Understanding Drama

Let's begin our unit on theatre with this entertaining and informative Crash Course video. First let's begin with two questions: 1. What is theater? And 2. Is it spelled -re or -er? Well, there's a clue to question two in the title of the video. The first question is a little trickier. We'll look at some of the historical definitions of theater, and investigate some of the ways people have thought about theater in different times and places in the world. 

Review the lecture on Understanding Drama. For those of you who enjoy reading the slides, I've included the original slides and lecture notes. 

Citing Drama

The text of a play is cited differently from traditional prose works. Because plays are often printed in many editions and anthologies, it is customary to cite the act, scene, and line number rather than the page number in your in-text citations.

Tips for citing plays:

• Begin with the broadest division (usually act) and continue through the smallest division (usually a scene or line).

• Separate each division with a period. Label each division so the reader knows exactly where to find the quotation in the text.

• Some plays will contain more or fewer divisions than act, scene, & line. Use as much information as is available in the text.

If you have included the author's name elsewhere in your paper, you do not need to include it in your parenthetical citation. Instead, include the first significant word of the title.

• Check out the helpful handout below from the BMCC Writing Center for examples of MLA citing of drama and of other genres of literature.

The Tragic Hero

A tragic hero is the protagonist of a tragedy in drama. In his Poetics, Aristotle strictly defines the role that the tragic hero must play and the kind of man he must be. Many of the most famous instances of tragic heroes appear in Greek literature, most notably in the works of Sophocles and Euripides.

Aristotle shared his view of what makes a tragic hero in his Poetics. Aristotle suggests that a hero of a tragedy must evoke in the audience a sense of pity or fear. He establishes the concept that the emotion of pity stems not from a person becoming better but when a person receives undeserved misfortune - and fear comes when the misfortune befalls a man like us. This is why Aristotle points out the simple fact that “The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad.” According to Aristotle, a tragic hero is thought to be a man whose misfortune comes to him, "not through vice or depravity but by some error of judgment." In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, for example, the title character kills a man without knowing that the man in question is his father, then marries his mother out of ignorance.

Therefore, the Aristotelian hero is characterized as virtuous but not "eminently good," which suggests a noble or important personage who is upstanding and morally inclined while nonetheless subject to human error. Aristotle's tragic heroes are flawed individuals who commit, without evil intent, great wrongs or injuries that ultimately lead to their misfortune, often followed by the tragic realization of the true nature of events that led to this destiny. This means the hero still must be - to some degree - morally grounded. The usual irony in Greek tragedy is that the hero is both extraordinarily capable and highly moral and it is these exact, highly-admirable qualities that lead the hero into tragic circumstances. The tragic hero is snared by his or her own greatness: extraordinary competence, a righteous passion for duty, and (often) the arrogance associated with greatness (hubris).

The influence of the Aristotelian hero extends past classical Greek literary criticism. Greek theater had a direct and profound influence on Roman theater, and both formed the basis of Western theater continuing into the modern era, and deeply influenced theater, literature, and film throughout the world. Many iconic characters in literature, theater, and film are considered by some critics to follow the archetype of the tragic hero. These include Charles Foster Kane of Citizen Kane (1941), Anakin Skywalker of Return of the Jedi (1983), Stannis Baratheon of A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-), and Game of Thrones (2011-) to name but a few examples. A minority of critics have also called Michael Corleone of the Godfather trilogy a tragic hero, although traditional literary conventions would classify him as a villain, not a tragic hero.