Tragedy

From The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama

Tragedy is usually considered to concern the fate of an individual hero, singled out from the community through circumstances and through his or her own actions. Comedy, on the other hand, focuses on the fortunes of the community itself. While the hero of tragedy is usually unique, the heroes of comedy often comes in pairs - the lovers who triumph over their parents in romantic comedies, the dupe and the trickster at the centre of more ironic or satirical comic modes. While tragedy points towards the hero's downfall or death, comedy generally points towards some kind of broader reform or remaking of society, usually signalled by a wedding or other celebration at the end of the play.

To speak of genre in this way, though, is to suggest that these ideal critical abstractions actually exist in some form, exemplified more or less adequately by particular plays. yet, as the very different genres of Japanese or Indian theatre suggest, terms like tragedy and comedy, or melodrama, tragicomedy, farce, and others, arise from our efforts to find continuities between extraordinarily different kinds of drama: between plays written in different theatres, for different purposes, to please different audiences, under different historical pressures. When we impose these terms in a prescriptive way, we usually find that the drama eludes them or even calls them into question. Aristotle's brilliant sense of Greek tragedy in The Poetics, for instance, hardly "applies" with equal force to Greek plays as different as Agamemnon, Oedipus the King, and Medea, or Kan'ami's elegant Noh drama, Matsukaze, let alone later plays like Hamlet or Endgame. In his essay, "Tragedy and the Common man", Arthur Miller tries to preserve "tragedy" for modern drama by redefining Aristotle's description of the hero of tragedy. Instead of Aristotle's hero, a man (not a woman) of an elevated social station, Miller argues that the modern hero should be an average, "common" man (not a woman), precisely because the "best families" do not seem normative to us or representative of our basic values, a goal he pursued in his classic American tragedy, Death of a Salesman. Our exemplary characters are taken from the middle classes. Yet to redefine the hero in this way calls Aristotle's other qualifications - the idea of the hero's character and actions, the meaning of the tragic "fall" - into question as well, forcing us to redefine Aristotelian tragedy in ways that made it something entirely new, something evocative in modern terms.

In approaching the question of genre, then, it is often useful to avoid asking how a play exemplifies the universal and unchanging features of tragedy and comedy. Instead, one could ask how a play or a theatre invents tragedy or comedy for its contemporary audience. What terms does the drama present, what formal features does it use, to represent human experience ? How do historically "local" genres - Renaissance revenge tragedy, French neoclassical drama, modern theatre of the absurd, kabuki, or even the kathakali of southern India - challenge, preserve, or redefine broader botions of genre ?