Roman Tragedy Research Articles

“The coming darkness”: Romantic Tragedy, Shakespeare, and Nahua Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris

ABSTRACT Cormac McCarthy has stated that tragedy is central to human experience and that “the core of literature is the idea of tragedy.” Furthermore, he maintains that the tragic genre probes how humans “deal with” the bad things that happen to them. McCarthy’s duology, The Passenger and Stella Maris, locates its main narrative concerning Alicia and Bobby Western’s taboo love within the framework of romantic tragedy. Incest has been a much-revisited topic within Western tragedy. Consider the dramas of Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, John Webster, John Ford, Henrik Ibsen, and Eugene O’Neill. In McCarthy’s treatment, incest is an impediment to reciprocal love. This tragic fatedness crosses any expectations Alicia and Bobby court of mutual happiness and fulfillment. The duology explores the siblings’ ways of dealing with their tragic condition, the romantic Alicia’s all-or-nothing, self-destructive passion and the ascetic Bobby’s attitude of self-denial and endurance. Two tragic antecedents further inform McCarthy’s examination of forbidden love: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597) and the Nahua myth of the warrior Popocatépetl and the princess Iztaccíhuatl. The article concludes by proposing that, despite the duology’s preoccupation with the tragic human condition, the narrative tentatively gestures to a state of being that might, perhaps, lie beyond tragedy.

A Western Pocahontas: Myth, Reality, and Memorialization for Spotted Tail’s Daughter, Mni-Akuwin

Abstract In March 1866, the Sicangu (Brulé) Lakota chief Spotted Tail brought the body of his seventeen- or eighteen-year-old daughter, Mni-Akuwin, to Fort Laramie. She had died somewhere in the Powder River country. Before she died, she had asked her father to bury her among the Whites at the fort. Her subsequent scaffold burial in the post cemetery was an unusual mix of military display, Christian rites, and Lakota traditions; and the events surrounding it became a dramatic episode in the story of Native-White relations and western settlement. Almost 140 years later she was memorialized at the fort, a National Park Service site, as a symbol of racial reconciliation. The story of Mni-Akuwin has been told and retold many times through the years, often as a romantic tragedy comparable to the story of early Jamestown and the much-celebrated Pocahontas. The two Native women had a surprising amount in common, including what we know and don’t know about them, what has been ascribed to their motives, and how they have been championed as defenders of European colonists and non-Native settlers. Indian princess mythology, with its insistence on innocence, purity, romantic purpose, and tragedy, has been vital to the persistence of this view—a perspective that has often put reconciliation in the service of White supremacy, dispossession, and rejection of Native culture. As the Mni-Akuwin story illustrates, reconciliation can be problematic.

«Tragedy and Ristori will die the same day». Contributions on the death of Romantic tragedy and the birth of art theatre in Portugal

«Tragedy and Ristori will die the same day». This is how António Feliciano de Castilho, the infamous ultra-Romantic Portuguese writer and polemist, refers to the great Adelaide Ristori, in an inflated article published in the «Revista Contemporanea de Portugal e Brazil» in 1859. Ristori was in Lisbon – for her premiere in Portugal – to present Montabelli’s adaptation of Medea at the National Theatre of São Carlos. Castilho, in eight full pages, depicts an elegant, hyperbolic short biography of the Italian actress, portrayed emphatically as the great muse Melpômene. This Romantic way to address the art of acting – exaggerated, elusive, emotional, immensely subjective – was standard in 19th century theatre criticism. Ristori was received in Portugal with the same ardour. This essay examines the way Ristori was receive by some Portuguese press, in 1859; and evaluates the critical discourse that encapsulates the way the ‘Grande Attore’ was perceived. This exercise will help to characterize the emergent Portuguese theatre criticism at the mid nineteenth century; as well as to compare the way other Portuguese actresses and Ristori were ‘criticised’ and elaborate on the way we can understand this anti-academism and the non-scientific approach to theatre as reasons to the death of Romantic tragedy and the birth of the Théâtre d’Art in Portugal.

Lyric and tragedy in Horace <i>Odes</i> 2.1

Horace Odes 2.1, addressed to the politician, historian and tragic poet C. Asinius Pollio, has in recent years been much analysed. Most often, critics have followed the steer of Nisbet and Hubbard’s commentary (1978) in looking for traces of Pollio’s lost Histories and of Pollio’s own historical role (e.g. Henderson, 1998; Woodman, 2012), and it is indeed clear that the poem contains a number of allusions to historiographical topics and stilemes and may relate to the lost proem of Pollio’s work. This paper looks in another direction, following the intuition of Nisbet and Hubbard that in this poem ‘Horace is suggesting an affinity between Pollio’s tragedies and his histories’ (1978: 9). It argues that Horace’s ode alludes more extensively than has been realised to established topics in tragedy, and thus to the other part of Pollio’s literary career which Horace here prominently mentions (2.1.9 severae Musa tragoediae) as being suspended for the writing of history. Given the loss of just about all pre-Augustan Roman tragedy, it argues from the texts of Greek tragedy, which Pollio must have imitated to some degree, that Horace’s poem is just as suffused with tragic topics as with historiographical material: similar references to blood, fire, gambling and dust can be found in tragic texts. It also suggests that the strong emphasis on sound and spectacle in the poem, usually thought to be part of a particularly vivid style of historical writing, can be related to the stage-productions of tragedies in Pollio’s own time, which we know to have been particularly lavish and grand.

Memoria storica, riforma del teatro e identità nazionale nel ciclo di tragedie romane di Antonio Conti

"This essay aims to analyze the presence of historical memory in Antonio Conti’s poetical and theoretical reflection. Through his cycle of Roman tragedies, he staged some salient moments of Roman history which illustrated the transition from the monarchy to the republic, and from the republic to the empire. In the framework of the theatrical reform inaugurated at the beginning of the 18th century by Scipione Maffei’s Merope, Conti’s dramaturgical and theoretical work constitutes an extremely important contribution , starting from the tragedies’ ponderous paratexts, where the author gradually establishes the need for a national theatre, following the English and French models, while being centered exclusively on the events of Roman history."

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Racine’s Roman Tragedies: Essays on ‘Britannicus’ and ‘Bérénice’. Edited by Nicholas Hammond and Paul Hammond

<i>Racine’s Roman Tragedies: Essays on ‘Britannicus’ and ‘Bérénice’</i>. Edited by Nicholas Hammond and Paul Hammond

All for Love and Antony and Cleopatra - A Comparative Study

Shakespeare's fantastic play "Antony and Cleopatra" is one of the greatest tragedies ever written in literature. Shakespeare's play contrasts passion and accountability. How the two most memorable characters desired to be, each other's yet were unable to be because of their circumstances. One of Dryden's objectives in creating the play was to demonstrate the vital force of love. After being banished, Cleopatra decides to return to Antony. She and Alexas try to make up a narrative about Cleopatra committing herself in her room to make Antony feel horrible (Dryden, 2021). After learning that Cleopatra murdered herself, Antony commits a clandestine suicide and collapses. Shakespeare's plays adopt a more specific, historical viewpoint than Dryden's plays, which are more of a romantic tragedy. The main distinction between Dryden's plays and Shakespeare's is this. Whether one favours Dryden's or Shakespeare's staging of the action, it goes without saying that the poetry—the dialogue—in both plays is of the highest grade and is predominantly written in iambic pentameter. To produce black verse in the manner of the "divine" Shakespeare, Dryden deviated from the rhyme scheme that had been established in his initial poem (Putra, 2022). Despite the fact that the main plot of "All for Love" by Dryden and "Antony and Cleopatra" by Shakespeare are the same, there are several significant distinctions between the two works' narrative strategies.

Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason ed. by Blair Hoxby

Reviewed by: Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason ed. by Blair Hoxby Jeffery Moser Blair Hoxby, editor. Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason. Ohio State UP, 2022. 328 p. Stanford professor Blair Hoxby's newest editorial production is a multi-author volume that considers the theory and practice of tragedy produced during Europe's Age of Reason, that intellectual and philosophical period promulgated during the late-seventeenth century and early- to mid-eighteenth century. Hoxby has an impressive record of research and publishing about European literature and culture. This text continues his theoretical approach to refigure and reassess traditional views about tragedy's power, versification, and imparts from classical beginnings during the Enlightenment, between 1685 and 1815, and beyond. For any student of history and literature, it is worth remembering that plays written and performed in the late-seventeenth century and after were post-Shakespeare's lifetime, post-Civil War, and post-Interregnum for England. With the public staging of plays licensed to reopen in 1660 after eighteen years of closure, not only did English theatre undergo a restoration, but so did England and the whole British Isles on an expansive socio-political scale, leading up to the Act of Union, which went into effect in the spring of 1707. The act created the Kingdom of Great Britain. Right on these heels followed political restoration and reform afoot in Europe, too, resulting in changes and adjustments. With Napoleon Bonaparte's dethronement in 1814, most of Europe was challenged to determine a new path forward. Events like another French Revolution or Russian conquest occurring again suddenly seemed to be impossibilities. The boundaries of European countries were renegotiated and seemingly settled, and the United States was well on its way to dominating Western ideals about democracy and sovereignty, while Imperial England's colonial grasp around the globe began to wane and fade. So it was, in many ways, that literature and culture during the late seventeenth-century and early- to mid-eighteenth century found itself in the crosshairs of optimism and pessimism. This is a particular prong that Hoxby stresses about tragedy, arguing in the introduction [End Page 333] that tragedy found itself at a "crossroads of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment" (1). In other words, tragedies of the time were caught between the expectations of doom and gloom of classical Greek and Roman tragedy traditions and the "optimism, reason, and a faith in human progress and productivity" still regarded today as the majority assessment that scholars associate with the Enlightenment. Hence, for Hoxby, and others who have contributed to this volume, the tragedy of this time must be seen to "teeter on the brink of paradox" (1). In this accord, the essays affirm that the scope of tragedy written and performed during this time was both expansive and transitional. It should not be easily categorized as stale or a noncontroversial accoutrement to the period, nor a genre that was subjugated to something less and not as entertaining, edgy, or discursive as its counterpart of comedy that rose in popularity among the masses during the Restoration. Instead, tragedy of this time must be newly seen and understood as "dynamic" and "paradoxical," experimenting and juggling classical, early modern, romantic, and emerging modern ideals and expectations about the genre. In addition to Hoxby, scholars contributing to this worthwhile academic collection include: Alex Eric Hernandez, Logan J. Connors, James Harriman-Smith, Russ Leo, Cecile Dudouyt, Adrian Daub, Stefan Tilg, Larry F. Norman, Joseph Harris, and Joshua Billings. Their essays are categorized into three relevant sections: Part 1-- Ancient Forms, Modern Affects; Part II – Philosophy, Religion, and the Institutions of Tragedy, and Part III – Ancients, Moderns, and the Historical Turn. Hoxby's own essay, "Joanna Baillie, the Gothic Bard, and Her Tragedies of Fear," concludes the first section. The Scottish poet and dramatist's books of verse and plays reveal her extensive study and critical appreciation of Shakespeare, especially the Bard's proficiency in the passions. Baillie's (1762-1851) tragedy of fear, Orra, is set "in the context of the critical reinvention of Shakespeare as a primitive genius whose mastery of the...

A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

Тайна в поэтике жанра романтической трагедии («Испанцы» М. Ю. Лермонтова)

This paper focuses on the role of the poetics of mystery in the formation of the romantic trag-edy genre. “The Spaniards” by Mikhail Lermontov is considered as a characteristic example of this genre, manifesting “melodramatization” of tragedy and tendency towards genre-generic synthesis. The action of “The Spaniards” is based on events related to the sphere of the mysterious, which are exceptional in life and common in melodrama. Central to the plot is the motif of the loss of a child. The secret of Fernando’s birth and “ignobility” form the con-flict and organize two storylines (love and family) and two (everyday life – melodramatic, and existential – tragic) levels of conflict. Mystery also plays an important role in revealing the inner world and expressing the romantic ideal of the hero. The ability to comprehend the mysterious, to pass beyond human experience and logic is not only the motivation of his ac-tions, but it also connects the hero with the ideal sphere. The study examines how the charac-ters’ anticipation of the “terrible” motivates their moral choices. Analyzing the interaction of lyrical motifs, the author suggests the motif of mystery as important for implementing the main (tragic) conflict, unlike melodrama, where the functions of mystery are plot-forming, stimulating the spectator’s interest and maximizing the dramatic tension. Mystery in the plot and the lyrical concept of the tragedy contributes to the understanding of the essence of the romantic conflict, has a suggestive impact on the audience, and deepens the psychologism.

George Chapman’ın Ceasar and Pompey Trajedisi ve Arabulucu Cato

The classical Roman past has been a rich source for the playwrights who desire to make literary connections between the ancient political characters and real life figures. George Chapman, a neglected playwright of the seventeenth century, uses the Roman Empire allegory in Caesar and Pompey: A Roman Tragedy (1631) to respond to the political dissagreements which lead England into the Civil War. Through Caesar and Pompey, Chapman conveys possible scenarios that correspond to specific political events in the history of early modern England. Using new historicism as a theoretical framework, this paper analyzes Chapman’s play as a political allegory of the dispute between Charles I and Parliamentarians, leading the three kingdoms into war in 1642. Drawing a parallel between the Roman republic depicted in the play and the specific moments of early modern world, this paper discusses how Cato acts as Chapman’s mouthpiece and the ardent supporter of political negotiation rather than conflict. Thus, the paper contributes to the scholarship about Chapman who uses the history of Roman republic as a warning for the future of English politics during the Elizabethan period.

Just Friends? Queering Male–Male Amity in Jean de Beaubreuil’s Regulus (1582)

ABSTRACT This article proposes a queer (re)reading of Jean de Beaubreuil’s Roman tragedy Regulus ([1582] 1999). The study begins with an exploration of the author’s trip to Rome and his visit with Marc-Antoine Muret, a renowned humanist who fled France in 1554 due to charges of heresy and sodomy. It then reads queerly two key passages from the play to suggest that the tragedy’s most strikingly queer elements include the intimate friendship formed between the main dramatis personae (Atilie and Manlie), their ritual of unity before battle that resembles a clandestine marriage ceremony, the mythological and historical references evoked during this ritual, and the replacement of Regulus’s legendary wife and children with Manlie. The article concludes with an analysis of the tensions between the hero’s public persona (Regulus) and private identity (Atilie), which invites the reader to reconsider the modalities of male–male amity in sixteenth-century France.

Sad Realities: The Romantic Tragedies of Charles Harpur

Charles Harpur (1813–68) is recognised in his native Australia as a pioneering Romantic poet, but his achievements are little recognised elsewhere. This essay considers his contribution to the development of Romantic tragedy. He wrote two tragedies, The Bushrangers (1853, orig. 1835), a gothic bandit drama in the tradition of Schiller’s Die Rauber (1781), and King Saul (c. 1838), an incomplete Biblical drama apparently inspired by Byron’s Cain: A Mystery (1821). Like many European playwrights of the period, Harpur was deeply influenced by the new kinds of melodrama that were sweeping the stage, but also sought to distinguish his literary productions from more popular fare. His alienation from the popular theatre was exacerbated by his colonial context, where strict censorship, rising snobbery and plentiful cultural imports from Britain stifled the early efforts of nationalist, convict-born writers like himself. These contexts help to explain three distinctive aspects of Harpur’s Romantic tragedies: they were direct in an age when drama was often evasive, radical even in an age of revolution, and mystical in an age of increasing religious scepticism. Whatever his theatrical merits, Harpur was a bold playwright who worked through controversial political and aesthetic problems in a remarkably explicit way.

‘The Hunt is Up’: Death, Dismemberment, and Feasting in Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies

Critics have noted the prominence in Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies of the related discourses of hunting, sacrifice, and ceremonialism. The emphasis on ritualism and aberrant feasting in these plays finds its echo in the par force hunting, which evokes in order to deny the subjectivity of the noble quarry, casting the deer as both worthy adversary and aestheticized corpse. Early modern hunting manuals describe the ritualism at the conclusion of the aristocratic hunt, formalised ceremonies which enacted an elaborately ceremonial dissection and distribution of the body of the slain quarry, drawing their symbolic charge from the inherent violence of the hunt and its sacrificial emphasis on the dead animal’s physical dismemberment. Exploring the interactions between hunting, ritualism, and sacrifice in Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus, this article excavates the contemporary significance of the deer as animal, as lordly game, and as symbol. This article suggests that in these plays, the animal corpse becomes a useful metaphor for communal conflict and division, resonances which the aristocratic sport easily evoked given the discourses of exclusion and elitism which surrounded it and its importance in the construction of noble male identity.

Intercultural theatrical encounter and the dramaturgy of surtitles

ABSTRACT Theatre surtitles have tended to be seen as a necessary inconvenience. However, recent technological developments have streamlined the provision of translated captions and these advances are influencing awareness of and attitudes to the use of surtitles in theatre spaces. Taking the ITA’s Roman Tragedies as an illustration, this article examines the application of surtitling technology in theatre translation. The intermedial performance of surtitles positions surtitles within new media dramaturgy, creating a form of interlinear translation. The dramaturgical effect of the integration of surtitles into production demonstrates how technological intervention can operate to co-produce the humanity of intercultural theatrical encounter.

Tragic Time in Ben Jonson's Sejanus and Catiline

This essay explores Ben Jonson's treatment of dramatic and historical time in his Roman tragedies, Sejanus His Fall (1603) and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611). Although the plays conspicuously fail to respect neoclassical strictures about the unity of time, both reproduce the temporal compression of Greek and Roman tragedy through their sustained intertextual engagements with a wide range of Roman source texts, including, above all, Lucan's Bellum Civile, and the works of the late antique court poet Claudian. The ultimate effect of these quotations, allusions, and reminiscences is to transform Jonson's dramas of early imperial corruption and late Republican civil conflict into proleptic visions of Roman history as a phantasmagoria of unceasing political violence, extending to the ends of both classical antiquity and classical literature.

Tragedy According to Jacobus Pontanus and the Tradition of Antiquity

The aim of this study is to present the findings of a comparative analysis that covers—on the one hand—the theory of tragedy presented in Poeticarum institutionum libri III by Jakob Pontanus (Spanmuller), the classical and Renaissance poetics and commentaries on which he based his work, as well as the ancient tragedies that belonged to the literary canon in Jesuit colleges, and—on the other hand—Pontanus’s theoretical approach mentioned above and his tragedy Elezarus Machabaeus. The works of Pontanus have previously been discussed by Joseph Bielmann. However, Bielmann did not present them against the background of the Greek and Roman tragedies or the statements of the ancient theorists on drama, the Renaissance theoretical reflection on tragedies, or the playwriting practice resulting from this reflection. Consequently, his characterisation of the Elezarus Machabaeus is untenable, and his comments on Pontanus’s theory of drama need reviewing. Determining whether Pontanus respected the rules of ancient tragedy or whether he openly violated them is important because he was one of the most outstanding Jesuit humanists and a person of authority in his community. If we take into account the fact that Elezarus Machabaeus was the first tragedy printed by the Jesuits, the Poeticarum institutionum libri tres was one of the first printed Jesuit textbooks of this kind, and Pontanus himself was also the author of other books recommended for reading in Jesuit colleges and participated in the work of the committee for the evaluation and approval of the Jesuit school act, his views on the imitation of ancient models should be considered influential at least to a moderate degree and at least in some literary circles of his time. This matter is addressed in the introductory part of this paper. It also contains a short presentation of Pontanus’s textbook against the background of other Jesuit poetics, as well as of his main sources in the field of drama theory. Subsequently, the author presents Pontanus’s concept of drama and then discusses his piece taking into account the context of ancient and contemporary drama theory and practice of writing. In the light of this comparative reading, Eleazarus Machabaeus seems to be generally based on ancient models despite certain peculiarities, such as the composition and absence of choruses, which may be surprising at first. Both Pontanus’s tragedy and his theoretical approach should be regarded as classical in nature.

Seneca: Medea. Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy by Helen Slaney

Seneca: Medea. Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy by Helen Slaney

Fortuna y Némesis como elementos trágicos en el libro 14 de Amiano Marcelino

This paper analizes the tragic genealogy of Fortune and Nemesis in book 14 of Ammianus Marcellinus. Specifically, the motif of the fickle Fortune that appears in the episode of Caesar Gallus is compared with its presence in Greek and Roman tragedy. In turn, the ambiguous nature of Fortune created by the introduction of Nemesis at the end of the book will be shown and the ways in which this duality is created will be analized. The comparison of similarities and differences of Ammianus’ work with tragic authors may allow a better understanding of the author’s style. The general aim of this work is to delve into the literary texture of Ammianus’ Res gestae, under the assumption that understanding his style may help to refine possible conclusions about his historiographical method.