Tragdey
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious,
complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with
each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in
separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative;
through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these
emotions.
Aristotle's phase several kinds being found in separate
parts of the play" is a reference to the structural origins
of drama. In it the spoken parts were written in the Attic dialect
whereas the choral (recited or sung) ones in the Doric dialect, these
discrepancies reflecting the differing religious origins and poetic
metres of the parts that were fused into a new entity, the theatrical
drama.
Tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a
unique and important role historically in the self-definition of
Western civilisation.That tradition has been multiple and
discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful
effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the
Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and
Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.
From its obscure origins in the theatres of Athens 2,500 years ago,
from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the
works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, and Schiller, to the more
recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett's modernist
meditations on death, loss and suffering, and Müller's postmodernist
reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important
site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change.
In the wake of Aristotle's
Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been
used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in
general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric) or at the
scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy). In the
modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama,
the tragicomic, and epic theatre.