In this course we shall be discussing some of the most gripping and influential dramatic works to have been written over the last 150 years – all works which have a claim to be called tragic. The point of the course is to consider that claim and in what sense it might be true. If ‘tragedy’ was something originally invented by the Greeks, and later rediscovered by Shakespeare, can it be the same thing that is alive in works of modern drama? Classic tragedy invokes ideas of supernatural forces, gods or fate; it sets before us heroic figures who raise our conception of what humanity can be; it draws on the energies of ritual and worship. Modern drama has lost faith in the supernatural; it looks sceptically on the notion of a tragic hero; its theatre belongs to a secular society, a self-consciously disillusioned world, suspicious of high seriousness in any of the arts and of others’ suffering as a source of edification, in particular.
If modern drama can be called tragic nevertheless, is this because it has found modern equivalents for the elements of classic tragedy, or because it has learned to do without them altogether? This question is the more intriguing because modern tragedy itself is so often concerned with the constraining, diminishing effect of contemporary actualities and the pressure they exert on aspirations that seem to belong to another mode of being, another time and place. Does such tragedy express the need to revolt and protest against the pressure of circumstances, or does it lie rather in the pathos of endurance? And how is that question related to the mode in which tragedy is written, its own relation to a realism that would seem to accept the demands of reality?
The plays set for study cover a spectrum from the naturalism of Ibsen to the extreme expressionism of Beckett. All of them, however, are studies in frustration and constraint: in the resentment of or rising up against such constraint there is something ambiguously magnificent and futile, which perhaps corresponds to the magnificence and futility of modern tragedy itself.
Learning outcomes
- Greater knowledge and appreciation of the works set;
- Reflection on the nature of tragedy and its evolution under the pressures of modernity;
- Skills in comparative criticism.
