Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 23
In Aristotle’s prime example, Oedipus, king of
Thebes, realizing that his city is suffering from the
plague because the killer of the late King Laius is still
on the loose, vows to find and destroy him. Soon, however,
Oedipus discovers that he himself, being impulsive
by nature (his fundamental flaw), had killed Laius
some years ago, thinking him a stranger he ran into at
a crossroads. He then finds out (his self-recognition)
that Laius was also his father, whom he had never met,
and that by marrying Laius’s widow Jocasta, he had
married his own mother. Jocasta kills herself at this
discovery. Wracked with shame, Oedipus plucks out
his eyes with brooches pulled from her gown, thus
precipitating the emotional release—the catharsis—of
the audience.
Struggle, self-recognition, and catharsis are central to
tragic drama, elevating the genre above mere sadness or
sentimentality. The eighteenth-century philosopher David
Hume proposed that tragedy must differentiate itself from
the everyday violence of the world by producing a kind
of beauty. This seems like a paradox: how can something
so miserable also be beautiful? But this paradox is at the
heart of what makes tragedy such an esteemed form of art.
Tragedy cannot simply be sad or terrifying; it is neither
pathetic nor maudlin. Instead, it focuses on greatness. By
involving a bold, aggressive, heroic attack against huge,
perhaps insurmountable, odds, tragedy is both recognizably
human and larger than life. Tragic protagonists
(Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear) are always flawed
in some way, but they are heroes, not victims. Their instigation
of the play’s action and their discoveries during its
course bring the audience to deep emotional and intellectual
involvement at the play’s climax—and then great
relief at its conclusion.
The notion of protagonist (Greek: “carrier of the
action”) is complemented by the notion of antagonist
(“opposer of the action”), which gives tragedy its
fundamental conflict and character struggle. Tragic
protagonists go forth against superhuman antagonists—
gods, ghosts, fate—and their struggle, though doomed,
takes on larger-than-life proportions. Through the heat of
such conflict, they assume superhuman force and offer
the audience a link outwardly to divine mysteries—or
inwardly to the unconscious mind. The goal of tragedy
is therefore to ennoble, not sadden, us. The tragic heroes
we admire will fall, but not before they heroically challenge
the universe. They carry us to the brink of disaster,
but it is their disaster, not ours—at least, not yet. Experiencing
a tragedy allows us to contemplate and rehearse
in our own minds the great conflicts that may await us.
Shakespeare took Sophocles’ blinding motif one step further in his
tragedy of King Lear, some two thousand years later, in which Lear’s
friend, the Duke of Gloucester, is brutally blinded onstage by Lear’s
daughter and her husband. Here, Japanese actor Kazunori Akitaya
plays the blinded Gloucester in a stylized Japanese production by the
Globe Theatre of Tokyo. © Robbie Jack/Historical/Corbis
Can a modern play be termed a tragedy? Playwright
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1947) —whose
protagonist, an ordinary American salesman, commits
suicide after realizing he has failed to fulfill his familial
obligations—has often been considered an attempt
at tragedy. Miller named his protagonist “Willy Loman”
(i.e., low man) to challenge the classical idea that a protagonist
must be of high rank. The title of one of Miller’s
most famous essays makes this point clearly: “Tragedy
and the Common Man.” The antagonists Willy faces in
the play are not gods but faceless bureaucrats, insensitive
children, and an impersonal capitalistic economic
system.
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