to exceed this limit." Sidney, following the lead of a 16th-century Italian
Neoclassicist, Ludovico Castelvetro,
added the unity of place: "the stage should always represent but one place,
and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle's precept
and common reason, but one day . . ." Sidney also seconds Horace's
disapproval of the mingling of styles, which Sidney says produces a
"mongrel tragicomedy."
Shakespeare's opinion of the relative
merits of the genres is unknown, but his opinion of the problem itself may be
surmised. In Hamlet he puts these
words in the mouth of the foolish old pedant Polonius: "The best actors in
the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral;
scene individable, or poem unlimited . . ." (Act II, scene 2). As to the
classical unities, Shakespeare adheres to them only twice and neither time in a
tragedy, in The Comedy of Errors and The
Tempest. And through the mouths of his characters, Shakespeare, like
Aristotle, puts himself on both sides of the central question of tragic
destiny--that of freedom and necessity. Aristotle says that a tragic destiny is
precipitated by the hero's tragic fault, his "error or frailty"
(hamartia), but Aristotle also calls this turn of events a change of
"fortune." Shakespeare's Cassius in Julius
Caesar says, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in
ourselves . . . ," and in King Lear, Edmund ridicules a belief in fortune
as the "foppery of the world." But Hamlet, in a comment on the nature
of hamartia, is a fatalist when he broods on the "mole of nature," the
"one defect" that some men are born with, "wherein they are not
guilty," and that brings them to disaster (Act I, scene 4). Similarly,
Sophocles' Oedipus, though he says, "It was Apollo who brought my woes to
pass," immediately adds, "it was my hand that struck my eyes."
These ambiguities are a powerful source of the tragic emotion of Athenian and
Elizabethan drama, unequalled by traditions that are more sure of themselves,
such as French Neoclassicism, or less sure of themselves, such as 20th-century
drama.
In the Neoclassical period Aristotle's
reasonableness was replaced by rationality,
and his moral ambiguity by the mechanics of "poetic
justice." In the 17th century, under the guise of a strict adherence
to Classical formulas, additional influences were brought to bear on the theory
of tragedy. In France, the theological doctrine of Jansenism,
which called for an extreme orthodoxy, exercised a strong influence. In England,
the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, with the reopening of the theatres,
introduced a period of witty and lusty literature. In both nations, the
influence of natural law--the idea that laws binding upon humanity are inferable
from nature--increased, along with the influence of the exact sciences. Critics
in both nations declared that Aristotle's "rules" were made to reduce
nature into a method.
In his 1679 preface to Shakespeare's Troilus
and Cressida, Dryden says, "we lament not, but detest a wicked man, we
are glad when we behold his crimes are punished, and that Poetical justice is
done upon him." Similar sentiments, calling for the punishment of crimes
and the reward of virtue, were expressed in France. Catharsis had become
vindication. Thomas Rymer, one
of the most influential English critics of the time, in The Tragedies of The Last Age(1678), wrote that
besides the purging of the passions,
something must stick by observing . . . that necessary relation and chain,
whereby the causes and the effects, the vertues and rewards, the vices and their
punishments are proportion'd and link'd together, how deep and dark soever are
laid the Springs, and however intricate and involv'd are their operations.
The effect was to rob tragedy of a great
deal of its darkness and depth. The temper of the age demanded that mystery be
brought to the surface and to the light, a process that had effects not merely
different from but in part antipathetic to tragedy. Nicolas
Boileau, the chief spokesman of the French Neoclassical movement, in his
discussion of pity and fear in Art
Poétique (1674),
qualified these terms with the adjectives "beguiling" and
"pleasant" (pitié
charmante, douce terreur), which radically changed their meaning. The purged
spectator became a grateful patient.
In his preface to Phèdre (1677), Racine
subscribed to the quid pro quo view of
retribution.
I have written no play in which virtue
has been more celebrated than in this one. The smallest faults are here severely
punished; the mere idea of a crime is looked upon with as much horror as the
crime itself.
Of Phèdre herself, his greatest
heroine, he says,
I have taken the trouble to make her a
little less hateful than she is in the ancient versions of this tragedy, in
which she herself resolves to accuse Hippolytus. I judged that that calumny had
about it something too base and black to be put into the mouth of a Princess . .
. This depravity seemed to me more appropriate to the character of a nurse,
whose inclinations might be supposed to be more servile . . . .
For Aristotle, pity and fear made a
counterpoint typical of Classicism, each tempering the other to create a
balance. For Racine, pity and fear each must be tempered in itself. In the
marginalia to his fragmentary translation of Aristotle's Poetics, Racine wrote that in arousing the passions of pity and
fear, tragedy
removes from them whatever they have of
the excessive and the vicious and brings them back to a moderated condition and
conformable to reason.
Corneille
contradicted Aristotle outright. Discussing Le Cid he said, in A Discourse
on Tragedy (1660),
Our pity ought to give us fear of
falling into similar misfortune, and purge us of that excess of love which is
the cause of their disaster . . . but I do not know that it gives us that, or
purges us, and I am afraid that the reasoning of Aristotle on this point is but
a pretty idea . . . it is not requisite that these two passions always serve
together . . . it suffices . . . that one of the two bring about the purgation.
. . .
The accommodation of tragedy to
Neoclassical ideas of order demanded a simplification of tragedy's complexities
and ambiguities. The simplifying process was now inspired, however, by the
fundamental tenet of all primitive scientific thought namely, that orderliness
and naturalness are in a directly proportionate relationship. Racine declared
the basis of the naturalistic effect in drama to be a strict adherence to the
unities, which now seem the opposite of naturalistic. In his preface to Bérénice
(1670), he asked what probability there could be when a multitude of things
that would scarcely happen in several weeks are made to happen in a day. The
illusion of probability, which is the Aristotelian criterion for the
verisimilitude of a stage occurrence, is made to sound as if it were the result
of a strict dramaturgical determinism, on the grounds that necessity is the
truest path to freedom.
Racine and Corneille both contradicted
Dante and Chaucer on the indispensability of a catastrophic final scene.
"Blood and deaths," said Racine, are not necessary, for "it is
enough that the action be grand, that the actors be heroic, that the passions be
aroused" to produce "that stately sorrow that makes the whole pleasure
of tragedy" (preface to Bérénice).
Milton was artistically much more
conservative. He prefaced his Samson Agonistes(1671) with a warning against the
error of intermixing Comic stuff with
Tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons: which by
all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion,
corruptly to gratify the people.
He bypassed Shakespeare for the ancients
and ranked Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as tragic poets unequalled yet by
any others. Part of the rule, for Milton, was that which affirmed the unities.
In his concurrence with the Classical idea of the purgative effect of pity and
fear, Milton combined reactionary aesthetics with the scientific spirit of the
recently formed Royal Society.
Nor is Nature wanting in her own
effects to make good his assertion [Aristotle on catharsis]: for so, in Physic
things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against
sour, salt to remove salt humours.
Dryden spoke against a delimiting
conception of either the genres or the unities. Speaking in the guise of Neander
in Of
Dramatick Poesie, an Essay(1668), he said that it was
to the honour of our nation, that we
have invented, increased, and perfected a more pleasant way of writing for the
stage, than was ever known to the ancients or moderns of any nation, which is
tragi-comedy. (see also tragicomedy)
The French dramatists, he felt, through
their observance of the unities of time and place, wrote plays characterized by
a dearth of plot and narrowness of imagination. Racine's approach to the
question of probability was turned completely around by Dryden, who asked:
How Many beautiful accidents might
naturally happen in two or three days, which cannot arrive with any probability
in the compass of twenty-four hours?
The definitive critique of Neoclassical
restrictions was not formulated, however, until the following century, when it
was made by Samuel Johnson and
was, significantly, part of his 1765 preface to Shakespeare, the first major
step in the long process of establishing Shakespeare as the preeminent tragic
poet of post-Classical drama. On genre he wrote:
Shakespeare's plays are not in the
rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a
distinct kind; . . . expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of
one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting
to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend . . . . That this is a practice
contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always
an appeal open from criticism to nature.
And on the unities:
The necessity of observing the unities
of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama
credible. [But] the objection arising from the impossibility of passing the
first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play
opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria . . . Surely he that
imagines this may imagine more.
Johnson's appeal to nature was the
essence of subsequent Romantic criticism.
Lessing
was the first important Romantic critic. He stated one of Romanticism's
chief innovations in his Hamburg
Dramaturgy(1767-69): (see also German
literature)
The names of princes and heroes can
lend pomp and majesty to a play, but they contribute nothing to our emotion. The
misfortune of those whose circumstances most resemble our own, must naturally
penetrate most deeply into our hearts, and if we pity kings, we pity them as
human beings, not as kings. (see also domestic
tragedy)
Within a generation, revolutions in
Europe and America offered social expression of this literary precept, and a
dramatic tradition dominant for 22 centuries was upturned. From the time of
Aristotle, who thought that the tragic hero should be highly renowned and
prosperous, the tragic hero had been an aristocrat, if not a man of royal blood.
With the exception of their minor or peripheral characters, the tragic dramas of
Athens, England, and France told nothing of the destinies of the mass of
mankind. All this was now changed.
But it is not certain that what was good
for the revolution was good for tragedy. Coleridge in his critical writings of
1808-18 said that:
there are two forms of disease most
preclusive of tragic worth. The first [is] a sense and love of the ludicrous,
and a diseased sensibility of the assimilating power . . . that in the boldest
bursts of passion will lie in wait, or at once kindle into jest . . . . The
second cause is matter of exultation to the philanthropist and philosopher, and
of regret to the poet , . . . namely, the security, comparative equability, and
ever-increasing sameness of human life.
In accord with this distaste for an
excess of the mundane, Coleridge attacked the new German tragedies in which
"the dramatist becomes a novelist in
his directions to the actors, and degrades tragedy to pantomime." To
describe, or rather indicate, what tragedy should ideally be, Coleridge said
"it is not a copy of nature; but
it is an imitation."
Coleridge's operative words and phrases
in his discussions of tragedy were "innate," "from within,"
"implicit," "the being within," "the inmost
heart," "our inward nature," "internal emotions," and
"retired recesses." The new philosophical dispensation in Coleridge,
like the new social dispensation in Lessing, reversed the old priorities; and
where there were once princes there were now burghers, and where there were once
the ordinances of God and the state there were now the dictates of the heart. By
means of this reversal, Coleridge effected a reconciliation of the "tragedy
of fate" and the "tragedy of character" in his description of the
force of fate as merely the embodiment of an interior compulsion different in
scale but not in kind from the interior compulsions of character. In Classical
tragedy, he said the human "will" was "exhibited as struggling
with fate, a great and beautiful instance and illustration of which is the
Prometheus of Aeschylus; and the deepest effect is produced, when the fate is
represented as a higher and intelligent will. . . ."
According to Coleridge, Shakespeare used
the imaginative "variety" that characterizes man's inward nature in
place of the mechanical regularity of the Neoclassical unities to produce plays
that were "neither tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one, but a different
genus, diverse in kind, not merely different in degree,--romantic dramas or
dramatic romances." In his preoccupation with the mixture of genres and his
distinction between the "mechanical" (Neoclassicism) and the
"organic" (Shakespeare), Coleridge was influenced by Lectures
on Dramatic Art and Literature (delivered 1808-09, published 1809-11), by August
Wilhelm von Schlegel, perhaps the most influential of German Romantic
critics.
Like Coleridge and most Romantic critics
of tragedy, Schlegel found his champion in Shakespeare, and, also like them, he
was preoccupied with the contrast between Classic and Romantic. Like Coleridge,
Schlegel emphasized Shakespeare's inwardness, what Coleridge called his
"implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness." It is in
Shakespeare's most profound insights that Schlegel locates one of the principal
distinctions between Classical and Shakespearean tragedy, in what he calls
Shakespeare's "secret irony." The irony in Oedipus
the King consists in the relation between the audience's knowledge of the
protagonist's situation and his own ignorance of it. But Shakespeare's
"readiness to remark the mind's fainter and involuntary utterances" is
so great, says Schlegel, that "nobody ever painted so truthfully as he has
done the facility of self-deception, the half self-conscious hypocrisy towards
ourselves, with which even noble minds attempt to disguise the almost inevitable
influence of selfish motives in human nature."
The irony Schlegel sees in Shakespeare's
characterizations also extends to the whole of the action, as well as to the
separate characters. In his discussion of it he suggests the reason for the
difficulty of Shakespeare's plays and for the quarrelsome, irreconcilable
"interpretations" among Shakespeare's commentators:
Most poets who portray human events in
a narrative or dramatic form take themselves apart, and exact from their readers
a blind approbation or condemnation of whatever side they choose to support or
oppose . . . . When, however, by a dexterous manoeuvre, the poet allows us an
occasional glance at the less brilliant reverse of the medal, then he makes, as
it were, a sort of secret understanding with the select circle of the more
intelligent of his readers or spectators; he shows them that he had previously
seen and admitted the validity of their tacit objections; that he himself is not
tied down to the represented subject but soars freely above it. . . .
In Greek tragedy, the commentary by the
chorus was an explicit and objective fact of the drama itself. In the
presentation of Shakespeare's plays, such a commentary is carried on in the
separate minds of the spectators, where it is diffused, silent, and not entirely
sure of itself. When the spectators speak their minds after the curtain falls,
it is not surprising that they often disagree.
In Oedipus
the King, which Aristotle cited as the model of Classical tragedy, the irony
of the protagonist's situation is evident to the spectator. In Hamlet,
however, according to the American philosopher George
Santayana, writing in 1908, it is the secret ironies, half-lights, and
self-contradictions that make it the central creation of Romantic tragedy. As
has been noted, Coleridge objected to the dramatist's giving directions to the
actors, but part of the price of not having them is to deny to the audience as
well an explicit indication of the playwright's meaning.
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831), the immensely influential German philospher, in his Aesthetik (1820-29), proposed that the sufferings of the tragic hero
are merely a means of reconciling opposing moral claims. The operation is a
success because of, not in spite of, the fact that the patient dies. According
to Hegel's account of Greek tragedy, the conflict is not between good and evil
but between goods that are each making too exclusive a claim. The heroes of
ancient tragedy, by adhering to the one ethical system by which they molded their own personality, must
come into conflict with the ethical claims of another. It is the moral
one-sidedness of the tragic actor, not any negatively tragic fault in his
morality or in the forces opposed to him, that proves his undoing, for both
sides of the contradiction, if taken by themselves, are justified.
The nuclear Greek tragedy for Hegel is,
understandably, Sophocles' Antigonewith its conflict between the valid claims of conscience
(Antigone's obligation to give her brother a suitable burial) and law (King
Creon's edict that enemies of the state should not be allowed burial). The two
claims represent what Hegel regards as essentially concordant ethical claims.
Antigone and Creon are, in this view, rather like pawns in the Hegelian dialectic--his
theory that thought progresses from a thesis (i.e.,
an idea), through an antithesis (an idea opposing the original thesis), to a
synthesis (a more comprehensive idea that embraces both the thesis and
antithesis), which in turn becomes the thesis in a further progression. At the
end of Antigone, something of the
sense of mutually appeased, if not concordant, forces does obtain after
Antigone's suicide and the destruction of Creon's family. Thus, in contrast to
Aristotle's statement that the tragic actors should represent not an extreme of
good or evil but something between, Hegel would have them too good to live; that
is, too extreme an embodiment of a particular good to survive in the world. He
also tends to dismiss other traditional categories of tragic theory. For
instance, he prefers his own kind of catharsis to Aristotle's--the feeling of reconciliation.
Hegel's emphasis on the correction of
moral imbalances in tragedy is reminiscent of the "poetic justice" of
Neoclassical theory, with its similar dialectic of crime and punishment. He
sounds remarkably like Racine when he claims that, in the tragic denouement, the
necessity of all that has been experienced by particular individuals is seen to
be in complete accord with reason and is harmonized on a true ethical basis. But
where the Neoclassicists were preoccupied with the unities of time and place,
Hegel's concerns, like those of other Romantics, are inward. For him, the final
issue of tragedy is not the misfortune and suffering of the tragic antagonists
but rather the satisfaction of spirit arising from "reconciliation."
Thus, the workings of the spirit, in Hegel's view, are subject to the
rationalistic universal laws.
Hegel's system is not applicable to
Shakespearean or Romantic tragedy. Such Shakespearean heroes as Macbeth, Richard
III, and Mark Antony cannot be regarded as embodiments of any transcendent good.
They behave as they do, says Hegel, now speaking outside of his scheme of
tragedy, simply because they are the kind of men they are. In a statement
pointing up the essence of uninhibited romantic lust and willfulness Hegel said:
"it is the inner experience of their heart and individual emotion, or the
particular qualities of their personality, which insist on satisfaction."
The traditional categories of tragedy
are nearly destroyed in the deepened subjectivities of Romanticism of the
19th-century German philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer and his disciple Friedrich
Nietzsche. In Schopenhauer's Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The World
as Will and Idea), much more than the social or ethical order is upturned.
In place of God, the good, reason, soul, or heart, Schopenhauer installs the
will, as reality's true inner nature, the metaphysical to everything physical in
the world. In Schopenhauer, there is no question of a Hegelian struggle to
achieve a more comprehensive good. There is rather the strife of will with
itself, manifested by fate in the form of chance and error and by the tragic
personages themselves. Both fate and men represent one and the same will, which
lives and appears in them all. Its individual manifestations, however, in the
form of such phenomena as chances, errors, or men, fight against and destroy
each other.
Schopenhauer accordingly rejects the
idea of poetic justice: "the demand for so-called poetical justice rests on
entire misconception of the nature of tragedy, and, indeed, of the nature of the
world itself . . . . The true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight, that it is
not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin, i.e.,
the crime of existence itself. . . ." Schopenhauer distinguishes three
types of tragic representation: (1) "by means of a character of
extraordinary wickedness . . . who becomes the author of the misfortune";
(2) "blind fate--i.e., chance and error" (such as the title characters in
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and
"most of the tragedies of the ancients"); and (3) when
"characters of ordinary morality . . . are so situated with regard to each
other that their position compels them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to
do each other the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the
wrong" (such as, "to a certain extent," Hamlet).
This last kind of tragedy seems to
Schopenhauer far to surpass the other two. His reason, almost too grim to
record, is that it provides the widest possible play to the destructive
manifestations of the will. It brings tragedy, so to speak, closest to home.
Schopenhauer finds tragedy to be the
summit of poetical art, because of the greatness of its effect and the
difficulty of its achievement. According to Schopenhauer, the egoism of the
protagonist is purified by suffering almost to the purity of nihilism. His
personal motives become dispersed as his insight into them grows; "the
complete knowledge of the nature of the world, which has a quieting effect on
the will, produces resignation, the surrender not merely of life, but of the
very will to live."
Schopenhauer's description has limited
application to tragic denouements in general. In the case of his own archetypal
hero, the hero's end seems merely the mirror image of his career, an oblivion of
resignation or death that follows an oblivion of violence. Instead of a dialogue
between higher and lower worlds of morality or feeling (which take place even in
Shakespeare's darkest plays), Schopenhauer posits a succession of states as
helpless in knowledge as in blindness. His "will" becomes a synonym
for all that is possessed and necessity-ridden.
Nietzsche's Geburt
der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872) was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer. The two elements of tragedy,
says Nietzsche, are the Apollonian (related to the Greek god Apollo, here used
as a symbol of measured restraint) and the Dionysian (from Dionysus, the Greek
god of ecstasy). His conception of the Apollonian is the equivalent of what
Schopenhauer called the individual phenomenon--the particular chance, error, or
man, the individuality of which is merely a mask for the essential truth of
reality which it conceals. The Dionysian element is a sense of universal
reality, which, according to Schopenhauer, is experienced after the loss of
individual egoism. The "Dionysian ecstasy," as defined by Nietzsche,
is experienced "not as individuals but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united." (see
also Apollonian-Dionysian
dichotomy)
Nietzsche dismisses out of hand one of
the most venerable features of the criticism of tragedy, the attempt to
reconcile the claims of ethics and art. He says that the events of a tragedy are
"supposed" to discharge pity and fear and are "supposed" to
elevate and inspire by the triumph of noble principles at the sacrifice of the
hero. But art, he says, must demand purity within its own sphere. To explain
tragic myth, the first requirement is to seek the pleasure that is peculiar to
it in the purely aesthetic sphere, without bringing in pity, fear, or the
morally sublime.
The essence of this specifically
aesthetic tragic effect is that it both reveals and conceals, causing both pain
and joy. The drama's exhibition of the phenomena of suffering individuals
(Apollonian elements) forces upon the audience "the struggle, the pain, the
destruction of phenomena," which in turn communicates "the exuberant
fertility of the universal." The spectators then "become, as it were,
one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and . . . we anticipate, in
Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy." Thus,
he says, there is a desire "to see tragedy and at the same time to get
beyond all seeing . . . to hear and at the same time long to get beyond all
hearing."
The inspired force of Nietzsche's vision
is mingled with a sense of nihilism:
"only after the spirit of science
has been pursued to its limits, . . . may we hope for a rebirth of tragedy . . .
I understand by the spirit of science the faith that first came to light in the
person of Socrates--the faith in the explicability of nature and in knowledge as
a panacea."
Nietzsche would replace the spirit of
science with a conception of existence and the world as an aesthetic phenomenon
and justified only as such. Tragedy would enjoy a prominent propagandistic
place. It is "precisely the tragic myth that has to convince us that even
the ugly and disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the
eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself." And, consummately:
"we have art in order that we may not perish through truth."
Musical dissonance was Nietzsche's model
for the double effect of tragedy. The first edition of his book was titled The
Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, another influence from
Schopenhauer, for whom music differed from all the other arts in that it is not
a copy of a phenomenon but the direct copy of the will itself. He even called
the world "embodied music , . . . embodied will." Nietzsche's
theorizing on the relation of the tragic theme to art forms other than the drama
was in fact confirmed in such operas
as Mussorgsky's version of Pushkin's tragedy Boris
Godunov, Verdi's of Macbeth and Othello,
and Gounod's Faust. In contrast to
these resettings of received forms, Wagner, Verdi, and Bizet achieved a new kind
of tragic power for Romanticism in the theme of the operatic love-death in,
respectively, Tristan and Isolde, Aida, and
Carmen. Thus, the previous progression
of the genre from tragedy to tragicomedy to romantic tragedy continued to a
literary-musical embodiment of what Nietzsche called "tragic
dithyrambs." (see also music,
history of)
An earlier prophecy than Nietzsche's
regarding tragedy and opera was made by the German poet Friedrich
von Schiller in a letter of 1797 to Goethe:
I have always trusted that out of
opera, as out of the choruses of the ancient festival of Bacchus, tragedy would
liberate itself and develop in a nobler form. In opera, servile imitation of
nature is dispensed with . . . here is . . . the avenue by which the ideal can
steal its way back into the theatre.
In the 20th century, discussion of
tragedy was sporadic until the aftermath of World War II. Then it enjoyed new
vigour, perhaps to compensate for, or help explain, the dearth of genuine tragic
literature, either in the novel or in the theatre. In the 1950s and 1960s
countless full-length studies, articles, and monographs variously sought the
essence, the vision, the view of life, or the spirit of tragedy out of a concern
for the vital culture loss were the death of tragedy to become a reality. They
also attempted to mediate the meaning of tragedy to a public that was denied its
reality, save in revivals or an occasional approximation. Since the Romantic
critics first ventured beyond the Aristotelean categories to consider tragedy,
or the tragic, as a sense of life, there was an increasing tendency to regard
tragedy not merely as drama but as a philosophical form. It is noteworthy that
the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno's influential book, The
Tragic Sense of Life (1921), barely mentions the formal drama.
From the time of Aristotle, tragedy has
achieved importance primarily as a medium of self-discovery--the discovery of
man's place in the universe and in society. That is the main concern of
Aristotle in his statements about reversal, recognition, and catharsis, though
it remained for the Romantic critics to point it out. The loss of this concern
in the facile plays of the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in the reduction of
tragic mystery to confused sentimentalism. Critics of the 20th century, being
less certain even than Schopenhauer or Nietzsche of what man's place in the
scheme of things may be, experimented with a variety of critical approaches,
just as contemporary dramatists experimented with various "theatres."
Although these critics lacked the philosophical certainties of earlier
theorists, they had a richer variety of cultures and genres to instruct them.
The hope of both critics and dramatists was that this multiplicity would produce
not mere impressionism or haphazard eclecticism but new form and new meaning.
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