Genre studies - Unit IV Tragedy

 

Tragedy

            Tragedy is dealing with the dark side of life. It aims at inspiring us with pity and awe. In Tragedy, characters are involved in circumstances that impel them towards an unhappy fate. The word ‘tragedy’ is derived from Greek term ‘tragoidia’ meaning ‘goat song’. It refers to the ancients sacrifice of a goat associated with the god of the fields.

            A form of drama in which the events lead to the downfall of the main character is called as Tragedy.

Development of tragedies

            Authors in the middle Ages lacked direct knowledge either classical tragedies or of Aristotle’s Poetics “The Poetics”. Medieval tragedies are simply the story of person of high status. Deservedly or not, he is brought from prosperity to wretchedness by an unpredictable turn of the wheel of fortune.

            The tragedies of the Elizabethan age owed much to the native religious drama, the miracle and the morality plays, which had developed independently of classical influence, but with a crucial contribution from the Roman writer Seneca whose dramas got to be widely known earlier than those of the Greek tragedies.  Senecan Tragedy was to be recited rather than acted. English playwrights thought that those tragedies had been intended for the stage. They provided the model for an organized five-act play with a complex plot and an elaborately formal style of dialogue. Senecan drama in the Elizabethan age had two main lines of development. One of these consisted of academic tragedies written in close imitation of the senecan model, including the use of a chorus, and usually constructed by Italian critics of 16^th Century. The earliest English example was Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s “Gorboduc” in 1562.

            The second important development is called the revenge tragedy or the tragedy of blood. This type of play is derived from Seneca’s favourite materials of murder, revenge, ghosts, mutilation and carnage. Thomas Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy” established this popular form. Its subject is a murder and the quest for vengeance. It includes a ghost, insanity, suicide, a play-within-a-play, sensational incidents, and bloody endings.

            Many Major tragedies between 1585 and 1625 by Marlowe, Shakespeare, George Chapman, Webster, Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. They deviate from the Aristotlean norm. It is a non-Aristotlean form.