Tragic Pairs: Classic and Contemporary Drama

What is tragedy, and why, in a world filled with misery, might we still need it? Strange to say, where there is so much misery, there may not be enough tragedy, if by that word we mean the dramatic form by which the ancient Greeks, in communal, civic fashion, represented their suffering to themselves. Modern science, with the dizzyingly high technology it has made possible, has advanced the state of medical art beyond the wildest imaginings of former generations. But for the maladies of the heart, mind, and soul, it has many fewer treatments (or even palliatives) than exist for the diseases of the body. And as for what really plagues us inwardly (which, curiously, may include the ailments of the city), almost no cures. If mind and body are indeed one, the consequences of this dearth for human well-being are not far to seek.

Still, if there is a danger in reducing art to therapy, even if therapy does turn out to be one of art’s (perhaps unexpected) offices, there is little doubt that the four modern writers featured in this series — two of them still alive, two having exited the stage only in the last decade — have found in the stuff of these four plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare, cause for vividly adapting and reimagining brilliant examples of an ancient (and, in the case of Shakespeare, an early modern) form. In Sophocles and Dove, we have the most perfect plot of tragic self-knowledge brought into the racial and sexual miasma of an antebellum plantation; in Sophocles and Heaney, a warrior, sickened by snakebite and maddened by loneliness and despair, first deserted and then duped, cured of wasting sickness only by the prospect of employing his lethal skill in the service of those who betrayed him against those who had done him no wrong – war as a tragic cure; in Euripides and Soyinka, the commingling of communal sight and blindness, spectacle itself made tragic under the influence of the god of both wine and theatre; and in Shakespeare and Morrison, the tragic separation of destroyed love turned into the music of ghostly conversation in the underworld. How these old stories, accompanied by such splendid counterparts, might nourish us in our contemporary predicament will itself probably fertilize the conversation with matter for reflection. Perhaps the responses of the four recent authors — two African-Americans, a Nigerian, and an Irishman; two women, two men — suggest that the tragic form still has the power to dignify human suffering and to gentle our condition.

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Further Resources

What Is Greek Tragedy? with Rush Rehm

The intro comes across as a little stilted, but once the interview gets going, this podcast episode is an excellent overview of Greek theatre and the role tragedy plays in society.

Britannica has a useful timeline of the development of tragedy in drama.

Oxford University has a series of wonderful podcasts dedicated to the history and present of Greek tragedy.