In little of the formal drama between the time of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov and the present are the full dimensions of tragedy presented. Some critics suggested that it was too late for tragedy, that modern man no longer valued himself highly enough, that too many sociological and ideological factors were working against the tragic temperament. The long and successful career of Eugene O’Neill may be a partial answer to this criticism. He has been called the first American to succeed in writing tragedy for the theatre, a fulfillment of his avowed purpose, for he had declared that in the tragic, alone, lay the meaning of life—and the hope. He sought in Freud’s concept of the subconscious the equivalent of the Greek idea of fate and modelled his great trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), on Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Although the hovering sense of an ancient evil is powerful, the psychological conditioning controls the characters too nakedly. They themselves declare forces that determine their behaviour, so that they seem almost to connive in their own manipulation. Desire Under the Elms (1924) presents a harsh analysis of decadence in the sexual and avaricious intrigues of a New England farmer’s family, unrelieved by manifestations of the transcendent human spirit. The Great God Brown (1926) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939–41; first performance, 1956) come closer to true tragedy. In the latter, the capacity for self-knowledge is demonstrated by each member of the wrangling Tyrone family (actually, O’Neill’s own; the play is frankly autobiographical). The insistent theme of the “death wish” (another example of Freud’s influence), however, indicates too radical a pessimism for tragedy; even the character of Edmund Tyrone, O’Neill’s own counterpart, confesses that he has always been a little in love with death, and in another late play, The Iceman Cometh (1939), the death wish is more strongly expressed. Although he never succeeded in establishing a tragic theatre comparable to the great theatres of the past, O’Neill made a significant contribution in his sustained concentration on subjects at least worthy of such a theatre. He made possible the significant, if slighter, contributions of Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman (1949) and A View from the Bridge

 

The questions of how and why tragedy came into being and of the bearing of its origins on its development in subsequent ages and cultures have been investigated by historians, philologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists with results that are suggestive but conjectural. Even the etymology of the word tragedy is far from established. The most generally accepted source is the Greek tragōidia, or “goat-song,” from tragos (“goat”) and aeidein (“to sing”). The word could have referred either to the prize, a goat, that was awarded to the dramatists whose plays won the earliest competitions or to the dress (goat skins) of the performers, or to the goat that was sacrificed in the primitive rituals from which tragedy developed.

In these communal celebrations, a choric dance may have been the first formal element and perhaps for centuries was the principal element. A speaker was later introduced into the ritual, in all likelihood as an extension of the role of the priest, and dialogue was established between him and the dancers, who became the chorus in the Athenian drama. Aeschylus is usually regarded as the one who, realizing the dramatic possibilities of the dialogue, first added a second speaker and thus invented the form of tragedy. That so sophisticated a form could have been fully developed by a single artist, however, is scarcely credible. Hundreds of early tragedies have been lost, including some by Aeschylus himself. Of some 90 plays attributed to him, only seven have survived.

Four Dionysia, or feasts of the Greek God Dionysus, were held annually in Athens. Since Dionysus once held place as the god of vegetation and the vine, and the goat was believed sacred to him, it has been conjectured that tragedy originated in fertility feasts to commemorate the harvest and the vintage and the associated ideas of the death and renewal of life. The purpose of such rituals is to exercise some influence over these vital forces. Whatever the original religious connections of tragedy may have been, two elements have never entirely been lost: (1) its high seriousness, befitting matters in which survival is at issue and (2) its involvement of the entire community in matters of ultimate and common concern. When either of these elements diminishes, when the form is overmixed with satiric, comic, or sentimental elements, or when the theatre of concern succumbs to the theatre of entertainment, then tragedy falls from its high estate and is on its way to becoming something else.

As the Greeks developed it, the tragic form, more than any other, raised questions about man’s existence. Why must man suffer? Why must man be forever torn between the seeming irreconcilables of good and evil, freedom and necessity, truth and deceit? Are the causes of his suffering outside himself, in blind chance, in the evil designs of others, in the malice of the gods? Are its causes within him, and does he bring suffering upon himself through arrogance, infatuation, or the tendency to overreach himself? Why is justice so elusive?

 

In little of the formal drama between the time of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov and the present are the full dimensions of tragedy presented. Some critics suggested that it was too late for tragedy, that modern man no longer valued himself highly enough, that too many sociological and ideological factors were working against the tragic temperament. The long and successful career of Eugene O’Neill may be a partial answer to this criticism. He has been called the first American to succeed in writing tragedy for the theatre, a fulfillment of his avowed purpose, for he had declared that in the tragic, alone, lay the meaning of life—and the hope. He sought in Freud’s concept of the subconscious the equivalent of the Greek idea of fate and modelled his great trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), on Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Although the hovering sense of an ancient evil is powerful, the psychological conditioning controls the characters too nakedly. They themselves declare forces that determine their behaviour, so that they seem almost to connive in their own manipulation. Desire Under the Elms (1924) presents a harsh analysis of decadence in the sexual and avaricious intrigues of a New England farmer’s family, unrelieved by manifestations of the transcendent human spirit. The Great God Brown (1926) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939–41; first performance, 1956) come closer to true tragedy. In the latter, the capacity for self-knowledge is demonstrated by each member of the wrangling Tyrone family (actually, O’Neill’s own; the play is frankly autobiographical). The insistent theme of the “death wish” (another example of Freud’s influence), however, indicates too radical a pessimism for tragedy; even the character of Edmund Tyrone, O’Neill’s own counterpart, confesses that he has always been a little in love with death, and in another late play, The Iceman Cometh (1939), the death wish is more strongly expressed. Although he never succeeded in establishing a tragic theatre comparable to the great theatres of the past, O’Neill made a significant contribution in his sustained concentration on subjects at least worthy of such a theatre. He made possible the significant, if slighter, contributions of Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman (1949) and A View from the Bridge (1955) contain material of tragic potential that is not fully realized. Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is a sensitive study of the breakdown of a character under social and psychological stress. As with Miller’s plays, however, it remains in the area of pathos rather than tragedy.

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), the immensely influential German philospher, in his Aesthetik (1820–29), proposed that the sufferings of the tragic hero are merely a means of reconciling opposing moral claims. The operation is a success because of, not in spite of, the fact that the patient dies. According to Hegel’s account of Greek tragedy, the conflict is not between good and evil but between goods that are each making too exclusive a claim. The heroes of ancient tragedy, by adhering to the one ethical system by which they molded their own personality, must come into conflict with the ethical claims of another. It is the moral one-sidedness of the tragic actor, not any negatively tragic fault in his morality or in the forces opposed to him, that proves his undoing, for both sides of the contradiction, if taken by themselves, are justified.

The nuclear Greek tragedy for Hegel is, understandably, Sophocles’ Antigone, with its conflict between the valid claims of conscience (Antigone’s obligation to give her brother a suitable burial) and law (King Creon’s edict that enemies of the state should not be allowed burial). The two claims represent what Hegel regards as essentially concordant ethical claims. Antigone and Creon are, in this view, rather like pawns in the Hegelian dialectic—his theory that thought progresses from a thesis (i.e., an idea), through an antithesis (an idea opposing the original thesis), to a synthesis (a more comprehensive idea that embraces both the thesis and antithesis), which in turn becomes the thesis in a further progression. At the end of Antigone, something of the sense of mutually appeased, if not concordant, forces does obtain after Antigone’s suicide and the destruction of Creon’s family. Thus, in contrast to Aristotle’s statement that the tragic actors should represent not an extreme of good or evil but something between, Hegel would have them too good to live; that is, too extreme an embodiment of a particular good to survive in the world. He also tends to dismiss other traditional categories of tragic theory. For instance, he prefers his own kind of catharsis to Aristotle’s—the feeling of reconciliation.

Hegel’s emphasis on the correction of moral imbalances in tragedy is reminiscent of the “poetic justice” of Neoclassical theory, with its similar dialectic of crime and punishment. He sounds remarkably like Racine when he claims that, in the tragic denouement, the necessity of all that has been experienced by particular individuals is seen to be in complete accord with reason and is harmonized on a true ethical basis. But where the Neoclassicists were preoccupied with the unities of time and place, Hegel’s concerns, like those of other Romantics, are inward. For him, the final issue of tragedy is not the misfortune and suffering of the tragic antagonists but rather the satisfaction of spirit arising from “reconciliation.” Thus, the workings of the spirit, in Hegel’s view, are subject to the rationalistic universal laws.

Hegel’s system is not applicable to Shakespearean or Romantic tragedy. Such Shakespearean heroes as Macbeth, Richard III, and Mark Antony cannot be regarded as embodiments of any transcendent good. They behave as they do, says Hegel, now speaking outside of his scheme of tragedy, simply because they are the kind of men they are. In a statement pointing up the essence of uninhibited romantic lust and willfulness Hegel said: “it is the inner experience of their heart and individual emotion, or the particular qualities of their personality, which insist on satisfaction.”

The traditional categories of tragedy are nearly destroyed in the deepened subjectivities of Romanticism of the 19th-century German philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer and his disciple Friedrich Nietzsche. In Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The World as Will and Idea), much more than the social or ethical order is upturned. In place of God, the good, reason, soul, or heart, Schopenhauer installs the will, as reality’s true inner nature, the metaphysical to everything physical in the world. In Schopenhauer, there is no question of a Hegelian struggle to achieve a more comprehensive good. There is rather the strife of will with itself, manifested by fate in the form of chance and error and by the tragic personages themselves. Both fate and men represent one and the same will, which lives and appears in them all. Its individual manifestations, however, in the form of such phenomena as chances, errors, or men, fight against and destroy each other.

Schopenhauer accordingly rejects the idea of poetic justice: “the demand for so-called poetical justice rests on entire misconception of the nature of tragedy, and, indeed, of the nature of the world itself . . . . The true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight, that it is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin, i.e., the crime of existence itself. . . .” Schopenhauer distinguishes three types of tragic representation: (1) “by means of a character of extraordinary wickedness . . . who becomes the author of the misfortune”; (2) “blind fate—i.e., chance and error” (such as the title characters in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and “most of the tragedies of the ancients”); and (3) when “characters of ordinary morality . . . are so situated with regard to each other that their position compels them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do each other the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong” (such as, “to a certain extent,” Hamlet).

This last kind of tragedy seems to Schopenhauer far to surpass the other two. His reason, almost too grim to record, is that it provides the widest possible play to the destructive manifestations of the will. It brings tragedy, so to speak, closest to home.

Schopenhauer finds tragedy to be the summit of poetical art, because of the greatness of its effect and the difficulty of its achievement. According to Schopenhauer, the egoism of the protagonist is purified by suffering almost to the purity of nihilism. His personal motives become dispersed as his insight into them grows; “the complete knowledge of the nature of the world, which has a quieting effect on the will, produces resignation, the surrender not merely of life, but of the very will to live.”

Schopenhauer’s description has limited application to tragic denouements in general. In the case of his own archetypal hero, the hero’s end seems merely the mirror image of his career, an oblivion of resignation or death that follows an oblivion of violence. Instead of a dialogue between higher and lower worlds of morality or feeling (which take place even in Shakespeare’s darkest plays), Schopenhauer posits a succession of states as helpless in knowledge as in blindness. His “will” becomes a synonym for all that is possessed and necessity-ridden.

Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872) was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer. The two elements of tragedy, says Nietzsche, are the Apollonian (related to the Greek god Apollo, here used as a symbol of measured restraint) and the Dionysian (from Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy). His conception of the Apollonian is the equivalent of what Schopenhauer called the individual phenomenon—the particular chance, error, or man, the individuality of which is merely a mask for the essential truth of reality which it conceals. The Dionysian element is a sense of universal reality, which, according to Schopenhauer, is experienced after the loss of individual egoism. The “Dionysian ecstasy,” as defined by Nietzsche, is experienced “not as individuals but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united.”

Nietzsche dismisses out of hand one of the most venerable features of the criticism of tragedy, the attempt to reconcile the claims of ethics and art. He says that the events of a tragedy are “supposed” to discharge pity and fear and are “supposed” to elevate and inspire by the triumph of noble principles at the sacrifice of the hero. But art, he says, must demand purity within its own sphere. To explain tragic myth, the first requirement is to seek the pleasure that is peculiar to it in the purely aesthetic sphere, without bringing in pity, fear, or the morally sublime.

The essence of this specifically aesthetic tragic effect is that it both reveals and conceals, causing both pain and joy. The drama’s exhibition of the phenomena of suffering individuals (Apollonian elements) forces upon the audience “the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena,” which in turn communicates “the exuberant fertility of the universal.” The spectators then “become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and . . . we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy.” Thus, he says, there is a desire “to see tragedy and at the same time to get beyond all seeing . . . to hear and at the same time long to get beyond all hearing.”

The inspired force of Nietzsche’s vision is mingled with a sense of nihilism:

“only after the spirit of science has been pursued to its limits, . . . may we hope for a rebirth of tragedy . . . I understand by the spirit of science the faith that first came to light in the person of Socrates—the faith in the explicability of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.”

 

Nietzsche would replace the spirit of science with a conception of existence and the world as an aesthetic phenomenon and justified only as such. Tragedy would enjoy a prominent propagandistic place. It is “precisely the tragic myth that has to convince us that even the ugly and disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself.” And, consummately: “we have art in order that we may not perish through truth.”

Musical dissonance was Nietzsche’s model for the double effect of tragedy. The first edition of his book was titled The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, another influence from Schopenhauer, for whom music differed from all the other arts in that it is not a copy of a phenomenon but the direct copy of the will itself. He even called the world “embodied music , . . . embodied will.” Nietzsche’s theorizing on the relation of the tragic theme to art forms other than the drama was in fact confirmed in such operas as Mussorgsky’s version of Pushkin’s tragedy Boris Godunov, Verdi’s of Macbeth and Othello, and Gounod’s Faust. In contrast to these resettings of received forms, Wagner, Verdi, and Bizet achieved a new kind of tragic power for Romanticism in the theme of the operatic love-death in, respectively, Tristan and Isolde, Aida, and Carmen. Thus, the previous progression of the genre from tragedy to tragicomedy to romantic tragedy continued to a literary–musical embodiment of what Nietzsche called “tragic dithyrambs.”

An earlier prophecy than Nietzsche’s regarding tragedy and opera was made by the German poet Friedrich von Schiller in a letter of 1797 to Goethe:

I have always trusted that out of opera, as out of the choruses of the ancient festival of Bacchus, tragedy would liberate itself and develop in a nobler form. In opera, servile imitation of nature is dispensed with . . . here is . . . the avenue by which the ideal can steal its way back into the theatre.

 

In the 20th century, discussion of tragedy was sporadic until the aftermath of World War II. Then it enjoyed new vigour, perhaps to compensate for, or help explain, the dearth of genuine tragic literature, either in the novel or in the theatre. In the 1950s and 1960s countless full-length studies, articles, and monographs variously sought the essence, the vision, the view of life, or the spirit of tragedy out of a concern for the vital culture loss were the death of tragedy to become a reality. They also attempted to mediate the meaning of tragedy to a public that was denied its reality, save in revivals or an occasional approximation. Since the Romantic critics first ventured beyond the Aristotelean categories to consider tragedy, or the tragic, as a sense of life, there was an increasing tendency to regard tragedy not merely as drama but as a philosophical form. It is noteworthy that the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s influential book, The Tragic Sense of Life (1921), barely mentions the formal drama.

From the time of Aristotle, tragedy has achieved importance primarily as a medium of self-discovery—the discovery of man’s place in the universe and in society. That is the main concern of Aristotle in his statements about reversal, recognition, and catharsis, though it remained for the Romantic critics to point it out. The loss of this concern in the facile plays of the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in the reduction of tragic mystery to confused sentimentalism. Critics of the 20th century, being less certain even than Schopenhauer or Nietzsche of what man’s place in the scheme of things may be, experimented with a variety of critical approaches, just as contemporary dramatists experimented with various “theatres.” Although these critics lacked the philosophical certainties of earlier theorists, they had a richer variety of cultures and genres to instruct them. The hope of both critics and dramatists was that this multiplicity would produce not mere impressionism or haphazard eclecticism but new form and new meaning.