Tragedy

2. From Aristotle to Rome

Aristotle’s Poetics (c.mid-4th century bce) is probably the single most influential work on tragedy ever written (see Aristotle §29). In contrast to Plato, Aristotle advances the view that writing tragedy is a rational activity that requires understanding the function of tragedy and the principles that ensure that its function is fulfilled. He also argues that some pleasures gained from tragedy derive from learning about the things imitated, and hence that it has cognitive value.

Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy at the beginning of chapter six of the Poetics differentiates it from other types of imitation (painting, music, dithyramb, epic, comedy):‘Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and possessing magnitude; in embellished language;... in the mode of action and not narrated; and effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions’(1449b24–28). It is clear that plot is the most important part of tragedy: chapters 7 to 12 are devoted entirely, and other chapters in part, to a discussion of it. He writes that the most effective plots, those best able to evoke the tragic emotions of pity and fear, are complex in a specific way: they involve a reversal of fortune and recognition on the part of protagonists of the tragic significance of their actions. He offers Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as the paradigm case of a tragedy having this sort of plot.

As Aristotle explains in his Rhetoric (c. mid-4th century bce), we pity someone who suffers undeserved misfortune, and we fear what is dangerous. A tragic character must be presented as a better person than most, so that his suffering will be seen as undeserved and hence pitiable, even though the suffering comes about because the protagonist makes some kind of mistake or error in judgment (hamartia) (though there is a now largely discarded tradition that takes hamartia to be a character flaw rather than a mistake). Aristotle allows that tragedies can have happy endings on the grounds that the threat of suffering is capable of generating the ‘tragic emotions’, even when the suffering itself is avoided.

The end or purpose (telos) of tragedy is essential to both its nature and its value, but there is considerable controversy about what Aristotle takes the telos of tragedy to be. One view is that producing pity and fear is the end of tragedy, and that catharsis is a potential benefit but not part of its proper function. But the most widespread view is that the end of tragedy is the pleasure from the catharsis that is produced by experiencing pity and fear (see Katharsis). Unfortunately, the passage quoted above contains the Poetics’ only occurrence of katharsis in the relevant sense and no explanation of what it means. Aristotle elsewhere uses katharsis in a medical sense, to refer to a useful type of purging that is induced homeopathically, that is, by applying the very type of thing one wishes to be rid of. On this view, our pity and fear in response to tragedy purge us of the harmful effects of like emotions in ourselves. Catharsis is also interpreted more intellectually as a way of clarifying one’s knowledge of the proper objects of such emotions, that is, of what is genuinely pitiable or fearful, and also as enhancing one’s moral virtue by making one more disposed to respond appropriately to events that occur in the world. In all of these cases, catharsis can be seen as producing a type of pleasure that is the end of tragedy.

A more ‘aestheticist’ interpretation takes Aristotle to be the first theorist to develop an account of tragedy as art in a modern sense. On this view, the construction of a particular type of plot is the end of tragedy, and our perception of it, rather than the pity and fear felt in response to it, is a source of pleasure. Others propose an epistemic or educational function for plots, emphasizing Aristotle’s claim that tragedy is more philosophical than history because it is more ‘universal’. The plot of a tragedy has a unity that history lacks: it is an imitation or mimesis of a single, unified action, and not merely of a sequence of actions superficially connected, for example, by the fact that they are all performed by the same person. Some scholars advance the view that unity of action depends on the likelihood that the individual actions would all be performed by someone with the relevant character traits.

Tragedies were written during Roman times, notably by the Roman Stoic politician and philosopher Seneca. They are filled with rhetorical conceits, and are now generally held to be affected, sentimental and bombastic. Nevertheless, they had important influence on the later course of tragedy. Horace’s Ars Poetica proposes that poetry (including tragedy) is utile dulce, ‘delightful instruction’, a form of rhetoric that is styled to give both pleasure and moral instruction, two themes that pervade theorizing about the genre.