Tragedy

4. England

The tragedies of William Shakespeare are hallmarks of the genre. In a major break from both Greek and Roman tragedy, and from the morality plays of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare’s plays explore the psychology and actions of individuals, rather than general character types. His tragedies contain extended comic scenes that some theorists attacked virulently as an inappropriate mixing of genres. Writing and acting were still male preserves, and women did not act female roles in England until the Restoration.

In the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer offered a famous definition of tragedy in The Monk’s Tale as a story of one who falls from prosperity into misery so that we are taught not to trust our temporary good fortune. Sir Philip Sidney (An Apology for Poetry, 1595) argues that emotional responses to tragedy are morally useful because they move viewers to want to know and do what is good. He holds that the admiration and commiseration felt by ordinary citizens teach them about the uncertainties of this world, but that only royal spectators feel fear.

One recurrent topic of speculation among English theorists is the so-called paradox of tragedy: how and why do we enjoy being moved by scenes of pity, fear, suffering, and distress, which are so unpleasant in themselves? Thomas Hobbes, a psychological egoist, suggests that the pleasure is of the thank-God-it’s-not-me variety: the suffering of the tragic hero makes spectators appreciate their own relative security and comfort. Thomas Rymer (1693) developed the concept of ‘poetic justice’, which requires that the plot must provide a clear moral lesson, and he holds that pleasure arises from the moral appreciation of seeing poetic justice take place.

David Hume’s essay ‘Of Tragedy’ (1757) attempts to explain‘the unaccountable pleasure... [we] receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy’. He recognizes some value in the observation of L’Abbé Du Bos that simply being dislodged from listlessness is itself pleasurable, and in Fontenelle’s idea that the sorrows of the theatre are softened by our recognizing ‘it is nothing but a fiction’. He adds that the eloquence of the poet pleases us and that all imitations please in themselves, so that these new passions predominate over and ‘convert’ the unpleasant ones. Hume’s view is not moralistic, though he asserts that conflicts between our own morality and the morality expressed in the play, and the sight of horrific violence (such as being‘besmear[ed] all over with mingled brains and gore’), can prevent us from being pleased by it (see Hume, D.; Emotion in response to art §5).