DRAMA/ CLASSICAL TRAGEDY
Terms:
Stage directions: words in a script that tell actors in a play when and where to exit or enter or how to gesture or move at certain moments.
Exposition: that part of a short story or play, usually early on, that provides background information on plot, setting, and character.
Dialogue: in fiction or drama, the spoken words of characters in conversation with one another.
Soliloquy (asides): a relatively long philosophical or reflective speech by a character in a play, alone onstage, who is presumably talking to himself but whose words are heard by the audience.
Suspense: an aspect or effect of plot in which a reader is able, based on information already provided, to guess or predict what will happen next or ultimately, but is unable to be certain of this prediction because some information has been withheld. Akin to a reader’s anticipation.
Plot line: see "Narrative" handout. Initial conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution/denouement.
Denouement: signifies the moment of final resolution of the conflict in a plot.
Dramatic Irony: a difference between appearance and reality. In drama, irony may involve the audience knowing something of which a character is unaware and the character acting in a way that is markedly different from the truth of the situation as the audience knows it.
Comedy: a kind of drama that aims to amuse and that ends happily. All pieces come together at the end.
Tragedy: broadly, a literary pattern in which a person of some status undergoes a decline in fortunes and ends in catastrophe, with the actions and their consequences treated seriously; more narrowly, that pattern presented in drama, or a particular kind of play that conforms to the tragic pattern.
Classical Tragedy: presents the decline of a person of high degree from fortune to disaster through a combination of his own actions, his moral character, and the operation of cosmic forces such as fate or divine will.
Revenge Tragedy or Blood Tragedy: makes a revenge motive central to the plot and depicts bloody and violent actions on stage as that revenge is worked out.
Middle-class or Bourgeois Tragedy: centers on a middle-class character whose misfortune result from a situation in ordinary life, not a situation of cosmic or national significance.
Qualities of Classical Tragedy:
A reversal of fortune, from good to bad
Often someone dies, undeservedly
People are left unhappy
Audience is affected emotionally
Tragic hero who suffers from a tragic flaw (ie, Hamlet’s indecision)
Tragic hero must recognize what has happened to him: often he discovers something previously unknown or something he knew but misconstrued
Tragic flaw, the fates, or errors in judgment often lead to the downfall of tragic hero
Tragic hero: the main character of a tragedy; typically, the tragic hero is a person of high social standing and moral character whose decline in fortune and ultimate disaster are presented as the inevitable result of his or her moral qualities combing with circumstances.
Tragic hero is assumed to achieve a moral triumph through the insight, recognition that comes with the decline of fortune he undergoes.
Tragic hero: usually larger than life, not generally an ordinary type man.
Why do we still read Classical Tragedy?
"Universal" appeal
They present people struggling with destiny and invoke important philosophical issues
Ancient texts established the 5 part structure still in dramatic practice
Sophocles: 496-406 BC
Most popular tragedian of his time
One of his primary, overriding themes concerns the relation of the individual to the polis, the state itself.
Reflection of his larger Greek society which valued the individual and at the same time regarded the polis as a sacred institution against a return to barbarism
Introduced innovations in structure of his plays by reducing the size of the chorus from 50 to 15 and by adding painted scenery, more props, and a third actor
Always adapted the material of others to his own purposes (Shakespeare)
Antigone
Plot Summary:
Antigone announces her intention to defy Creon, Ismene refuses to join her
Creon’s edict; he is told that someone has buried Polyneices; orders the guard to find the one who disobeyed
Antigone arrested; admits guilt; sentenced to death. Ismene pleads for Antigone’s life
Haemon tries to persuade his father to spare Antigone; Unsuccessful, he threatens to kill himself
Antigone appears and Creon sends her to be entombed
Teiresias prophesies disaster, but Creon is unmoved
Chorus finally persuades Creon to bury Polyneices and release Antigone
Catastrophe: deaths are announced: Antigone, Haemon, Eurydice. Creon assumes his responsibility.