Tragedy

Edipo Rey of Sophocles. 2011 Lugo Festival.

The tragedy is a literary, theatrical or dramatic form of solemn language, whose leading characters are illustrious and face each other in a mysterious, invincible and inevitable way, due to a fatal error or condition of character (the so-called hamartia) against a fatal destiny '[fatum]', fate or fate) the gods, generating a conflict whose end is hopelessly sad: the destruction of the protagonist [hero], who dies or goes mad.

Etymology and Concept

The term comes from the Greek word tragoedia or “song of the goat” (τραγῳδία, a word composed of τράγος “ram” and ᾠδή “song”) and alludes to the song of the Athenian Greeks that was sung in a procession in honor of the god Dionysus at his Dionysian festivals.

The genre is defined as a dramatic work with a terrible subject and a fatal outcome in which illustrious or heroic characters take part, and employs a sublime or solemn style of language. Aristotle, in his Poetics, left the first definition of the term:

Tragedy is the imitation of an action of high and complete character, endowed with some extension, in a pleasant language, full of beauties of a particular species according to its various parts, imitation that has been made or is made by characters in action and not by a narration, which, moving to compassion and fear, works in the spectator the purification (catarsis) of these emotional states [...] There are in all tragedies six constitutive parts, according to which each tragic work possesses its own quality; these parts are the fable or plot, the characters, the elocution, the way of thinking or ideology, the spectacle and the singing.

Tragedies generally end in the death, exile, or physical, moral, and financial destruction of the main character, who is faced with an intractable conflict that forces him to make a fatal mistake or hamartia in trying to "make the right thing" in a situation where the right thing simply cannot be done. The tragic hero is thus sacrificed to that force that imposes itself on him, and against which he rebels with insolent pride or hubris.

There is also a type of sublimation tragedy, in which the main character is shown as a hero who defies adversity with the strength of his virtues, thus earning the admiration of the viewer, as is the case of Antigone by Sophocles.

Tragedy was born as such in Greece with the works of Thespis and Phrynicus, and was consolidated with the triad of the great tragedians of Greek classicism: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Classical tragedies are characterized, according to Aristotle, by generating a catharsis in the viewer.

Evolution

Greek tragedy

Antigone, Sófocles. Greek-Latin Theatre Festival in Lugo, 2009.

Tradition attributes the first tragic composition to Thespis, but hardly any remains of his works are preserved. Later, among other authors, the tragedy stood out and made it evolve, in chronological order, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

In his Poetics, Aristotle points out that the parts of the tragedy are divided into prologue, episode, exodus and the part of the chorus, which is divided into parodo and estasimo. The prologue precedes the parodo of the choir. Then come seven intertwined episodes for each estasimo to conclude with the exodus, an intervention by the choir that is not sung. As for the estasimo, it is a choir song without anapesto or troqueo.

• Prologue: According to Aristotle is what precedes the entrance of the choir. The general characteristics are: the temporary location is given and the hero's past is joined with the present; three actors can participate but only two speak and the other is silent or can be a monologue. The spectator is informed why the punishment that the hero will receive and in this part the choir is not involved.
• Párodos: songs by the choir during the entrance by the left párodo presided by a flautist. In this part a lyric song is performed, dances of advance and retrocess are given; the doric dialect is used (more suitable to the choral songs due to its musicality).
• Episodes: can be up to five, there is dialogue between the choir and the characters or between characters; it is the most important part because it is the dramatic par excellence and expresses the thought and ideas of the character. Inside the episodes you can find the agoneswhich are passages in which the protagonist faces dialectically with another character.
• Sonimo: it is the lyrical-dramatic part where the author expresses his political, philosophical, religious ideas, etc.; there are three to five, it is the second entrance of the choir and in this part does not dance. The episodes are always separated by we are. These can be divided into verses and antiestrophae, which are always pronounced by the choir, although in the ancient Greek festival, the antiestrophaes were said by a Corifeus (a choir representative).
• Exodus: is the final part of the tragedy, there are lyric and dramatic chants, the hero recognizes his error and is punished (sometimes with death) by the gods, suffering the pathos and many times becoming pharmakon (the remedy for evil). This is where moral teaching appears. The exodus, as we are, is always pronounced by the choir or the Corifeus.

Latin tragedy

The first Latin tragedy was composed by Livio Andrónico and performed in ancient Rome in the year 514 of its foundation (240 BC) at the time of the consulate of Gaius Claudius Centon and M. Sempiterno, some one hundred and sixty years later of the death of Sophocles and Euripides and two hundred and twenty years before that of Virgil. Influenced by Ennio, Pacuvio and Accio, Seneca already composed eleven tragedies in the Silver Age of Latin literature that have been preserved and powerfully influenced the theater in the vernacular of the Renaissance and the Baroque; The one inspired by the homonymous tragedy by Sophocles, Phaedra, stands out in particular.

Modern tragedy

Modern tragedy arose at the time of the Renaissance and by translations or imitations of antiquity. It is true that some essays are found in the vernacular, especially in Greece, from the XIII to the XVI but there is no doubt that the first regular tragedy is Sofonisba, composed by Gian Giorgio Trissino and performed in Rome in 1515 In 1552, the poet Jodelle, the first in France, had the tragedy of his invention Cleopatra Captive performed. Robert Garnier (1544-1590), Alexandre Hardy and Jean Mairet followed his example until Corneille appeared in 1635, with his first tragedy, Medea, followed later by Racine who elevated the restored genre to perfection. Among the modern authors who have distinguished themselves the most in tragedy, mention should be made of:

• In Spain to Lope de Vega (The gentleman of Olmedo, Punishment without revengeand Calderón de la Barca (The constant prince, The doctor of your honor, The daughter of the air) that consisted of true tragedies despite the titles comedies. Also to Quintana, Cienfuegos, Huerta, Jovellanos, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, Manuel Tamayo and Baus, Benito Pérez Galdós. In the centuryXX. especially Miguel de Unamuno (The otherFederico García Lorca (Mariana Pineda, Blood balls, The House of Bernarda Albaand Antonio Buero VallejoIn the fiery darkness, The skylight, The mens, The foundation).
• in France, Corneille and Racine, in addition to Crebillon, Voltaire, Lemercier, Casimir Delavigne.
• in Italy, Metastasio, Alfieri and D'Annunzio.
• in England, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Otway, Dryden, Addison.
• in Germany and Austria, Goethe, Schiller, Grillparzer.
• in Denmark, Johannes Ewald.
• in Mexico to Sergio Magaña, Rodolfo Usigli and Héctor Azar.

Theories

Defining tragedy is not a simple matter, and there are many definitions, some of which are incompatible with each other. Oscar Mandel, in A Definition of Tragedy (1961), contrasted two essentially different ways of arriving at a definition. The first is what he calls derivative , in which tragedy is thought to be the expression of an ordering of the world; "instead of asking what tragedy expresses, the derivative definition tends to ask what is expressed through tragedy". The second is the substantive way of defining tragedy, which starts from the work of art that is supposed to contain the ordering of the world. Substantive critics "are interested in the constitutive elements of art, rather than its ontological sources". It recognizes four subclasses: a. "definition by formal elements" (for example, the alleged "three units"); b. "definition by situation" (when defining tragedy, for example, as "the display of the fall of a good man"); c. "definition by ethical direction" (when the critic is concerned with meaning, with "intellectual and moral effect"); and d. "definition by emotional effect" (and for the "moral effect"). "definition by emotional effect" (and cites Aristotle's "demand for pity and fear").

Aristotle

Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that tragedy is characterized by seriousness and involves a great person experiencing a reversal of misfortune (Peripeteia). Aristotle's definition may include a change of fortune from bad to good as in Eumenides'], but he says that a change from good to bad as in Oedipus Rex is preferable because this induces pity and fear in the spectators. The tragedy brings about a catharsis (emotional cleansing) or healing for the audience through their experience of these emotions in response to the suffering of the characters in the drama.

According to Aristotle, "the structure of the best tragedy should not be simple, but complex and depict incidents that arouse fear and pity - for that is peculiar to this art form". This reversal of fortune must be caused by the hamartia of the tragic hero, which is often translated as a character flaw, or mistake (since the original Greek etymology goes back to hamartanein, a sporting term referring to an archer or spear thrower who misses his target). According to Aristotle, "Misfortune is caused not by [general] vice or depravity, but by some [particular] error or frailty. &#3. 4; Template:Not Specific Backhand is the inevitable but unforeseen result of some action taken by the hero. It is also a mistake to think that this setback can be caused by a higher power (for example, the law, the gods, fate or society), but if the fall of a character is caused by an external cause, Aristotle describes it as a misadventure and not as a tragedy.

In addition, the tragic hero may achieve some revelation or recognition (anagnorisis--"to know again" or "to know again" or "to know through") about human destiny, fate and the will of the gods. Aristotle calls this type of recognition "a change from ignorance to awareness of a bond of love or hate."

In Poetics, Aristotle gave the following Ancient Greek definition of the word "tragedy" (τραγῳδία):

Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete (composed of an introduction, an average part and an end), and possesses magnitude; in a pleasing language, each of its separate species in different parts; represented by actors, not through narration; effecting through piety and fear the purification of such emotions.

Common use of tragedy refers to any story with a sad ending, while to be an Aristotelian tragedy the story must conform to the set of requirements established by Poetics. According to this definition, the social drama cannot be tragic because in it the hero is the victim of circumstances and incidents that depend on the society in which he lives and not on the interior compulsions -psychological or religious- that determine his progress towards self-knowledge and death. However, what exactly constitutes a "tragedy" is a frequently debated question.

According to Aristotle, there are four kinds of tragedy:

1. Complex, which implies Events and Discovery.

2. Suffering, tragedies of such a nature can be seen in the Greek mythological stories of Ajaxes and Ixiones.

3. Character, tragedy of a moral or ethical nature. Tragedies of this nature can be found in Phthiotides and Peleus.

4. Show, the theme similar to horror. Examples of this nature are Phorcides and Prometheus.

Hegel

G.W.F. Hegel, the German philosopher most famous for his dialectical approach to epistemology and history, also applied this methodology to his theory of tragedy. In his essay & # 34; Hegel & # 39; s Theory of Tragedy & # 34;, A.C. Bradley first presented to the Anglo-Saxon world Hegel's theory, which Bradley called the "tragic collision", and contrasted it with Aristotelian notions of the "tragic hero" and his & # 34; hamartia & # 34; in later analyzes of the trilogy of Aeschylus's Oresteia and Sophocles's Antigone Hegel himself, however, in his seminal & # 34; The Phenomenology of the Spirit & # 34; he defends a more complicated theory of tragedy, with two complementary strands which, though driven by a single dialectical principle, differentiate Greek tragedy from that which follows Shakespeare. His last lectures formulate such a theory of tragedy as a conflict of ethical forces, represented by characters, in ancient Greek tragedy, but in Shakespearean tragedy the conflict is presented as one of subject and object, of individual personality that must manifest self-destructive passions. for only such passions are strong enough to defend the individual from a hostile and capricious external world:

The heroes of the ancient classical tragedy meet with situations in which, if they decide firmly in favor of the only ethical pathos that only suits their finished character, they must necessarily enter into conflict with the ethical power equally [gleichberechtigt] justified that they face. The modern characters, on the other hand, are in a cluster of more accidental circumstances, within which one could act in this or that way, so that the conflict, although caused by external preconditions, remains essentially rooted in character. The new individuals, in their passions, obey their own nature simply because they are what they are. Greek heroes also act according to individuality, but in the ancient tragedy such individuality is necessarily... an autonomous ethical pathos... In the modern tragedy, however, the character in its peculiarity decides according to the subjective desires... in such a way that the congruence of character with the outer ethical objective no longer constitutes an essential basis of tragic beauty...

Hegel's comments on a particular work may further elucidate his theory: "Seen externally, Hamlet's death may be seen as accidentally brought about... but in Hamlet's soul we understand that death has lurked ever since. the beginning: the sandbar of finiteness cannot suffice for his pain and tenderness, for such grief and nausea in the face of all the conditions of life... We sense that he is a man whom inner disgust has almost consumed long before he that death befalls him from outside".