Tragedy

TRAGEDY

It will arouse pity and fear in the audience as it witnesses the action. It allows for an arousal of this pity and fear and creates an affect of purgation or catharsis of these strong emotions by the audience. Tragedy is serious by nature in its theme and deals with profound problems. These profound problems are universal when applied to the human experience. In classical tragedy we find a protagonist at the center of the drama that is a great person, usually of upper class birth. He is a good man that can be admired, but he has a tragic flaw, a hamartia, that will be the ultimate cause of his down fall. This tragic flaw can take on many characteristics but it is most often too much pride or hubris. The protagonist always learns, usually too late, the nature of his flaw and his mistakes that have caused his downfall. He becomes self-aware and accepts the inevitability of his fate and takes full responsibility for his actions. We must have this element of inevitability in tragedy. There must be a cause and effect relationship from the beginning through the middle to the end or final catastrophe. It must be logical in the conclusion of the necessary outcome. Tragedy will involve the audience in the action and create tension and expectation. With the climax and final end the audience will have learned a lesson and will leave the theatre not depressed or sullen, but uplifted and enlightened.

It celebrates the individual’s subjugation and his or her release from the burden of repression and its attendant anxiety. When remedy is exhausted, so is grief. The hero of the tragedy has to fight the world, though powerless – and with no tools whatsoever except his will. Like Hamlet or Odysseus or Oedipus or Othello. All hands are turned against these heroes, and they are unfit for the journey they must take. The strength of these heroes comes from the power to resist. They resist the desire to manipulate, the desire the ‘help’. Tragedy is a celebration not of our eventual triumph, but of the truth – it is not a victory, but a resignation. Much of its calmative power comes, again, from that action described by Shakespeare: when remedy is exhausted, so is grief.