We are the living dead. We mourn the past and what shadows it has left us. We are the zombies.

Is Opera tragic? It certainly depicts tragic events, but is it too beautiful to be truly tragic. Is the coded nature of its existence a barrier to it becoming true tragedy? John Adams ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ (1991) and Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ (1859) are interesting examples to consider in this case. Certainly to argue that being coded is non tragic is to ignore how layered, and stylistically coded Greek Tragedy was. Perhaps, then, it is the overt and stylised musicality of Opera which pushes it towards another genre. Or is it just another form of tragedy, sitting the opposite end of the spectrum to the more profane and humanist English Renaissance model.

Tragedy compromises the individual, placing him in situations of risk and danger and often pain. Pain deals entirely with sensations rather than thoughts. It is an experience which tries to resist turning itself into ideas.

The fragility of our flesh can test the strongest of spirits. As put in Much Ado About Nothing:

‘For there was never yet a philosopher, that could endure the toothache patiently’ The weakness of the spirit when countered with the weakness of the flesh.’

Such a direct attack on our ability to hold both consciousness and logical thought is almost an attack on what it is we consider to make us unique as humans. It is not surprising, therefore, to see pain reduce humans to the level of the beast. The impact of suffering in this manner is seen throughout King Lear.

The chaos that descends around Lear leads him to observe that ‘man’s life is as cheap as beast’s’. Our mortality is made pressing clear to him and our lack of privileged detachment from time, danger or death makes him reassess his view of humanity.

Expressions of pain in Greek tragedy were composed of sounds and phrases which had a complexity and innate musicality, particularly when handled by the chorus. The language, structure and style of ‘English’ tragedy does not allow for such melodic pronouncements of pain. Italian Opera is a more direct descendant in that sense.

Shakespeare expresses pain in a number of ways, but none more often than the simple use of the word ‘O’. The single letter is used nearly 2500 times in his plays. It lacks the eloquence of the Greek howls, for which there is no singular or useful translation. Much has been written on the use of ‘O’ in Shakespeare, particularly in light of the rise of structuralism, post structuralism and linguistics. It has been used, it seems, as a device for a range of scholars from a broad array of fields to put forward intelligent, creative and original interpretations of Shakespeare. Whilst many make for interesting reading often the observation could be that it has become a vehicle to push other agendas and to represent the fluidity and openness of new academic methodologies. That said, amongst the mass of literature many strong and convincing arguments have been made.

Feminist interpretations (for want of a less loaded and unhelpful term) have shed light on Shakespeare’s depiction of Ophelia (and therefore more broadly his treatment of women) by analysing the use of the word and letter ‘O’ in conjunction with her character. It runs from her name through to her cries of anguish. O can be seen as a signifier of nothing, of the empty space, of the number zero. It is the space to be filled, the hole to be entered, a crude symbol of the female form, her sex, her mouth, as an object to be possessed. The ‘O’ is the infinite cycle, the signifier of nothingness, the abyss. Such interpretation needs to be careful to remain context dependant and to avoid merely projecting a wider sociological gender doctrine onto the letter and text. Yet there is no doubt of its importance to the character of Ophelia, whose role in Hamlet is limiting if not interesting. Hamlet displays a complexity of character and a combination of types which is in direct contrast to Ophelia’s character, who seems to be largely a vehicle to both develop plot and shed light on his character.

If the experience and understanding of pain is central to tragedy then how do we square that with a contemporary audience? Everyone understands pain, but it could be argued that we have become numb to depictions of human pain and suffering. Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (1967) puts forward, with heavily Marxist overtones, an argument for our increasing detachment from the world of pain outside of our personal existence. Television has become a vehicle through which we are subjected to constant images of suffering and barbarity, often from real life and recent time. Yet we view these images from a safe distance and become so accustomed to them that their visceral impact disappears. We still hold onto a sociologically constructed notion that we should feel upset and feel empathy, but it is a detached, objected, cerebral form of empathy, not the type that taps into us and touches our sensations beyond logical thought. It does not trigger our emotions in the same way it once did. If we buy this argument then it can certainly only have got worse in the intervening years. A number of technological advances have exacerbated the condition Debord describes, most notably the internet. Through the internet we are bombarding with such a mass of images and sensual experiences, with depictions of horror rife. Add to this various forms of 24 hour news, flashing us images from around the world, often live, of suffering, cruelty and horror. The result is an increasingly effective form of anaesthetic.

The response to this detachment is that writers, artists and directors have had to seek new ways to visualise pain, in an attempt to break through the barriers society has created. The most popular response has been what could be described as ‘horror porn’, where images of horror, barbarity and pain have been pushed to their absolute extremes and have been used to serve a singular purpose, to shock and unsettled. If this was once effective then now it is largely a vehicle for a number of things, but certainly not a way to make us actually feel for the victims. The answer, I believe, is to find ways to make people realise that they are not feeling anything. This happens in Warhol’s depictions of car crash victims. The screen printed image is repeated over a grid. We view it feeling a sense of detached remorse and upset. By the time you move down a few rows you start to become aware that this remorse is merely something we are telling ourselves to recognise, because this is the social convention. We become aware that we are not actually feel truly upset. This awareness, this emptying, is what opens the channels, for there is a melancholy to be felt for our inability to connect and to feel. Such a paradoxical strategy can be used as a way to open people up to a more primitive and instinctive and tangible form of feelings in the face of images of pain and horror. Comedy is a highly effective tool in this respect. We certainly need something to wake us up.

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.