Aristoteles’ Poetics (c. 335 BCE) is an interesting work for a number of reasons. Here, he represents and discusses the main traits of tragedy, but he does so using terminology which is never sufficiently explained. This, as you might imagine, has led to a great deal of discussion and speculation. Scholars don’t even agree about whether the Poetics should be read as prescriptive or descriptive, that is, as a rule-book for, or a guidebook to, poetry, tragedy and so on.
In general terms, however, it is possible draw out some of the main points from what Aristotle said about tragedy.
Story and events
According to Aristotle, a tragedy should have a certain shape. There should be a main character, a protagonist or ‘tragic hero’, who makes some sort of mistake and, being blind to the consequences of their actions, they meet some sort of untimely end. This does not mean they have to die, but the ending should be unhappy in some way or other. The key moment in the play is the turning point when the hero finally realises the nature of their mistake and the blindness ends.
What is important to understand here is that an unhappy ending in itself does not make a tragedy. The whole structure described above needs to be in place for it to be a proper tragedy, or so Aristotle claims. And the people in the drama are important as well.
Characters
The main character of a tragedy should be someone of high birth (often royalty or at least a nobleman or noblewoman) whose circumstances are very good, but who plummets from high to low in the course of the tragedy, due to their mistakes and inability to see things for what they are. The tragic hero should be someone the audience sympathises with, because we need to be moved by their downfall in order to experience the heft of the tragedy’s moral purpose. Tragedies are about societal ethics and are supposed to teach us something. Therefore, we must feel sympathy for the tragic hero.
We get to feel sympathy for the hero, because they are often unlucky and not favoured by the gods. Moreover, in tragedies, the hero is not someone who is morally flawed – that is not what is meant by tragic flaw. Instead, she or he has overlooked something important. This is not always something they could have been in a position to know about in the first place. Oedipus, in Oedipus Rex, really had no way of knowing that he had killed his father and married his mother.
Catharsis
This endlessly debated word is never explained by Aristotle, but he presents it as the ultimate design of a tragedy. It has been variably translated as cleansing, purification or some sort of intellectual-philosophical clarification. The exact translation and sense is not important as long as we understand that to witness a tragedy is to have some sort of powerful emotional experience that enables us to understand something about life, society and human beings. A tragedy is supposed to arouse feelings of fear and pity, and through these feelings we may experience catharsis, whatever it is. The moral purpose of catharsis, then, is not to accuse a weak, evil, compromised hero, but to investigate what they do rather than what kinds of inborn qualities they might have. For Oedipus, what defines him as a man is what he does after the crisis of the play: he blinds himself as an act of self-punishing redemption.
Unities of time and place
Even though classical Greek plays were not realistic per se, it was for some reason considered implausible that the action of a play could take place over several weeks, months or years or in multiple locations. The convention, therefore, was that a play, be it a tragedy or a comedy or a play in some other genre, had to take place in one single location (often a central, public space in a city) over the course of not much longer than one day, preferably less. The action would be quite condensed and external information would be conveyed by the chorus (see the section on speeches) and messengers, bringing in news from afar.
Tragedy, then, is a genre which is described in some detail by Aristotle, and which has had a very long cultural history in a number of forms and media since his times, and which has, inevitably, changed and transformed through the centuries, though it has retained a connection with the Ancient Greek world whence it came. Comedy, on the other hand, is a genre we know less about, even though it too has endured with at least as much success as tragedy, if not more.
Next: Comedy