Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan Jizzakh state pedagogical institute English Faculty

1.2 The types of tragedy

Tragedy - Tragic plays normally focus on misfortunes surrounding a hero, usually the protagonist, and often a flawed one. Tragedies typically include serious subject matter or themes, and sometimes end in the downfall or death of one or more characters. Greek Tragedy -Ancient Greek tragedies typically consisted of a protagonist of high rank who makes an error of judgement (flawed) and accepts his fall from grace. Other important elements include Gods, mythology, conflict, suffering and catharsis. The great Greek tragedians were Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex is often considered the perfect tragedy. Roman Tragedy - While many Greek tragedies were still being performed during Roman times, few genuine Roman tragedies survive. Those that have survived are mostly adaptations of Greek tragedies. Nine plays written by Roman philosopher Seneca survive today, some of which are considered revenge tragedies, adopted by Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy - Elizabethan tragedies (not all written by William Shakespeare) often include protagonists of high status (nobility, military rank, etc.) who are flawed, encounter a reversal of fortune and (usually) die at play’s end. Jacobean tragedies are mostly characterised as being revenge tragedies (see below). Revenge Tragedy Revenge tragedies are dramatic works in which one character seeks revenge upon another character for an evil doing. Most often associated with the Jacobean era, these revenge tragedies were actually a revival from Roman times. Excellent examples of revenge tragedies include William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Tragicomedy - a mixture of tragic and comic elements existing in a single dramatic work. Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot is a fine example of the form, where the comic elements are not necessarily noticeable at first glance. Domestic Tragedy - these dramas originated in the Elizabethan period, but broke from previously established conventions, instead portraying the common man in a domestic setting as the tragic hero (as opposed to a character of nobility in a palatial setting). Excellent examples include Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Senior
There are four distinct kinds of tragedy, and the poet should aim at bringing out all the important parts of the kind he chooses. First, there is the complex tragedy, made up of peripeteia and anagnorisis; second, the tragedy of suffering; third, the tragedy of character; and fourth, the tragedy of spectacle. In this manner, what are the types of tragedy?

Domestic tragedy. Tragicomedy. Unities. Senecan tragedy. Hamartia. Revenge tragedy. Catharsis. Heroic play.

Tragedy is a type of drama that presents a serious subject matter about human suffering and corresponding terrible events in a dignified manner. In English drama, a domestic tragedy is a tragedy in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle-class or working-class individuals. This subgenre contrasts with classical and Neoclassical tragedy, in which the protagonists are of kingly or aristocratic rank and their downfall is an affair of state as well as a personal matter. The Ancient Greek theorist Aristotle had argued that tragedy should concern only great individuals with great minds and souls, because their catastrophic downfall would be more emotionally powerful to the audience; only comedy should depict middle-class people. Domestic tragedy breaks with Aristotle's precepts, taking as its subjects merchants or citizens whose lives have less consequence in the wider world.
In Britain, the first domestic tragedies were written in the English Renaissance; one of the first was Arden of Faversham (1592), depicting the murder of a bourgeois man by his adulterous wife. Other famous examples are A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), and The Witch of Edmonton (1621). Othello can be classified as a domestic tragedy. Domestic tragedy disappeared during the era of Restoration drama, when Neoclassicism dominated the stage, but it emerged again with the work of George Lillo and Sir Richard Steele in the eighteenth century.
Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or a serious play with a happy ending. Tragicomedy, as its name implies, invokes the intended response of both the tragedy and the comedy in the audience, the former being a genre based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis and the latter being a genre intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter.
The classical unities, Aristotelian unities, or three unities represent a prescriptive theory of dramatic tragedy that was introduced in Italy in the 16th century and was influential for three centuries. The three unities are:
1.unity of action: a tragedy should have one principal action. 2.unity of time: the action in a tragedy should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours. 3.unity of place: a tragedy should exist in a single physical location.
The Classical Unities seem to have had less impact in England. It had adherents in Ben Jonson and John Dryden. Examples of plays that followed the theory include: Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1682), Joseph Addison's Cato, and Samuel Johnson's Irene (1749). Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610) takes place almost entirely on an island, during the course of four hours, and with one major action — that of Prospero reclaiming his role as the Duke of Milan. It is suggested that Prospero's way of regularly checking the time of day during the play might be satirizing the concept of the unities. In An Apology for Poetry (1595), Philip Sidney advocates for the unities, and complains that English plays are ignoring them. In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale the chorus notes that the story makes a jump of 16 years: lImpute it not a crime To me or my swift passage, that I slide O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untried Of that wide gap
Senecan tragedy, body of nine closet dramas (i.e., plays intended to be read rather than performed), written in blank verse by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca in the 1st century AD. Rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century, they became the models for the revival of tragedy on the Renaissance stage. The two great, but very different, dramatic traditions of the age—French Neoclassical tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy—both drew inspiration from Seneca. Seneca’s plays were reworkings chiefly of Euripides’ dramas and also of works of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Probably meant to be recited at elite gatherings, they differ from their originals in their long declamatory, narrative accounts of action, their obtrusive moralizing, and their bombastic rhetoric. They dwell on detailed accounts of horrible deeds and contain long reflective soliloquies. Though the gods rarely appear in these plays, ghosts and witches abound. In an age when the Greek originals were scarcely known, Seneca’s plays were mistaken for high Classical drama. The Renaissance scholar J.C. Scaliger (1484–1558), who knew both Latin and Greek, preferred Seneca to Euripides. French Neoclassical dramatic tradition, which reached its highest expression in the 17th-century tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, drew on Seneca for form and grandeur of style. These Neoclassicists adopted Seneca’s innovation of the confidant (usually a servant), his substitution of speech for action, and his moral hairsplitting. The Elizabethan dramatists found Seneca’s themes of bloodthirsty revenge more congenial to English taste than they did his form. The first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, is a chain of slaughter and revenge written in direct imitation of Seneca. Senecan tragedy is also evident in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; the revenge theme, the corpse-strewn climax, and such points of stage machinery as the ghost can all be traced back to the Senecan model.
Hamartia as it pertains to dramatic literature was first used by Aristotle in his Poetics. In tragedy, hamartia is commonly understood to refer to the protagonist's error or tragic flaw that leads to a chain of actions which culminate in a reversal of events from felicity to disaster. What qualifies as the error or flaw varies, and can include an error resulting from ignorance, an error of judgment, an inherent flaw in the character, or a wrongdoing. The spectrum of meanings has invited debate among critics and scholars and different interpretations among dramatists. In a tragedy, a protagonist's flaw in their personality is called hamartia, which leads to a heroic decline toward a tragic end. The term covers deeds that are unworthy of a hero. A classic instance of hamartia is where a hero wishes to attain a worthy goal but yields to an moral error while working toward it, bringing about catastrophic results. Such downward movement for a heroic character is considered a reversal of fortune, or peripeteia. Hamartia is first described in the subject of literary criticism by Aristotle in his Poetics. The source of hamartia is at the juncture between character and the character's actions or behaviors as described by Aristotle.
Character in a play is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents, i.e. the sort of thing they seek or avoid. In his introduction to the S. H. Butcher translation of Poetics, Francis Fergusson describes hamartia as the inner quality that initiates, as in Dante's words, a "movement of spirit" within the protagonist to commit actions which drive the plot towards its tragic end, inspiring in the audience a build of pity and fear that leads to a purgation of those emotions, or catharsis. Jules Brody, however, argues that "it is the height of irony that the idea of the tragic flaw should have had its origin in the Aristotelian notion of hamartia. Whatever this problematic word may be taken to mean, it has nothing to do with such ideas as fault, vice, guilt, moral deficiency, or the like. Hamartia is a morally neutral non-normative term, derived from the verb hamartano, meaning 'to miss the mark', 'to fall short of an objective'. And by extension: to reach one destination rather than the intended one; to make a mistake, not in the sense of a moral failure, but in the nonjudgmental sense of taking one thing for another, taking something for its opposite. Hamartia may betoken an error of discernment due to ignorance, to the lack of an essential piece of information. Finally, hamartia may be viewed simply as an act which, for whatever reason, ends in failure rather than success.
The revenge tragedy, or revenge play, is a dramatic genre in which the protagonist seeks revenge for an imagined or actual injury. The term, revenge tragedy, was first introduced in 1900 by A. H. Thorndike to label a class of plays written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras (circa 1580s to 1620s). The revenge tragedy was established on the Elizabethan stage with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy in 1587. In this play, Hieronimo's discovery of his son Horatio's dead body leads him into a brief fit of madness, after which he discovers the identity of his son's murderers and plans his revenge through a play-within-a-play. It is during this play that he enacts his revenge, after which he kills himself. With Hieronimo's quest for justice in the face of a seemingly powerless state, Spanish Tragedy introduced the thematic issues of retributive justice that would be explored as the genre gained popularity and developed on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. The distinction and cultural contention between public and private revenge has been considered by some to be the defining theme of not only early modern revenge tragedy but all early modern tragedy. The tension between public and private revenge, then, has also led to disputes between whether the protagonists enacting private revenge are heroes or villains: is Hieronimo, a character who seeks private revenge to gain retribution for the private murder of his son, a villain or a hero? Believed to have been staged shortly afterwards, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is another early piece of the genre in which the dangerous cycle of revenge through private justice is brought to the fore and the typical features of the genre can be found. In this play, Titus' murder of Tamora's eldest son in a ritual of war leads to the rape and mutilation of his daughter Lavinia. As his revenge, Titus murders Tamora's remaining sons, bakes them into pie, and serves them to her at a feast. One of the great contentions of the revenge tragedy is the issue of private revenge vs. divine revenge or public (i.e. state sanctioned) revenge. In his essay, "Of Revenge," Francis Bacon writes: "the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong, putteth the Law out of Office. Certainly, in taking revenge, a man is but even with his Enemy. But in passing it over, he is Superior: For it is a princes part to Pardon." As the genre gained popularity, playwrights explored the issue of private vs. public or state justice through the introduction of a variety of revenge characters. In Antonio's Revenge, John Marston creates a character named Pandulpho who embodies an idea from the Spanish Tragedy of the Senecan stoic. The Senecan stoic is not ruled by emotions but rather follows a balance of cosmic determinism and human freedom to avoid misfortune. In Hamlet, Shakespeare explores the complexities of the very human desire for revenge in the face of stoic philosophy and ethics. Throughout the play, Hamlet struggles to avenge his father's murder (as has been demanded of him by his father's ghost), and only does so in the end by mischance.[13]

Other play writers of the period questioned the conventions of the genre through parody reversals of generic expectations.[14] In Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, the revenge character Vindice is a spiteful man whose pleasure in the act of revenge is what seems to be his true motivation for its fulfillment.[15] The Atheist's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur followed an anti-revenge plot by having Montferrer's ghost explicitly order his son Charlemont not to seek revenge in order to avoid the villainy of violence.

Catharsis is a term in dramatic art that describes the effect of tragedy (or comedy and quite possibly other artistic forms)[6] principally on the audience (although some have speculated on characters in the drama as well). Nowhere does Aristotle explain the meaning of "catharsis" as he is using that term in the definition of tragedy in the Poetics (1449b21-28). G. F. Else argues that traditional, widely held interpretations of catharsis as "purification" or "purgation" have no basis in the text of the Poetics, but are derived from the use of catharsis in other Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian contexts.[7] For this reason, a number of diverse interpretations of the meaning of this term have arisen. The term is often discussed along with Aristotle's concept of anagnorisis.

D. W. Lucas, in an authoritative edition of the Poetics, comprehensively covers the various nuances inherent in the meaning of the term in an Appendix devoted to "Pity, Fear, and Katharsis".[8] Lucas recognizes the possibility of catharsis bearing some aspect of the meaning of "purification, purgation, and 'intellectual clarification,'" although his approach to these terms differs in some ways from that of other influential scholars. In particular, Lucas's interpretation is based on "the Greek doctrine of Humours," which has not received wide subsequent acceptance. The conception of catharsis in terms of purgation and purification remains in wide use today, as it has for centuries.[9] However, since the twentieth century, the interpretation of catharsis as "intellectual clarification" has gained recognition in describing the effect of catharsis on members of the audience.

Heroic Tragedy is a name given to the form of tragedy which had some vogue in the beginning of the Restoration period (1660-1700). It was drama in the epic mode – grand, rhetorical and declamatory at its best and often bombastic at its worst. Its themes were love and honour, and it was considerably influenced by French classical drama, especially by the works of Corneille and Racine. John Dryden thus defined it in the preface to The Conquest of Granada (1672) : “ An heroic play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem ; and consequently love and valour ought to be the subject of it”. In these plays, as in an epic, the protagonist is a large-scale warrior whose actions involve the fate of an empire. A noble hero and an equally noble heroine are typically placed in a situation in which their passionate love is in conflict with the demands of honour and with the hero’s patriotic duty to his country. When the conflict ends in a disaster, the effect is a tragedy. The most significant noted trend in the British theatre was found after the restoration of the royal power in England in 1660. A new type of drama come out which was known as the great neo-classical tragedy or heroic tragedies of restoration period. The source of inspiration of this type of tragedy was France and some other parts of the continent. The heroic plays of the restoration forms a class by itself and stands between tragedy and romance. The subject matter of this tragedies are mainly chivalrous - honour, love and war. The conflict between love and honour is tried to be depicted in a romantic setting presenting grand heroic personalities with a superhuman ability. The subject matter of heroic tragedy has deal with improbable situation or any sort of grand heroic feat. The problem of heroic life indeed constitutes the essence of the theme of the war, battle, fight and so on. This type of drama presents heroic problems and conflicts which result ultimately in human glory and death. The development of heroic tragedy has its beginning in the great elizabethan period and found continued in the restoration age. In heroic tragedies there are found the strict adherence to classical rules and principles following more or less classical concept of tragedy, particularly in the matter of form. The heroine tragedy is usually written in the rhymed heroic couplet. Heroic tragedies tried to follow strictly the classical rule of the unity of the time, place and action. Among the great heroic tragedies mention must be made of Dryden's - The Indian Emperor, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, Aurangzeb and All for Love etc.