Tragic Tradition Research Articles

Domestic violence, tragedy, and reconciliation in Menander’s Perikeiromene

Menander’s Perikeiromene centers on a haircut forcibly imposed on a free woman by her lover, a recently demobilized soldier. This paper interprets the haircut against evidence of domestic violence in ancient Greece, tragic models of self-sacrificing virgins, and contemporary studies of intimate partner violence. Glykera’s loyalty to her natal home shows an internalization of patriarchal values, in the tragic tradition. Although Polemon shows striking similarities with modern perpetrators and victim disfigurement is common, the actual act of cutting the victim’s hair is not and he shows some elements of the kind of abuser who can change.

Aestheticism versus Utilitarianism: The Reception of the “Tragic” in 1930s Chinese Literary Discourse

This study examines the construction of the Chinese literary discourse on tragedy in the 1930s, when the intertwining connections between literature and politics left a noticeable influence on the Chinese understanding of the concept. It approaches the subject from three angles: first, it reviews both theoretical discussions of the concept of tragedy and the literary practice of the tragic, exploring possible factors that have either promoted or prevented the application of theory to practice. Second, it traces the changing relationship between pragmatic and aesthetic perspectives during the formation of the Chinese intellectual discourse on tragedy, analysing its relevance to the inextricable link between literature and politics in the 1930s. Thirdly, it investigates the differences between the Chinese perception of tragedy and its foreign origins, presenting the constant interplay among several cultural, social, and political elements that affected the establishment of the 1930s Chinese tragic tradition. In doing so, this study demonstrates the particular features of the Chinese perception of the tragic in the 1930s, as well as the decisive role that socio-political factors played in manipulating the intellectual practices at the time.

Anti-Virgilianism in Late Medieval English Troy Narratives

Late medieval English traditions of Troy material are each anti-Virgilian, and therefore anti-imperialist. The three principal Troy traditions in late medieval British writing are as follows: (i) the elegiac tradition of Ovid's Heroides (pre-2 BCE); (ii) the tragic tradition, derived from Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae (1287); and (iii) the Galfridian tradition, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (1136). The anti-Virgilian, anti-imperialist thesis applies to each tradition. In the elegiac tradition anti-Virgilianism and indifference to the imperialist enterprise are all but explicit. In the second, tragic tradition, Trojan narratives are not anti-militarist, but they are fundamentally anti-imperialist: imperialist claims derived from Virgil, and an aggressive chivalric ethos, are, for authors in this tradition, extremely dangerous. The third late medieval British Troy tradition, the pseudo-historical tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth, seems, on the face of it, both imperialist and para-Virgilian. Even here, however, Virgilian imperialism turns to catastrophe; the energies that might lead to imperial ambition in fact provoke lethal internal fractures within the imperial polity. This tradition is initially drawn to the Virgilian project, but finally repelled by it.

The Centre: a search for belonging

The Centre explores the research question: How can the Ancient Greek tragic tradition expose contemporary experiences of asylum seekers in detention? Tragic theatre is a space to challenge societal and political motivations by either reimagining or condemning the current expression of humanity. The pre-polis construct of the hearth, or hestia in the Ancient Greek, can be viewed as an external manifestation of the innate human impulse towards connectivity and belonging; in other words Ancient Greek tragedy promotes a hestian notion that ‘to be is to belong’ [Brock, G. 2014. ‘Greek Tragedy and the Poetics of the Hearth.’ PhD Thesis, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland: 5]. This ontological positioning suggests that to be without home—without a sense of belonging—is to be without the fullness of being. In this way, a pre-polis reading of Ancient Greek tragedy positions homelessness as the most tragic condition. Detention centres, then, can be seen as a denial of home, a denial of belonging and therefore a denial of selfhood. The play merges the characters and storylines from ancient Greek texts with contemporary events to expose the current situation in Australian offshore processing centres.;

Greek Tragedy: Lost Plays and Neglected Authors

Greek Tragedy: Lost Plays and Neglected Authors J. MICHAEL WALTON At the bottom of page 1 of The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Volume 1,* Matthew Wright adds a footnote to his résumé of some of the views of early Greek tragedy before Aeschylus’ Persians. “I do not discuss the early twentieth-century ‘ritualists’—e.g. Harrison, Cornford, Murray—whose work is refuted at length by Pickard-Cambridge (1927), because I regard their theories as pure fantasy .” This is an encouraging opening if only because Greek drama is curiously prone, in generalized summaries of Athenian culture or of theatre history, to maintaining obsolete notions about anything from kothornoi to compulsory attendance at the theatre as a civic obligation. An exclusively ritual origin to the dramatic festivals is another of these that has recently re-raised its implausible head, and it is good to see it summarily dismissed. Wright continues to lay out his stall in this chapter, entitled “The Earliest Tragedies,” and to consider the possible contributions of Thespis, Choerilus, Pratinas and Phrynichus as “prototragedy.” He follows with the account of origins offered by Aristotle in the Poetics. What is missing, and is, I would suggest, a serious oversight in such a study, is any critical assessment of the importance of Homer, either in terms of subject matter or how epic may have become dramatic. Skeptical as Wright may be about approaching Greek drama from a performance perspective, there is surely room for the moment, Thespian or otherwise, when the rhapsode’s “Agamemnon spoke and said” morphs into “Enter Agamemnon.” *Matthew Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Volume 1: Neglected Authors, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2016, 277 pages. arion 24.3 winter 2017 What follows is for the most part more persuasive. In the five chapters after this opening, Wright marshals a mass of references from the best part of a thousand years about a strong tragic tradition which lasted well into the Hellenistic period before declining from Greek into Latin. Numerous lost playwrights are identified, traced as far as maybe with a diligence that is admirable, indeed formidable. A whole chapter (chap. 3) devoted to Agathon is justified if only because more is known about him, though not his work, than about any other of these “neglected authors.” The suggestion, however, that he might somehow have influenced Oscar Wilde carries little conviction. Chapter 4 on “Tragic Family Trees” is the most intriguing . Wright takes off in a different direction here, asking interesting questions about the possibility of theatrical dynasties in Athens. But some of the questions, though asked, can produce no proper answer, at least at this point in his argument. The reason for novel approaches is surely more to do with the need for innovation in the well-trodden path of Greek myth, which Wright later emphasizes for the fourth century BCE (121), than with the agonistic nature of theatrical production (92). A couple of passing references to Harold Bloom serve only to remind us how marginal his reading of the Greeks now seems. On the other hand, the detailed tracing of Carcinus, best known as a choreographer (or a comic butt) from the finale to Aristophanes ’ Wasps, identifies first his son, then his grandson, another Carcinus, as an important figure of the fourth century stage. The trouble is, and it is something of which Wright is clearly aware, what sense can you make tracing a dramatic tradition via plays that are not there? And none of them are. Most of the tragedians whose existence is recognized from fragments, quotations or didascaliae are at best ghostly presences represented, if they are lucky, by the odd speech of twenty or so lines without a context. And with dramatic dialogue context is everything. greek tragedy: lost plays and neglected authors 160 Imagine, for example, if nothing was left from Euripides’ Medea but the following: Oh, Jason, I’m sorry. Forgive me For what I said. I was angry . . . “What a fool you are, Medea,” I tell myself “To get upset with those who want to help . . .” (869–74) Even if aware of Euripides’ other work, might we not imagine from such lines in...

Thoughts on racial democratic education and moral virtue

The taking of Black life by state authorities is a long-standing tragic tradition in America. However, in recent years, instances of Black death have gained wider media attention. This is a potentially important teaching moment, especially as it regards moral virtue and racism. In this article, I argue that Blacks have been put through a kind of educational regimen on account of racism and that moral imagination is crucial to the development of Whites’ moral virtue. I conclude by suggesting that radicalism broadly construed needs to return as part of Blacks’ political sensibilities.

Liminal Gardens: Edenic Iconography and the Disruption of Sexual Difference in Tragedy

Societal fascination with and anxiety over the potential unfixing of essentialized, oppositional gender roles manifests itself at many different levels in early modern English drama. What Catherine Belsey labels “the tradition of female transvestism,” and its facilitation of staged, comedic, female usurpation of masculine authority, is noticeably absent from tragedy. This article proposes a tragic tradition employing Edenic iconography in connection with female gender-transgressive behavior. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus showcase the ways in which the unfixing of sexual disposition intersects in tragedy with the garden/bower as a physical setting, with Edenic/garden metaphor applied to and around the bodies of the plays’ female characters, and with an emphasis on perpetual and multilayered vulnerability to observation which, as in Eden, threatens patriarchal inheritance and ultimately results in death.

Dramatic Expression in Rameau’s Tragédie en Musique: Between Tradition and Enlightenment by Cynthia Verba (review)

Dramatic Expression in Tragedie en Musique : Between Tradition and Enlightenment. By Cynthia Verba. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2013. [xi, 327 p. ISBN 9781107021563 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781107302570 (e-book), $79.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliog- raphy, index.Admirers of Jean-Philippe Rameau are fortunate that the late-twentieth-century re- vival of his music, a revival that owes much to William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, has given rise also to equally flourishing scholarly literatures on both Rameau the and Rameau the theorist. With respect to the former, one thinks immedi- ately of such studies as Charles Dill's Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1998) and Downing Thomas's Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2002); the latter, of Thomas Christensen's Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1993) and Joel Lester's Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1992). Yet only rarely, in Brian Hyer's article 'Sighing branches': Proso- popoeia in Pigmalion, for in- stance, are these two literatures brought to- gether (Music Analysis 13, no. 1 [March 1994]: 7-50). The stated aim of Cynthia Verba's new book-to weave seamlessly back and forth between Rameau the theo- rist and Rameau the composer (p. ix)-is thus a most welcome departure from musi- cological business as usual.Verba starts, in her book's introductory chapter, with an extended series of binary oppositions: reason vs. feeling, vs. practice, tradition vs. innovation, masculine vs. feminine, vs. text. Indeed, this brief chapter covers so much conceptual ground in so few words that a reader might be forgiven for wondering just where the argument is headed. Chapters 2 and 3, though, narrow the scope to Verba's more immediate concerns: chapter 2 is devoted to Rameau's concept of musical expres- sion (p. 25); chapter 3 then cashes out this conceptual work with three sample analyses that in turn provide the templates for the more developed readings offered in chap- ters 5-7.Verba begins, in her second chapter, from the conviction that music has an ex- pressive capacity in its own right (p. 25), and she proceeds, drawing on both theoretical writings and his mu- sic (his theory and his practice), to ex- plain what, in her view, is the substance of this expressive capacity. The key theoretical text in this regard is Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, et sur son principe (Paris: Chez Prault fils, 1754), and in particular, that text's discussion of the affective implications of flat-ward and sharp-ward harmonic motions respectively, a discussion that comes immediately before the lengthy rebuttals to Rousseau's attacks on Armide that preoccupy Rameau for the remainder of that book. The passage is worth quoting in its entirety, not least since one irritation of Verba's study is its reti- cence about providing chapter and verse for the positions it imputes to Rameau. (One can sympathize, of course with the desire to keep citations to a minimum, es- pecially in a discipline as enamored of the footnote as academic musicology; still, while historians of will be able to supply the missing references, the book clearly aims at a wider readership):All these discoveries lead to observations that are all the more necessary because what follows depends upon them absolutely.If it were a question of comparisons here, would we not attribute to joy that crowd of descendants that the submulti- ples [roughly: the first five overtones] of- fer, whose existence is indicated by the resonance [of a sounding body]? It is precisely there, also, that the major third, the major mode, the sharp, the melody whose force redoubles in rising, and the dominant-the fifth above-have their source. …

Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition (review)

Reviewed by: Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition Robin Mitchell-Boyask Simon Goldhill and Edith Hall, eds. Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi + 336 pp. Cloth, $99. Just as Machiavelli argued that the successful ruler needs to be feared more than loved, one might say of modern academia that the truly successful scholar should be respected more than loved, though most of us would prefer to experience both. I doubt there is any figure in the study of Greek literature who has inspired more respect and love than the scholar to whom this volume is dedicated in honor, Pat Easterling. Indeed, I here openly acknowledge that I am a part of the group, well represented in this book, who has benefitted from Pat's advice and guidance, and I am thus somewhat relieved to be able to report that the collection as a whole is worthy of its object. The editors' introductory chapter, "Sophocles: the state of play," uses Jebb as a springboard to dive into the changes and trends in the study of Sophocles over the past century, balancing Jebb's idealistic but staid Victorianism, with its stress on aesthetic beauty against the darker impulses of the Elektra of Hofmannstahl (and Strauss). The influences of anthropology and psychology on the Viennese poet's vision of Sophoclean tragedy would set the stage for much scholarly thought in later decades. This essay is particularly valuable because it sets Sophoclean criticism in historical and theoretical contexts and self-consciously addresses the cyclical nature of scholarly trends, as it offers a stimulating assessment of the contributions of such scholars as Reinhardt, Kitto, Bowra, Knox, Winnington-Ingram, Vernant (and his colleagues), Segal, and Zeitlin. One would hope that this essay would be read by every graduate student seriously engaged in the study of tragedy. Particularly valuable is the authors' concern with how the tradition of Sophoclean criticism has been constructed (18-20). They identify four main areas of particular current ferment from this tradition: first, the relationship between tragic drama and Athenian democracy and how and to what extent tragedy is political; second, performance, especially performance in the city of Athens; third, [End Page 158] the nature of tragic language (of particular interest to Goldhill recently); fourth, a grab bag called again "tradition," but perhaps it should be more accurately labeled "reception." These areas then become the organizing structure of the rest of the volume. Part 1, "Between Audience and Actor," presents three chapters that examine the relationship between audience and the actors in Sophocles. This is the strongest and most coherent part of the book. Part 2, "Oedipus and the Play of Meaning," remains fascinating, especially with its persistent interest in Sophoclean ambiguity and ambivalence, but, as a unit it is not as tightly conceptually unified as part 1. Part 3, "Constructing Tragic Traditions," continues the topical broadening, and really is much more of a grab-bag than the editors allow; again, these are essays worth reading, but their insistence that this is still "Sophocles AND . . ." becomes rather strained. In part 1, Simon Goldhill ("The audience on stage: rhetoric, emotion, and judgement in Sophoclean theatre," 27-47) opens with his customary verve and argues that the Athenian audience member viewed the performances as a democratic citizen who participates in a collective act of deliberation with other spectators. Sophocles shapes and dramatizes this deliberation by staging scenes with an on-stage audience in which characters are observed by other characters, whose responses model the deliberations of the audience in the theater. Goldhill thus posits an audience response that is more emotionally detached, critical, and intellectual than is commonly thought. Next, Ismene Lada-Richards similarly examines metadrama in Sophocles ("'The players will tell all': the dramatist, the actors and the art of acting in Sophocles' Philoctetes," 48-68), although without Goldhill's political framework. Lada-Richards shows how the rebellion of Neoptolemus the actor against the part assigned to him in the drama staged by Odysseus reflects the increasing independence of theatrical actors late in the fifth century and the concomitant "dwindling authority of dramatist and text" (65). Lada-Richards makes a provocative, but ultimately convincing argument that the...

Simon Goldhill and Edith Hall, eds., Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition

109 BOOKREVIEWS Simon GOLDHILL and Edith HALL, eds., Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 336. Cloth,$99.00. ISBN978-0-521-88785-4. This Festschrift is a tribute to Pat Easterling’s contributions to the study of Greek tragedy and the history of its performance. It assembles essays written by leading scholars, many of whom testify to the profound influence of Pat Easterling both as a scholar and as a Mensch. Many Festschriften are characterized by sloppy editing and essays that are hastily thrown together. Not this one. Typographical errors are few and minor, and the essays are generally well conceived and cogently written—nothing less would passmuster as homage to Pat Easterling. The essays are divided into three parts. The first explores the relationship of actor and audience, and the ways in which this relationship reflects the political preoccupations(broadly conceived) of the Athenianpolis. The second offers four essays centered on the figure of Oedipus, while the last examines the development of the tragic genre in both ancient and modern contexts. The editors optimistically suggest a coherence to the offerings, especially in the dust jacket blurb, but any such attempt to tie these essays together is bound to be a stretch. Indeed, the variety of topics should be seen as a strength of this volume, not least because it is a fitting tribute to the range of Pat Easterling’s interests. Aeschylus and Euripides , Astydamas and Plutarch, Shakespeare and Yeats all enjoy their moment in the sun, and “the Greek Tragic Tradition” in the title is meant as a catch-all phrase to encompass the many pages that have little or nothing to do with Sophocles . In the first chapter (“Sophocles: the state of play,” pp. 1–24), SimonGoldhill and Edith Hall introduce the volume as a whole by assessing how scholarly interests have developed over the last century or so. They choose Jebb and his 1900 edition of Antigone as a watershed for contrasting what went before (Victorian idealism and obsession with the beauty of tragedy) with what followed (already in 1903 we have Hofmannsthal’s dark and violent interpretation of Electra). What makes this overview particularly valuable is the attempt to place individual oeuvres into their wider cultural and intellectual context—by tracing for exam- 110 BOOK REVIEWS ple, the influences of anthropology, psychology, and new theories about dance and ritual on Hofmannsthal, and noting the challenge these new interpretations presented to the privileged position of Greek culture as the intellectual ancestor of Western civilization. The chapter offers a provocative discussion of the intellectual pedigree and contributions of scholars such as Reinhardt, Kitto, Bowra, Knox, Winnington-Ingram, Vernant, Vidal-Naquet, Segal, Zeitlin, Foley, and Loraux, and acknowledges the recent explosion in performance of Greek tragedy (more expansive treatment of this important area would have been welcome). It also makes broader observations about how continuity and change occur in scholarly trends—the degree, for example, to which lag plays a part, with critics writing against the backdrop of the previous generation’s work (a lag, of course, that is also evident inthe approaches taken in this volume). The chapterthenlays out four areas in which Sophoclean scholarship is currently engaged: (i) the political sphere (how political/how Athenian is tragedy?); (ii) performance studies, which have now moved from purely practical/dramaturgical considerations to cultural dimensions of performance, including other sites of “performance” in the city; (iii) the language of tragedy (especially its ambiguity); and (iv) the performance history of plays, both in ancient and modern times. These four areas, not coincidentally,are the primary focus of the present volume. Part One: Between Audience and Actor Simon Goldhill (Chapter 2, “The audience on stage: rhetoric, emotion, and judgement in Sophoclean theatre,” pp. 27–47) makes an ambitious attempt to develop a theory of the audience that can account for democracy’s belief in the collective deliberative ability of citizens. He examines how Sophocles dramatizes the process of being (in) an audience through the dramatic device of creating an on-stage audience (beyond the chorus, which serves continuously in this capacity , offering a helpful alternative model to the “chorus as sounding...

The Metamorphosis of the Tragic Hero - The Classical Period

When one takes an overview of the tragic tradition from Aristotle to the present. It is clear that tragedy has undergone changes in definition and practice over the years. In the light of this, the study tries to show the diversity of the tragic conception, its continuity, and major deviations from the classical order to the modern period. Sophocles, the Greek tragedian, looked at the tragic hero in the context of the fundamental Greek concept of law, crime and punishment. To Aristotle, however, the concept of hamartia is crucial to tragedy. Consequently, Greek tragedy focuses on the action and plot and not on character, and this is crucial to the definition of the concept of the tragic hero.The subsequent publications will look at the tragic hero in terms of the Renaissance, Neo-Classical and the Modern periods. This is crucial, because these periods clearly show a metamorphosis of the tragic hero from this clerical order.

Thinking Responsibility Differently: Reconciliation and the Tragedy of Colonisation

This paper explores the limits of conventional legal understandings of responsibility as a means of dealing with the legacies of colonisation of Australia. It suggests that the overriding focus upon ‘moral agency’ in contemporary legal and historical debates may actually restrict or derail the institution of reconciliation as a tool of justice. I suggest that the tragic tradition can enrich or extend our understanding of the reconciliation process, firstly by sponsoring a concept of responsibility that does not take its bearings from the purposes or intentions of the agent and, secondly, by establishing a connection between our spectatorship on the events of the past and the education of compassion.

Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition, and: English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane (review)

Reviewed by: Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition, and: English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane William Weber Charles Dill. Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Pp. xx + 197. $39.95 cloth. Jane Girdham. English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Pp. xiv + 272. $89.00 cloth. These two studies have more in common than one might suppose. Rameau and Storace may seem apples and oranges, but Charles Gill and Jane Girdham each studies an opera composer in reference to larger social contexts, and generally to good effect. And they both approach the music in intelligent critical terms, trying to establish what was better and worse in the musician’s work. Charles Dill’s Monstrous Opera is a broad, original, and very interesting work. Its main goal is to study the relationship of Jean-Philippe Rameau to his public, starting from Jeffrey Kallberg’s conceptualization of the contract between composer and listeners. “What makes Rameau’s operas significant is at least in part that they serve as a ground upon which the composer [End Page 157] and his audiences contested the issues related to authorship” (xv). He begins with the puzzle of what Rameau’s omission of recitative from the edition of Les Indes Galantes had to do with his interaction with the public; he ends up concluding that, “however entertaining it might have been, Rameau’s work represented the failure of the generic contract between composer and public, the failure of the circuit through which artist and audience communicated” (138). Dill’s argument is that Rameau began his work on tragédie en musique with a dramatic approach that went far beyond its origins in the productions of Jean-Baptiste Lully and that challenged his audiences to listen on an unusually serious plane. But when he made revisions to these works he drew back from that goal, providing either simple word painting or light divertissement. Dill quotes Friedrich Melchior Grimm in arguing that the 1756 version of the 1748 Zoroastre amounted to a “trivialization” of the story by Cahusac (119). What that involved was the tension between music and poetry in the French context, the pressures to keep music in a subservient position to the drama. Dill makes a lucid discussion of the problem, showing the complexities by which Voltaire approached opera. The problem with this thesis, however, is that it draws a terribly exaggerated dichotomy between tragedy and what Dill persists in calling mere “entertainment.” In using that term he draws upon the extreme cultural values of our massified society; he makes Rameau’s revised scores serve virtually as background music. He does not go so far as to say that people did not listen, and indeed illustrates the vitality of the audience’s engagement with what it heard. But he fails to grasp how vague and contradictory eighteenth-century people were in defining the more casual or serious genres and cultural experiences. Dill neglects to draw upon work by historians on the public, indeed the public sphere. My article on revivals of old works at the Opera, for example, published in the Journal of Modern History in 1984 (not cited), shows that after the 1750s Rameau’s works were performed far more impressively than he suggests. Nor are any of the important publications by the musicologist Elisabeth Bartlet named. Jane Girdham makes a marvelous contribution in studying the career in the London theatre made by Stephen Storace, a still much too little-known composer of significance. She does not approach her subject with quite the imagination that Charles Dill displays, but she accomplishes her tasks with great care and discernment. She starts from the premise that composing for the musical theater was by definition a collective effort for which one cannot ask too much idealism. She defines nicely just how Storace conducted his business, with whom, and under what practical circumstances. The book is a handy guide to the important details one might want to know about how English opera institutions operated. One of the more current issues Girdham takes up is borrowing—how Storace inserted...

Review: Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition by Charles Dill

Review: Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition by Charles Dill

Euripides and the Tragic Tradition

Euripides and the Tragic Tradition

Euripides and the Tragic Tradition

Euripides and the Tragic Tradition

Duerrenmatt's Physicists And The Tragic Tradition

THE QUESTION OF GENRE IN A DRAMA BY Duerrenmatt is problematic, and the most cursory glance into the corpus of Duerrenmatt-criticism brings to light a variety of generic possibilities. The title of a recent study of The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, for example-“Tragic Elements of a Duerrenmatt Comedy"-is significant in that it indicates the fusion of the two extremes of dramatic composition. The Physicists, which is again styled a comedy by its author, represents a converse of this formulation. The thesis proposed in this article is that The Physicists may not only be termed a tragedy in the full sense, but further, may even be seen in some respects as representing a final stage in the tragic tradition.