Aristotle proclaimed that tragedy should stimulate pity and fear in the viewer. Pity is our impulse to approach, due to empathy. Fear is our impulse to retreat. When we encounter both we are left in a state of uncertainty, we encounter a desire which pulls us closer and a fear which pushes us away.

In 1872 Nietzsche published ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ in which he traces the rise of tragedy from Greek origins. He sees tragedy as being based on sensual experience and the celebration of the terrors of reality. As such it is in opposition to a Socratic belief in the ability of logic to reveal all the mysteries of reality.
Nietzsche wrote: “The psychology of the orgiastic as an overflowing feeling of life and strength, where even pain still has the effect of a stimulus, gave me the key to the concept of tragic feeling”
Nietzsche saw the celebration of life and sensation, of every form, including and perhaps particularly the destructive as being typically Dionysian. There is no catharitc element to this belief though. He says it is:
“Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge — which is how Aristotle understood tragedy — but in order to celebrate oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity — that tragic joy included even joy in destruction.”
This thesis on tragedy is no singular, and Nietzsche sees tragedy as being about the meeting of this Dionysian type with an Apollonian type. The Apollonian principle search and creates increasingly ridged structures. The Dionysian principle looks to shatter this form, and inevitable and eventually will. The more rigid and solid the form, the more violent and explosive it’s destruction. This urge is inherent in the relationship between the two, to the point of being pathological, it is like a looping rhythm. Consider the patriarchal hierarchy of Lear, a social construct which provided clear and tight controls, a form highly resistant to change. The very strength of the structure is met with an equally violent eruption, which resonates throughout the play. As such tragedy is seen as a radical critique of human systems, products, ideals and structures.

As Professor Adrian Poole suggests Nietzsche sees tragedy as the necessary birth pangs of society, Schopenhauer sees it as death pangs. Nietzsche’s account is an explanation and justification of tragic events.

The notion of Tragic decorum passed down from the Greeks and was eventually come to dominate Italian and French theatre of the 17th Century. It is a model which suggests that scenes of violence, death and horror should be kept off stage. Classical theory had less of a restrictive hold on the theatre of the English Renaissance, with writters far more prone to showing, and even delighting in, the portrayal of horrific and violent acts on stage.

There have been constant attempts to justify or to implore tragedy to be moral, to have a function. The most notable intervention is perhaps the rewriting of the end of King Lear by Tait, to have a happy ending, to find resolution. This version first appeared on stage in 1681 and is believed to have replaced the original until 1838.

There is historical justification for this change, the play certainly played on tensions which were perhaps to close to those in Britain across that period. But Tragdy should not lecture, it should not be about telling us how we should behave, what is right and wrong, of showing us vice and virtue. It should be more philosophical, merely presenting things as they are, exploring the depth and range of the human condition, good or bad, without judgement. Its job is to present, not to analyse and then present us with dictums by which to live our lives. It is our job to deconstruct.

The notion that virtue is rewarded and vice punished is presenting us with an idealised and unrealistic world view, we are better to learn rather than to be blindly guided. People don’t see a play and think I will act like this or that because this they did in the play and that’s what happened to them.

Stripping King Lear of the death of Cordelia and Lear is an odd and ineffective censorship, suggesting that virtue is rewarded and vice punished. Death is promiscuous in tragedy, as it is in life, it should not have a judgemental moralistic hand. It is indiscriminate. If the good die that should not suggest that being good goes unrewarded. Do natural disasters or weapons of mass destruction discriminate; does a bullet make a judgement? People are destroyed with no regard to justice or if they deserve it or not. Tragedy is a place ruled by disorder and anxiety, not an ordered world of ideal moralistic outcomes. As such it reflects life.

Hegel was a German philosopher most famous for his dialectical approach to history, this approach was also applied to tragedy. Hegel’s theory provides the first fully fledged thesis on tragedy, upon which grounds it becomes Tragedy. Hegel’s notion of Tragedy fits in with his notion of the Zeitgeist looking to find ways to work itself into the material world as a manifestation of metaphysical values of the age. The journey and incarnation is one of conflict with resolution, it has a clear narrative arch, a battle that ends with harmony and balance. In “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy” A. C. Bradley discusses the idea of a tragic collision in Hegel’s model of Tragedy, articulating the idea that Hegel’s model of tragedy all necessitates a logical conclusion to emerge from the chaos.
In “The Phenomenology of Spirit” Hegels puts forward an idea for a more complicated philosophy for tragedy. He proposes the Greek tragedy and that which follow Shakespeare might share a common underlying principle and drive but develop along different paths. He sees tragedy as the conflict of forces. In Greek tragedy this conflict is seen in characters and in Shakespeare between a subject and the external world, between an individual personality and his passions which fight against the ideologies of the external world and system he lives within.
“The heroes of ancient classical tragedy encounter situations in which, if they firmly decide in favor of the one ethical pathos that alone suits their finished character, they must necessarily come into conflict with the equally [gleichberechtigt] justified ethical power that confronts them. Modern characters, on the other hand, stand in a wealth of more accidental circumstances, within which one could act this way or that, so that the conflict which is, though occasioned by external preconditions, still essentially grounded in the character. (Hegel, ed. Glockner, vol XIV pp567–8).
The notion of a shifting form of tragedy fits in with Hegels view of History, with the idea of the progress of the spirit through time and space. The idea of conflict in Tragedy of a variety of types is clearly accurate, and Hegel’s analyze of the shifts seem accurate. His account is problematic in that it presumes a need for resolution. It feels as if this analysis is constructed in order to fit in with his wider methodologies and philosophy.
The notion that Tragedy requires resolution seems limiting and fraught with danger. Should conflict need to end with something logical and comprehensible? Should Tragedy have to have a neat, moralistic resolution? Such a belief is one reason why Tait’s rewriting of King Lear was so popular, with the death of Lear and Cordelia removed. Yet this ending, and Hegel’s view of such an ending is to reduce Tragedy down to a formulaic structure. It also raises the dangerous possibility of Tragedy to be utalised as some form of social political tool, indoctrinating the masses with a view of vice and virtue, suggesting that the good will prosper. Simple answers should not be given and Tragedy should not look to provide a model for some form of ideology or a philosophy which we should follow. Instead it should look to present to us the conflicts that exist in the human condition. These conflicts will vary, from those between characters, those between an individual and his conscious or some wider external system. Hegel was correct to point out the conflict is central to Tragedy but wrong to suggest that resolution is either inherent or necessary.

Theodor Adorno and Brecht are two of the central figures to suggest that tragedy has become defunct, that its power has become lost as it has become institutionalised. When tragedy is hijacked by the establishment for their own ends it becomes a set of banal convictions about the inevitability of suffering.
Barthes “Tragedy is only a way of assembling human misfortune, of subsuming if, and thus of justifying it by putting it into a form of necessity, of a kind of wisdom, or a purification”

Tragedy needs to be questioned, its values constantly challenged, it must philosophise not lecture. The second tragedy becomes a formula and a system, it is dead. It should never become a vehicle to justify some other system of values.

Tragedy is a spectator sport; it necessitates an audience, both internal and external to the stage or picture plane. We are the external spectator and there are many examples of internal spectators; the chorus in Greek tragedy or the witness figure that Allbertti gave birth to in Italian Renaissance paintings. Wollheim talks comprehensively of the relationship between the two, with particular focus on Manet. The internal spectators provide a bridge, letting us into their world.

The spectator is the character who judges, who sits detached from the central action, able to weigh up the other components, to connect the complex systems of cause and consequence, innocence and guilt. The figure is not totally exempt or detached though, the involvement in decision making is what opens up our ability to feels, to have empathy, it involves us.

Witnesses of pain are particularly vulnerable to becomingly personally engaged. Consider the figure of Midas in Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas. He is the thinker, the philosopher, the melancholic pensive figure who witnesses the suffering. He becomes implicated, and as such so are we.

Was an American photographer who committed suicide at the age of 22. Her work often featured herself, naked and in bare architectural interiors. She experimented with movement through the use of long exposure times, to create ethereal images in which she emerged from or dissolved into her architectural surroundings.

In theatre we expect words, they are the tools with which plot and psychological states are expressed. Malcolm asks Macduff to ‘Give sorrow words’. But there are points when the high poetry of tragic theatre can’t suffice, when we seek something beyond poetry. ‘Words, words, words’, what use are they.

It is a dilemma which theatre has sought numerous solutions for, aware of the need to sometimes use silence as a crucial device. Silence on stage is very different to silence in a painting. Silence is inherent in painting, where as sound in the form of spoken words is inherent in theatre. As such they both use sound as a value to hold in opposition to our expectations. For theatre the silence is a surprise, for painting the suggestion of a sound which cannot come plays the same role, both are setting up noise values which contradict their inherent qualities. Think the silent scream in painting.

In theatre the role of silence is often to appear where we expect words to provide elaborate descriptions of mental states or plot development.

In tragedy silence is often what follows the onslaught of staged words over a duration of a few hours. As with many things in theatre the value of silence is due to its relation to what has come before, it is an art which relates to us through the constant shift between poles, in sound, space and time in particular. In painting it is the constant and unchanging qualities of sound, space and time from which we draw value.

Hamlet is the most loquacious character in all of Shakespeare’s plays. Fittingly his last words as he passes away are ‘The rest is silence’.

And Cordelia’s silence bookends the tragedy of King Lear. When asked by Lear what she cam say to declare her love, like her sisters, in return for a stake of the kingdom she replies ‘nothing’. It is her refusal to articulate her love and enter the game played by her father and sisters, that opens the door to all that follows.

A few hours later Lear returns on stage with all his daughters, as he started. They are all dead, leaving Lear to follow after them. Before his death, with Cordelia in his arms he laments:

‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life?, and thou no breath at all?

Her silence is the silence of death, and Lear’s silence follows. The characters that are left are marked by their inability to either articulate the scale of the tragedy that has preceded them or to express an effective way forward.

George Elliot talks of the pain in life which cannot be expressed in words. “there is much pain that is quite noiseless, and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.”

Seneca idea of stoicism, bequeathed to early Christian Martyrs sees silence become a method of denying pain. The heroism of a figure refusing to despair in the face of ultimate pain or grief is held up as the ultimate form of nobility and honour. In David’s Brutus, Brutus is the silent dignified silence in opposition to the extreme outpouring of grief in the mother and daughters. But a psychological complexity exists within the picture. It is clear that Brutus is hiding an inner turmoil, look at the mechanics of his body and his twisted toes. He has sentenced his sons to death and now sits whilst their bodies are returned. His sacrifice for the greater good of the republican state does not appear like a price worth paying. The Christian Martyrs who are capable of remaining calm and serene whilst holding their own heads was an ultimate proof of belief to Christian viewers. To us now such blind and excessive belief seems ludicrous and comic.

Silence is often used as a device to suggest that sorrow or grief goes beyond words. In Sophocles a messenger gives a lengthy speech passing on detailed information of a loved ones death. When they exist we expect an articulate and elaborate display of suffering. Instead the listener just exists the stage.

Theatre presents us with sensitive, intelligent and multiple methods of expressing grief. Silence is one device, and often one that we wish we could use in our personal lives, we desire the kind of nobility and control of a Shakespearian character. If we do articulate our feelings we try and find eloquent and sensitive methods, the equivalents of those from tragic plays. In reality we normally enter into excessive and inarticulate expressions of our feelings, broken, fragmented and nonsensical. Words tend to fail us.

Many tragic plots are bound on the relationship between mortals and a divine force, be that the Greco Roman gods or the omnipresent God such as that in Christianity. Conflict is normally found when the two worlds collide, when a mortal challenges, disobeys, threatens or breaks the trust of the divine force. Think Adam and Eve with the apple or Marsyas challenging Apollo to a musical duel. In many cases it’s about desire or free willing seeing and individual have aspirations which go against that of a greater system. There is inevitability in the human condition of our ability to have choice which is leads to such peril, this remains a truism regardless of belief. As Milton summarises, we are ‘sufficient to have stood but free to fall’. It is certainly true that the loss of one belief does not bring an end to the kind of peril and conflict represented by the relationship between a moral and a divine power. We have developed, in our increasingly secularised society, new ideas of suffering and hope, new dangers.
In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon the chorus cry: ‘Zeus whoever you are’. There uncertain highlights that the specific nature of the greater force which threatens us, which causes us to be fearful, which presents dangers, is not necessarily important, it is the danger itself and our innate tendency to seek it that is crucial to tragedy.