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Craig White's Literature Courses Tragedy Modernizes (see also periods of tragedy) |
 A modern tragedy that uses masks like Classical Tragedy |
How tragedy modernizes after 5th century BC Greece:
Other narrative genres
appear more prominently: esp. romance but also dark
comedy (also dark humor
or the grotesque).
Examples: In Mourning Becomes Electra: Homecoming,
characterization of Adam Brant as "romantic"
including his "dream" of owning his own ship and escaping to a Pacific Island
comparable to the Garden of Eden.
In Hamlet, the darkly comic grave-digger's scene is more extended and
developed than any comedy that appears in classical Greek tragedy, where comic
moments are brief if they happen at all.
Democratization of characters.
High characters become lower. Low characters become
higher. Heroic characters become less noble
or aristocratic, more everyday and realistic. Heroes may be
underdogs rather than rulers, children rather than parents, princes or
princesses rather than kings or queens
Historic examples: Hamlet is prince rather
than king of Denmark. Modern
audiences identify more with the character Antigone as princess than with
King Oedipus or King Creon.
Twentieth-century tragic heroes include middle-class salesmen (Death of a
Salesman), farmers (Desire Under the Elms), or
industrialists
(All My Sons). Adam Brant in Mourning Becomes Electra:
Homecoming is the son of a servant girl who works his way up to become a
ship's captain.
Characters' motivations
or drives become internal & psychological instead of external forces
like divine curses or
prophecies (e.g. Freud's Oedipal Conflict rather
than the will of the gods).
Fate
or destiny may still appear in terms of family predispositions, but these are
more naturalistic than divine or fate-driven.
God(s) or
Divinity may appear less polytheistic, more monotheistic.
Chorus diminishes. Choral functions of background information and
commentary may be reassigned from "community of elders" to marginal
groups or individuals; sometimes a narrator or
voice-over. (Settings may also potentially convey background
information.)
Masks disappear except in experimental theater
(e.g. O'Neill's The Great God Brown, see above) or as metaphors for
public selves v. interior selves.
More
spectacle.
Examples:
sword-fights in Hamlet,
visible murder of
Ezra Manning in Mourning Becomes Electra: Homecoming (in contrast to
off-stage murder of Agamemnon in Oresteia: Agamemnon;
dance scene in
Desire Under the Elms
but
spectacle remains carefully managed in all
tragedy—too much spectacle distracts from complexity of plot and depth of
characterization.
As with all tragedy, any conclusions are open-ended and descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Earlier models of tragedy may prefigure later changes, and later models may retain traditional conventions.
